, an e-commerce website jointly established by Tencent, Baidu and Wanda Group, went into operation on July 31. It launched an open platform to shopping centers, adopted Internet-based ideas, technologies and resources, and crafted customized “Internet+” solutions for business partners to build an e-commerce-focused ecosystem.

It’s learned the open platform is made up of four management platforms separately responsible for membership management, membership reward alliance, smart payment, and marketing & operation. Backed by its membership alliance, big data and cloud computing infrastructure, ffan offers one-stop business management services for shopping centers and merchants, ranging from membership, membership points to marketing and payment. These services enable business partners to effectively and accurately seize every selling opportunity in the ever-changing Internet era. In the meantime, it can help consumers pinpoint a specific store, find vacant parking seats and reduce waiting time. Digital shopping centers are available online through the application of a complete set of smart hardware & software solutions, so that consumers can enjoy the most pleasant online shopping experience.

Specifically, the membership management platform, based on big data mining, provides shopping centers with various services they need at different stages of business operations, including establishing a membership system, extracting membership values and encouraging members to shop more often. The platform will also launch membership activities to increase members’ activeness and boost online sales revenue. By means of mutual recognition of membership, business partners can also share ffan’s membership system and its experience in membership operation.
 
The membership reward alliance platform allows members to earn and use reward points at different merchants of different industries. That gives members a great deal of freedom to collect and use their points, accelerating the circulation of the points and enhancing their monetary value. As a result, members will become more active spenders so as to earn points.

The smart payment platform offers payment, verification and settlement solutions for different consumption scenarios at the shopping centers. As a gateway to smart payment service, the “smart checkout counter” can integrate various pay channels to facilitate payments with bank cards, third-party payment tools, prepaid cards, member cards, reward point cards as well as public bus cards. Besides, it also enables payment with POS terminals, ffan member cards, QR Codes as well as NFC devices. A broad range of mobile payment services give shoppers a strong sense of security, convenience and efficiency when making purchases at the shopping centers. 

The marketing & operation platform, based on its membership system, is able to classify members based on specific criteria and achieve precision marketing by targeting certain consumers. Merchants can set marketing rules, and then marketing activities can be carried out automatically. That helps merchants not only reduce marketing cost and resources, but also move more quickly to respond to consumer demands. In addition, a unified marketing & operation platform can gather all merchants’ promotional information and make it easier for the shopping centers to concentrate resources in its day-to-day marketing campaign.

ffan.com has established a unified membership system with roughly 60 million registered members by June 2015. The number is expected to exceed one billion when the system is integrated with Tencent’s membership system. Ffan member reward alliance has attracted more than 6,900 merchants to join and has forged strategic partnership with the leading enterprises in such sectors as finance, civil aviation, communications, Internet and business travel. The comprehensive and intensive business cooperation enables ffan and partners to offer members with the most competitive services and resources available on the market. On the basis of the ffan app, ffan all-in-one cards and Wanda membership accounts, has opened payment access to bank cards, public bus cards, prepaid cards, WeChat wallet and Baidu wallet, and provides consumers with a wide variety of smart services related to shopping and basic necessities of everyday life.

Besides, ffan has developed big data application systems and data products and established a complete set of framework to analyze sectors like department store, merchandise management, hotel and real estate. Based on the existing offline data collected by the shopping center, ffan has acquired Internet-based analytic skills and offers analysis on different types of business, analysis on member labeling and merchant labeling, Internet marketing and offline marketing, customer relationship management, dynamic analysis of members, analysis of popular areas in the shopping center, as well as makes sales forecast. A cloud computing base built by ffan in Chengdu is moving toward completion. In the first phase, 5,000 cabinets and 80,000 servers can provide virtual resources and computing resources and offer computing services to public and private users. These hardware facilities can effectively reduce the IT infrastructure cost for the shopping center.

After it goes online, ffan will further expand access to resources at Tencent, Baidu and Wanda and provide perfect experiential scenarios to consumers. In the meanwhile, it will build an open-ended all-business management platform, aiming to increase the number of registered users to 100 million and forge partnership with 370 large commercial centers by the end of this year. That goal, if accomplished, will enable ffan to help large shopping centers and commercial complexes across China to establish and expand footprint in the online shopping market and let Internet play a role in their business operations.