Author: Porter Erisman

Publisher: St Martin’s Press

Comments:The author, ex-vice president at Alibaba group, is known as an expert on e-commerce in emerging markets. In some of these, such as China, India and Nigeria, e-commerce in entering a golden age. This is where, he claims, the next stage of e-commerce development will take place. It is being driven by widespread internet adoption, a rising middle class, and most importantly by innovative new business models which serve the needs of local customers better than the models used by western giants. The mistake of western companies, including Amazon, is to apply the original model to emerging markets. As Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba put it, it is like putting a Rolls Royce jet airplane engine into a hang glider. Alibaba started by focusing on the asset-light C2C model with Taobao before shifting focus to B2C with Tmall. In addition, the western Amazon model leaves little room for product information and a rich experience, which doesn’t matter if customers are already familiar with the product from other channels. On Tmall in China, on the other hand, all kinds of videos, product demos, colourful branded content and more is possible on the site which fits emerging markets better.