China e-commerce: What Western brands are getting wrong about it
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What can the West learn from China e-commerce? Explore key insights from China expert and join our free webinar exploring the topic further.
What are Western brands still getting wrong about China e-commerce? Discover insights from Björn Ognibeni, one of the few Western experts with a deep understanding of the Chinese e-commerce landscape, and join our exclusive free webinar to dive deeper into the topic. Registration link inside the article. Only 100 spots available.
When Chinese marketplaces like Shein landed on European doorsteps, most Western businesses did what businesses usually do: they looked for a category to put them in. Cheap. Disruptive. A threat. But according to Björn Ognibeni, practical visionary, co-founder of ChinaBriefs.io, and digital strategist with over 20 years advising brands on digital transformation, that reaction already reveals the problem. China e-commerce, he argues, has never been reducible to a single platform and the brands that reduce it to one are the ones most likely to be blindsided by what comes next.
The global top five e-commerce marketplaces by GMV are, at this point, almost entirely Asian. The core Western e-commerce experience – search bar, product listing, product detail page, checkout – was largely designed in the late 1990s and hasn’t fundamentally changed since. Meanwhile, in China e-commerce has been rebuilt multiple times. Not through incremental optimisation, but through genuine rethinking.
Below are the three lessons Ognibeni draws from China e-commerce – the ones he believes Western businesses can adapt right now, without copying, pretending cultural differences don’t exist, and waiting to see where things land.
Lesson 1 in China e-commerce: Stop optimising the same thing and start rethinking it
Ognibeni has a framework he uses when evaluating digital innovation: he plots it on two axes: business impact and degree of innovation. Most of what gets presented at e-commerce conferences, he notes, falls into what he calls the “workhorse” category: real business value, but no real newness. It’s doing the same thing, only faster or cheaper. China e-commerce conferences look different – and that difference, he argues, is the point.
The danger isn’t that workhorses are useless. The danger is mistaking them for transformation. When the world around you is changing, being efficient at the wrong thing is still being wrong.
Quote / Björn Ognibeni at E-commerce Berlin Expo 2025 during his presentation on China's digital trends and why they confuse the WestStop optimising and start rethinking. Most AI in the West is just the efficiency trap dressed up in new clothes.
The China e-commerce example that illustrates this best is Shein. Western discourse tends to frame Shein as a fast-fashion company that’s very good at being cheap. Ognibeni reframes it entirely: Shein is, at its core, an AI and supply chain company. It shows consumers up to thousands of new designs per day, watches how they interact with those designs, which they share, which they save, which they return to, and uses that data to decide, with extraordinary precision, what to actually manufacture.
That’s not fashion innovation. That’s a fundamental rethink of how a company should be structured. Shein doesn’t operate in silos – a design team here, a sourcing team there, a marketing team somewhere else, none of them talking to each other. It operates as a single integrated system where consumer behaviour directly drives production. “Shein is not a fashion company,” Ognibeni says bluntly. “It’s an IT platform, a holistic ERP system that integrates the front end of the consumer with the last element of the supply chain.”
The same principle applies at Alibaba’s Tmall Innovation Center, which uses e-commerce platform data to help brands design new products together with consumers, well before those products enter production. It’s top-line thinking – creating new value – rather than the bottom-line thinking that dominates most Western digital strategy.
The question for any Western brand isn’t “how do we become Shein?” It’s: where in our business are we trapped optimising something that should be fundamentally redesigned?
Lesson 2 in China e-commerce: Make the Internet social again
One of the most striking examples Ognibeni shares involves Xiaohongshu – known in the West as RedNote – and what happened when millions of American TikTok users migrated there in early 2025. What they found wasn’t a chaotic feed of outrage and envy. It was people sharing their lives, welcoming strangers, exchanging curiosity across a language barrier. The comment sections filled with warmth. Users described it as peaceful. As a place to breathe.
The business implication, Ognibeni argues, is significant. “How could this cage fight be good business?” he asks, referring to the adversarial atmosphere of most Western social platforms. “Because people come back to this kind of experience much happier.” Social media in China isn’t just a place to broadcast, it’s a place to be together. Xiaohongshu is a hybrid of Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, and e-commerce, all within a single app, built around authentic user-generated content and genuine community.
This integration matters for e-commerce because discovery-driven commerce – finding out what you want, rather than searching for what you already know you want – requires a social context to work. When Ognibeni talks about social shopping on Taobao, he’s describing something technically simple but conceptually profound: a screen-sharing function that lets you browse a store with a friend in real time, talking as you go. Exactly what millions of people do in physical retail every weekend. A use case that doesn’t exist anywhere in Western e-commerce – but has been standard in China e-commerce for years.
