Brian A. Wong grew up in Silicon Valley, but it was in China where he helped shape the future of digital retail. In 1999, Wong was only the 52nd person—and the first American—whom Alibaba founder Jack Ma hired.
At the time, Alibaba was a fledgling B2B website that helped Chinese manufacturers reach an international market. But in the last 23 years, it has become a powerhouse, with businesses including Taobao, a C2C marketplace similar to eBay, and TMall, which is more like Amazon.
Wong, who lives in Shanghai, is the author of The Tao of Alibaba, which was published on November 1. We talked about Alibaba starting at a time when the Chinese government’s then-new economic reforms allowed it to revolutionize e-commerce, the enormity of Singles Day, and why he stopped thinking of the US as lighting the way for retail’s future.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
When online shopping began in the US in the 1990s, there already were decades of malls, and Americans were pretty enthusiastic and sophisticated consumers. But you write that when you moved to China in 1999, retail there was pretty basic.
In America, e-commerce is the dessert, and in China, e-commerce is the main course. So you started in America with shopping malls and a very developed retail infrastructure. When e-commerce came along, it was a nice-to-have, something that enhanced your life, but it wasn’t the core of how you purchase. When I came [to China] from the US, there were shopping malls…in places like Shanghai that everyone would go to because they knew that they were the best places to get the really cool stuff, but everywhere else was boring—like dry, kind of generic products.
Can you talk about Singles Day, which is a huge retail and economic event in China but not a thing in the US?
It was a college campus custom, but then we decided to use it as a catalyst for a retail kind of activity. The first time that we organized it [in 2009], it was very rudimentary, but we got a number of brands to kind of come on and say, “Hey, let’s celebrate Singles Day by offering discounts.” It proved that there was interest both on the brand side and also with consumers.
Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
And now?
We have Chinese celebrities…but we also invited people like Daniel Craig and Taylor Swift and Kobe Bryant to come. I got to hang out with Kobe for dinner and we subsequently did more stuff together with him and the company. It’s such a big day in the consumer and retail space that if you want to be a player in China’s retail sector, that is the place to go to get your name out there and build your fan base. And if anything, it was an opportunity for brands to really build awareness and acquire customers but they did not necessarily make money on that day. Because the amount of discount that you give is probably in lieu of your marketing dollars that you’d spend the rest of the year trying to acquire the customers.
And how does Singles Day compare revenue-wise to Prime Day at Amazon?
So 2021 was at $84.5 billion. That’s seven times the global GNP of Amazon’s Prime Day [which, in July, surpassed $11.9 billion].
At the moment, you’re back in Palo Alto talking to me from the house you grew up in, and I’m wondering when you walk into a store in the US these days, how that experience compares to China.
Up until maybe seven years ago, when I went from China to Silicon Valley, it was always kind of this progression in terms of where technology is headed. But in the last say, five or six years, I feel like when I go from Shanghai to here in California, there are things that I start to see that feel not quite up-to-date.
When it comes to payment, sometimes I forget to bring my wallet with me because…everything now in China is done through the mobile phone. There’s manless restaurants with no waiters that will come take your order. I guess they had this during Covid-19 here in the US, but [in China], it’s become an everyday thing. The QR code is omnipresent. Everything kind of moves to the digital because they’re just making it more efficient and more direct.