San Francisco, July28, 2014 (People's Daily Online) - China's leading discount e-commerce retailer Vipshop recently announced the establishment of its first R&D center in Silicon Valley.

“Vipshop is China’s first online discount company to open a R&D center in the U.S.,” said Eric Shen, CEO of Vipshop. “As a rapidly expanding company, Vipshop settles down in Silicon Valley because of its multilingual businesses and high-caliber technology talents."

The newly built R&D center is located in San Jose, the "capital" of Silicon Valley. The center will mainly focus on mobile platforms, machine learning and big data. Through unleashing advanced analytics on big data, Vipshop aims to provide more customized services for consumers. In the near future, consumers will be able to upload pictures of products they like to Vipshop’s e-commerce website and the platform will automatically recognize and suggest the same products or similar goods for customers.

Another example of big data applications is to simplify shopping process and enhance consumers' satisfaction by pushing popular products and personalized landing page based on the members’ browsing habits on the company's website.

Vipshop’s R&D Center, also known as Vipshop U.S. Inc., is a wholly owned subsidiary of Vipshop Holdings Limited. Daniel Gao, CTO of Vipshop, said: “The U.S. technology team has been instrumental in further developing Vipshop’s e-commerce platform, bringing a combination of discipline and innovation. "

Founded in August 2008, Vipshop is China's No.1 online discount retailer with a unique business model of offering limited quantities of discounted online products to consumers in China, which is known by Chinese people as “flash Sales".

Actually, “flash sales” model is one of the three mainstream e-commerce models in the country, together with “mark et place,” represented by Tmall, and “traditional B2C” represented by JD. Nowadays, the company's website vip.com ranked No. 3 both in the 2014 Q1 "China B2C Online Shopping Market Share" and "China Mobile Shopping Market Share" by iResearch, which specializes in detailed analysis of companies in China’s Internet industry.