With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1388249
"When I have friends who want to buy luxury goods, I go to out- lets and buy luxury goods for them," says Tan, who was contacted through the popular Chinese social media platform WeChat for an interview. "I also sell snacks and some daily necessities and health- care products. Canada Goose is also popular, but the shipping costs are a little bit higher." Now Tan works part-time in what's known around the world as daigou—the practice of buying outside China and getting products back there, either by flying with them or sending them through cou- rier companies, for a fee. That surrogate-shopping phenomenon exploded in many coun- tries a little more than a decade ago as Chinese citizens decided in increasing numbers that they didn't like the prices, the quality or even the safety of what they had available in their own country. A scandal over the 2008 discovery of melamine in Chinese infant formula that resulted in kidney damage made many wary of that product in particular. Makeup and food in China have also come under scrutiny. When it comes to luxury goods, Chinese buyers have turned to daigou to ensure they're getting the real thing, not counterfeits, or to get products for half the price they would sell for in China—or both. As a result, daigou has become so big and, at times, so pervasive that Australia once imposed a limit on sales of baby formula because of the way products were being cleaned off the shelves by those buyers. Craig Patterson, a Toronto-based Canadian retailing expert, says the practice was very prevalent before the pandemic, to the point ISTOCK JULY/AUGUST 2021 BCBUSINESS 37 Various media reports have referred to estimates of a million such shoppers around the world and billions of dollars in sales, but no one really knows TAKE A GANDER Canada Goose is a popular brand for Chinese buyers who order from surrogate shoppers where some stores were limiting how much of one item a shopper could buy in a day. It's also a black-hole piece of the econ- omy, since daigou shoppers typically avoid paying tax or declaring in any way what they're doing. That makes it hard to mea- sure how big (or small) a part of the retail sector they are in nations where the prac- tice is prevalent, like South Korea, Britain, Italy, France, the U.S. and Canada. Various media reports have referred to estimates of a million such shoppers around the world and billions of dollars in sales, but no one really knows. In B.C., people at the local branch of the Retail Council of Canada have heard of the term but have no statistics. It's the same at the Business Council of British Columbia.