Startup aims to empower Chinese consumers

As Chinese consumers become more affluent, they also become more discerning and demanding than ever before. Two American entrepreneurs are looking to tap this trend with Web sites that give Chinese consumers independent product reviews and ratings.

Objective reviews and information are hard to find in China. Online and print media, which are often the channels for such information, can be unreliable or misleading. Companies routinely pay reporters and editors to publish positive stories or dish dirt on competitors.

“It’s a way to try to bring more transparency to consumer transactions in China,” said Anne Stevenson-Yang, president of Beijing Bamboo Technology Co.

She and her business partner Tom Melcher, who is Bamboo’s CEO, plan to build a network of sites in a bid to fill this gap. Each site will offer independent reviews from peers and experts on a specific category of goods and services. The sites will be funded by advertising, but won’t accept ads from companies that offer the same type of product covered on the site, she said.

The company’s first site, 6xue.info, was launched Tuesday and includes information drawn from 14,000 surveys of Chinese students studying abroad and graduates of overseas universities and test-preparation schools in China. When read in Chinese, the site’s name sounds like “study abroad.”

The 6xue.info site is based on XOOPS, a content-management system developed by the XOOPS Project. Jiang Taiwen, the chief designer of the XOOPS system and webmaster of the Chinese XOOPS group, is also the technical architect and chief programmer for 6xue.info.

Work is underway on Bamboo’s second site, ChinaDeco.info, which is focused on home decoration products. Further down the road, the company plans to expand beyond the Internet into other medium, such as print and television, as well as conferences, Stevenson-Yang said.