How China’s E‑Commerce Rescued What Amazon Abandoned | Björn Ognibeni

Matt Edmundson

00:00:04.960 - 00:02:12.610

Welcome to the E Commerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. This is a show all about helping you deliver E Commerce. Wow. And I am chatting today with my very special guest, Björn Ognibeni.

We are going to be talking about why E Commerce has remained largely unchanged for many years. And is all that about to change? That's the question of the day. So we're gonna get into that. But before we do, the usual shout out for the newsletter.

If you haven't done so already, head over to our newsletter and sign up for that. We would love to stay connected with you.

We send you the notes, the transcripts and all that sort of stuff along with our very new shiny, beautiful newsletter thing that gets sent out and it's beautiful and it's wonderful, but just go to ecommercepodcast.net and sign up for it there.

But before get into today's conversation, let me give a short shout out to Friedrich Schwandt, who connected Björn and I today, if you haven't done so already. Friedrich and I talk about the science behind data driven E commerce. And it was absolutely fascinating.

And that episode is live on the site as we speak. So go check that out. Now let's talk about our guest for the day, Mr.

Björn Ognibeni, a digital strategy maverick with over two decades of who's helping bridge the gap between companies and their customers in our rapidly digitized world. Oh, yes, he is.

When he's not teaching at Hamburg School of Business Administration or directing XR Research at the University of Munster, you'll find him decoding China's digital innovations for Western executives through his think tank ChinaBriefs.io. And he's dropping knowledge bombs everywhere in publications like Focus and Handelsblatt.

And I hope I'm not butchering too much Björn, the German pronunciation for some of these things. I'm very sorry if I am, but warm welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Thank you for joining us. And I'm loving the backdrop too.

Björn Ognibeni

00:02:13.630 - 00:02:16.054

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Matt Edmundson

00:02:16.142 - 00:02:17.638

No, no, no problem, no problem.

Björn Ognibeni

00:02:17.694 - 00:02:20.966

Maverick sounds good. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:02:21.078 - 00:02:42.520

Everyone loves the word maverick if you're a man of a certain age with the Top Gun movie franchise. Everyone just loves the word maverick, don't they? Yes, I'm maverick. No, you're not. Your goose. You know those kind of things. It's funny, isn't it?

So behind you on the screen, I see a dragon, I see some Chinese letters. Do you know what they're about?

Björn Ognibeni

00:02:43.540 - 00:02:46.764

Yes. Do you know how Chinese letters work?

Matt Edmundson

00:02:46.932 - 00:02:49.360

I have Absolutely no idea.

Björn Ognibeni

00:02:50.660 - 00:03:16.840

The thing is with Chinese letters that every letter has a meaning and when you combine them, you create a new meaning. So that's different from our letters or syllables. Yeah, that doesn't make much sense alone.

And that one here, I think maybe you can guess at what that means. It's actually extremely simple. It's middle.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:17.260 - 00:03:22.080

This is where my ignorance is just going to blissfully become aware to everyone.

Björn Ognibeni

00:03:22.460 - 00:03:23.680

Middle of something.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:24.090 - 00:03:25.362

Middle of something.

Björn Ognibeni

00:03:25.546 - 00:03:26.178

Middle.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:26.274 - 00:03:26.626

Okay.

Björn Ognibeni

00:03:26.658 - 00:03:34.466

And this means country, kingdom. And if you combine these two, like country and middle.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:34.578 - 00:03:35.270

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:03:35.770 - 00:03:37.714

Guess what you get? Middle.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:37.762 - 00:03:45.750

Country. Oh, China. Okay, so this is. Okay, fair play. The Middle Kingdom. Yeah, of course, the, you know, the old, ancient novels. The Middle Kingdom.

Björn Ognibeni

00:03:46.250 - 00:03:52.790

So that means China and the one above means digital. And so the whole thing means digital China.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:53.090 - 00:04:16.550

Ah, very good. I feel like I'm learning already. This is great. So digital China.

So you've obviously got involved with, I mean you, you know, you're one of your companies, ChinaBriefs, you've obviously got involved with trade with the east then, haven't you? And you understand China. I'm just reading through your notes and the bio, Björn, you seem to become quite an expert in this whole area.

