How Innovation Helped Alibaba Soar High Even During 60-day COVID-19 Lockdown

When the ecommerce industry of the entire world has slowed down drastically owing to Coronavirus, 2 eCommerce giants of China  – Alibaba & JD.com, emerged as the real saviors during Wuhan Lockdown. They not only survived, but with the help of technology, they have been able to keep the economy afloat and ensured everyone has access to basic necessities in spite of lockdown. And that too with minimal human contact.

COVID-19 and Wuhan – The Commercial Capital

In order to prevent and control the spread of Novel Coved-19, Chinese Government imposed a full lockdown on Jan 23, 2020 in the city of Wuhan. All major roads and highways were blocked as a reason of the same and approximately 11 million citizens were placed in quarantine that lasted for an unexpected duration of 60 days.

Various severe challenges were imposed because of this lockdown. As Wuhan is considered as the circulatory system of the entire retail sector. Be it groceries or everyday supplies. And the lockdown acted as a barrier wherein the people were cut off from the communities and were locked up in their homes/apartments.

Soon after the declaration of the lockdown the first situation that came up was panic buying from the local stores. In order to prevent themselves from the risk of contamination arising out of contamination.

During this situation two biggest retail giants of china accepted the challenge to keep the quarantined residents supplied with all the necessary items during the isolation days. High degree of innovation and flexibility was seen in terms of skills, processes along with range of products and services offered.

Technology Transformation By Alibaba

With the help of its digital logistics platform, Alibaba became the first one to take a huge move in this direction. With rapid fast market understanding Alibaba identified and contacted all the major quality manufacturing partners, which reopened the mask and other medical supply units during the time of Chinese New Year.

Alibaba offered fast track shipping and tracking of all the critical supplies such as face masks, hand sanitizers and other essential supplies at best prices through its B2C and C2C marketplace.

Alibaba Didn’t stop here, with the help of its digital payment system named Alipay, they were able to collect a huge donation amounting to $1 million alone in the very first 8 hours.

When it comes to physical delivery and distribution, Alibaba’s Cainiao Network and its competitor JD.com are already in process of experimenting new automated technologies in a bid achieving an edge over Western rivals Amazon and Alphabet. 

Innovative Solution By JD.com Played An Important Role In Fighting COVID-19

If we talk about the examples, in 2018, JD.com had tested delivery in remote areas through drones, driverless smart vehicles etc.

After the lockdown was imposed, the first challenge that was faced by digital retailers was: Increasing the delivery capacity without moving manpower into the province?

Coming up with a solution JD.com and few other retailers deployed their new automated technology. Smart vehicles with loaded maps were remotely operated to deliver donated goods to hospitals and household communities.

The empty streets contributed to this experiment. Along with empowering the retailers to cope up with demand hikes without violating the Government laid policies and guidelines.

Major Challenge Faced By The eCommerce Giants:

As major roads and highways were blocked, it was a challenging task to deliver goods and essential items to remote areas affected by virus. Delivery to some remote areas that were still connected by small roads and ferries were consuming time up to 6 hours.

Here JD’s team came up with a creative and innovative idea of delivery using drones, which completed the task effectively in just 20 minutes.

Lockdown resulted in a huge demand of daily essential such as rice, flour, fruits, vegetables and other items. As a result of the same there was a huge transformation from offline to online stores. Which led to shortage of human resources to monitor these supply chains.

Smart Move by Freshippo (Grocery Subsidiary of Alibaba) & 7Fresh (branch of JD.com)

Grocery subsidiary of Alibaba named Freshippo, confronted the challenge by asking workers from shuttered restaurants and retail outlets to staff the supply chain and hiring them

JD.com’s 7Fresh branch quickly followed the suit. And in a short span of time were able to leverage these workers and had to provide them with least knowledge and skills in terms of e-commerce context.

Further leveraging the opportunity, 7Fresh significantly increased the production of ready to cook items with the help of the temporary catering staff that they have hired.

Similarly, MTDP, a super-app restaurant delivery platform came forward to offer its services for the delivery of everyday supplies by partnering with over more than 7,000 brick-and-mortar supermarkets to process digital orders and deliver to individual households.

Contact Less Deliveries:

Delivery workers are most prone to this situation as they are the one who will interact and get in touch with the consumer base. Putting their health at stake and may act as a vector in transmitting the virus.

In order to further reduce and minimize the risks, JD.com and Alibaba both took all the necessary steps like equipping their employees with facial masks, gloves and disinfectants.

Not only that further safety processes were incorporated in their routine, such as temperature checks, mandate disinfection after each delivery and final drop off.

The last mile delivery, which required customer signatures before drop off also proved to be major area of concern for the e-commerce giants as customers refused to accept the orders because of interaction with the delivery personnel and gated communities also refused the entry.

In order to overcome this situation, JD.com placed delivery boxes outside the gated communities and after placing the order in the box a QR code is sent to consumer informing the delivery of the item and requesting the receipt.

Other Initiatives By Alibaba To Fight COVID-19

AliHealth also got pace during this time, providing Covid-19 information through Taobao and Alipay. As the situation started getting worse, it started offering free online consultation on their platform.

As the businesses and Government of the entire world came on to the foot front to defeat the Covid-19 situation, the rapid success of Chinese e-commerce giants and their strategy is teaching the entire world, how to be tech savvy and access mass markets.