Amap, a mapping service by Alibaba, has launched the world's first user-behavior-generated ranking list called the “Amap Street Rankings” and plans to issue more than 1 billion RMB (591 million MYR) in subsidies to encourage users to shop in stores.
According to reports from Sina Technology and NBD, Alibaba's Amap announced on the 10th that, effective immediately, it is launching the Amap Street Rankings, which comprehensively scores and ranks merchants across multiple industries including food, attractions, hotels, and more. This feature has already been made available on the Amap mobile application.
On the same day, Amap also launched the “Support Plan for Lively Stores,” aiming to bring an additional 10 million offline customers per day to the food & beverage and other service industries by issuing more than 1 billion RMB in subsidies, as well as providing traffic promotion and other measures.
According to the introduction, to address the difficulties faced by the catering industry—such as the low barrier to negative reviews and the high cost of positive reviews—the Amap Street Rankings, after obtaining user authorization, will for the first time integrate the Alipay Sesame Credit system. It combines users’ credit ratings to weight trustworthy reviews, and uses artificial intelligence (AI) risk control features to identify and filter out fake and noisy reviews.
Amap also disclosed for the first time that its application now covers over 7 million restaurant locations in China, sees 120 million daily searches related to lifestyle services, and navigates users to 13 million lifestyle service destinations every day.