(Chinese Version)

After its announcement of joining two of the country's biggest Internet companies, the search engine Baidu and social media giant Tencent, in building a massive e-commerce platform, Wanda became a rather hot company in China. Whether this company could succeed in building this platform or not, it’s going to be a huge bomb to the industry. Also, after Wang Sicong, Wanda CEO Wang Jianlin’s son, became a well-known figure on the Internet, there have been so much rumor between him and Wanda as well.

According to a credible source from Wanda Group, the new Wanda e-commerce platform will replace Wanhui, the former e-commerce brand of Wanda, with Feifan. This new platform is in the beta testing stage, and will allegedly launch the first trial run at the end of the first quarter this year.

A glimpse of the interface of Feifan

We have to admit, Feifan does sound funny in Chinese, but ultimately, the product itself and the services it can offer are the things what customers really care about. Now, let’s have a deeper look at how Feifan works and see if it’s bound to succeed.

At the Wanda Plaza in Tong Zhou district of Beijing, a friend of mine actually got the chance to try out Feifan. On Feifan, users can have access to useful real time information of the parking lot, such as the parking space through parking space reservation function. They can select a particular time and make reservation via credits or a credit card. Moreover, Feifan can mark the parking space you are using in case you forget where your car is.

It’s said that the Wanda Plaza in Tong Zhou district is now able to provide in-door navigation and positioning service thanks to Beacon technology. My friend tried to find the bathroom and the elevator, and the navigation did lead him to them successfully. The navigation and positioning system’s pretty accurate. But still, when my friend was using the navigation function near the elevator entrance, the navigation then pointed to another elevator. It seemed that the accuracy of the navigation service remained to be improved when it comes to navigating on multiple floors. 

Apart from that, Wanda e-commerce has also installed queuing machines that are ready to use for many restaurants in the plaza. It’s said that there are 8 products that Wanda e-commerce platform will launch into the market, including movie ticket booking service and shopping service.

These functions and services are all integrated into one single app, Feifan, which makes it much easier for users to use all the functions and services. But if Wanda is going to carry out Wang Jianling’s plan and finish developing 15 smart products and make strategic plans for the next 3 years by the end of 2015, the company will have a difficult time building this enormous and complex app. Wanda must give top priority to the stability and user experience of this product while developing it.

For Wanda e-commerce platform, there are many other things that are worth considering as well. 

First, the overall user experience of these services are generally pretty good. They can totally help those who are having a hard time parking their cars or dying of boredom while waiting outside a restaurant. If Wanda can really pull it off, consumers will enter a new world where they can book parking space before they go out and make reservation at the restaurant beforehand. They will also have quick access to online shops and make their purchases conveniently. Their smart phones will display all the discounts they need and people can have access to anywhere using their phones. Isn’t it what O2O really should be?

Second, it’s known to all that Wanda Group possesses tremendous amount of off-line resources, which makes it easier for the company to build an O2O platform compared to those that started from online services and later extended to off-line sectors, such as Alibaba, JD and Meituan. At present, Wanda seems to be more focused on the off-line sectors while it lacks adequate online services. Unfortunately, the services that Wanda are beta testing for are only available for its VIP members and can only be used in a Wanda Plaza. Wanda is not giving much thought to the consumers online and the potential off-line consumers that are far from Wanda Plaza’s reach.

To tackle this obstacle, Wanda aims to create an open platform. Currently, Wanda plazas and hotels are all a part of the open platform. And Wanda plans to cover every commercial district in China, aiming to be a leading O2O giant in the country.

From my perspective, it’s an easy task for Wanda, a company famous for its ability to execute strategies, to integrate its off-line resources within its system. However, to build an open platform, the company has to have an open mind that is common in the Internet industry. Anyhow, whether a traditional company like Wanda could make this transition or not remains unclear. I guess we will just have to wait and see what will happen.

(The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Liu Huafang, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.)

Translated by Garret Lee(Senior Translator at ECHO), working for TMTpost.