Expert Roundtable: Trends and Countermeasures of Cross-border E-commerce

China's cross-border e-commerce export industry is entering a golden period of development. According to a survey by iiMedia Research, in 2016, the overall transaction scale of China's import and export of cross-border e-commerce reached 6.3 trillion. It is estimated that by 2018, the overall transaction size will reach 8.8 trillion.

The pie of the cross-border export e-commerce industry is so big that many Chinese manufacturers want to get a piece of the pie and use its development to transform and upgrade. However, in the process, exporters face many challenges such as intellectual property protection, shortage of cross-border e-commerce talents, and weak negotiating power compared to e-commerce platforms and overseas buyers. To this end, this round of experts invited cross-border e-commerce operation experts, Noah Herschman, general manager of Yangbo E-commerce Alliance, and Zhu Dongpo, business development director of Xike Network Technology Co., Ltd., to solve these problems for export manufacturing enterprises Offer advice.

CEConline: From the perspective of historical development, do you think cross-border e-commerce is a crisis or an opportunity for export manufacturing companies? Why?

He Noah: It's definitely an opportunity, but changes are fast, you can't use the normal method, you have to have more flexible insights. Most Chinese sellers make the same mistakes, like wasting time looking for shortcuts and trying to catch loopholes in their rules on Amazon or another platform. Rather than that, it’s better to have a deep understanding of the rules of these platforms and what the purpose of those rules are, and don’t forget to think about how to provide the best user experience for consumers. If the seller can cooperate with the platform well, then the seller's purpose will be easier to achieve.

Zhu Dongpo: Crisis and opportunity coexist. In the face of all new things, 20% of enterprises are opportunities, while 80% of enterprises are crisis. Not all enterprises will succeed in the process of transformation. Only by changing your thinking fast can you keep up with the trend.

For example, there was a customer in the past. As a manufacturer, they used to receive two large orders a year. Later, the customer gradually turned the order into a small order 12 times a year. The orders of many batches are changed into small batches, in which he feels the trend of B2C. Facing the trend, he did not resist, but adjusted his supply chain, collected data to improve his products, and made his products more in line with the target market. Soon he changed his operating model and became the first group of people to do cross-border e-commerce.

For such companies, this will be an opportunity; for some companies that stick to their own fields, it may be a crisis for merchants who are still stubborn in taking such large-scale orders, and merchants should consider Flexible supply chain to meet the different needs of customers.

CEConline: As far as you know, what new policies do major cross-border e-commerce platforms have? How do you think Chinese export manufacturing companies should take advantage of these policies?

He Noah: Amazon has very strict policies, especially for Chinese sellers. There have been some new policies released recently, such as evaluation rules. In the past, some sellers used discounts or free products to get positive reviews. This kind of transaction is now completely banned by Amazon. Once found, Amazon will immediately close the store. This new rule will obviously affect the sales of new products by some sellers, because if a new product does not have consumer reviews, it is difficult for buyers to buy it. Of course, Amazon also provides a corresponding service called Vine Program. Amazon Vine refers to Amazon’s invitation to the most trusted reviewers to give their views and opinions on new or pre-sale products to help other buyers make informed shopping decisions.

CEConline: If an export manufacturing company wants to do cross-border e-commerce, what aspects should be paid attention to?

He Nuoya: Chinese factories have a long history of OEM and have certain logistics capabilities. However, typical Chinese companies also have some shortcomings. First, they do not understand foreign consumers. Second, they do not know how to establish a market position. For example, in the American market, consumers are not as price-sensitive as Chinese people. American consumers pay more attention to product quality, and they want to buy "authentic" products. If a company can provide a persuasive product story that attracts people to learn more about it, consumers will definitely buy it. From a product perspective, the most successful products are those that solve consumer problems. There are many Chinese export manufacturing enterprises that just repeat their work and manufacture products without any innovation. So I think it will be more in line with market needs to manufacture products from the perspective of solving consumer problems. The second suggestion is the opportunity to discover products from keywords. You can use Merchant Words to discover the most clicked keywords in each category, the trick is to find keywords that are popular and have few results.

In China, if a company creates a good business model, there will be many other companies that will repeat that model. For example, renting a bicycle: After Mobike was founded, many competitors followed, such as OFO, GoGo, etc. But apart from the cheap price, other bicycle rental companies do not have their own advantages, and the manufacturing companies are the same. The earliest export product category was the power bank. Anker was the first well-known brand. Later, various competitors opened up, and as a result, many companies lost money. A better way is to find a category with more space to enter, or find some innovative points to cut in, which will have better results.

