big big shop

» see bigbigshop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

TVB opened big big shop on 7 May 2018, eleven months after launching the livestreaming app it hung off. The Chinese trade term for the model is 視網聯銷, television and web selling together, and it means what it sounds like: the broadcaster puts a product inside a program, the audience taps through, the same company takes the ad revenue and the retail margin. HKTVmall had already shown in Hong Kong that a failed television licensee could become a real e-commerce business. TVB was the successful licensee trying the move in the other direction.

Growth came through acquisition. In March 2019 FingerShopping, the online arm of Convenience Retail Asia, merged into it, and the combined operation kept only the big big shop name. That is the high point: a broadcaster's four-year-old shopping app large enough to swallow a convenience-store chain's internet business and keep its own branding on the door.

Three and a half years later TVB closed it, and the announcement came from the shop's own Facebook page on 20 September 2022, saying the platform had been upgraded and transformed into Ztore and Neigbuy. Operations formally stopped the next day. Marketing-Interactive reported the staff reorganization that came with the upgrade, and the local entertainment press was blunter about how many people were leaving.

~ the case file ~

~ paid in airtime ~

The deal that ended it was announced on 19 August 2021. TVB and Shaw Brothers put HK$200 million into roughly 75 percent of Ztore Investment Limited, which owned ztore.com and neigbuy.com. The structure is the interesting part. Only HK$70 million of it was cash. The other HK$130 million was paid in TVB resources: artiste time and advertising inventory across the free-to-air and digital platforms.

A broadcaster that cannot sell all its own airtime can spend the remainder on equity, and a grocery startup that could never afford prime-time Hong Kong television gets it at a price nobody has to write a check for. Both sides signed in August 2021.

~ what the numbers did ~

Once TVB owned a working grocery operation, big big shop was a second checkout for the same customers. The consolidation flattered everything at first. TVB's average monthly e-commerce revenue went from HK$29 million in 2020 to HK$238 million in 2021 once Ztore's results were folded in, which is the kind of line a broadcaster in structural decline badly wants on a slide. It did not hold. By 2023 the e-commerce segment was down 44 percent to HK$486 million for the year, Ztore was being merged into Neigbuy with about a hundred jobs going, and Hong Kong business commentary was describing the whole acquisition as something TVB was writing off.

~ the address ~

bigbigshop.com no longer resolves at all. No redirect to Ztore and no holding page, just nothing answering in DNS. The app it was built onto outlived it by seven months and then went too, on 2 May 2023, and TVB called that one a historical legacy business. Whatever the shop was, it never got a phrase that generous.

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