China's Automakers Sell Online: Is It A Trend or Just A Gimmick?
Kuaishou, Chinese short video and live-streaming app, brought electric vehicles to its e-commerce platform in March 2021, teaming up with SGMW and GM China. This is Kuaishou's first attempt at selling a vehicle through live shopping.
Kuaishou sold the Hongguang Mini EV, an all-electric city car that is manufactured by SGMW, in two live-streaming sessions, offering a RMB 5,000 (USD 761) discount from the original price of RMB 32,800 (USD 4,992). Viewers could add the vehicle into a shopping cart and the inventory was all sold out just minutes after the show started. “Live-streaming could help SGMW to increase sales,” their auto analyst Zhang said, “EVs are more suitable for this kind of promotion.” Many market analysts expected that more automakers will inevitably sell cars directly on Kuaishou or other live-streaming apps in the future.
Autohome, an online platform for buying and selling cars in China, expects new businesses like data products to grow as it tracks the country’s booming EV market. The platform has been working with leading Chinese EV start-ups such as NIO, Xpeng and Li Auto, offering them its data products like SaaS solutions that can help to boost customer conversion among potential EV buyers. Autohome created a community with 42.1 million daily active users last year, according to QuestMobile. The major revenue generators of Autohome are advertisements from carmakers and fees from car dealers for using its platform to create their own online stores.
However, the method of selling cars online like live-streaming relies on piquing the interest of customers, and so far, live-streaming has had mixed results for EV makers. China Potion revealed that a number of viewers appeared to be less impressed with some of the live-streams, describing the live shows as boring and lacking in informative content. Also, some industry insiders believed that to car companies, the e-commerce platform is closer to marketing, matching, and customer gathering tool. If the company wants to sell a new car, they still can’t bypass the offline 4S store channels as e-commerce is at most an incremental function.
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