Björn Ognibeni

00:04:17.540 - 00:05:08.786

Yeah, well, my usually joke when I introduce myself is not maverick, but being a practical visionary. And that's only half a joke because that's actually what I do. I try to find new interesting ideas. That's the visionary part.

But I do a lot of keynotes and do teaching at universities. But I always try also to help companies use these trends and actually drive value with them. And that's the practical part.

And being a practical visionary, I always need to find new trends. Yes. Sometime like 10 years ago or so I. I realized for this I used to go to the us to Silicon Valley.

And at some point I realized there's not much new coming out of Silicon Valley.

Matt Edmundson

00:05:08.898 - 00:05:09.330

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:05:09.410 - 00:05:29.266

And that was. I go every year to south by Southwest in Austin. Really love the whole festival.

And it used to be that when you come back you have something on your phone that the whole world talks about that for the rest of the year. Like Twitter was launched there.

Matt Edmundson

00:05:29.338 - 00:05:30.146

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:05:30.338 - 00:06:45.240

And I think it was 2014 or so. I did a speech there and I realized there isn't much new coming out of south by Southwest.

And then I realized there isn't much new happening in, in the western Internet in general. And at one point I was invited to come on a tour with Accenture to China. And I didn't knew what to expect, was just interested.

And I realized that all the new Things that I was missing from the US are now happening in China and nobody here knows anything about this.

And so that was the point where I started to look more into China's digital trends and helped explain companies here in the west that don't have anything to do with China. Mostly to learn from, from China, the same way we normally look to Silicon Valley for new trends and learn from them.

So that's basically the idea behind China Breeze, but also behind what I'm doing.

Matt Edmundson

00:06:46.420 - 00:06:52.972

And so you've been going in and out of China then for a little while. Are you still going to Austin?

Björn Ognibeni

00:06:53.036 - 00:07:56.080

Well, because of COVID I haven't been going there. I started going down. Now it's easier than ever because you no longer need a visa for short term stay. So I invite everybody to go and visit.

But I, I can do all my research also just using the Internet.

But being in China is actually something that I recommend for everyone because being there and, and seeing what's happening there, experiencing what happens when one of the biggest cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen or Beijing are totally quiet because all the cars are already electrified. It's not a distant future. It's something that's totally normal.

Things like this and when you are there and you're experiencing them, it's much easier to understand why it's so interesting. But you can get all the latest interesting things also from just online sources.

Matt Edmundson

00:07:57.300 - 00:09:31.830

Do you think?

I mean, listening to you talk and I get why you would say there's been not much innovation from the west where the Internet is concerned, with probably the exception of AI, which has been the big thing everyone's talked about maybe the last 18 months. But you're right, I think, you know, I'm an Apple guy and Apple news is awash of leaks of the new iPhone 17.

And you know that the iPhone 17 is going to be remarkably similar to the iPhone 16. It's just, it's just they try and jazz it up and make it sound really good, but fundamentally there's not really that much innovation there.

And so I'm curious, you know, with that sort of mindset, if I think about the world of e commerce, I've been around since 2002 in E Commerce. So I've been doing it 23 years now, which is a really long time. The basic essence of e commerce has not changed in 23 years.

You know, the fundamental structure of an e commerce website, the product page, the image, the add to carbon, there's not been that much innovation. What we've done is we've made the Internet faster and we've made code a lot more complicated and now we've bought in things like AI.

So the stuff that we show you is maybe a bit more relevant, you know, with personalization, but there's not been massive innovation there. I don't know if I'm being a bit doomsdayish or whether you would see the same thing.

Björn Ognibeni

00:09:32.770 - 00:13:50.884

Yeah, the funny thing is I totally agree with you, but nobody knows anything. I realized that if I tell people that E commerce never really changed then people would say yeah, but that's because E commerce is like that.

What should change there? And that's also the reason why China is so interesting.

I mean there are a lot of very interesting countries in Asia besides China, but they are all living in the same digital ecosystem. I have a lot of friends in India, they are all on LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp.

Yeah, we are all in the same digital ecosystem and they are all looking to the US for guidance. And China is the only place in the digital space that's being locked up for political reasons with all the problems that are connected to this.

But because of this, things developed in a totally different way there. And that's why it's so interesting.

