To Shop Black Friday Alongside Americans, Amazon First Had to Go All Out

The time difference has its perks: while shoppers across the ocean stay up all night, you can place your orders over afternoon tea. Here is what Amazon did to make that possible.

If Singles' Day ("Double 11") didn't satisfy your appetite, today you can splurge on "Black Friday".

At 9 a.m. Beijing time, Amazon's Chinese-language cross-border shopping service, Global Store, officially launched. At 4 p.m., which is midnight on Black Friday on the US West Coast, you can use it to fight for "Black Friday discounts of 50% off or more" on what Amazon says are 150,000 products.

Meanwhile, Alipay says it has spent four straight days handing out 60 million yuan in overseas direct-purchase red envelopes through Taobao Global, Tmall Global and Etao's overseas shopping platform. These red envelopes are also aimed at Black Friday: after midnight on the US West Coast, you can spend them at four major American department store sites: Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. Alibaba has also brought in iHerb, a US site for health supplements and drugstore beauty products; Gilt, a luxury flash-sale site; Ashford, an online watch retailer; and the online stores of four apparel brands: Aeropostale, American Apparel, Ann Taylor and Avenue.

In the United States, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and marks the official start of the Christmas shopping season. It began as a promotion run only by brick-and-mortar stores, which record losses in red and profits in black, which is how the day came to be called "Black Friday". Store employees also use the name in self-mockery, because they know they will be run off their feet that day.

But Black Friday outgrew physical stores long ago. As with "Cyber Monday" two days later, the players are no longer just e-commerce companies, and the line between online and offline has disappeared, just as more and more shopping malls have joined in on Singles' Day.

After Black Friday 2013, a survey by the National Retail Federation (NRF) showed that US retail sales over Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the rest of the weekend reached US$57.4 billion. Walmart said more than 22 million shoppers visited its stores on Thanksgiving Day itself, and that 10 million transactions took place between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Amazon sold more than 4 million items on Black Friday.

This year, they are all even more excited.

The NRF also forecasts that 140 million American consumers will head to stores or shop online for "post-Thanksgiving deals" this weekend, equal to 44% of the US population. US retail sales are expected to grow 4.8% in November and December, the biggest increase since 2011. That beats retailers' own expectations, and none of them wants to miss the best holiday shopping season the country has had in three years.

They hope Black Friday will get things off to a good start. J.C. Penney will open at 5 p.m., three hours earlier than last year; Macy's has moved its opening time forward by two hours; and at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, Walmart will roll out a US$29 RCA tablet, US$1.99 DVDs and a US$218 50-inch HD television.

None of this had much to do with consumers in China, until e-commerce companies could no longer sit still. Amazon China has used Black Friday as a discount gimmick in past years, but few people took part, and Amazon never seriously considered letting Chinese users join in for real.

Since announcing a partnership with the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone on August 20 this year, Amazon China has held four launch events on cross-border shopping. Only three days ago did it finally reveal that it would bring Black Friday to China.

Doug Gurr, president of Amazon China, at the November 24 launch event

By then, Global Store had already been in trial operation for two weeks. It went live at midnight on this year's Singles' Day. Next to the fanfare Chinese e-commerce companies make around Singles' Day, its launch was low-key. In QDaily's several contacts with Amazon's Global Store team, they consistently avoided comparing Amazon's sales with Tmall's Singles' Day figures.

The day before Singles' Day, Zhao Li, the senior manager in charge of Amazon's cross-border business, and her team held a small launch event at the Beijing office, squeezing a dozen or so people into a conference room of a few dozen square meters. Zhao demonstrated a demo of the not-yet-live site on her own computer. Asked what Amazon would do on Black Friday, she sidestepped the question for the time being: "Let's look at the products first."

On November 24, Amazon held a formal launch event for bringing Black Friday discounts to China. As expected, the question it heard most was: "Why wait until this year to launch a cross-border shopping service in China?"

Amazon did not answer that question directly. The reply from Doug Gurr, president of Amazon China, is worth pondering: "When we talk about the best time to plant a tree, the best time was actually a hundred years ago, and the second-best time is today."

According to a Nielsen report, mainland China has at least 18 million overseas shoppers, who spent as much as US$213.6 billion on overseas purchases over the past 12 months.

Amazon cannot be blind to what these numbers mean. "Amazon US data also shows more and more Chinese IP addresses visiting Amazon US," Zhao told QDaily in that same office. It was the first media interview Amazon had given about the Global Store project.

From the moment the China team proposed the project in March this year to Global Store's launch in November, more than 100 Amazon teams worldwide were involved, along with more than 100 people in China. Zhao said that for a multinational like Amazon this speed was unprecedented, and that the project had a high priority inside the company.

Amazon did not disclose transaction values, but according to figures Zhao provided, orders for Amazon's international selection during this year's Singles' Day period were 70% higher than in the same period the month before, and orders have kept growing at roughly that pace since. The product range grew from 80,000 items at Singles' Day to several thousand new additions every day afterward. That gave Amazon a great deal of confidence, and it was one of the main reasons it finally decided to bring in Black Friday.

So from 9 a.m. today, Global Store drops its "trial operation" label. The range has grown to 150,000 products, all shipped directly to China.

