China Market Entry

The following is a list of the more common challenges experienced by companies and organizations looking to access the Chinese online population, both consumers and businesses alike.

• The Great Firewall - "The Great Firewall of China" censors or outright blocks many websites, especially from outside of China, for a vareity of reasons including political, competitive and offensive content etc. Commonly known sites currently blocked in China include such global brands as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, YouTube, IMDB, The New York Times and Wikipedia, just to name a few.
• Slow (if not super slow) Access - Those sites hosted on non-Chinese clouds like Acquia, Google, Amazon, Rackspace etc. can experience notable differences in performance and load speeds when compared to those sites hosted on Chinese-based clouds like Alibaba's Aliyun.
• Network Issues - Without proper guidance and configuration, companies and organizations trying to get into the Chinese market are much more prone to unstable network environments and even more susceptible to such common site hacking efforts such as DDoS, SQL injections, cross-site scripting and brute force attacks.
• Poor Search Engine Marketing - Companies who think that their current search engine marketing strategy will translate both literally and figuratively across to the Chinese market will be sorely mistaken. For starters, Google doesn't work in China and the major search providers used by the Chinese population (ie. biggest market share of search volume) are Baidu (59%), 360 Search (25%) and Soguo (13%). Secondly, while the same SEO tactics used to optimize for Google today can be employed to improve rankings, many of the out of date, more questionable tactics such as key word stuffing and low quality backlink building are still recognized in helping companies rank better on the Chinese search engines. Next, Pay Per Click on Baidu and the other engines can also pose challenges because of the several differences in how they are set up and operate, causing companies unfamiliar with these platforms to suffer financial losses because of poor understanding. Lastly, while keyword research remains at the core of any good SEM strategy, moving from another language to Chinese can always cause things to get "lost in translation" if proper guidance isn't involved.
• Chinese Social Networks - As noted previously many popular sites globally, including major social networking platforms Facebook and Twitter, are completely blocked in China. Furthermore, many of the more common global social platforms have Chinese counterparts that do the same thing and are much more heavily adopted by the Chinese user population. These include Weibo (replacement for Twitter), WeChat (replacement for Facebook, Whatsapp), Youku (replacement for YouTube), QQ (replacement for Skype) and Taobao (replacement for Ebay) to name just a few. Appropriate social strategy leveraging these channels should be a major priority for any company looking to break into the Chinese online market, especially for consumer brands, because if left underdeveloped or completely disregarded could result in major negative repercussions both short and long term.
• Chinese Language First - Not a surprise by any stretch, but the Chinese people favor websites and apps written in Chinese, specifically simplified Chinese. The major search engines in China are also known to favor Chinese first websites over translations and other languages when it comes to rankings and the costs associated with Pay Per Click.