If I need new ideas, I look at places where things are different, not where everybody's doing more or less the same. And E commerce is a pretty good example for this because as you said, our E commerce was always search driven. Somebody like Google.

Yeah, you want to have something, you have a search bar, you get a product listing, you get a product details page, you put it into some kind of shopping cart and then you have a lock on process and then you have a logistic process and that's it. That's E commerce. Right. And that never really changed and nobody realized that it should change. That's the other thing.

It's not like people are asking for something different. And in China you have a different e commerce paradigm that's parallel to this.

Our ecommerce Powerline grew out of the idea of what's the mission of E commerce? Making things easy. But like 20 years ago or 25 years ago when we thought about why do we need E commerce, we realized E commerce makes things easy.

I don't have to go to a shop, I don't have to check if stuff is there. Go to another one to see if there is something that was totally normal 20 years ago. It's something that we don't do now. Yeah.

So that's the easy thing we have covered and that's the Same in China. And in China they at a certain point said, yeah, okay, we have this easy thing, but how about making shopping exciting, creating experience?

And that's a goal that we never had, I think. And out of this grew something that you could call discovery driven E commerce. So it's not Google, it's more Instagram or TikTok.

You don't go to Instagram or TikTok to look at this, to find a specific picture or video. You go there to look at videos and to get entertained by videos. And that's the basic paradigm for a lot of e commerce companies in China.

You don't want to go there, present or let the customer find what he wants. He doesn't want anything, he wants to get entertained.

You create a totally different experience and that's why people come to your site and then suddenly you have a totally different e commerce system that also needs, for example, totally different KPIs. If conversion is your main KPI and people just come to hang out, what happens to your conversion? It suddenly becomes a problem because it's too low.

But it's totally fine to have people just hanging out. Why not? And that's actually. That all sounds totally new, but it isn't that new. A classic mall worked like this.

Matt Edmundson

00:13:51.002 - 00:13:51.904

Yeah. Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:13:52.032 - 00:14:21.262

What's a place to hang out? A classic normal retail shop used to work like that. Yeah, I just go there to browse through things if I want to buy anything or not. We'll see.

And there's another interesting use case that's missing from our Internet is I can go with friends to the mall and browse through shops together with other. Yeah, that's, that's a use case that I think is not very unusual.

Matt Edmundson

00:14:21.406 - 00:14:21.870

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:14:21.950 - 00:15:43.720

How do you do this online? How do I go to some kind of e commerce shop with friends to look at what. What's there?

Yeah, but it's something that I could send you a link on WhatsApp and then you also go to a web page and then something like that. But it's not really. Yeah. And it's not really an experience. And that's something that you can find in China.

You see there on Taobao, they have a function where you have the Taobao app open. I hit a button, the app connects me to a friend. Just like what we are doing here. Screen sharing and looking at the screen.

We look at the shared screen which is what happens to be. It's a shop. Yeah, it's, it's technology wise, it's totally uninnovative. Yeah. It's, it's not really spectacular innovation that's going on there.

And then we both look at the same shop and talk to each other and then at the same time browse through the shop together. That's a very simple use case. And nobody here in the west has even thought about it.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:44.140 - 00:18:06.078

See, this is, this is really fascinating to me, Björn, and partly because, right, the last two, last three days, I try and write a post and put it on LinkedIn every day. I try and be active every day on LinkedIn. I'm a big fan. And for the last three days, right, this is why this is timely.

I have been talking about old brands that for whatever reason didn't seem to cut it in the e commerce digital world. The obvious one being, and the one that I started with being Blockbuster, the video rental store.

I don't know if you had those in Germany, but we had them here in the uk. And you would go and you would rent your, you know, your film and, and all that sort of thing.

And how everybody uses this as a, as an example of a company that didn't innovate and therefore they're not around anymore. And Netflix, you know, is dominated. And Blockbuster should have been Netflix.

And you listen to the stories and you go, yes, because on the surface that makes sense. But the last three blog posts I've done, I'm like, well, hang on a minute. Have we thrown the baby out with a bathwater?

I don't know if that phrase translates into your German ears, but it's. Did we have. We missed a trick here?

Because here's the thing, when it comes to Blockbuster, I have some great memories of Blockbuster because I had to go to the store. I went with family, I went with friends. We decided together what movie to watch.

