Baidu To Send Mobile Search Users JD.Com’s Way

Baidu, the Chinese internet search giant, reached a deal with Chinese eCommerce company JD.com in which it will send users looking for products online JD.com’s way.

According to a report in Bloomberg, under terms of the deal users who are looking for product information on Baidu’s mobile search app will be able to access a section in which they can purchase products right from JD.com. Baidu gets to keep users within the app and also gets its hand of valuable data about what its customers like and don’t like, reported Bloomberg.

“Baidu can use its advantages in information to help JD greatly shorten the time between spotting an item to actual purchase,” Baidu said in a statement to Bloomberg. “This improves efficiency, reduces marketing costs but also enhances the shopping experience.” The move on the part of Baidu and JD.com comes at a time when the leading eCommerce company in China, Alibaba, is using its vast digital information on consumers to drive an offline online retail strategy. It also comes at a time when a slew of technology companies are in a battle to turn the information they gather on consumers into sales, noted Bloomberg.

The report noted that both companies have not said how many items of JD.com will show up on the Baidu mobile app, but over the long run it could help Baidu grow its revenue. For JD.com it could result in more eCommerce sales and thus more advertising from brands that want to promote their products on the website. This isn’t the first deal Baidu struck in recent weeks. In June, KITT.AI, the company that makes human machine interaction easy with natural-language understanding technologies, announced it was sold to Baidu. In a blog post at the time, KITT.AI said that over the last two years it has developed three products: Snowboy, NLU and chatbot engine ChatFlow. As of July, it has powered more than 12,000 developers on the Snowboy platform, who in turn created the biggest hotword library in the world, with 9,000 unique hotwords in 15 major languages and has turned ChatFlow into an enterprise-level software and has been looking at ways to monetize its chatbot platform.