JD.com

JD.com, Inc. (), also known as Jingdong and formerly called 360buy, is a Chinese e-commerce company headquartered in Beijing. It is one of the two massive B2C online retailers in China by transaction volume and revenue, a member of the Fortune Global 500 and a major competitor to Alibaba-run Tmall.
The company was founded by Liu Qiangdong on June 18, 1998, and its retail platform went online in 2004. It started as an online magneto-optical store, but soon diversified, selling electronics, mobile phones, computers, and similar items. The company changed its domain name to 360buy.com in June 2007 and then to JD.com in 2013. The latter purchase is understood to have cost $5,000,000. At the same time, JD.com announced its new logo and mascot. It is partly owned by Tencent, which has a 20% stake in the company.
JD.com has invested in high tech and AI delivery through drones, autonomous technology and robots, and possesses the largest drone delivery system, infrastructure and capability in the world. It has recently started testing robotic delivery services and building drone delivery airports, as well as operating driverless delivery by unveiling its first autonomous truck.
Digital marketing.
Jingteng Plan.
In 2015, JD.com and Tencent announced the launch of the "Jingteng Plan" (), a portmanteau of the two companies' names, which will provide merchants with a complete solution to establish a brand and promote marketing effectiveness by linking JD.com consumption data with Tencent social data. JD.com provides online shopping and claims "authentic low price and quality assurance" and "customer first".
The Jingteng Plan has made progress in three areas: Jingdong has ~170 million E-Commerce platform users, and Tencent has the largest WeChat and mobile QQ users in China. The plan integrates consumer behaviour data and social data. The Jingteng Plan integrates marketing solutions for shopping and social data. “The precise orientation, closed-loop experience, user portraits, personalized creativity, unity of product and effect, and scientific measure of effectiveness” are said to be the six major aspects of the Jingteng Plan.
Partnership with Farfetch.
In light of the increasing number of mobile consumers in China, in 2017, Jingdong invested $397 million in Farfetch, which provided luxury e-commerce service based on the headquarters in London. The deal focussed on Farfetch's respect for intellectual property which has been contrasted with Alibaba's reputation. The Jingdong and Farfetch partnership aims to increase their market share in China.
Partnership with Ruyi.
On 4 September 2018, JD.com signed a strategic agreement with Ruyi, a leading textile and fashion giant who owns global fashion brands including Aquascutum, CERRUTI1881, Sandro and Maje. As stated in the press release, JD would deploy its smart logistics, supply chain solutions, big data-enabled inventory management and membership systems for Ruyi's subsidiary brands. Based on this partnership, JD and Ruyi will jointly establish fashion and lifestyle concept stores in core cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing.
Price war with Dangdang.
Price war in physical books.
On December 10, 2010, JD's founder Liu Qiangdong announced through his Weibo account that every book sold on JD.com would be priced at 20 percent cheaper than its competitors. Although Liu did not give a specific name of his opponent, journalists thought Dangdang was JD.com's obvious rival in the field of online book sale. Dangdang is an electronic business platform well known for its core business, selling books, and ranked first among all online B2C booksellers of 2010 in China.
The price war between JD.com and Dangdang started on December 14; users of JD.com found out that the books were cheaper than from Dangdang. In response, Dangdang also began to offer discounts to customers such as 30 yuan off when they spend 199 yuan or more. On the morning of December 16, Dangdang stated that the company would invest 40 million Chinese yuan to give discounts to customers. As a result, JD.com launched the second promotion to sell books at a lower price than Dangdang that afternoon. On the same day, Liu Qiangdong posted through his Weibo account that JD.com would give coupons instead of reducing prices to protect the benefits of publishers, which marked a phase of the price war.
Liu said that JD.com could not get supplies from some book publishers due to contracts between Dangdang and the publishers. From Liu's perspective, Dangdang were not allowing publishers to supply books to JD.com. However, the publishers refuted the allegation. Su Huiyan, a business consultant of iResearch pointed out that JD.com wanted to attract more customers by the price war.
In November 2011, the second stage of the competition was triggered by Suning.com, a B2C shopping platform, announcing they would expand their business to include bookselling. JD.com and Dangdang competed with each other on lowering the prices of books again. JD.com provided its customers with a 10 percent discount on books while Dangdang, sent promotional messages to its users stating that they would be offered 200 yuan if they purchased books for more than 100 yuan total. Dangdang used the slogan “争当败家子” meaning 'striving to be a spendthrift' aiming to increase their website traffic.
The sudden increase of orders not only caused network errors but also postponed transits of books, which fueled customers’ complaints.
Price war in electronic books.
On December 21, 2011, Dangdang launched its electronic book service online. More than 50,000 e-books were available on dangdang.com with over 90 percent of the e-books sold at 30 percent of the price of the physical books. JD.com started the e-book selling business online on February 20, 2012, and provided customers with more than 80,000 electronic books. JD.com also offered discounts to the buyers, this situation was the unfoldment of a new round of price war.
On April 17, 2013, most of the e-books on Dangdang's website were free for users to download. Consequently, JD.com priced 50,000 electronic books at 0 yuan to match. Liu Zhenyou, an author, criticized that both of them had raised their brand awareness, but their actions caused damage to book publishers.