Suning banks on crowdsourcing to hit $4b sales

Shoppers go online to compare prices at a Suning Commerce Group Co store in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. The company opened 97 stores in the second-and-third-tier cities in the country last year. Lang Congliu / For China Daily

Suning Commerce Group Co Ltd, the leading home appliance retailer in China, aims to reach sales of 25 billion yuan ($4.03 billion) from its crowdsourcing business in 2015 and 45 billion by 2017.

Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

To achieve the goal, Suning has focused on development of home appliances, Internet intellectual hardware products and hopes to extend it to their infant and maternal products as well as other daily necessities products.

Suning has sold nearly 200,000 units of cellphones, which have used crowdsourcing to develop photo-shooting technology and applications for female consumers, in just two months since launch.