Amazon keeps a global database of products that can be shipped directly to China. "We check this database regularly. The products that Chinese IP addresses visited most often over the past six months become the basis for our selection," Zhao said. The first 80,000 products, covering popular categories such as maternity and baby goods, clothing, footwear and outdoor gear, were chosen this way. For products that consumers like but that cannot yet be shipped directly worldwide, her team will prioritize negotiating partnerships. "We have a dedicated team that studies each industry's national market-entry standards."

With back-end data to rely on, choosing products was not the hard part. Zhao said that in the eight months between proposing the project and launching it, the team spent the most time and energy on "localization into Chinese." She stressed that word, localization, rather than translation. "This is a brand-new project, and it required connecting two platforms, Amazon China and Amazon's global platform."

Translating product descriptions into Chinese was only a small part of the development work. The harder part was matching, one by one, the interface wording in the front end and back end, words consumers may barely notice, to Chinese equivalents. That required cooperation not only within the China team but also with teams in other countries, such as those in Europe and India.

Amazon's European sites had been through similar language conversions before. This time, a team in Luxembourg built a dedicated localization module for Global Store, so the China team could import Chinese descriptions and match them in the back end. "That's why, once the first batch of products went live for Singles' Day, we could add new products much faster," Zhao explained. "Building the framework is the hardest part." Modules such as "My Account" and "My Orders" were built by the technical team in India from wireframes supplied by the China team.

"For some details, they [the technical teams] say they can't support them, so we have to explain why they matter, and that often takes a lot of back-and-forth." The project's product manager met with the Luxembourg, India and US teams several times a day, and the China team sent two people to Luxembourg and Seattle, each for two months.

Localization meant more than presenting content in Chinese. Connecting the systems also meant making sure that US prices, inventory and other information synced to the Chinese pages in real time. Prices, for example, have to be converted into renminbi at that day's exchange rate, so customers can see what the product itself costs and roughly what they will pay in total, since that price also includes shipping and customs duties. This system was built from scratch for the Global Store project.

The result is that users see two prices on a product page. The US dollar price is pulled in real time from Amazon's US site, while the "approximately" price is calculated in real time from Bloomberg's exchange rate. Users can check the total landed price in the upper right corner to see an item's estimated shipping and import duties. Before this, seasoned overseas shoppers advised using a price-comparison plug-in to see real-time renminbi prices on Amazon's US site, but when one page listed different prices for different sizes or models, the plug-in could not cope.

Countless experienced overseas shoppers have posted detailed "step-by-step bilingual guides to overseas shopping," yet posts from complete beginners asking for help still turn up on social networks every day. And high direct-shipping fees and unregulated freight forwarders are the topics people complain about most on overseas-shopping forums. In October, Amazon launched direct shipping to China for selected products from several of its sites worldwide. Delivery now takes as little as three days and usually 10 to 15 days, far shorter than the one-to-two-month wait overseas shoppers used to face.

Now the process goes like this: open Global Store, pick an item, read the Chinese description, choose to buy, log in with a US Amazon account, set an address, pay by credit card, and the order is placed. Like an American customer's order, it goes straight to an Amazon warehouse in the US to be picked and packed, then travels through Amazon's own US logistics to a port for customs clearance. International logistics partners then ship it to China as fast as possible, and once it clears Chinese customs it enters Amazon China's logistics and delivery system.

"We have some advantages in this process," Zhao said. "For example, customs clearance is paperless both when goods leave the US and when they enter China, so it's very fast. We have kept a good working relationship with customs, which is why we are the only cross-border e-commerce company that does not require users to provide an ID card number."

Users no longer need to read long English product descriptions, but the purchase still takes place on Amazon's US site, because Global Store is only Amazon's official intermediary platform. So users still need a credit card to pay, and the delivery address cannot be entered in Chinese characters; it must be typed in pinyin. Here Ant Group, which takes over from the payment stage onward, seems to make life easier for users: they pay through Alipay, enter a Chinese delivery address, and Cainiao handles delivery. Zhao said users who run into these difficulties can contact customer service for one-on-one guidance. Amazon has staffed the Global Store project with a 60-person bilingual Chinese-English customer service team.

According to figures Zhao provided, more than one million users have now registered and placed orders through Global Store. Amazon China still has problems to solve, of course: payment and logistics are inconvenient, and so is after-sales service, since returns must still be mailed back to the US, even with local Chinese customer service helping all the way. And missing features such as "Add to Cart" and "Add to Wish List" keep the shopping experience from being entirely smooth.

Still, in Amazon China's category tree, users can now filter by the "Global Store" category to see whether the category they want to shop in includes products selected for Global Store. The same product may sit in different categories on the two sites, and matching up the category trees also took the development team a great deal of effort.

Users can tell whether a product is part of Global Store by the Global Store icon with an American flag next to its price. The icon went through a dozen or so versions. "For now we only connect to Amazon US, so we put an American flag on it," Zhao said. "You could say it also hints that we will open more sites in the future."

Meanwhile, Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma has said he will build an international version of Taobao, serving buyers worldwide in English, Chinese and other languages. Much as Amazon is trying out Singles' Day this year, Alibaba is arguably taking Black Friday seriously for the first time. Each is "invading" territory the other knows well. For consumers, that should be good news.

From this afternoon's tea time, more and more American Black Friday packages will be headed for Chinese IP addresses. How it all turns out, we will see after the splurge.

Cover image from Wired