A day in the life of a big spender on Alibaba’s online shopping sites
Members of Alibaba’s elite APASS community are discovering benefits of networking with like-minded individuals
China’s explosive growth of online shopping and cashless payment, and an industrial ecosystem surrounding mobile internet have Alibaba Group Holdings into Asia’s most capitalised company, while making its founder and chairman Jack Ma one of China’s wealthiest men.
Behind Ma’s wealth are tens and thousands of women like Yin Han, a film and television producer in Beijing, who’s been an active online shopper for years. In 2014, she was among the first to be conferred the APASS membership since the programme was introduced.
“I buy almost everything online nowadays,” Yin said in an interview with the South China Morning Post, owned by Alibaba. She spent 940,000 yuan on Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall platforms last year, Yin said.
Using Alibaba’s Tmall platform, she regularly buys imported food and branded clothes and luxury cosmetics from flagship shops. Prices are roughly the same whether purchased online or offline, and goods purchased from official online stores can be returned at brick-and-mortar shops, she added.
Yin also shops on Taobao, mostly for designer’s clothes. As a mother raising a young family, she is a frequent buyer of children’s products as well as pet food.