The China Commerce Exchange - by K5

Right now, someone is filming your product and posting it on TikTok. You didn’t approve it. You can’t stop it. You probably don’t even know it’s happening. Fabian Ouwehand, founder of Socialscale, lives in Shenzhen and delivers one of the sharpest social commerce diagnoses you’ll hear. His perspective is rare: his wife was one of the first ten creators on Douyin, and he built the social commerce d...

The classic marketing funnel is dead in China — welcome to the 360° conversion circle. In the West, discovery and conversion are separated by clicks and friction. In China, every touchpoint is a potential checkout. Olivia Plotnick, founder of Shanghai agency Wai Social, walked ~1,200 km across 32 cities in 60 days to document what Western boardrooms are still missing. In this English-language conv...

JD is buying Ceconomy. MediaMarkt and Saturn could be under Chinese operational control within a year — and anyone who thinks Chinese platforms are coming to Europe with new web shops has missed the strategy. Sven Rittau talks with analyst Ed Sander (China Digital Retail Report) about the mechanics Western executives overlook. In China, online acquisition costs now exceed offline, making the physi...

The Chinese government just published your next product roadmap — and 99% of European entrepreneurs won’t read it. In the first episode of The China Commerce Exchange, Sven Rittau talks with Kaiser Kuo (Sinica podcast, former Baidu) about why China thinks like an “engineering state.” Over 75% of its political elite are trained engineers or scientists; the Fengkou (“wind mouth”) principle pulls clu...