Chinese Online Baby Products Retailing: What to Know

Chinese parents are still spending more online for their babies every year, even as fewer babies are born. And they still trust foreign brands to deliver.
China’s baby products market has moved past the population boom that used to drive it. Growth today comes from parents spending more per child, not from more children being born. That shift creates a real opening for foreign brands, but only for the ones who read the market correctly.
At GMA, we’ve helped international companies break into China’s baby care space through tailored digital strategies and market research grounded in what Chinese parents actually search for and buy.
In this article, you’ll find the current numbers, an honest look at the demographic question everyone asks about this market, and the steps that get a foreign baby brand its first real sales in China.

Written by Olivier Verot, founder and CEO of GMA. Over the past decade our team has worked with several maternity and baby brands, from European organic skincare lines to Nordic formula makers, on getting their first real traction on Tmall and JD.com.

Overview of the baby products market in China

China’s maternity and baby online market reached roughly RMB 223.78 billion (about $33.11 billion) in 2025, up 12.6% year on year, according to Statista. That is a healthy growth rate for a market this size, and it is not slowing because parents have stopped spending. It is slowing, then picking back up, because the mix of who buys and why has changed.

Online channels now account for 46.1% of maternity and baby sales in China, up from 35.1% just two years earlier, according to China Briefing’s market research. At that pace, e-commerce will likely overtake offline retail within the next two to three years. For a foreign brand deciding where to put its first budget, that answers the question before it gets asked: online first.

China’s middle class keeps growing, and that keeps pushing parents toward higher-quality infant care. Foreign brands still carry weight here. Chinese parents choose them because they trust the quality control behind imported baby food and skincare more than many domestic alternatives, especially since the 2008 melamine scandal, which is still referenced in parenting forums today, nearly two decades later.

Why a shrinking birth rate does not mean a shrinking market

Let’s address this honestly, because every brand we talk to asks it eventually: China’s birth rate is falling, and the number of new babies is not coming back to where it was a decade ago. Births fell to a record low of 7.92 million in 2025, and China’s population has now declined for four straight years. Chinese demand-side research puts 2026 in a similar range, somewhere around 7.2 to 7.8 million births, described locally as the market entering a “flat bottom” after years of steep decline rather than a floor that keeps dropping.

That is real, and no honest agency will tell you otherwise. What it means in practice is that the market has stopped growing by volume and started growing by value. Annual spending per child aged 0 to 3 rose to around RMB 48,000 (about $7,100) in 2025, and is projected to reach RMB 72,000 (about $10,650) by 2030, a compound growth rate of 6 to 7% a year, according to China Briefing. Parents are having fewer children and spending more on each one.

The categories benefiting most from this shift are not the cheapest ones. Diapers and wipes still make up 60 to 70% of category value by volume, but toiletries and skincare are the fastest-growing segment, expanding at 11 to 16% a year. That is where premiumization is concentrated, and it is exactly where a foreign brand with a genuine quality story has the most room to compete.

There is also a geographic shift worth knowing about. Growth used to come almost entirely from tier-1 and tier-2 cities. Chinese trade press now points to county-level and smaller cities as the segment quietly propping up the birth rate and, with it, a meaningful share of new baby-product demand. If your China strategy is built entirely around Shanghai and Beijing consumers, you are missing where some of the newer growth actually sits.

Parents prefer to purchase mother and baby products online

As more Chinese parents shop online by default, e-commerce keeps taking share from offline baby stores and pharmacies. With platforms making cross-border purchases easier and safer on paper, Chinese consumers keep buying foreign-made baby products for their perceived quality and safety standards over domestic options.

What changed since this article was first written is the platform mix. Tmall and JD.com remain where purchases happen, but Xiaohongshu and Douyin now do most of the work of getting a parent to trust a brand before she ever opens Tmall. Skipping that discovery step and going straight to a storefront is the single most common mistake we see from new entrants.

Growing preference for foreign brands

China’s middle class keeps growing its purchasing power, and baby products remain one of the categories where that shows up first. Chinese parents still turn to imported products over concerns about contamination and quality assurance in domestic brands, and some are willing to pay a premium for a foreign name on baby formula or diapers.

That preference is not unconditional anymore. Domestic brands like BeingMate and Feihe have closed a lot of the trust gap over the past few years with better manufacturing and aggressive local marketing. A foreign brand cannot coast on being foreign. It needs a real reason to be chosen.

