Tmall’s Luxury Pavilion Launches New Loyalty Club On April 11, Tmall’s Luxury Pavilion launched a New Retail-driven loyalty program that will allow brands to create a personalized and seamless online-to-offline experience for its top customers. The Pavilion was launched last August to deliver to China’s high-end consumers the same kind of brand exclusivity and tailored shopping experience online that they would expect at a brick-and-mortar store. With the arrival of the new Luxury Pavilion Club, customers will also have access to exclusive offers, celebrity events, flexible payment options, priority purchases and door-to-door returns. All shoppers on the invite-only Luxury Pavilion automatically become members of the new Club. However, there are two tiers of membership, regular and premier. In addition to the benefits available to all Club members, premier users receive the most-exclusive offerings from the Pavilion as well as offline services. JD.com Teams Up With China Resources Vanguard JD.com has signed a deal with retail giant China Resources Vanguard, which will see the latter’s outlets being linked to the JD Daojia platform. JD Daojia is the online to offline arm of JD.com, and the deal will initially allow customers to purchase items from CR Vanguard’s outlets in Hangzhou and Nanjing. The partnership plans to include 2,000 Vanguard stores across more than 30 cities over time. CR Vanguard currently operates more than 3,000 retail stores in 200-plus cities in China. Walmart Opens First Small High-tech Supermarket in China On April 2, Walmart has opened its first small high-tech supermarket in China, where smartphones can be used to pay for items that are mostly available on the U.S. retailer’s store on online platform JD Daojia, an affiliate of JD.com. The outlet will stock more than 8,000 items ranging from stir-fried clams to fresh fruit, 90 percent of which will be available online. Items can be delivered within a 2 kilometer (1.2 mile) radius as quickly as 29 minutes. Walmart did not specify the size of the China store in the southern city of Shenzhen. Customers can opt to pay with their smartphone using a program on Tencent Holding Ltd’s WeChat messaging. JD.com to Launch 1,000 Stores Per Day JD.com’s founder and chief executive vowed late last week to open 1,000 stores every day this year. According to Liu Qiangdong, CEO of JD.com. as of last month, JD.com opened 1,000 convenience stores in China every week. The target is to open 1,000 stores every day by year-end. Almost every store would be franchised. Liu’s latest announcement comes a month after the eCommerce platform signed an agreement with convenience store operator FamilyMart in early March, which enabled JD users to have food delivered to their homes from FamilyMart’s core locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu within one-half-hour at any time. The ambitious aim is a part of a plan the retail giant announced last April, when Liu declared that the eCommerce company would open one million convenience stores in the next five years. The plan’s first batch of shops, comprising 1,111 stores, opened their doors to customers on the same day last November. .