Desperately Seeking (Mobile) Simplicity
It was 2012. I was sitting in some terrible bar/club/sparkler-in-champagne extravaganza in Shenzhen with a Chinese friend I’ll call Christy. (Back then, I wrote reviews of bars and restaurants for an expat magazine to pass the time and to later be able to credibly write essays like this one.)
Every once in a while, Christy would take a break from our conversation and people-watching to furiously tap on her phone. I asked her who she was messaging — a friend, a boyfriend. None of the above, she told me. Just some guy in the bar. “Should we go find him so you can chat in real life?” Christy looked at me incredulously and said: “Now, why would we do that?”
I don’t remember which chat service she was using — it could have been Weixin (WeChat), QQ or even Momo. But that was three years ago. Since then, all of these have expanded far beyond their chatty roots into the world of commerce. In China, WeChat is the major platform for any brand or retailer targeting Chinese consumers; even Amazon, which hasn’t found a lot of traction in China, sells there.
But there’s a whole wide world of Chinese apps beyond WeChat. These are some of the ones worth watching.
Ejiazheng (e家政, e housework): Hire someone to do all the stuff you don’t want to: from household chores like scrubbing the floor or changing the cooking oil to cleaning the carpet. The price is fixed; you set the time, the location and, of course, pay in the app.
Aidachu (爱大厨, love the chef) With Aidachu, foodies in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen can schedule chefs to cook for them in their own homes. Users choose the style of food and who provides the ingredients — chef or customer. The app includes ratings of the most popular dishes and a long list of chefs to choose from.
Yitingche（宜停车, easy parking) guides you to the closest parking spot in Shenzhen, which you can pay for in the app. It’s run by the city. Tingchebao is a similar app that offers the service in Beijing, Shanghai and beyond.
Meituan (美团): With 50 million users, Meituan, often called the Groupon of China, has managed to outlast all of the country’s group-buying competitors. It is rumored to be considering an IPO in the next few years.
Yaochufazhoubianyou (要出发周边游) customers can get travel ideas, book tickets and earn rewards to apply to future trips.
As head of product at Modest, I’m lucky enough to spend my days dreaming about the future of commerce, working on features that will make shopping easier, painless and even more fun. And whenever I think about where innovation in mobile shopping is happening the fastest, I don’t think of the U.S.-based commerce behemoths; I always think of China.
Whether it’s the chat-client-as-commerce-platform model or a specialized app, for shoppers, it’s a no-brainer; you can get anything you want — with just a tap. Once you’ve entered your payment information, it’s saved forever and the convenience factor pays off for those brands and those customers again and again.
At Modest, we love that.
