HEADING News

As global retail continues to integrate at an accelerating pace, CHINAMALL is a large-scale international retail group operating multiple sub-brands, including China Mall, China Square, My Home, China Cash and Carry, China Centre, and The General Store. Its business covers South Africa, Zambia, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Kenya, Mexico, and other markets. CHINAMALL currently operates over 50 stores across international markets, serving tens of millions of customers.

In January 2025, CHINAMALL became the brand partner of the Yiwu Selection overseas brand collection store in Kenya. This partnership is built on its distinctive model of integrated supply chains combined with localized operations and further strengthens its role as an important platform for Chinese retail brands expanding abroad. As a key hub connecting Chinese suppliers with overseas retail terminals, CHINAMALL has built strong competitive advantages through a highly responsive global supply chain. Its supply chain efficiency and store productivity are among the top performers in local retail markets, positioning as a CHINAMALL as a recognized benchmark enterprise within the overseas Chinese business community.

As CHINAMALL's business footprint expanded rapidly in previous years, the group began to encounter typical challenges of multinational operations at the digital management level, including data latency caused by time zone, collaboration barriers in multilingual environments, and information gaps across long and complex supply chains. To address these challenges, CHINAMALL initiated a strategic collaboration with HEADING in early 2024, jointly building a comprehensive digital solution covering the entire chain from procurement and logistics to store operations, enabling a shift from experience-driven operations to data-driven decision-making.

CHINAMALL's stores are widely distributed across different regions of the world, spanning multiple time zones, geographies, and cultural contexts. This scattered layout led to serious information silos. Product data, inventory records, and financial information had to be maintained repeatedly at individual stores, so there is a lack of effective information sharing and collaboration mechanisms between each store and the headquarters. As a result, headquarters lacked accurate, real-time visibility into global store operations, impacting efficiency and informed decision-making.

In multi-time zone stores collaboration scenarios, operational processing and performance reporting posed significant challenges. When stores in Kenya were operating at peak hours with high transaction volumes, stores in Mexico might still be offline at night. It became a critical technical requirement for headquarters to accurately process transactions and consolidate performance data based on each store's local time within a single system.

HEADING provided CHINAMALL with a unified management platform that tightly connects data and information across all stores, enabling centralized and integrated global management. Through this platform, headquarters can monitor and analyze store operations worldwide in real time, with key operational metrics clearly visible. The system's intelligent time zone functionality processes transactions and calculates performance based on each store's local time, ensuring accurate and consistent data across all stores.

In the domestic market, the names of goods purchased uniformly are usually presented in Chinese. However, when these products are distributed to overseas stores, product information must be translated into multiple languages, with pricing labels displayed in both the original and local languages. Previously, the manual translation method required a huge amount of effort, not only was prone to errors but also inefficient. For example, translating a product list containing thousands of SKUs into three languages could take a week. Any translation errors could result in inaccurate product information, negatively impacting purchasing decisions and thereby reduces the sales performance of the store.

The AI automatic translation function built into the HEADING system has become a key tool to solve this problem. By simply inputting Chinese product names, the system can quickly and accurately translate them into multiple languages. The translation workload that previously took a week was reduced to three hours. In addition, price labels can display both the original language and foreign language, making verification easy for store staff and simplifying localization. This ensures accurate product information in overseas markets while enhancing store operations and service quality.

CHINAMALL operates under a distinctive business model, with its headquarters based in Yiwu city, and all retail stores located overseas. The source of goods concentrated in regions such as Yiwu, Hebei, Guangdong and other places. Products are supplied to overseas stores through international trade channels. Store replenishment follows a complex process chain: supplier delivery → domestic warehouse → sea freight (2–3 months) → overseas stores. Under this chain, stores previously lacked real-time visibility into order status, while business teams had to manually calculate container consolidation and shipping schedules, resulting in complex workflows and low efficiency.

HEADING's system provides precise and end-to-end support for this trade-oriented operational model. It enables real-time tracking of store replenishment orders, making order statuses fully visible. For example, after placing an order at the Mexican store, the system can display whether goods have been dispatched from suppliers, arrived at domestic warehouses, or been loaded and shipped overseas.

Meanwhile, business teams can plan container loading and book shipping in advance based on supplier delivery schedules as well as product weight and volume. The system also records all related costs in a clear and structured manner, including domestic logistics, overseas logistics, and labor costs, allocating them accurately to each container and down to individual products. This leads to more accurate product cost calculations, supporting sound pricing decisions and sustainable profitability.

In the wave of retail brands expanding globally, HEADING helps CHINAMALL and other overseas enterprises overcome barriers related to language, time zones, and supply chains. This collaboration highlights the practical role of digital solutions in supporting multinational retail operations but also provides a replicable reference for the global expansion of retail brands, highlighting HEADING's steady and robust progress in international markets.