Chinese technology group Alibaba Cloud is helping retailers impacted by the coronavirus outbreak launch an ecommerce platform within five days.

The ecommerce plug-and-play products cover computing, databases, multimedia, video live streaming, collaboration, security and data analytics to help retailers rapidly launch an ecommerce business.

“The global retail industry has been hit hard by the widespread outbreak of the novel coronavirus, with businesses encountering a variety of challenges including limited access to supplies, decreasing consumer demand and foot traffic,” said Selina Yuan, president of international business at Alibaba Cloud. “Retailers are in urgent need of a digital enterprise platform and ready-to-deploy ecommerce system to continue growing their businesses despite the uncertainty. Alibaba Cloud is committed to supporting retailers amidst the coronavirus outbreak. Our suite is to facilitate this process quickly and securely, making ecommerce a sustainable option for offline retailers to carry on with business as usual.”

The core benefit of the ecommerce suite is the ability for retailers to upgrade to an omnichannel shopping experience within days. Alibaba Cloud experts with experience in ecommerce will provide remote hands-on training with a focus on time to market. The products support three business models: business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) and online-to-offline (O2O). Businesses can launch a B2C platform in five days and a B2B2C or an O2O platform in less than 25 days.

Lin Qingxuan, a cosmetics company based in China, was one of many brands affected by the coronavirus outbreak. Having to close half its stores temporarily, coupled with a drastic decline in physical store traffic, Lin Qingxuan’s sales plummeted by 90% during the 2020 Chinese New Year shopping season.

However, with the help of Alibaba Cloud’s ecommerce products, Lin Qingxuan was able to transform its business model. The company began hosting live-streaming sessions to recommend products on ecommerce channels. The live streaming on Valentine’s Day attracted over 60,000 viewers and sold more than 400,000 bottles of camellia oil. By leveraging collaboration tools such as DingTalk, Lin Qingxuan’s shopping advisors can offer personalised customer service online.

“Alibaba Cloud’s ecommerce helped us quickly kick off digital transformation when the traditional retail environment was no longer viable due to the coronavirus outbreak,” said Sun Laichun, founder of Lin Qingxuan. “With hands-on training from Alibaba experts, we were able to quickly pick up live-streaming skills, conduct resource planning and implement omnichannel customer service, which helped us achieve great accomplishments during this unusual time. It helped us realise that business can be easily conducted in this new digital path.”

Alibaba Cloud launched a dedicated campaign to support businesses to fight against the coronavirus through technology. Eligible organisations will be offered $1000 cloud credits and can sign-up for ecommerce for free for three months.