China’s Ride-Hailing King Has eCommerce Ambitions

Chinese ride-hailing app company Didi Kuaidi is expanding its test drive service to unlock a whole new market of automobile eCommerce to its user base, the company announced.

The test drive service, which was launched in October last year, allows users to take one of the 92 different car models from 19 companies, including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota and Audi, for a test ride. The service gained such popularity that, within three months of its launch, the Chinese giant recorded 1.4 million orders by over 1.8 million users across six cities in China and sold about 200 cars within two hours in a test.

Now, the company wants to build the service into a full-fledged eCommerce platform that will match up car dealers with its enormous database of users through targeted advertising and provide functionalities, like demand projections and pricing, to its users — essentially making eCommerce a part of its global day-to-day operations.

“The peer-to-peer information- and experience-sharing on the platform also underlines Didi Kuaidi’s firm commitment to the sharing economy,” said Lei Zhu, vice president of Didi Test Drive. “Placed between car manufacturers and dealers, Didi Kuaidi is in the best position to create customized intermediary services.”

For the Beijing-based company, the move into the new space comes at a time when Uber is working its way into the Chinese ride-hailing app market — 70 percent of which is dominated by Didi Kuaidi, which operates in 259 cities and plans on expanding to 400 next month.

The company also partnered with other ride-hailing app companies, including Uber’s American rival, Lyft, India-based Ola and South Asian giant GrabTaxi, in December last year to better compete against Uber, which has over $8 billion at its disposal.

The companies together raised $7 billion to put up a strong campaign for their expansion plan that would allow international users to pay for rides in other countries using their local currency.