Global beauty retailer Sephora, part of French luxury goods group LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, launched its first online store in China on shopping platform JD.com Inc, the latest global firm to tap into China's booming e-commerce market.
The cosmetics chain, which has 174 physical stores in the Chinese mainland, said on Wednesday it had chosen JD partly due to its focus on fighting counterfeit goods, an issue that has plagued China's online retail market including sector leader Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
Alibaba and JD sold a combined 2.53 trillion yuan ($407.83 billion) worth of goods in 2014.
"We are very concerned about having control of the product. For China's e-platforms, this has been the biggest question mark," said Helen Zhou, Sephora's vice president for Greater China.
Counterfeit goods can be found on all Chinese e-commerce platforms, despite efforts to fight them, because of the sheer scale of the issue, industry experts say.
"I would guess that JD isn't doing much better than tmall.com in terms of [the number] of grey products, they both have issues," said Thibault Boiron, Shanghai-based general manager of e-commerce consultancy Altima Agency, referring to Alibaba's Amazon-like platform.
