Recently, the drama between Jingdong Mall and Alibaba, two of the biggest e-commerce companies in China, reflected not only the increasing intensified completionbetween different e-commerce platforms, but also the life-and-death challenges faced all the e-dealers of different industries, automobile included.
The causes are actually quite explicit: lower demands, more competitions and tougher regulations.
Under the background of a relatively weak economy, the year of 2015 has barely witnessed any increase in the overall auto market and even a negative figure in the sedan segment. Consumers tend to purchase less vehicles, even when there are actually more models in the market to choose from. When the customers just decide that they are not buying,the e-commerce platforms could barely do anything.
On the other hands, there are just too many players in this market. Besides Alibaba and Jingdong, automobile websites such as Autohome and Yiche, Internet giants such as Sina, Sohu and Tencent, car dealers of different sizes and even the car manufacturers themselves all want to enter the e-commerce market and share this pie. The thing is none of these parties have absolute predominance upon others,the car company-owned platforms get the cars and the e-commerce platforms get the clicksand good prices while the traditional car dealers get nothing but a doomed tragic end to be phased out. How could this not end up with a lose-lose situation?
To make things worse, China’s Price Supervision and Ant-Monopoly Bureau under the National Development and Reform Commission has recently issued a document to regulate the e-commerce platforms’ promotions and sales, which could put the armless e-dealers into a quite awkward position considered the overwhelming majority of their car buyers only turn to them for the good price.
