360Buy Sees 10 Million Smartphone App Downloads, Aims for 25% of Shoppers Being Mobile
China’s second-biggest B2C e-commerce site, 360Buy, has revealed that its mobile shopping app has been downloaded over 10 million times. The 360Buy app is actually cross-platform – across iOS, Android, Symbian, WP7, and even web TV – and allows people to browse and purchase items right from their smartphone (or TV).
Its apps only began rolling out in February of last year. But now the company claims that, after a year of being downloaded by Chinese consumers, it saw the 360Buy app accelerate in growth by 100 percent in the last three quarters of 2011. 360Buy customers tend to use either cash-on-delivery or online payment via 99Bill or UnionPay, all of which are do-able from within the app. 360Buy ditched Alipay, the payment platform of its corporate nemesis, Alibaba, last year.
360Buy also said that it anticipates mobile e-commerce to become more substantial in future, predicting that 20 to 25 percent of the site’s sales might eventually come from its mobile apps. But the company did not reveal any current figures for sales made via the apps.
The 10 million download figure was collated from cross-platform app stores – such as Apple’s iTunes and Nokia’s Ovi store – as well as local alternative Android app stores like Wandoujia and AppChina.
Bizarrely, 360Buy seems to have removed its mobile shopping app from Google’s Play Store (née the Android Market) – in line with a trend for Chinese companies to issue the Android app ‘.apk’ file directly to consumers, or via some of the afore-mentioned alternative app stores – so it’s not possible to check its downloads stats from there.
360Buy expanded aggressively in 2011, adding a luxury fashion store and securing major funding from Russian investment group DST.