The lesson isn’t to replicate. Ognibeni is careful about this – he consistently distinguishes between learning and copying. “Cultural differences are everywhere,” he said in response to a question after his presentation on China’s digital trends confusing the West at E-commerce Berlin Expo 2025. “You have to adapt to those. You have to think about how you can take these ideas and apply them to your specific context.” The more interesting observation is that when Western consumers stumbled into a Chinese-style social experience, they didn’t reject it. They loved it. The cultural gap may be smaller than we assume.
The real question for Western brands is: where in your digital experience can people actually be together? Not marketed at. Not funnelled. Together.
Go deeper With Björn live on 2nd of July
| These insights are just the starting point. On July 2nd, 3 PM CEST, China expert Björn Ognibe will join E-commerce Berlin Expo for an exclusive, free online session called Disruptive China Preview with co-host Zheng Xu, International Expansion Architect with 18 years of Germany-China experience. Expect concrete patterns from China you can adapt to your own business & a sense of the opportunities inside China & more! 100 spots available. Registration is a must. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by! |
Lesson 3 in China e-commerce: Build trust, not reach
This is, perhaps, the hardest lesson to hear because it implicates a lot of what Western e-commerce currently calls success.
Ognibeni draws a direct line from the structure of Western performance marketing to “burn-out brands” – the accelerating erosion of brand loyalty that many companies are experiencing. The logic, he argues, is simple: when your entire customer relationship is built around efficient transactions rather than real connection, you don’t build a relationship. You rent one, repeatedly, from whoever controls the distribution, Amazon, Meta, Google, until the margins collapse.
The leading Chinese e-commerce platforms took a fundamentally different approach. Their extraordinary ad spend in Western markets is often cited as evidence of reckless behaviour. Ognibeni reads it differently: they were not buying sales, they were buying users and data. Because these platforms are AI-powered at their core, they need data to function. The spend is an investment in building a platform, not a campaign to generate short-term ROI. The KPIs are daily active users, monthly active users, time spent, not conversion rate or ROAS.
That’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about what China e-commerce is for and what Western businesses might borrow from it.
The contrast is clear while looking at Tmall’s Luxury Pavilion. Brands like Gucci, Balenciaga, and Chloé operate online flagship stores with live streaming, virtual try-ons, interactive brand experiences, and community-driven content. Something unique in the West, standard on Tmall. That’s what Chinese e-commerce looks like at its most sophisticated.
The difference is that Tmall is selling a brand experience, not just products. Chinese consumers spend hours in these digital flagship stores. The visit is part of the value. “We in the West try to provide an e-commerce service, not a brand experience,” Ognibeni observes. “That’s what’s missing.”
And underpinning all of it is something surprisingly simple: the willingness to have a real conversation with customers. Every major China e-commerce platform has a live chat function. Not a bot designed to deflect. Not a ticket system. A response. A relationship. “In China, if a customer comes in, whether it’s online or in real life, it’s an opportunity to build a relationship,” Ognibeni explains. “We scale KPIs. We don’t build relationships.”
For Western brands with a genuine product and a real customer base, this represents an open opportunity. The brands that start treating digital touchpoints as relationship-building moments – rather than conversion events – are the ones most likely to survive the next wave of disruption from China, whatever form it takes.
China isn’t just “cheap” and never was
One of the most persistent misconceptions Ognibeni sets out to correct is the equation of e-commerce in China with low cost. “China equals cheap” is, he argues, an historically illiterate view. The Silk Road wasn’t named for the goods you’d find at a discount market. For most of recorded history, China was the source of the world’s most prized luxury goods. Silk. Porcelain – which we literally called “China.” Marco Polo didn’t travel thousands of miles for cheap plastic watch bands.
The cheap-manufacturing era is real and recent, roughly the last fifty years. But it’s already evolving. Chinese luxury brands are beginning to emerge. Chinese electric vehicles are outpacing Western competitors on quality and price simultaneously. Tmall’s Luxury Pavilion already hosts hundreds of global high-end labels in a China e-commerce environment more sophisticated than anything Western platforms have built. And platforms like Shein could, with a pivot in positioning, become the YouTube of fashion, enabling creative designers anywhere in the world to reach a global audience through a world-class production and distribution system.
The next wave of disruption from China e-commerce may not look like anything we’ve seen before.
“We should understand something we don’t know,” Ognibeni summarises, “and then not copy it, but try to adapt it to our business.” Three lessons. Create value, not theatre. Be together, not alone. Build trust, not reach.
The tools are there. The examples are visible. What remains is the willingness to actually look.
Ready to go deeper? Register for our webinar
Join us & China experts Björn Ognibeni & Zheng Xu on July 2nd, 3 PM CEST, for a live, free, online session on the China e-commerce trends shaping Western markets and what you can actually do about them. Only 100 places available.
See you there!