We couldn't watch what we wanted whenever we wanted to watch it because they weren't always in. You know, we got the popcorn, there was the smell, there was the sort of, the effort to go and get it.

And in the name of convenience we seemed to have, everybody was like, oh, this is brilliant, because I can just go to Netflix and decide what to watch. Not that we can, because there's so much to watch. We're sort of paralyzed by choice.

But what Netflix is, it's sort of like a sort of sanitized convenience, I think I called it.

Whereas Blockbuster, for all its quirks and for all its lack of innovation, there are many people in my generation that will be able to give you some kind of memory that is linked to the Blockbuster store. I Cannot give you a single memory to a Netflix adventure. I just can't. I can tell you the TV show that I watched and I thought it was great.

Björn Ognibeni

00:18:06.134 - 00:18:06.730

Right.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:07.370 - 00:19:09.680

And so I'm intrigued by this because I think E commerce in the west has gone down the same route that Netflix has gone down, the same route that Spotify has gone down, you know, the same route that a lot of these sort of stores have gone down, which is speed and convenience. Amazon is fast and it's convenient. I can search what it is that I want. I have to know what it is that I want first and foremost.

But if I know what it is that I want, I can go and find it quickly and easily. But we seem to have lost the soul of that. One of the things that we. That came up in those conversations is the mall.

So you would go the shopping center. The shopping mall with your friends, and it was events. Right. You.

You would go there for the day, you would browse with your friends, you would look with your friends. And I think Western E commerce seems to have forgotten that. So I'm kind of curious that the E commerce in China seems to have engaged with that.

Björn Ognibeni

00:19:10.460 - 00:19:57.460

Yeah. I think one of the reasons why things are like this is we don't invent. We invent something when something is new. Yeah.

When there was no E commerce, we had to invent E commerce and there were a lot of innovation. At a certain point, we are finished. It's ready. E commerce was ready or finished.

And at that point we have KPIs and we optimize these KPIs and convenience, how quick things are, how cheap it is, lowering costs. These are all very handy KPIs that we can optimize. Everything that we can put into Excel charts. How do you optimize experience? Kind of difficult.

Matt Edmundson

00:19:59.000 - 00:20:00.686

Difficult to measure. Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:20:00.808 - 00:21:25.400

Let's try to drive down costs. That is much easier. And that's probably one of the factors.

And the other thing is in China, you have so much competition that people, companies don't get finished with anything. If you have something that works today, you know that tomorrow will be five other guys who do the same.

But they can only copy your yesterday idea, maybe the one that you had today, but you know you have to have another one tomorrow. If not, you won't survive. And this kind of competition and pressure make sure that you have a lot of innovation in these systems.

And that's probably also a reason why things are so different there. Here we don't have any competition if we really think about it. Yeah. If you look at. I'm an economist by training. Yeah. And the situation where you.

Our whole market economy is not supposed to create giant corporations with giant surpluses and even more giant market values. That's actually a sign of a system that doesn't really work.

Matt Edmundson

00:21:25.520 - 00:21:26.136

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:21:26.248 - 00:21:41.608

Because the prospect of getting giant earnings is what should drive our system. Because if somebody earns a lot of money, others should come and take it away from him through better innovation and better ideas.

Matt Edmundson

00:21:41.784 - 00:21:47.540

Yeah. That's free market economics in a nutshell, isn't it?

Björn Ognibeni

00:21:48.250 - 00:22:17.510

What we see when we describe what we have. And that's not an E commerce topic, that's a whole digital ecosystem topic. You mentioned Apple. They have no real competition.

They have great products and they have a lot of satisfied customers. But the innovation is very small from phone as you mentioned.

Matt Edmundson

00:22:17.590 - 00:22:18.166

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:22:18.278 - 00:22:20.054

Because there is no competition.

Matt Edmundson

00:22:20.182 - 00:22:20.966

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:22:21.158 - 00:23:07.820

The same with Meta and with and E commerce is the same. Right.

And the reason I focus more on automotive and totally different areas than E commerce, but E commerce came on my radar because of Shein and Temu. And these are companies that suddenly arrive here and take away a lot of revenue from companies who don't expect any competition.

