(Yicai) Oct. 16 -- Yiwu, the Chinese city that boasts the world’s biggest wholesale market for small commodities such as Halloween and Christmas decorations, has opened its sixth-generation market, a vast commercial space replete with digital infrastructure and services aimed at modernizing trade.

The Global Digital Trade Center, with 3,700 sellers from eight new industries spread across its 410,000 square meters of market space, has attracted more than 30,000 buyers since opening on Oct. 14. The vendors’ wares include fashion jewelry, trendy toys, and smart equipment, with more than half of them selling products under their own brand labels or intellectual properties.

The site has a total footprint of over 1.25 million sqm, with commercial offices, a business street, apartments, and a digital trade port in addition to the marketplace, and deploys an integrated upstream-to-downstream model where buyers can “view samples downstairs and sign contracts upstairs.”

Buyers previously spent too much time locating products and stalls, said Zhou Jian, general manager of Yiwu China Small Commodity City Big Data. The new center addresses this with precise stall navigation plus product search, stall lookup and image-based recognition tools, all designed to speed up and simplify sourcing, Zhou pointed out.

The sixth-generation market represents a clear upgrade, according to Huang Zixuan, head of Tang Tang Tang Cultural Communication. “It’s no longer a traditional wholesale bazaar,” Huang said. “It integrates culture and tourism, branding, digitalization, and smart services, creating an ecosystem that is more attractive to younger visitors and better able to retain customer traffic and boost conversion.”

Over more than 40 years Yiwu’s market has relocated six times, expanded 10 times, and upgraded through six generations, evolving from a national trading center into a global marketplace. Now it is experimenting with digital tools to “crack the business code” and digitally empower traditional trade.

The Global Digital Trade Center’s launch is not just a physical upgrade to Yiwu’s market but a preview of the future of trade. By deeply integrating traditional commerce with the digital world, the resilience of China’s international trade is poised to gain an even more solid foundation.

Editor: Martin Kadiev