China's Retail in New Era: Digital transformation spreads to supermarkets

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China's grocery stores are going through a digital revolution. That's as online retail platforms are opening brick and mortar shops. Traditional supermarkets are also catching up with their competition thanks to some serious digital make-overs. Zheng Junfeng shows you some new shopping tricks.

Offline is now hotter than online. It all started at the end of 2017 when many Chinese online retailers opened offline shops.

Suning has announced that it will open 50 Su Fresh groceries this year. Alibaba has detailed plans to open 100 He Ma groceries in 2018. JD.com is even more aggressive with a decision to open 1,000 7-Fresh groceries over the next 5 years.

So what about China's traditional supermarkets?

ZHENG JUNFENG CGTN "Le Marché is Carrefour's answer to China's emerging New Retailing. Its cooperation with Tencent allows customers to do something quite interesting."

Le Marché means the market in French. The most popular trick is SCAN and GO. See I am buying these Peppa Pig biscuits. I just scan the barcode on its box with my WeChat and buy with WeChat pay. And I show my shopping list to the staff at a special SCAN and Go exit. And it's done. No queue. No waiting.

MS. XU CUSTOMER "I was told that this shop can do SCAN and GO. I just tried it and it's really convenient. It feels like you are your own cashier and it saves a lot of time."

If shopping with your phone is too much trouble, what about shopping with your face! But of course, you need to register first and put your face photo into Carrefour's WeChat application. It just took seconds for me. So I tried to buy some water with nothing but my face! And it worked! I never knew my face is worth so much money!

MR. WANG CUSTOMER "The FACE SCAN PAY is totally amazing and fun. I guess many people will try it if they know about it."

Behind the interesting shopping experience is a powerful digital system, including IT, payment and marketing, set up by China's social network giant Tencent.

DAVIS LIN, VICE PRESIDENT TENCENT "Tencent's vision is being connecting people, and connecting people to the business. So it's only natural for us to move from Internet service to physical world, and retail being the most frequently connected and used with our users and also the consumers."

And it seems the new technologies are well received by Carrefour customers.

YU YING, VICE PRESIDENT & CMO CARREFOUR CHINA "All the transformation is to think about to the customer in shop experience, like we said before the scan and go with three days you can have already 30% of the customer use it."

And Tencent is not shy about their ambitions. The popular social network WeChat already has over 1 billion users and it plans to connect to every shop in China.

DAVIS LIN, VICE PRESIDENT TENCENT "I believe this is going to be a digital transformation for everyone. So we start partnering with giant like Carrefour. With that we obviously hopefully want to create the followership in the industry for others to also realize the benefit of smart retail and essentially go to every single retailer in China."

Every single retailer in China? Imagine not for long, people could shop with no cash, no phone, but just their face. That's how digital China's future could be. Zheng Junfeng, CGTN.