And that's the reason why I became interested in the whole e commerce sphere. And then that's also where I realized how little has changed over the years.

Matt Edmundson

00:23:10.010 - 00:25:19.400

Yeah, it's a fair point. And I mean having purchased from Temu, the app and you know, some of these banggood and there's another one that I've looked at.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because some of the stuff, if I'm honest, I, when I'm on the apps I just found annoying or I found garish.

And that part is, you know, my Western mindset, isn't it? It's just I. This is not. I'm culturally not connected with what's going on here.

I must get an email from one of the Chinese websites every day going, oh, sorry, we forgot that, you know something with your order you're entitled to a discount and all this. It's like really? Okay. And some of the things I do find a little bit odd, but I appreciate that that's a cultural thing.

One of the things I guess that I've seen and I think is a topic of massive conversation at the moment is what is being coined in the worst social commerce. So you mentioned TikTok for example, and how TikTok seems to be disrupting the game quite considerably.

As long as Donald Trump doesn't turn it off again, you know, it's that Kind of, certainly for the states. But I was always surprised that three years ago Instagram didn't allow you to buy products on their platform and they took a cut of all the sales.

That just really surprised me that they didn't do that. I'm really surprised YouTube hasn't done that yet because it just tells me, I just think the platforms are right for it.

And, and, and I think TikTok, you know, comes along, the little upstart and starts adding that and all of a sudden, you know, the US is like, well, it's Chinese. You can't, you can't use it because it's Chinese and we're going to shut it down. And Instagram is going, well, do we need to do social commerce?

And I, I find it, I find it fascinating.

And so I'm seeing play out what you're talking about, for example, with TikTok and with Instagram and how TikTok has innovated and Instagram, which has all the money of Zuckerberg behind it, you know, and Facebook and WhatsApp and all of that data and all of that knowledge has done relatively little other than try and get me to spend more on my ads.

Björn Ognibeni

00:25:20.620 - 00:26:22.390

Yeah. And you see the same digital stagnation in these services, right? I mean, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, that they all never really changed.

I think the most change on Instagram was driven by TikTok.

Yeah, they suddenly showed up and did something totally different and all the advertisers went there and then Mark Zuckerberg said, hey, look at this, I want this too. But it never really evolved from the thing that was finished at some point in the past.

And the, the real innovation with E Commerce on, on TikTok is not that you can sell it on the app, it's that you don't have to link to some, to a different place. You can buy it within the app. And TikTok is also making sure that you get your stuff. Yeah. Doing all the hard fulfillment part.

And that's something that everybody in China does and nobody here does.

Matt Edmundson

00:26:22.510 - 00:26:23.158

Yeah, yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:26:23.174 - 00:27:14.926

I mean Meta and all the other companies have a very solid, well working business model and that's ads. And everything that distracts from this is probably bad.

And if you suddenly have to handle the packages and have to have hotlines for customers because they buy something from your platform, that's something that you try to avoid. So you stick to your basic business model, selling reach and what you do is you outlink to a different shop.

And that's something that actually works pretty well as we all know buying something on Instagram meaning clicking a link and then going to a shop.

Matt Edmundson

00:27:15.098 - 00:27:15.878

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:27:16.054 - 00:27:45.050

And Instagram earns money, the shop sells something. But the conversion rate is probably not very good because you always have the problem with sign up, email registration and all these other things.

I think there was some interesting experiment. I'm not sure how well this actually works, where Instagram and Amazon together created an integrated checkout process. Is that something?

Matt Edmundson

00:27:45.830 - 00:27:55.262

Yeah, I have some vague recollection of this and it never really took off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sort of racking my brain and I remember it didn't take off.

Björn Ognibeni

00:27:55.446 - 00:28:34.018

Yeah. Wonder why. Really interesting question. I have no idea. But that's something that would be natural, right?

That somehow you have a very smooth buying process within these platforms and that's something that everybody in China does. Social commerce here doesn't mean anything social. Right. It's just something that we call social media, which also usually isn't social.

And ironically, yeah, you, you click on something and you buy something and then the whole thing becomes social media, social commerce.

Matt Edmundson

00:28:34.114 - 00:28:34.794

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:28:34.962 - 00:28:51.670

And have you heard about Xiaohongshu (aka RedNote)? Because that's a very, very interesting case. As I said, our social media is not really social. I think we all know that.