Chinese parents prefer eco-friendly and organic products

As Chinese parents become more health-conscious, eco-friendly and organic baby products keep gaining ground. That is a real opening for foreign brands with a genuine sustainability story to target this segment.

One example of foreign success here is the Dutch brand Rituals, which entered China’s baby care market on organic ingredients as its main selling point, paired with premium pricing aimed at parents who prioritize safety and quality control above everything else.

How to sell baby products to Chinese consumers?

Getting into China’s baby products market means prioritizing safety and quality control, adapting to local preferences through real market research, using e-commerce and social platforms the way Chinese parents actually use them, and building an after-sales system that keeps a customer for the next child, not just the first purchase.

Partner with local distributors or retailers

Local partners bring insight into consumer preferences and cultural nuance, and help navigate regulatory hurdles that catch most new entrants off guard, particularly anything touching infant formula or health claims.

Working with Alibaba’s Tmall Global platform gives foreign brands access to hundreds of millions of registered users, plus logistical support and marketing tools. For brands not ready to register a Chinese entity, Tmall Overseas Fulfillment is usually the fastest legitimate way to test demand before committing to a full market entry.

Use e-commerce platforms and social media the way Chinese parents actually do

Online shopping is the default for the large majority of Chinese parents buying baby care products, and China’s mobile commerce market remains the largest in the world by transaction volume.

By partnering with established platforms such as Taobao or JD.com, foreign brands can reach a wide, purchase-ready audience quickly. Douyin’s 2026 shopping data shows the average order value climbing well past what it was even two years ago, as parents shift from buying on price to buying on product quality first. Timing matters too: brands that build a presence ahead of China’s major shopping festivals, particularly 618 and Double 11, consistently see a disproportionate share of their annual sales land in those two windows.

Develop innovative and unique products

Chinese consumers are selective and look for high-quality, safe products for their children, and that bar keeps rising every year.

Fisher-Price’s “Smart Connect” line is a good example: it built app-controlled settings into ordinary products like swings and bouncers, appealing to tech-comfortable Chinese parents while adding real convenience, not novelty for its own sake. Product innovation that solves an actual parenting problem, like infant probiotics aimed at digestion and immunity, tends to travel faster on Chinese social platforms than pure design updates.

Prioritize safety: it is the single biggest factor in this category

Chinese parents remain wary of imported baby goods after past safety scandals, and that wariness works in favor of brands that are transparent about it.

Jujube, an American diaper bag company, is a good case study in handling this well. After Chinese customers complained about straps breaking, Jujube issued a recall and redesigned the product to meet higher safety standards for the China market. That single decision did more for the brand’s reputation than any ad campaign could have.

Work with parenting influencers, but pick the right ones

Influencer partnerships and celebrity endorsements still build credibility fast. A growing number of parenting influencers, many of them millennials with kids of their own now, work with Chinese retailers and foreign brands to reach a new generation of parents active on social media.

Chinese mothers are always looking for safe, high-quality products, and a trusted influencer’s recommendation carries real weight in that decision. Celebrity endorsements go further: when actress Zhang Ziyi endorsed Gerber’s infant formula line, it visibly moved the brand’s reputation with Chinese parents. But smaller creators with real, credible parenting content usually convert better per dollar spent than a single celebrity moment, because the trust reads as personal rather than paid.

One caution: be careful with marketing claims around infant formula and breast-milk substitutes. Violations of international rules like the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes damage a brand’s reputation fast, and Chinese regulators pay close attention to this category specifically.

How a German skincare brand turned a slow Tmall launch around

Anton runs a German organic baby skincare brand that opened a Tmall Overseas store expecting the reputation it had built in Europe to carry over. It didn’t. After twelve months, the store converted at 0.6%, well under the category average, and total sales stayed under ¥400,000 for the year.

The first fix his team tried was more paid search spend on the storefront itself. It didn’t move the number. The store had zero reviews and zero presence anywhere a Chinese parent would look before trusting a product for a baby’s skin, so paid traffic arrived, looked around, and left.

