We ask digital trend expert Björn Ognibeni to share the limitations of search-driven e-commerce and how Shein and Temu’s next steps will further reshape the online landscape. “In China, for e-commerce, the main competitor is Netflix,” he says.

The Hamburg-based Ognibeni (pictured) describes himself as a Practical visionary, specialised in digital trends, and helps companies with their digital innovation. During the Ambiente trade fair in Frankfurt, we met him right after he took the stage for a keynote titled AI, Fun & Social – How we can rethink online commerce with ideas from Digital China.

– A couple of years ago, I realised that, with the exception of AI, there’s not much new coming out of the US right now—or, since 2007, more or less. So, I started to look to other areas to find new innovation. What makes China so interesting is that it’s the only area that isn’t looking to the US for guidance. In Scandinavia, Germany, but also Africa and parts of Asia, we are all looking to Silicon Valley for new interesting stuff. China is the only place where they have grown their own ecosystems. And if you want to find new solutions and new ideas, that’s the place where you should go.

What makes Chinese online commerce so relevant?

– We only have search-driven e-commerce. When somebody wants to buy something, we make sure that the consumer finds it on my website. We don’t entertain people. In China, for e-commerce, the main competitor is Netflix—or a Chinese compliment to Netflix—because people go through the e-commerce site to get entertained. That’s an approach that is pretty alien to us, but that we can learn from China.

But it requires not only investment but also a change in mindset.

– Exactly. A lot of these things don’t need that much money. It needs a change of mindset, and that usually comes very cheap. Changing the way how we do things also means new KPIs. If you have a conversion as your main KPI and people just come to your website to hang out, that means you have a problem with your KPI conversion rate. But if you have something like monthly active user or daily active user, things change. Very often, the first problem is not the money but the mindset, because very often we spend a lot of money on media. That’s also something that we can learn from Temu and Shein; they spend a lot of money for media. That’s why Meta and Google earned so much money in the last two years, and they are actually driving people to platforms and trying to keep them there.

On stage, you mentioned that TikTok Shop will hit Germany in Q2. What can Europe expect? Will it be a change-maker?

– It depends. The interesting thing about TikTok Shop is the fulfilment part—they really make shopping and social media easy, and what’s totally normal in China is something that nobody here in the West has tried yet. In the US and UK, TikTok Shop has already been available for quite some time. What I think that they (the US and UK brands, Ed’s note) are doing wrong there, is that they are doing the same things that they know from China. They’re focusing very much on live video, live shopping, and influencers selling their stuff. That’s extremely successful in the beginning, but when all the influencers have sold their stuff, you realise that there’s not much coming after that, Ognibeni explains. He continues:

– TikTok Shop will probably be way more successful when they start to find new ways that work with Western consumers and with Western influencers. In China, a KOL (Key Opinion Leader) is doing a live stream for like 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. Here, it’s more to do it once a week for an hour, which drives TikTok crazy—that we are so lazy compared to Chinese people.

You said that ‘what’s completely normal in China, we haven’t seen here.’ Can you develop that?

– I always like to say that we have the problem of ‘asymmetric ignorance.’ Chinese know everything about us, and we don’t even know what we don’t know about China, because we just don’t look there. This is a huge problem and it becomes a much bigger one once a company like Deepseek, Temu, or BYD shows up and is suddenly extremely successful. 

Can you share the current situation with Shein and Temu? Where are we?

– Right now, they’re very successful. And they are very successful because they have rethought the supply chain model of fashion companies, which is something that is known more and more. Very often, we think it’s only cheap fashion and cheap prices, but the way how they achieve these cheap prices, that’s the interesting part. 

– Shein and Temu are a little bit different. Temu is selling stuff directly from factories in China. Now, they are changing their logistics model—it has changed already. What we still think about is that they are sending packages from China directly to European or Western markets; around 4 billion packages into the EU last year. But they are changing that because they can only send very lightweight, cheap plastic stuff. Now, they have models with warehouses in the EU—or sellers who have their stuff already here—so that it gets imported through regular channels using the usual processes. With all the customs, we now have discussions that they will no longer be relevant, but they still have hundreds of millions of satisfied customers. What they will realise is that they get a larger selection of products and they get delivered way faster, so let’s see how successful they are with it.

According to Ognibeni, a common problem for European companies is that they don’t think about doing things totally differently.

– Instagram, Facebook and Amazon, for example, came up with a business model, optimised it and stuck with it, and never really thought about doing things differently. That’s more or less how every Western business works. If it works, that’s fine, but if you’re suddenly confronted with competitors, for example from China who are doing things differently, you have to come up with new ideas. If your own experience prohibits you from finding new ideas, you have to ask somebody who could come up with new ideas. That’s how we could use AI, to discuss new ideas to rethink a business model. Nobody is really doing that right now. 

And with players like Deepseek, it doesn’t even have to be expensive anymore.

– Exactly.

Lastly, if we look at China, what’s the next big thing?

– More and more companies and brands that will be very successful in the West. We started with stuff Made in China and then sold by Western sellers and e-commerce stores. Then we saw Chinese selling directly through Western stores—dropshipping—and all the Chinese sellers on Amazon. Now, the Chinese are taking over the store, making the product and selling it through their own channels by their own sellers. The next step would be their own brands, and not only cheap plastic stuff but really high-quality stuff, which is something that we usually miss. We think that from China comes only cheap stuff but we forget that our iPhones also come from China.