Zhu Dongpo: In the process of operating the platform, we pay more attention to some platforms that can bring us traffic, such as Google and Facebook. Generally speaking, the channels that can bring traffic to e-commerce are as follows: 1. From search engines, such as Google, which used to be relatively heavy in the past, but the rate of return is decreasing recently; 2. From social media, such as Facebook, Pinterest, if you learn to use this method, you will gain exponentially; 3. Promotion from network alliances, in short, is to put your corporate advertising information on alliance websites, such as advertisements on pages and pop-up advertisements. Drainage; 4. There is also the traditional EDM email push. In the process of promotion, no matter which channel is used, we must pay attention to avoid infringing the copyright of other brands, because the management of intellectual property rights in foreign countries is very strict, and you may be punished if you are not careful, causing unnecessary development in the future. hinder.

CEConline: What new trends and characteristics have you observed in the cross-border e-commerce export industry?

Zhu Dongpo: The policy reflects the trend, combined with the new regulations of several mainstream B2B/B2C platforms or self-operated independent stations, it can be summarized into three points:

1. The platform is no longer limited to providing information display to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers, but has transformed and upgraded into a one-stop comprehensive service platform that provides import and export services required in foreign trade transactions such as customs clearance, foreign exchange settlement, tax rebates, logistics, and finance. B2B platform with a large proportion of overseas e-commerce exports;

2. The requirements for logistics timeliness have increased, and the use of overseas warehouses has become more and more common, which not only improves the delivery timeliness, but also makes overseas export categories. It can be expanded, no longer limited to 2 kg in the era of small bags and the limitation of packaging volume, so that the online export and retail of hardware, furniture and outdoor products has been developed;

3. In terms of promotion and marketing , we found that if we only promote a single product on social media, it has little effect. Now it has gradually turned to content dissemination, focusing on creating a bright story. For example, Fine Carving mainly produces clothing, and now it is no longer a single product picture to put pictures, but on the basis of brand establishment, to promote a designer, through his design concept and personal background, to put the story behind the designer Roll out, and then send that content to Google, Facebook, etc. The result is that its retweet rate may be much higher than the single product promotion. In our experience, shaping some topical content stories, the promotion effect will be more successful. Therefore, from product as the core to content as the core, cross-border e-commerce must strive to change their thinking mode when promoting.

CEConline: According to your observation, what is the biggest trouble for export manufacturing companies to operate cross-border e-commerce? What is the path for the enterprise to effectively solve it?

He Nuoya: From the perspective of content operation, many Chinese sellers do not know how to create the most efficient product content, especially on the Amazon platform. Amazon's product page structure is limited, with small spaces for titles, selling points, and images, and sellers must optimize the content of each aspect. In order to optimize content, sellers should first understand the best keywords to use. The fastest way is to understand the commonly used keywords of competing products. Knowing the best keywords can create more attractive titles, selling points and product descriptions. An effective way to optimize your images is to upload both a product image and an image of the lifestyle that the product represents.

From a logistics operation perspective, my advice is that on Amazon, merchants should be careful not to put too much inventory in FBA warehouses. The cost of products that stay in the FBA warehouse for a long time is very expensive, so in order to avoid excessive costs, merchants should find a third-party warehouse (such as wholesale breakthrough). Typical third-party warehouse inventory costs are cheaper than FBA. The best way is to send the inventory to the third-party warehouse first, and then slowly provide it to the FBA warehouse (according to the sales volume of the product).

Zhu Dongpo: The main reason is the lack of talents. In traditional production enterprises, there is still a lack of such cross-border e-commerce talents in China. My suggestion is that for production companies, do not do it blindly without experience, because it is easy to hit a wall if you operate without market data feedback. Merchants can rely on some existing third-party platforms, such as Global.com or small independent stations, to listen to the voices of consumers through these channels. In this way, you can manufacture products in a targeted manner, so as to reduce your inventory pressure and production risk, and then start to take the route of independent research and development and branding. After you are familiar with this set of processes, you can go to Amazon, eBay and other e-commerce platforms that you need to operate yourself.

Photo/He Nuoya, Zhu Dongpo

Host/The Sun