Alibaba, the world’s largest e-commerce retailer, has revealed how it uses its massive stores of consumer data to fuel China’s offline retail sector in a two-part Warc Exclusive series.
As China’s retail sector shows few signs of slowing, the company – which on Friday announced Q4 sales up 39% year on year – sees itself as an important link between online and offline retail in the country.
Danfeng Li, the company’s Director of Big Data and Technology, explained at MRMW 2016 in Kuala Lumpur how the e-commerce giant captures first-party data from customer smartphones in the stores of participating offline retailers and links this with third-party data from Alibaba’s own properties to build a holistic picture of the path to purchase.
Alibaba can use wifi sniffers, beacons, infrared, and cameras, among other methods, to determine traffic flows in participating stores, areas of longer engagement or even ‘bounce rate’ – how many customers enter a store then leave quickly.
Although Alibaba is able to track unique smartphone identifiers from the likes of wifi sniffers, it is unable to reach customers directly unless permission is given, due to privacy laws.
(Source: WARC.com)