What worked was reversing the order: before spending more on the storefront, we placed the product with about a dozen mid-tier Xiaohongshu parenting creators who used it in real routines over several weeks, not a single sponsored post. That built the reviews and the search results a cautious parent looks for. Paid traffic on Tmall was then redirected to retarget people who had already seen that organic content. The trust was built first; the traffic came second, not the other way around. Conversion climbed to 2.4% within five months, and the store closed its second year just over ¥1.8 million in revenue.

Collaborate with Chinese parents and parenting communities for product feedback

Collaborating with local parents and parenting communities for product feedback tends to pay off. It gives brands direct input from the people actually buying, which makes it easier to tailor products and marketing to what they want rather than what a foreign team assumes they want.

Social campaigns that invite user-generated content, reviews, photos of the product in daily use, work well here. Focus groups or surveys with early-adopter parents are another reliable option, especially in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities now driving a growing share of category demand.

Build an after-sales system that earns the second purchase

Loyalty programs, a smooth post-purchase experience, satisfaction surveys, and clear feedback channels all matter here. Even basic things like warranty policies, return policies, and how a complaint gets handled shape whether a customer sticks with the brand for the next stage of their child’s life.

Continuous product improvement, paired with real quality assurance, is what keeps a brand relevant as parents’ needs shift from newborn to toddler to preschool. In a market where each family has fewer children, keeping the ones you already have as customers matters more than it used to.

Frequently asked questions

Is China’s baby products market still worth entering with the birth rate falling?

Yes, but for a different reason than five years ago. Fewer babies are born each year, but each family spends more per child, and e-commerce keeps taking share from offline retail. The opportunity has shifted from volume to value: fewer buyers, higher spend per buyer, and a growing preference for quality over price. Brands chasing scale through sheer birth numbers will be disappointed. Brands built around premium positioning and trust are seeing real growth.

Do I need a Chinese business license to sell baby products online?

Not necessarily at first. Cross-border e-commerce models like Tmall Overseas let you sell into China through bonded warehouses without registering a local entity, which is how most foreign brands test the market. Once sales justify it, moving to a domestic store on Tmall or JD.com usually means local registration and, for categories like infant formula, additional product registration. Get this checked category by category before you commit, the rules differ for skincare, formula, and supplements.

How long before a new baby brand sees real sales in China?

Plan for four to six months before a Tmall or JD storefront produces meaningful revenue, and longer for infant formula because of registration requirements. The brands that move faster than that usually built trust content on Xiaohongshu or Douyin before opening the store, not after.

Should we start with Tmall, JD.com, or Douyin?

Most brands need two, not one. Tmall or JD.com for the actual transaction, and Xiaohongshu or Douyin for the discovery and trust-building that happens before a parent ever searches for your brand by name. Skipping the discovery platform and going straight to a storefront is the most common reason new entrants underperform in their first year.

Are domestic Chinese baby brands a real threat now?

Yes, more than they were a few years ago. Brands like BeingMate and Feihe have closed much of the quality gap with better manufacturing and strong local marketing. Being foreign is no longer enough on its own. A foreign brand needs a specific, provable reason for a Chinese parent to choose it, whether that is ingredient sourcing, a certification domestic brands don’t have, or a formulation genuinely built for local needs.

We are your China-based agency, ready to help

Foreign brands still have a real opportunity in China’s baby products market, but it is a different opportunity than it was five years ago. Adapting to a value-driven, premium-focused market, prioritizing safety and transparency, and building trust on Xiaohongshu and Douyin before pushing sales on Tmall or JD.com is what separates brands that grow from brands that stall out after year one.

GMA is a Shanghai-based digital agency. On baby and maternity brands specifically, we handle cross-border registration and bonded-warehouse setup, Xiaohongshu and Douyin content built for young Chinese parents rather than generic lifestyle content, and the compliance checks that keep formula and skincare products off customs holds. Our international team works directly with your brand team, not through a black box.

We specialize in:

• Website creation, development, and audit of the site.
• Baidu Search Engine Optimization
• WeChat & Xiaohongshu Content Marketing
• Managing reputation and community development.
• The creation of monthly reports and analyses by our team of experts.

We build long-term partnerships with brands serious about expanding into China’s market, not one-off campaigns.

For more information, contact our team of experts for a detailed discussion of what your baby or maternity brand needs to enter this market.

Sources: China’s Maternity and Baby Market: Demographics and Trends, China Briefing; China’s Maternity and Baby Market Part II, China Briefing; Maternity and childcare product industry in China, Statista.