It's a place where we hang out to see ads and then some content.

Matt Edmundson

00:28:52.050 - 00:28:53.978

Place where we go to get mental health issues.

Björn Ognibeni

00:28:54.034 - 00:31:00.808

Yeah, yeah, that's the other problem. Well, that's the side effect. And social media in China is totally different.

Yeah, you have a really social experience and all the stuff that makes social media in the west so miserable is missing in China. And we don't know anything about this because we don't know any Chinese social media services. TikTok is the one exception.

And when the TikTok ban loomed two weeks ago, millions of TikTok users under the hashtag TikTok refugees joined. Somebody told them that this Shangshu is the. The Chinese tick tock, which isn't because is the Chinese tick tock which is owned by the same company.

It looks more or less the same, different content.

But so, but suddenly you have an influx of millions of Western users to Sha Hongshu and getting an unfiltered authentic Chinese social media experience. And that was an extremely interesting experiment because everybody liked it.

Suddenly if you look, if you search for TikTok refugee on TikTok or on Instagram, you see lots of videos from people who describe their experience that social media can be totally different.

People were so welcoming and had really good conversations and all the stuff that makes Life here so miserable isn't happening there because every social media service in China tries to create the atmosphere of a neighborhood bar where you come hang out with friends, have nice conversations, because that's the place where people like to be.

Matt Edmundson

00:31:00.944 - 00:31:01.896

Yeah, yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:31:02.008 - 00:32:11.760

It's the. The Western social media cage fight thing.

I don't know why it's so successful, but it's counterintuitive if you want to create a good atmosphere, get people to be social. You don't go into a bar where everybody's fighting with each other. You even never come back.

And for some reason, this model was a prevailing model in Western social media. And that's what everybody is doing. And that's not the social media thing in China.

And there it's really social and that's a much better atmosphere to sell stuff, to get recommendations, to talk about products. And so the whole Xiaohongshu thing, or in. In Western world, it's called (aka RedNote). The app is.

(aka RedNote) was an extremely, extremely interesting experiment because it showed that the Chinese version of social is very compatible with Western consumers or users.

Matt Edmundson

00:32:12.240 - 00:32:17.640

So it'll be interesting to see how that changes things over the next few years. It'll be interesting to see.

Björn Ognibeni

00:32:17.680 - 00:33:37.022

I mean, now we have TikTok back and probably a lot of people move back.

The interesting thing is it's also a very interesting case of China speed because Cha Hongshu had an app in the Western App Store, but it was not really localized. There were some English navigation elements, but most of the stuff was just Chinese.

I think their main target group were just Chinese people who are expats in Western countries. So Chinese users downloading the Western version to get into the Shanghu in China. And it took Sha Honshu 3, 4 days to localize the whole app.

Within just a couple of days, we had all the navigation in English. We had translate buttons on all Chinese postings. Was extremely fast. And that's also an interesting learning. Yeah. How quickly you can do this.

And the interesting question is now, does Shahongshu use this as an opportunity to grow their business here? Nobody knows. Not sure if even Shahangzhi knows this, how they make use of this situation, but that's extremely interesting, I think. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:33:37.086 - 00:34:17.740

No, fascinating as to how fast and. And that change was brought about. I mean, goodness me, three to four days. You imagine you wouldn't. I just don't know.

It takes Apple six months to make some changes to the way they do news notifications. So I'm not. I'm not holding my breath. What do you think, Björn? I mean, I'm aware of time here. So I. What do you think?

Knowing what you know about the market is the biggest thing that we as e commerce entrepreneurs can take advantage of from our Chinese, you know, cousins. What can we. How can we look at what they do and go right, this is one key thing. We could learn to help out our business.

Björn Ognibeni

00:34:18.520 - 00:34:34.570

Yeah. I think that the first thing is become aware of what's happening there. Yeah. Because we aren't. Yeah.

I, I always like to call this asymmetric ignorance. Chinese know everything about us.

Matt Edmundson

00:34:34.690 - 00:34:35.034

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:34:35.082 - 00:34:37.818

We don't even know what we don't know about China.

