Key Findings

Selling Is Knowing: Twenty brand sites are e-commerce enabled, twice the number from 2010. Brands selling online have an average IQ 16 points higher than those without online sales. With 11 out of 15 brands selling online.

Beauty brands continue to have the highest e-commerce penetration. However, the Fashion category had the largest change from 2010, increasing from seven percent to 24 percent.

Digital Disparity: Although over half of Chinese luxury purchases are made abroad, only 58 percent of brands provide U.S. and European store locators, a large missed opportunity to expand their global reach. The majority of sites fail to list pricing in Chinese currency, provide user reviews, or integrate Chinese social media.

Wild About Weibo: In the highly fragmented Chinese social landscape, Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, is the platform of choice. Fifty-seven percent of prestige brands maintain a presence on this platform.

Buried on Baidu: Local search engine Baidu possesses 76 percent of the Chinese search market. However, visibility on Baidu has declined since April 2010, with 42 percent of prestige brand sites failing to be returned in the top three search results for a Chinese brand name search, up from 29 percent.

Mobile Incompatibility: Two-thirds of China’s 485 million Internet users access the web via their phone, yet only 25 percent of brands (up from two percent in 2010) maintain a mobile optimized site. While 60 percent of Prestige 100® brands have an app in the Chinese iTunes store (up from 16 percent in 2010), only two-thirds of these apps are available in Chinese.