The right way to cross-border e-commerce

Under the current situation of weak foreign trade growth, China's cross-border e-commerce export industry is entering a period of strong growth. According to iiMedia Research (iiMedia Consulting) data, in 2016, the overall transaction scale of China's import and export cross-border e-commerce reached 6.3 trillion. It is estimated that by 2018, the overall transaction scale of China's import and export of cross-border e-commerce will reach 8.8 trillion, and the penetration rate of the cross-border e-commerce market will further increase.

Beginning in the second half of 2015, cross-border e-commerce companies began to set off a wave of listings. In the past period of time, many companies such as PepsiCo, Higo Technology, Price Chain, and Cross-border Wing have been successfully listed. . Based on this, various capitals have rushed to cross-border export e-commerce. On the other hand, national policies have also stepped up efforts to support cross-border e-commerce companies. At the 2016 Two Sessions, Premier Li Keqiang clearly pointed out that multiple measures should be taken to promote the innovative development of foreign trade to curb the downward trend of imports and exports. He also explicitly called for "encouraging business model innovation" and "expanding cross-border e-commerce pilots". Following this, local governments have frequently promulgated policies to encourage the development of cross-border export e-commerce, and a number of new cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones have been established. With the help of capital and the support of policies, cross-border export e-commerce is booming.

In this changing situation, Chinese export manufacturers are facing new issues of their own iterative upgrades. As a new development trend, cross-border e-commerce has become a new engine for export manufacturing enterprises to enhance efficiency. By reducing export costs and foreign trade thresholds, it enables Chinese manufacturing enterprises to face international customers, have the opportunity to participate in international market competition, and promote enterprises to create their own brands to get rid of the predicament of OEM and low-end value chains.

"It is said that these years are the most difficult times for the manufacturing industry. In fact, the really difficult times will be in the next three years. If they do not transform and upgrade at that time, enterprises will become very passive. Business is a new opportunity for export manufacturers, whether it is to do it themselves or to others, in short, Chinese manufacturers should embrace cross-border e-commerce." Feng Zhaohui, general manager of Dongguan Hewang Electric Co., Ltd., accepted the "CEConline" magazine. said in an interview. For Chinese export manufacturing enterprises, the transformation to cross-border e-commerce has become the general trend.

However, the transformation of traditional manufacturing enterprises to operate cross-border e-commerce has not been smooth sailing. The difficulties of cross-border e-commerce operation have discouraged some Chinese manufacturing enterprises that want to transform into cross-border e-commerce, while others Export manufacturing companies that are doing cross-border e-commerce are struggling.

"CEConline" magazine surveyed 243 traditional export enterprises in the cover topic of this issue, and found that in the process of cross-border e-commerce operation, the problems that make export enterprises feel headaches are the lack of professional talents , the lack of logistics supply chain management capabilities, intellectual property barriers, complaints and lawsuits.

Opportunities and challenges coexist. Facing the rising cross-border e-commerce industry, how traditional export enterprises should grasp the trend to improve their competitiveness will be the key for export manufacturers in the process of transformation and upgrading.

Cultivation of talents requires multi-party cooperation

“Thousands of gold are easy to obtain, but one will be hard to find” is the most common problem in the cross-border e-commerce industry. With the rapid development of the cross-border e-commerce industry, professional talent resources have become increasingly scarce, both in terms of quantity and quality, far from meeting the development needs of enterprises.

According to "CEConline", enterprises have an urgent need for cross-border e-commerce talents, and they do not hesitate to offer high salaries and other favorable conditions to attract talents, and even lower the threshold to "no experience required, as long as they know foreign languages and computers." Just do it". "In the cross-border e-commerce industry, in order to attract talents, even the salary of ordinary operators is as high as tens of thousands." Jiang Han, CEO of Shenzhen Longao Management Consulting Co., Ltd., said in an interview with "CEConline", "Talents The salary demanded by itself has also risen, generally asking for an annual salary of hundreds of thousands, and some even asking for millions. This situation has become more and more serious in the past two years, and there is no sign of easing.”

