Furnishing fine design via the internet

Although based in Amsterdam, Fabian Nijlant thinks about China all the time.

Every day, his main concern is about the tastes of the millions of Chinese consumers on the other side of the internet.

Nijlant is the director of China of Flinders, a major online retailer of premium furniture, lighting and home accessories in the Netherlands.

The company sells 15 brands and almost 200 products to Chinese consumers through the Tmall Global platform. It aims to increase its range to 25 brands and 500 products by the end of the year.

"We're growing rapidly. Next year we expect to grow 400 percent," he says.

It now sells a wide variety of products from different European designers and brands to Chinese consumers.

"While it is quite hard to determine the taste of the Chinese consumer, we aim to continuously expand our assortment with more products. Design relates to your personal taste, so by expanding our assortment we try to give the Chinese consumer a broad choice," Nijlant says.

The latest annual global cross-border survey by online payments service provider PayPal and French market research firm Ipsos found that 35 percent of Chinese online shoppers looked overseas for goods in 2015, compared with 26 percent in 2014.

Safety, convenience and authenticity are the top drivers for Chinese consumers who do cross-border shopping.

Flinders launched its Tmall Global store at flinders.tmall.hk in April 2015. Nijlant says it gives Chinese consumers the ability to buy beautiful, distinctive and genuine design products from great European brands.

"We saw that only a limited number of European brands were available in China and even fewer design brands were sold online. We have all these brands in stock in our Dutch warehouse and we guarantee the authenticity of the products. This made us think that opening a store on Tmall Global would be a good idea," he says.

With an e-commerce background and having managed several e-commerce businesses active in Europe and the US, Nijlant said he only discovered e-commerce in China four years ago.

"And now I can say that e-commerce in China is truly the most advanced in the world - which makes it interesting to be active in, but at the same time very challenging because it's very different compared with Europe," he says.

Moreover, he says the Tmall Global platform from Alibaba allows foreign merchants to open a store, arranging international money transfers and offering an attractive logistic solution from Europe.

"Altogether this lowers the threshold for entering the Chinese market," he says, adding that Flinders also sells to other countries much closer to the Netherlands, like Belgium and Germany.

Nijlant says Chinese consumers value design products and are increasingly willing to pay a premium price. But they prefer to get in touch with the merchants before buying, sometimes because they have questions about the products or sometimes just because they want to be sure that everything is "real".

"What I'm personally happy with is that we also succeed at selling products that are less known by their brand but stand out purely from their design," he says.

"I see the cross-border e-commerce market as an attractive way for merchants to enter the Chinese market, and for Chinese consumers as an easy and convenient way to purchase products from abroad," he says.

He says the future for cross-border e-commerce is bright. However, the future will also depend on how regulations evolve. For example, when taxes for cross-border e-commerce go up, the consequence will be that product prices will go up as well.

Once prices get seriously higher compared with the price of a similar product at home, the Chinese consumer won't buy anymore via the regular cross-border marketplaces and will find other ways to get it, he says.

chenyingqun@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 10/21/2016 page7)