How do Chinese shoppers check out a foreign brand before they buy?
Not on your website. A Chinese shopper who hears about your brand usually does three things: searches your name inside an app like Xiaohongshu or WeChat rather than on the open web, reads what other people have posted about the product, and checks whether the brand has a Chinese name they can actually type. Increasingly, some also ask an AI assistant. If none of that turns anything up, the default conclusion isn't "this brand is new to China." It's "I can't verify this," and they move on. We haven't found a published study that maps this sequence end to end; it's the pattern we work from when we look at how a Canadian brand shows up in China, and the platform data below is consistent with it. Why don't they just go to my website? Three practical reasons, and none of them are about your website being bad. It's in the wrong language and the wrong place. The research happens inside apps. Search on Chinese platforms is in-app: people...