Since the cross-border e-commerce industry has only begun to emerge in recent years, it is normal for the supply of professional talents to be insufficient; The start of the institution has been later than the market demand, resulting in a shortage of talents in the cross-border e-commerce industry. "The fresh graduates who majored in e-commerce are still out of touch with practical operations; and the training of existing talents is basically from scratch, and their training requires a certain period of time. The current situation is that the supply of new talents is not enough. Professionals have high self-esteem, and it is not easy for ordinary companies to dig up." Jiang Han said.

On the other hand, it is more difficult for companies to recruit and retain people. According to the "2016 Cross-border E-commerce Industry Talent Management Trend Research Report" jointly released by Delek Management Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. and Payoneer, on the whole, about 72% of the companies have an active talent loss rate of 20%. within.

Jiang Han believes that such a problem exists because there are differences and conflicts between the thinking of cross-border e-commerce operators and the thinking of traditional manufacturing enterprises. "There are many traditional manufacturers and e-commerce talents who can't talk about it, because their thinking still can't be turned around. For example, they do not develop products and organize operations from the needs of C-end consumers, and they still think in the B-end thinking mode. This way This will lead to differences of opinion between the two parties, which may eventually lead to parting ways. Of course, in the fiercely competitive cross-border e-commerce industry, it is not ruled out that peers will spend a lot of money to poach talents.”

Facing serious talents Jiang Han gave specific suggestions for enterprises to attract and retain talents: "First, enterprises should let existing employees participate in training to improve the ability of existing employees; Ways to poach talents and let them lead newcomers to the company; third, school-enterprise cooperation or cooperation with training institutions to deliver talents suitable for enterprise development to the enterprise; fourth, hand over the business to the agency operator, but learn to identify and rely on The fifth is to supply directly to the e-commerce platform, eliminating the problem of the company's own operation; sixth, to find well-operated traders, to develop and cooperate together.”

Jian Overseas Warehouse New Trends

For most companies operating cross-border e-commerce, logistics is an unavoidable pain. It is understood that a large part of the order complaints on cross-border e-commerce platforms are caused by logistics, which also seriously affects the shopping experience of consumers. Cross-border e-commerce has high logistics costs, long time-consuming, and some fragile, overweight, and oversized products cannot reach buyers safely and efficiently, resulting in poor user experience and hindering the rapid development of cross-border e-commerce. one of the top problems.

"If you fail in cross-border e-commerce, you will fail in logistics, and if you die, you will die in inventory." Feng Zhaohui, general manager of Dongguan Hewang Electric Co., Ltd., said in an interview with "CEConline". Hewang Electric, which has successfully transformed into a cross-border e-commerce business, also encountered logistics problems at the beginning. Because its main products are overweight hardware accessories, and the transportation cost of heavy goods is too high, it is not easy to operate. After several thoughts, Feng Zhaohui decided to use overseas warehouses to solve logistics problems. "Most traditional companies take the form of international small packages, that is to say, the weight of each batch of shipments will not exceed 2 kilograms, which is a light asset model. We are in the market of more than 2 kilograms, and few people will touch it. In fact, it is a very large market and a blue ocean for cross-border e-commerce.”

Feng Zhaohui believes that there is not much competitiveness and vitality in small packages. If you know how to use overseas warehousing to deploy cross-border E-commerce can raise the bar for competition. In addition, Hewang Electric has overseas offices in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and other places. These offices have become the contact points and operators for the company to set up overseas warehouses in the local area. "We cooperate with local professional warehousing and logistics companies to ship domestic goods by sea and send them to their warehouses in a whole container, and then wait for retail orders to be delivered directly from overseas warehouses through the IT system." Feng Zhaohui said.

