East-West-Connect.com

Last week I was interviewed by James Renouf for an upcoming audio book and one of the questions they asked me was something like, “What is the biggest mistake you see Western companies making in entering the online Chinese market?” The answer I gave was that they just sit and wait until the best time for entry is already over. Read more...

The CNNIC report for January 2012 came out, so I've updated my graphs to reflect the recent data. The data is up-to-date as of the end of December, 2011.

Highlights: Read more...

On Nov 11, 2011, Singles Day, TMall held a massive one-day sale, resulting in a total of 3.36 billion Chinese Yuan in revenue (530 million US Dollars). With massive support from Taobao, TMall has seen incredible growth throughout 2011. In this post I’m going to introduce TMall and explain some of the major changes TMall made in 2011 and early 2012. Read more...

Baidu’s “Brand Promotion” product allows famous brands to display a lot more information about their brand for branded searches. When a Baidu user searches for a brand that uses Baidu’s brand advertising product, they will see text, images and video related to the brand as well as links that lead deeper into the company’s website. Read more...

Baidu Tongji (Analytics) launched some cool new tools this year that provide some functionality not available in Google Analytics: Heat Maps, Site Speed Test and Baidu Index Checker. Let’s take a look!

Baidu Index Checker

This is a great tool for monitoring how many of your website’s pages have been indexed by Baidu. It not only shows you current data, but shows you historical data as well. Read more...

Echo just made a guest post on Groupon China's counterfeit Tissot watch incident, how they dealt with it and what this might mean for Chinese group-buying websites and Chinese e-commerce in general. Check it out on TechRice.com.

TechRice is a great blog about Chinese web startups and major Chinese-language players on the Internet.

You may have noticed that we have a new red panda mascot for the blog. I think he's pretty cool!

The red panda images on the top and bottom of the blog were illustrated by Agus Prajago of choppic.com. Read more...

Tablet time!

A reader asked for some data on tablet usage on China, so I did some digging around and found a couple semi-relevant articles. I've simplified and 'Englishified' two Chinese-language articles that I found online Read more...

In my earlier blog post “How to Choose a Chinese Online Payment Solution”, I introduced some of the more popular Chinese online payment solutions. Some are fit for non-Chinese companies and some aren’t. Most China-based payment companies know Chinese clients well, but have major problems dealing with non-Chinese companies. Read more...

Although there are over 700 million Chinese people classified as living in rural areas, only about 125 million of them use the Internet. That’s a penetration rate of 18.5%*, far below the urban Chinese rate of 50%. These users are usually the last ones on the minds of International companies that are setting up shop in China’s first and second tier cities. However, when it comes to Internet marketing, rural Chinese Internet users are a rising force. Read more...