Apple Watch to be sold alongside its knock offs on China’s major online retailers

Alibaba’s Tmall and JD.com are boasting their involvement with the Apple Watch but copy-cat companies are already using them to sell off their imitations of the watch

April 24 seems to be quite far away right now but it seems that the retailers in China are already getting excited over the prospect of selling the Apple Watch. According to a report, some important online retailers, which include the likes of Alibaba’s Tmall and JD.com, are proudly declaring how they will be offering one of the most popular smartwatches of this year.

Alibaba took to its Alizila blog and announced that “The Apple Watch rollout represents another milestone for Tmall, in its effort to provide Western brands with a direct sales path to free-spending Chinese consumers.” JD.com is also equally excited and feeling proud of their involvement with the Apple gadget and announced the three hour delivery service declaring that this is “for those who want their Apple products even faster than standard same-day delivery.”

However, this situation involving these major online retailers is full of irony; right now they might be boasting their ability to sell the watch online but they are also serving as a sale platform for all the fake copies of the Apple Watch.

Companies copying Apple’s design are using both Tmall and JD.com to sell their imitations which look as good as the real deal. Whereas the real Apple Watch starts off at $349 for its most basic sports version, these copies are available for as low as $50. Though we are quite sure that these are not going to confuse customers looking for the real thing, we are still of the view that these cheaper and similar looking devices can take away some market from the Apple Watch after all.

The copies however are only limited to the basic sports version which is the cheapest Apple Watch. It wouldn’t have made sense if these copy-cat companies tried to imitate the more luxurious Apple Watch Edition which starts at $17,000 because firstly there would be little to no similarity to confuse anyone and secondly those looking to buy this luxury variant are not going to settle for anything less let alone a cheap knock off.