“We’re here to shake up the UK e-commerce market,” says Matthew Nobbs, the UK boss of Joybuy which is spearheading a European charge by China’s version of Amazon.
“I see our competitors as everyone,” he adds, reflecting the scale of ambition of the online retailer that sells home appliances, groceries, makeup and more.
Joybuy is owned by China’s JD.com, the giant online and high street retail group which is taking on its US rival Amazon in Britain in a clash that is expected to lead to “collateral damage” for UK retailers caught up in the tussle for shoppers.
JD.com – not to be confused with the British sportswear chain JD Sports – was founded in 1998 by Liu Qiangdong as Jingdong, a physical store selling office equipment.
The company was founded in 1998 by Liu as Jing Dong, and started as a physical store in Beijing selling office equipment.
JD.com went online in 2002, listed on the US’s Nasdaq exchange in 2014 and is now China’s largest retailer in terms of sales, which hit 1,309bn yuan (£141.3bn) last year. The company is now the world’s second biggest retailer behind Amazon and more than twice the size of the UK’s biggest retailer – Tesco.
JD.com has been sniffing around the UK for some time, considering making an offer for electrical goods retailer Currys in 2024 and making a more serious attempt to buy Argos last year.
Now, the Chinese retailer – which has more than 700 million active customers in its home market – is seemingly set on grabbing market share in the UK more directly as part of a Europe-wide push.
Joybuy’s push started last month with a TV commercial reimagining noughties boyband ’NSync’s hit Bye, Bye, Bye in an all-singing, all-dancing jingle to get viewers to “Joybuy-buy-buy”.
The ads draw attention to its website, which offers more than 50,000 different product lines in the UK, including well-known brands such as Apple, Sony and Morrisons groceries, and more than 200,000 across Europe, from clothing to pet supplies, beauty products, electrical goods, food and furniture. Brands such as Lego and L’Oréal already host their own online shopping areas on the site.
The company is also heavily promoting its “double 11” policy – a pledge to deliver orders made before 11am on the same day and those made before 11pm by the next day.
Joybuy already has 1,000 workers in the UK, including some self-employed delivery drivers, and a UK head office in London’s Victoria district.
In the UK, items are sold from Joybuy’s own hi-tech distribution centres in Milton Keynes and Luton, which enable it to offer next-day delivery to about 17 million households across London, Birmingham and the M40 corridor including Oxford and Cambridge. The aim is to gradually increase that fast-track delivery area this year, with more warehouses likely to be on the horizon.
That setup marks Joybuy out from the fast-growing Temu and Shein, which have recently taken Europe by storm but are marketplaces that connect overseas factories directly to shoppers in the UK.
Nobbs says Joybuy was known in China for “zero tolerance” of counterfeit goods: “Our mission is to be the world’s most trusted brand.”
He adds: “There is no question the UK is a tough market and we have to be laser focused on delivering excellent products at excellent prices with our gold standard ‘double 11’ delivery service”.
The hope is that this “sum of the parts” – deals, delivery and product range – could win over shoppers in the face of heavy competition. He says there are products not available elsewhere, such as its range of 3D printers, and new services such as an AI shopping assistant and imagery linked to haptics – movement conveyed via your phone.
There is also the Joyplus membership scheme, which offers unlimited free same and next-day delivery on any order size for £3.99 a month, compared with Amazon Prime’s £8.99 a month.
Nobbs says the most successful products sold so far have been consumer electronics and appliances, heartland products for the wider company since its launch.
However, one industry insider said Joybuy’s arrival is a risk to all UK retailers as its enormous scale in China gives it a “huge structural cost advantage. “They have got Amazon in their sights and by having that everybody else is collateral damage potentially,” they said.
“[Joybuy] has got very deep pockets and the latest technology. Everything it learned as JD in China is being brought here: warehouse automation, AI search. If it isn’t already here it is coming. They are building it and building it fast.”
While some rivals think JD.com would be more interested in acquiring a logistics company – rather than a UK retailer – to widen its delivery capabilities, further takeover attempts cannot be ruled out.
David Hughes, an analyst at Shore Capital, says Joybuy has plenty of cash to play with “if it wants to play that game” and clearly “pushed hard” to try to secure a deal with Argos.
Acquisition is an important part of its strategy in mainland Europe where Joybuy launched in five markets including France, Germany and the Netherlands last month. That effort is being underpinned by the €2.2bn (£1.9bn) takeover of Germany’s Ceconomy, the company behind the electricals retailers MediaMarkt and Saturn, which is expected to finalised by the summer.
The buyout of Ceconomy, which has more than 1,000 stores across 12 different countries, also comes with about a 20% stake in Fnac Darty, which operates more than 1,500 electrical and entertainment goods stores under those two brands.
The stake does not allow JD.com direct involvement in the daily management of Fnac Darty but is expected to lead to linked services between Joybuy and the group’s store network.
This would follow the shape of JD.com in China, which mixes physical stores with online. Alongside its big online presence, the business has 10,000 outlets in China and is rapidly opening more under a variety of formats.
Despite that massive scale, grabbing market share from established names in the UK such as Amazon, Currys, AO.com, John Lewis and the big supermarkets, including Tesco and Asda, may not be easy.
Australia’s Bunnings, for example, a giant of DIY in its own market, was forced to rapidly and expensively retreat from the UK in 2018 where it found life more difficult than expected against the homegrown B&Q and Wickes.
One rival said Joybuy appeared to be selling relatively low volumes of goods at this stage and was likely to have to soak up several years of large losses to secure a foothold in the market.
“The UK is one of the most competitive markets in the world and to get to scale could take a long time and a lot of money. The question is: ‘How long are they prepared to stomach that for?’,” the competitor said.
Hughes says data from the online monitoring service Similarweb suggests Joybuy’s UK site has attracted about 1 million visitors in its first month, which was “not to be sniffed at but well below the likes of Shein or Amazon”.
“There is a big challenge in building brand recognition at speed,” he adds.
