Online retailer JD.com, is tightening its connection to Tencent, in a hope of destabilising Alibaba's continuing dominance of e-commerce in the country. The two companies have held a partnership since 2014, but announced this week that they'd developed a marketing and branding tool in order to share big data. Whilst Tencent will share public accounts data gathered from its social media platform WeChat, JD.com will provide transactional data gathered from what users have bought through their online store. JD.com said that by sharing this data, both companies would be able to target consumers, more accurately, using platforms such as WeChat. Both companies insist however that the Chinese economic slowdown will not affect their new strategy, as their promotions will be limited to products people actually want.Â
