China: Starbucks Coffee Experiments on New Digitalized Retail

Starbucks Coffee is turning out to be the favourite place for many people in China. The beverage giant has established itself to become a poster brand for the digitalized retail or the new retail in China.

The new retail is nothing but bringing few technological changes in the stores like AR (augmented reality), AI (artificial intelligence), mobile apps, robots, mobile payments and many other changes which could help the consumers to serve seamlessly.

Currently, Starbucks Coffee has been assisted by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group to meet the consumers demand despite a fierce competition with Luckin Coffee, a local coffee outlet in China. Starbucks coffee is selling their food and beverage on tmall.com, utilizing Alipay (Alibaba’s Mobile and online payment platform) and leveraging the delivery services of Ele.me (Alibaba’s online food delivery platform). Ele.me is helping the American coffee giant to deliver beverages to the online customers quickly (for a delivery fee of 9 RMB).

Currently, Starbucks Coffee and Alibaba are the only companies which are looking to create a new benchmark in this new arena of retailing.

JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce and logistical company has its own flagship store where it showcases its tech prowess, i.e. QM furniture store (located in Beijing). Apart from that, Alibaba and JD.com have opened their own digitalized supermarkets with the help of Hema and 7Fresh respectively.

Alibaba’s Founder Jack Ma and Howard Schultz, Starbucks Coffee’s executive Chairman have maintained a good relationship in terms of business. The two companies are very serious on the expansion spree.