Dewu (POIZON)

Sector

E-commerce

Chinese name

得物

Programme

Day 2 · 12 Oct 2026 · Shanghai

Dewu (得物) is the Chinese marketplace for sneakers, streetwear, luxury, beauty and outdoor gear where almost every product is checked by the platform itself before it goes to the buyer. That promise, 先鉴别，后发货 (verify first, ship later), made the app a fixture for young Chinese shoppers. Internationally the company is called POIZON. For Europe, Dewu is above all a major buyer of European brands, often through channels the brands did not choose themselves. The delegation of the China Business Mission 2026 had Dewu on its programme in Shanghai on day 2.

Born of distrust

The story begins on a basketball forum. In 2004 Cheng Hang and student Yang Bing started the NBA forum that grew into Hupu (虎扑), China's largest sports community. For years, experienced members judged photos of sneakers for free: real or fake? In 2015 Yang Bing turned that into an app of its own, 毒 (Du, 'poison'), after sneaker slang for someone who is hooked. It started as a community, authentication was added at the end of 2015 and trading from 2017.

Around 2019, limited-edition sneakers became an investment asset in China, and the Shanghai branch of the central bank warned about speculation on sneaker platforms. On 1 January 2020 毒 was renamed 得物, 'getting good things', and the range broadened to fashion, luxury, beauty and electronics (Daxue Consulting). Yang Bing is founder, CEO and largest shareholder. The company is not listed and publishes no annual figures, so revenue and valuation are third-party estimates.

Verify first, ship later

On Taobao or JD.com, a seller sends a product straight to the buyer. On Dewu it first goes to one of the platform's inspection centres. There every item is received individually, photographed and authenticated in several layers, after which it gets a numbered tag and a certificate. If a product fails, it goes back to the seller and the buyer is refunded.

Yang Bing calls this expensive, labour-intensive model 'a necessary heaviness' (必要的重). Where other platforms try to be as asset-light as possible, Dewu deliberately opts for warehouses, labs and thousands of inspectors. Its largest inspection centre is in Jiading, in north-west Shanghai. The lab works with a library of genuine reference items and with microscopy and spectroscopy, and according to Chinese media Dewu helped write industry standards for authenticating shoes, cosmetics and watches.

An exchange with a community attached

Dewu combines that inspection with the logic of an exchange, like StockX in the United States. Many sellers offer exactly the same product, but the buyer only sees the lowest asking price or places a bid. That creates a visible market price, and Dewu earns from commissions and services. There is also a community where users share photos, reviews and outfits. It resembles Xiaohongshu but is more focused on products: young buyers read first and buy later.

That transparency has a downside for brands. When the lowest price on a secondary channel becomes the market price, they lose control over pricing. In July 2026 Nike announced that from 1 January 2027 it will stop online sales by its Chinese distributors and keep the internet for its own app and official stores on Tmall, JD.com and Douyin, partly to curb heavy discounting (Retail Gazette). Dewu was not named in the announcement, but the decision targets exactly the channels through which branded goods end up on such platforms.

From the human eye to a robot

Every inspected product is photographed and recorded, and Dewu is now putting that huge image bank to work for AI. At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on 17 July 2026, the company and Qianjue Robotics presented an authentication robot: a robotic arm with cameras that captures a product and compares it with the reference library (Eastmoney). According to Dewu, the verdict comes after about five seconds and matches its own experts in at least 99.9999% of cases. That figure comes from the company and has not been independently verified.

Europe as a sourcing market

European consumers cannot buy from POIZON. For Dewu, Europe is a source: it buys luxury, fashion, sneakers and outdoor gear there for Chinese customers, and has companies in Milan (2022) and Paris (2023) for that purpose. Part of that luxury comes from the so-called grey market: genuine products bought outside the brand's official channels, often from European boutiques or distributors, and sold more cheaply in China. Luxury brands respond by shielding their wholesale business more tightly.

Italy shows how a country can deliberately work with this. In 2026 ICE, the Italian trade agency, launched a programme with POIZON: up to twenty Italian brands new to the platform get their own showcase. ICE pays for twelve months of marketing, while the companies cover logistics and the commission themselves and must ship orders to POIZON's Milan warehouse within 48 working hours (ICE). Applications closed on 23 September 2026.

What is new in 2026

At the internal new year meeting in March 2026, according to Chinese media, Yang Bing set the course for the coming decade: helping users make the best purchasing decision. New services come with it, as the company itself presents them:

• Rental: since late July 2026, more than a hundred types of products can be rented through Dewu, from cameras and game consoles to luxury bags.
• Shipping abroad: since the summer, the Chinese app delivers directly to nine markets, from Japan and South Korea to Australia. Europe is not among them.
• Purchase help: product pages show a price chart and a tab listing a product's drawbacks, which is unusual for an online shop.

Dewu is no longer a sneaker shop. It is growing in outdoor, beauty and collectibles, and for Chinese brands such as Li-Ning and DJI it is also becoming a route to customers abroad.

Trust as a business model

Dewu shows that for a long time the biggest problem of buying online in China was not price but whether a product was genuine, and that a platform can solve it by deliberately being heavy. For European brands this cuts both ways. Dewu is a fast route to young Chinese consumers with money to spend. A brand that is not on it can still end up there through distributors or boutiques, and then the platform helps set its price in China. Anyone selling in China should therefore decide explicitly which partners may serve which channels. More on those choices under doing business in China and in our article on Shanghai.