Matt Edmundson

00:34:37.954 - 00:34:38.410

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:34:38.490 - 00:36:32.116

And so get rid of this is probably the best recommendation that you can get. Look at companies like Xiaohongshu and study what makes them successful.

Also tmall for example or Taobao and all these other Chinese e commerce operations. There are a lot of small things like the one that I just mentioned, social shopping, meaning thinking about how can my customers shop together.

That's something that's very easy. Another thing that's missing is every Chinese e commerce app, but also normal app, has an easy mode for senior people.

Think about how difficult Amazon is actually for not somebody who's 70, but like 80.

We're in a society that has more and more older people and they very often have a lot of time and a lot of money and they probably would like to spend it online because all the shop closed on the high street so they actually have to buy something online. But it's extremely difficult to do. Not for us, but for older people it is. And that's also something that's.

There are solutions in China where you can use this easy mode to make everything a little bit easier. Get rid of all the pop ups, make the selection of products a little bit different. That's something. Also don't copy what the Chinese are doing.

That's also a very common mistake. Understand it and then adapt it to how we should do this.

Matt Edmundson

00:36:32.268 - 00:36:32.692

Yeah.

Björn Ognibeni

00:36:32.756 - 00:36:48.830

That's probably the other recommendation. And it's not like there's just one thing, it's the thinking that's different and that we should change.

Becoming aware of stuff that isn't changing here.

Matt Edmundson

00:36:49.290 - 00:37:12.440

Yeah, no, it's so important. I love that. I love that. Be aware. Just go and stop being ignorant. Matthew.

Don't be an ignoramus, as my mum would say, and go and find out about stuff which tell us about. You've got China Blast. I was looking at the site, you've got a lot of information on there. So I guess that's a good Place to start.

Björn Ognibeni

00:37:14.740 - 00:38:00.470

Yeah, my homepage is probably a good place. I aggregate all my podcast appearances, my blog posts and all the stuff that I write for other magazines. It's all on this site.

There are also all my speaking engagements if somebody wants to see me, that's a place to see. LinkedIn is of course another good place.

And yeah, we are right now in the process of relaunching ChinaBriefs in a couple of weeks with a different team. And the site will be, will look different, but we'll have the same mission. Explain companies in the west what they can learn from digital China.

Matt Edmundson

00:38:00.930 - 00:38:30.800

Fantastic.

Now we will of course link to ChinaBriefs in the, in the newsletter it will be in the show notes which if you're listening on a podcast, you just scroll down and get them super, super easy. And of course we will link to your LinkedIn as well, Björn, which you mentioned and we'll. I connected with you earlier actually, so we're.

I'm going to be following with avid interest what you post on LinkedIn. I really am. I will be on there commenting.

Björn Ognibeni

00:38:30.880 - 00:38:43.776

So one very lengthy article about the whole Xiaohongshu thing that I would recommend because that's really an eye opening experience I think on so many levels.

Matt Edmundson

00:38:43.888 - 00:39:08.800

Yeah, no, fantastic, fantastic. Listen, thank you so much for coming onto the show.

It's been great to chat with you, great to have a conversation and I'm absolutely fascinated by the whole thing. And yeah, I'm gonna go away and do some research and have a little bit of think about the whole thing and what it means for our business.

But really great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been much appreciated.

Björn Ognibeni

00:39:09.380 - 00:39:10.920

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Matt Edmundson

00:39:11.300 - 00:39:16.880

Great, great. Well, there we go, another great conversation. In fact, let me do the. Yes.

Björn Ognibeni

00:39:17.220 - 00:39:18.242

Oh yes.

Matt Edmundson

00:39:18.356 - 00:40:13.980

Another huge round of applause for our guest today.

Now be sure to follow the ecommerce podcast wherever you get your podcast from because we've got more great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss any of them. And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first. You are awesome. Yes, you are created awesome. It's just a burden you've got to bear.

Björn's got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now the E Commerce podcast is produced by Podjunction.

You can find our end entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app.

Our theme music was written by Josh Edmundson and as I mentioned, if you'd like to read the transcript, the show notes, head over to the website ecommercepodcast.net where, incidentally, you can sign up to the newsletter and get all of the good stuff coming straight to your inbox every week, all for free. But that's it from me. That's it from Björn. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world.

I will see you next time. Bye for now.