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Price War in physical books
On December 10, 2010, Liu Qiangdong announced through his Weibo account that every book sold on JD.com would be priced at 20 percent cheaper than its opponents. Although Liu did not give a specific name of his opponent, journalists thought Dangdang was the opponent of JD.com in the field of online book sale. Dangdang was a electronic business platform which is well-known for its core business – selling books – and ranked the first among all online B2C book sellers in 2010 in China.

The price war between JD.com and Dangdang started on December 14. Users of JD.com found out that the book were cheaper than Dangdang. In response, Dangdang also began to offer discounts to customers such as‘Buy 199 yuan reduce 30 yuan’. On the morning of December 16, Dangdang stated that the company would invest 40 million Chinese yuan to give discounts to customers. As a result, JD.com launched the second promotion to sell books at a lower price than Dangdang in the afternoon. On the same day, Liu Qiangdong posted through his Weibo account that JD.com would give coupons instead of reducing prices to protect the benefits of co-publishers, which marked a phase of the price war.

Talking about his motivation, Liu said that JD.com could not get supplies from some book publishers due to the contracts between Dangdang and the publishers. From Liu's perspective, Dangdang did not allow the publishers to supply books to JD.com. However, his opinion caused a fierce opposition from the publishers. Su Huiyan, a business consultant of iResearch pointed out that JD.com wanted to attract more customers by the price war.

In November 2011, the second stage of the competition was trigged by Suning.com, a B2C shopping platform, which announced to expand its business to include book selling. JD.com and Dangdang competed with each other on lowering prices of book again. JD.com provided its customers with 10 percent discount on books while Dangdang sent promotion messages to its users that they would be offer 200 yuan if they purchase books more than 100 yuan totally. Dangdang even put slogan that to be a spendthrift to increase website traffic.

The sudden increase of orders not only caused network errors but also postponed transits of books, and this aroused customers’complaints.

Price War in electronic books
On December 21, 2011, Dangdang put its electronic book service online. More than 50,000 e-books were available on dangdang.com and over 90 percent of the e-books were sold at 30 percent of the price of the physical books. JD.com started the e-book selling business online on February 20, 2012 and provided customers with more than 80,000 kinds of electronic books. JD.com also offered discounts to the buyers and this situation showed that a new round of price war began.

On April 17, 2013, Dangdang users could download most of the e-books on the website. Then, JD.com priced 50,000 electronic books at 0 to match. Liu Zhenyou, an author, criticized that both of them had raised their brand awareness, but their actions caused damages to co-publishers.