Top Mistakes made by Luxury Brands in China

Luxury websites are usually slick and elegant with exquisite and giant images rolling on the main website page, but many are failing to deliver the most fundamental requirement: a first-class user experience.

When you frustratingly wait for the website to load an exquisite picture popped on the main page which fails to load halfway, it is paradoxical to think that premium and luxury brands offer such poor online experiences.

Luxury brands need to pay much attention to the user experience

There is a difference between online and offline for luxury brands. The trouble for luxury brands online is that a lot of what makes them luxury brands occurs offline, such as fancy showrooms, personal service, and so on.

If these brands do not provide the equivalent value of service online and still charge customers the same high price, the user experience and reputation are about to drop with a dash. Therefore online, if you’re expecting people to spend big money on big-ticket items, then providing a great user experience is the least you can do.

Besides the usual poor u-experience, many luxury brands are criticized by a lot for their problematical websites.

Mistake 1: Slow Load Times

Most visitors do not want to wait to load a website for too long. Even if it is their favorite brand, they still will lose their patience because of the long waiting loading. In fact, nearly half of the online visitors expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a website that isn’t loaded within three seconds.

Unfortunately, slow loading times appear to be a common theme among luxury websites, which often perform poorly due to a lack of optimization.

But websites do not need to compromise on speed to accommodate better aesthetic design with all the bells and whistles. Rich graphics and images can be used, but they should always be optimized to ensure great website performance.

Mistake 2: poor website content

Content is a crucial component of a website’s usability. No matter what message you are trying to get across, nothing will get through if the content just isn’t easily visible.

Yet many luxury brands make design choices that are challenging from a user-experience perspective, including:

Fancy font styles that may be pretty but are just impossible to decipher;

Tiny font sizes that require a magnifying glass to view properly;

Low-contrast color schemes make reading very tiring for the eyes.

Mistake 3: Lack of information on SEO

For business in China, it is essential to have some information on the first page for any business when people do some research on the SEO, but clearly, these foreign luxury brands are not quite visible on SEO.

Using text as images, and lack of attention to copywriting for SEO can mean that sites don’t even rank for their own products.

Mistake 4: Not Optimized For Mobile Devices

It is an inevitable tendency to optimize its own website for mobile phones and all sorts of systems such as ISO, and Android. Therefore, providing a seamless user experience across all devices is thus paramount if luxury brands want to reach consumers in all the moments that matter. But, surprisingly, many websites are still not optimized for mobile devices.

Mistake5: Not highlight the eCommerce site

It is paradoxical that some luxury brands tend to accelerate their sales through e-commerce, but they don’t emphasize their purchasing portal or even it can be very hard to actually find the eCommerce part of this site.

Like the official eCommerce website of Dolce & Gabbana, there is a link to the online store, but it’s in small grey text on a black background. Also, though the site displays lots of images from its shows, advertising, and new collections, none of these pages actually link you to the product pages where you can actually buy them.

How to sell luxury brands online in China?

Navigate an appropriate e-commerce platform and open an account. For many luxury brands, to reach more sales in China, E-commerce definitely will be good for the business, but the main problem is that not any e-commerce platform is suitable for the business.

Tmall, Taobao, and JD are the giants of e-commerce. They are the bigger platforms and also the bests in terms of quality and safety. Thus they are good for selling on Tmall or JD because Chinese people only trust reliable platforms with quality.

However because these e-commerce platforms are very popular in China, it’s not easy to sell on that platform. Most of them only accept brands that have already a significant presence and realized high sales in China. That’s why most of the spirits brands failed to sell on the giants’ platforms, Tmall, Taobao, or JD.

In addition, WeChat is also a good platform for the e-store. Due to its huge number of registered users, whether establishing your own mini-program or sharing some information about your business through the official WeChat account people can subscribe to or WeChat group.

Be visible on Baidu

It should be visible on Baidu for these luxury brands, especially for these which haven’t done much marketing in China. 75% of research in China is on Baidu. You need to have a good ranking on Baidu to be visible. Chinese consumers will only buy brands that have a good ranking on Baidu.

SEO is extremely efficient but asks for more work. It requires you to create good content, shareable, using keywords in order to increase your presence on the web for search engines.

Promote on Chinese Social media platforms

As Chinese people cannot leave without social media nowadays, advertising on various Chinese social media platforms is very effective. Among these major platforms, we have WeChat, which is now the platform of excellence for many companies. With around 889 million registered users in December 2016, Wechat has become a powerful tool for businesses around the world. It is widely used especially among Chinese youth, who are most likely to travel.

As a second popular platform in China, we also note Weibo. It is also very powerful for sharing images and content with a wider audience. Although it cannot match the Wechat user base, it still registered nearly 260 million active users in 2016. Chinese tourists often look for information on these social media platforms before making decisions about travel.

Collaborate with influencers

Influencers have become a powerful tool for luxury marketing in China. Many influencers command thousands of followers on Chinese social media platforms. They will share your messages with their fans and write articles about your company. Chinese customers tend to trust the opinions of these influencers more.

Case study

Giorgio Armani is an Italian Luxury fashion label. Well-known today for his clean, tailored lines, Giorgio Armani Beauty is designed with elegance and sophistication in mind. Makeup and skincare are created from the finest materials.GMA worked with Giorgio Armani and helped it with its e-reputation in China.

Because we know e-reputation is essential for all luxury brands to be successful, our mission for it mainly focused on gaining more and more e-reputation in China through our tactful and efficient methods.

Gentlemen Marketing Agency is specialized in digital marketing in the Chinese market. If you want to access more information about marketing in China, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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