All-Domain Commerce vs. Omnichannel: How Digital China Rethinks Retail from the Ground Up.
Here is my talk at the Retail Innovation Days in Heilbronn, in front of around 500 executives from German retail companies. The video is in German, but below you find a summary of what I covered.
The truth about Omnichannel
Western retailers have spent years connecting their online and offline channels. Yet in many companies, omnichannel remains primarily a technical exercise: existing silos are connected, but they are still managed separately. The result is rarely a truly seamless customer experience or a business model in which the different touchpoints systematically reinforce one another.
China offers a fundamentally different perspective. Instead of optimising individual channels, leading Chinese companies build integrated ecosystems around customer activity, relationships and data. Their objective is not merely to improve conversion rates or make existing processes more efficient. They aim to create continuous engagement, learn from customer behaviour and use these insights to improve everything from product development and marketing to supply chains and physical retail.
How to try something different
Companies such as SHEIN and Temu illustrate this difference. Their enormous investments in customer acquisition are not simply designed to generate immediate sales. They are intended to bring customers into their own platforms, increase usage, generate data and establish relationships that can lead to repeated transactions. This reflects the Chinese concept of moving customers from “public traffic” on external platforms into “private traffic” environments such as brand communities, customer groups and proprietary apps.
Customers also play a much more active role. They are not treated as isolated individuals who simply receive campaigns and purchase products. They are participants in networks who recommend products, create content, answer questions and influence other customers. TikTok Shop, for example, is not primarily a live-shopping channel. Its real power comes from mobilising creators, fans and customers to become part of the sales and communication system. These digital activities can also generate substantial traffic for physical stores.
This is the logic behind All-Domain Operations. The model connects four fields: public traffic, private traffic, online retail and offline retail. Stores can generate content and attract people into communities. Communities can drive livestream participation and online purchases. Digital engagement can bring customers back into stores, while physical experiences create content, relationships and recommendations that generate further digital activity.
Building systems instead of connecting silos
The crucial difference is therefore not the number of channels, but the architecture connecting them. In a genuine all-domain system, every customer interaction contributes to a self-reinforcing cycle of experience, community, engagement, data and commerce.
This approach also provides a strategic response to agentic commerce. Retailers that compete only through price, convenience and transactions risk becoming interchangeable when AI agents begin purchasing on behalf of consumers. Brands that build meaningful experiences, active communities and direct customer relationships are far less vulnerable because their value extends beyond the individual transaction.
The lesson is not to copy Chinese platforms or practices directly. Chinese solutions have emerged from a different market, culture and digital ecosystem. But Western retailers can learn from the underlying principles, strategies and organisational architectures. China acts as a digital time machine, revealing business models and competitive dynamics that may soon become relevant elsewhere.
The next phase of Chinese competition will no longer be defined solely by inexpensive products. Chinese companies are increasingly combining strong products, competitive prices, advanced supply chains, customer data and integrated ecosystems. Western retailers must therefore look beyond tariffs, regulation and defensive measures. Those that study these models, adapt their strongest ideas and develop their own integrated ecosystems can turn the challenge from China into a source of competitive advantage.
