You may remember a scant five months ago that major online supermarket Yihaodian launched a much-touted English-language version of their app called YHD. The app had a fraction of the goods available on the Chinese version, but at least it was all in English. It's also no longer supported by YHD, rendering the app useless. According to someone who worked there, the entire YHD English-language team has been moved over to parent company JD's global division and are now working on their app and website. Shenanigans!

*** The YHD english-language app (sometimes referred to YHD Expats) was described as "an English online shopping app specially designed for Expats living in China." We wrote about it when it first launched here. Right now, accessing the app, no longer available on the iOS Store but still up on the Google Play Store, just returns a "Network Error" message. The website yhd.com/en is also no longer available. Their English-language hotline appears to always be busy. The shut-down came with no official announcement we could find. When we called the Chinese-language customer service number, they said support had been halted on October 1. When the app was first launched back in May, it had about 100,000 products available (of an estimate 1 million on the Chinese version), and some pretty good deals, intended to drive initial adoption. Between 500-1000 users have downloaded the app on Google Play. We also spoke to someone who used to work at Yihaodian, who said the whole YHD Expats team was transferred to JD's Global Department to "reform it into JD's English app." They also mentioned that JD already has a global website, joybuy.com, which sells Chinese products to other countries, and that JD is starting to "develop the expats market in China [as] YHD Expats did before." First registered back in 2002, Joybuy.com is the English-language version of JD.com. It also has an app, available in English and Russian on Android (launched end of 2015) and Apple devices (launched early 2016). The English description on the iOS store says it was "developed and released specially for Russian users." That's still working, though the reviews on Google Play and the iOS Store. On Google Play, it's sitting pretty on 100,000 downloads. Reviews are mixed (and mostly in Russian). On the iOS Store, it hasn't received enough ratings to show anything. On either store, the first result for "joybuy" is JD's Chinese language app. If it's true that the English-language team has been moved to JD's global department, they might be put to work on Joybuy's English-language social media; Instagram and Pintrest pages could use a bit of love. Their Facebook's doing pretty well though. From a cursory foray into the JD/YHD world, it seems the original goal was to target the growing Russian ecommerce market. Joybuy was a part of that effort, but the focus has shifted more internationally, and YHD's English version was subsumed into that greater drive. "Consolidating their unique skilled assets to optimize their market penetration," you might say. It reeks of a bit of a rough transition, and a pretty graceless shut-down. Hopefully, they get this mess untangled. A notification to their users explaining what's up would have been nice. Founded in 2008 by two ex-Dell executives, YHD was fully acquired by Walmart in 2015. The following year, in June 2016, it was reported that Walmart had sold YHD to JD. JD.com also operates the Russian JD.ru and Indonesian JD.in, in addition to JoyBuy.com. *** tl;dr YHD's English-language service is gone and their app doesn't work. But JoyBuy.com exists and has an app, so we guess go download that instead.