Alibaba Aims At Modifying China's Shopping Habits Using Barcode Scanning

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s (NYSE: BABA) online shopping platform Taobao last week held a sales campaign aimed at encouraging consumers to make purchases by scanning products’ barcodes, Shanghai's China Business News reported.

The sale took place on March 8, and offered Taobao's mobile phone app users a 50 percent discount on products acquired via barcode scanning. The discounts were limited to 100 yuan ($16) per person, the article said, adding that it these markdowns are unlikely to be offered regularly.

According to Alibaba, the campaign attracted more than one million shoppers, and cost the company “several hundred million yuan,” which were paid to vendors across China. The company’s COO Zhang Yong explained the campaign: “Our primary target was to cultivate the habit among users of shopping by scanning barcodes.”

Barcode scanning makes comparing prices much easier and faster, and has proved to be a popular approach, as evidenced by the popularity of Wochacha, an app that allows users to compare product prices by scanning barcodes.

While the viability of the project is yet to be proven, similar experiments, like the ones conducted by Meituan and Dianping, provide an encouraging precedent.

WantChinaTimes explained, “Meituan spends a great deal of time and employs a large work force to manage unconnected vendors, which is difficult for Alibaba and Taobao to replicate. As a result, the e-commerce giant turned to an area in which it enjoys a competitive edge — barcodes, the magazine said.

"Alibaba first started asking vendors to submit product barcodes a year ago, and the company now has the world's largest database of barcodes, with over 100 million items, Zhang said.”