China Data You Can Trust

Ecommerce Data

Our ecommerce data is supplied by a trusted partner in China who provides product listing data from four key platforms:

Tmall

Tmall Global

Tmall Supermarket

Taobao

And Access To

over 200 billion RMB in sales revenue, 250,000 product listings and deep dives into 500 of the top selling listings per sub-category every month, our trackers have access to an enormous depth of data.

Take our skincare tracker for example:

  • 17 subcategories

  • 2 billion units sold

  • 250,000 data points

    Monthly and Up-To-Date

    Data is collected every month so that our trackers remain current and reflect trends taking place on the ground now. With monthly data reaching back to the end of 2020 you have access to trends through the pandemic and out the other side.

Depth of Data

In addition to high level data, we deep dive into the top 500 listings of each subcategory, accounting for 75-100% of sales revenue depending on the subcategory. Beyond the top 500 listings, brands and product listings become less reliable and legitimate; despite Tmall being arguably the most reliable ecommerce platform in China, fake and misleading products continue to find their way online.

Data Cleaned, Tripled-Checked and Scrutinised

The data is then organised, translated and fed into our tracker model which is designed to be as user-friendly as possible while delivering deep and accurate insights into the market.

What Issues Need Scrutiny?

As noted, despite Tmall being arguably the most reliable ecommerce platform in China, fake and misleading products continue to find their way online. In our experience, this is mostly related to Tmall sellers playing fast and loose with brand names and origins. How does this look?

  • Sellers can manipulate brand origin by using the source of one or some ingredients.

  • Sellers can manipulate brand name to look like foreign brands.

  • Brand origin can be replaced with the Tmall sellers origin.

Social Data

While ecommerce data is a powerful tool unto itself, it has always been our philosophy to use all available sources of information. Social data provides our trackers with a second avenue for plotting product and claim trends, with data from:

While post content is not translated, they can be opened and explored. China Skinny also runs ‘chatter analysis’ which searches the content for keywords and topics that are covered in the posts and these are then compared by post count, engagement, reach etc. so that you can see which topics are hot right now, which ones get the most engagement and on which platforms.

A.I. For Better Data

We have also developed an AI sentiment analysis to give you an idea as to whether the content is positive, negative or neutral and whether certain topics trend towards positive or negative content. AI is also employed for crawling, cleaning and organising data to make sure that we provide quality data.