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TechPolicy

Chinese e-commerce platform JD.com kicks off digital yuan trial at Double Twelve shopping festival

  • JD.com saw nearly 20,000 orders using the DCEP during its Double Twelve shopping festival
  • JD.com has partnered with China’s central bank to test 20 million yuan worth of digital currency in Suzhou

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China's central bank and the municipal government of Suzhou are helping JD.com, the second largest online retailer in the country, test out the use of digital currency for online shopping. Photo: JD.com
Masha Borak
Online shoppers got their first opportunity to test out China’s new digital currency this weekend during an e-commerce festival organised by JD.com, the country’s second-largest online retailer.

JD kicked off the Double Twelve festival on Friday evening with nearly 20,000 orders using the digital yuan, known officially as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP), the company said in a WeChat post. The trial, the first for an online shopping platform in China, was conducted as a partnership between JD Digits, the platform’s financial arm, the People’s Bank of China and the local government of Suzhou.

“JD has over 441 million annual active users and nationwide logistics services as well as omnichannel operations, and these advantages will help promote the building of the DCEP ecosystem,” Peng Fei, head of the DCEP programme at JD Digits said in a statement. The test is also meant to stimulate consumption and the real economy, Peng added.

To lure in digital currency users, Suzhou gave away 20 million yuan (US$3 million) to residents via a lottery on Friday at the kick-off of the Double Twelve shopping festival. A total of 100,000 digital red packets were distributed, each containing 200 yuan.
Red packets are a popular way to gift money in China, and their digital version was first popularised by mobile payment platforms such as WeChat Pay and Alipay. Suzhou residents that received the digital currency red packets were invited to download the official Digital Renminbi app, allowing them to use the digital currency on JD.com after linking it to the JD app.

Suzhou may be the first city in China to test digital currency for online shopping, but this was just one of the several digital yuan trials China’s central bank has conducted in the past year in a bid to move the country towards a cashless society.

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