JD ZCY APP

JD ZCY APP by Team Sea of Stars for 2023 APEC APP Challenge

Inspiration

MSMEs and other groups with untapped economic potential have tremendous potential and resilience, however, most people lack the channels for participation in global digitally-enabled trade and the international marketplace. On the other hand, they don't really know how to get involved —— necessary channel, product, assistance, would be indispensable. Another story, Wenxing Liu, 72 years old, is from Wuyi County, Hengshui City, Hebei Province, China. In May 2016, JD teamed with the local government on a poverty alleviation project, free-range chickens, with digital procurement access. Liu and 51 other farmers participated, and six months later, Liu and the villagers sold every one of the chickens online through JD.com. As a result, the farmers increased their annual income by several thousand dollars each. From this case, the effect of digital tools and knowledge has been demonstrated. Further, for the groups with untapped economic potential have tremendous potential and resilience, we want to develop a new APP, i.e. JD JCY APP (submitted to APEC App Challenge 2023), with better capacity of user access, cheap and cheerful, and open a unique part for them in app. With our design, we expect those who have never been exposed an e-commerce platform, could How can we help MSMEs and other groups with untapped economic potential participate in global digitally-enabled trade and the international marketplace.

What it does

JD.com is China’s largest online retailer and its biggest overall retailer. It offers customers the best online shopping experience. The company is a member of the Fortune Global 500. Under the foundation and support of JD.com, a new APP, named JD ZCY came into being. In JD ZCY APP, the JD's original ability of commodity, marketing and supply chain could be fully applied, and a proprietary service system in APP has been built to enable MSMES to access quickly, buy cheaply, sell easily, and participate in global markets with better digital capacity. First, New-store allowance, digital logistics management, as well as dedicated customer service, would assist MSMES to start a business easily. Second, exclusive prices of over million commodities would be enjoyed for the MSMEs settled. And other well-known e-commerce providers have been introduced for price-comparison. Meanwhile, special products, such as local agricultural products and handicrafts by MSMEs, will be displayed preferentially in a special zone, and the products will be exposed to over ten million consumers every day. Especially, JD ZCY APP offers auxiliary function for the groups with poorly educated or disabled. Concise page, larger font, and voice broadcasting can assist them to participate in global digitally-enabled trade easily.

How we built it

The overall architecture of JD ZCY App is based on a combination of client and server. The mobile client mainly adopts mobile native technology+H5, and the server builds SaaS services based on cloud services. The overall design concept of JD ZCY App is simple, lite, and can adapt to multi-platform end and multi scene designs, so it mainly focuses on H5 design. The H5 part is developed using Vue3+Taro+NutUI as a whole. Taro is a multi-terminal unified development framework developed by JD.com, which can generate mini Apps with one click. NutUI is a JD style mobile component library with rich templates and components. The entire app has flexible scalability and compatibility, and can be embedded in various shopping malls and welfare scenarios. Simultaneously connecting Eagle Eye performance monitoring and crash release components and message push components, with rich functions. The back-end services are delivered externally by the Saas server as a whole, using cloud native technology to adapt to multi cloud environments. The technology stack adopts Docker+K8S+Springcloud family bucket, which can output services from multiple suppliers such as JD to the supply chain. At the same time, it provides multi venue capabilities such as hot search, tags, recommendations, welfare zones, special groups zones, life halls, auxiliary equipment halls, etc. It supports mobile payment, account period, and payment on delivery Multiple payment methods such as mixed point payment. At the same time, JD ZCY APP also integrates big data analysis technology, and through hot search and hot selling product analysis, the latest products will be continuously released and launched to provide better experience services.

Challenges we ran into

Cultural difference, language, and purchasing habit may be the challenges for us. JD.com is China’s leading one-stop e-commerce platform, providing over 580 million active customers with direct access to an unrivalled range of authentic, high-quality products. While for the global digitally-enabled trade, different cultural demands shall be met in diversity, which reflecting in product description, customer service, product usability and so on. We design the product as carefully as possible, and think about how to accept this product as a MSME.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Based on the MSMEs and other groups with untapped economic potential, a new and completed APP has been developed, which can be really used in the international marketplace. At the same time, with the reuse of JD’s logistics capabilities, JD ZCY APP can provide small-to-medium sized warehousing, oversized warehousing, cross border, cold chain delivery, frozen and chilled warehousing facilities, B2B and crowdsourcing logistics, and it is legal and compliant to rotate goods between different countries. It means that the commodities around the world can be truly purchased and sold in one platform. Further, for the groups with untapped economic potential, JD ZCY APP, more parts in APP have been set from product design and system functionality. Though the difficulty of developing, we want to make JD ZCY APP be the first product they used for participating in global digitally-enabled trade, the functions, zones, support pages and operation instruction, and customer service representatives are presented on the front page clearly, ensuring their equal and full participation in social life and their share of the material and cultural wealth of the society. Especially, JD ZCY provide disabled persons with special assistance by adopting supplementary methods and supportive measures, such as voice broadcasting and special guidelines, so as to alleviate or eliminate the effects of their disabilities and external barriers and ensure the realization of their rights.

What we learned

The whole society shall carry forward humanitarianism, understand, respect, care for and help MSMEs and other groups with untapped economic potential, and support the cause of them. Especially, according to our field research in Chinese rural areas, disabled people are more eager to enter global trade, therefore, the internet and digital tools should be further developed, which are practical, accessible and widely beneficial, and give priority to them.

What's next for JD ZCY APP

We will first invite some users, such as people with disabilities, and those from remote and rural communities in China, for an internal test, and some online marketing activities would be implemented for boosting publicity. Meanwhile, according to the feedback, more system functions will be optimized synchronously for the groups with untapped economic potential. In the future, JD ZCY APP will focus on user experience, and develop intelligent customer service based voice-boarding, intelligent logistics and delivery services. At the same time, the latest Flutter+Dart will be used to expand multi-scenarios, and accessing more capabilities, such as mobile scanning, robotics, and WeChat payment, and the product could be providing intelligent services for various groups. New zones and other scenarios will be also added to provide MSMESs with one click purchase of all services. Besides, we are particularly grateful to each of MSMEs and other groups with untapped economic potential. With their participation, we have even more reason to be excited and optimistic about the future. Working together, we can play our part in helping the world become more open, inclusive and sustainable.