In response to the "last mile" problem of logistics, more and more cross-border e-commerce companies have begun to deploy overseas warehouses around the world to improve user experience by delivering goods to their destinations in advance. "I personally think that overseas warehouses must be used for cross-border e-commerce in the future. At present, third-party platforms have similar overseas warehouse services, and some cross-border logistics companies are also actively building overseas warehouses. Small and medium-sized sellers can Choose an overseas warehouse that suits your company’s actual situation. Although overseas warehouses require a certain amount of investment, from the long-term development of cross-border e-commerce, overseas warehouses are an inevitable trend and choice.” Feng Zhaohui said.

In fact, the establishment of overseas warehouses has positive significance for the corporate brand. Xu Xinhua, chairman of Guangdong Bestay Electronic Commerce Co., Ltd., attaches great importance to brand building. He introduced to "CEConline" that at the beginning of the transformation of cross-border e-commerce, PepsiCo set up branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, and built corresponding overseas warehouses to ensure that local customers can get better services. Brand lift also provides better support.

Building intellectual property barriers

Chinese traditional enterprises have suffered a lot due to their weak awareness of intellectual property rights when operating cross-border e-commerce. In 2016, the breaking news of the cross-border e-commerce circle came out: at the beginning of the year, more than 3,000 Chinese independent websites were brought to court by the American ABPIA, claiming that their infringement problems were rampant, and the serious involvement of independent websites even had their domain names taken back. By the end of the year, more than 600 independent Chinese wedding websites were "warned" by ABPIA.

"When many traditional manufacturers sell products through cross-border e-commerce platforms, they often imitate or copy foreign brand products in terms of function, appearance and publicity." Zhu Dongpo said in an interview with "CEConline". Fine carving is a fashion cross-border e-commerce platform with original fashion designer clothing as the entry point. He said: "Some clothing manufacturers that cooperate with us have been hindered in overseas promotion because of the problem of stealing pictures. This method will not work and will cause more trouble."

It is understood that generally speaking, platforms with relatively mature foreign operations have very strict regulations on intellectual property rights. If companies do not pay attention to avoiding the occurrence of infringement problems, it is very likely that the products will be taken off the shelves, or even legal proceedings. "Especially in the United States, the protection of intellectual property rights is very detailed, and the penalties for violations of intellectual property rights are quite severe." Zhu Dongpo said. Therefore, in the process of operating cross-border e-commerce, Chinese manufacturers should gradually strengthen their awareness of intellectual property rights to avoid such problems. In order to occupy the commanding heights of competition, some companies even take the initiative to build barriers in intellectual property to avoid unnecessary "trouble".

Shenzhen Lingjiexin Technology Co., Ltd. is a manufacturing enterprise that takes the initiative in intellectual property rights. Its main product is magnetic charging cable. At present, its products have been sold to more than 100 through cross-border e-commerce. country and region. Since 2014, Lingjiexin Technology has registered a large number of related patents on magnetic lines of force, costing a total of more than 1 million, and registered trademarks in more than 40 countries. "In terms of patents, we have fought 6 or 7 lawsuits and won all of them," said Wu Jian, founder of Lingjiexin Technology, "once a client secretly applied for registration of our brand trademark in South Korea, but during the examination The local area found that the brand had been registered in China and many other countries, and rejected the client's application. After hearing the news, we hurriedly went to South Korea to apply for registration, and it was approved quickly." Through patent application and trademark registration , Lingjiexin Technology has built its own firewall in the process of cross-border e-commerce operation.

"For companies that don't understand relevant laws and regulations, they can seek help from professional institutions, or cooperate with some independent stations, and gradually learn to operate while watching their operations." Zhu Dongpo suggested.

To sum up, in the process of transforming cross-border e-commerce, Chinese manufacturing enterprises are facing some "pits" that are difficult to bypass. Actively deploying to grasp the trend is a smarter choice for enterprises.

Picture / Jia Qiang