Foreigners love to buy Chinese products.
Written by IT Times reporter Sun Yan
Edited by Qian Lifu and Sun Yan
In the offices of some sellers, it is sometimes possible to see the gods enshrined, and when people are unable to explain why they have succeeded, they are willing to attribute their blessings to supernatural forces. It is full of stories of "selling a product and changing a suite in Shenzhen" to get rich, and sellers often think that the explosion of products depends on luck, especially when opening up an unfamiliar market, they can only rely on the experience of their predecessors to choose products. When Li Xiang (pseudonym) first came to a cross-border e-commerce pilot zone in Shenzhen from Shanghai, he was shocked by the huge difference in entrepreneurial atmosphere.
10 years ago, wigs, wedding dresses, surveillance cameras, auto parts, and gardening products were the most popular Chinese products on cross-border e-commerce platforms. Some interesting data shows that one out of every four wigs worn by Americans is made in China. Europeans and Americans prefer to use old cars for new use, repair or modify cars by themselves, and many people have enviable gardens and will pay more attention to using cameras and other products to bring a sense of security. Needless to say, in the past 10 years, SHEIN has grown from a wedding dress foreign trade ** to a fast fashion "unicorn" with a valuation of 66 billion US dollars and annual sales of more than 29 billion US dollars.
10 years later, the "Chinese goods" that foreigners love to buy have also quietly changed, "Reverse, please note, reverse, please note!" The prompt sound is all over the streets of foreign countries, and the domestic "three jumpers" that can pull goods and people are sold overseas. When winter is approaching, Europeans will buy up Chinese electric blankets.
Take the goods from 1688, a few dollars of Apple line protective cover, sold to the UK for 999 pounds, a small product profit of dozens of dollars. "The profit from a mobile phone screen amplifier is enough for me to buy a house in Shenzhen. "On Tik Tok, I can sell whatever bloggers recommend, I can sell what is good on Amazon's best-selling stores, and I have also sold toe separation silicone, ambient lights, ultraviolet disinfection lamps, and so on. In 2021, after the real estate business fell into trouble, Li Xiang lay in a rental house in Shanghai to brush up on **, and one after another cross-border e-commerce "get rich" poured towards him, and he was attracted.
After receiving an invitation from a friend, Li Xiang went south to Shenzhen and broke into the cross-border independent clothing station with enthusiasm. "If you explode a product, you can take off", under the encouragement of this kind of "Prosperity Sutra", Li Xiang must do his homework on research and selection every day. “Foreigners like to buy colorful and unconventional clothing, especially derivatives of movies and animations, holiday series of clothing, and the perennial best-selling fitness clothes, and the keen way to buy is to open the blind box. As a cross-border novice, Li Xiang didn't know much about the aesthetic differences of various countries at the beginning, and mostly followed the experience of his predecessors.
Li Xiang's work has changed from selling goods to being a pitcher for advertising and pulling traffic, and all the money is pressed on third-party international payment platforms such as PayPal, and the freezing period of funds is up to 180 days. However, during the freezing period, if you don't continue to invest in the stream, the sales volume will not be good, and the final fund unfreezing rate is only 40% 50%.
Li Xiang, who couldn't bear to put money in other people's pockets, left Shenzhen on New Year's Day of the following year and returned to Shanghai to resume his old business.
Jiang Bo (pseudonym) is a veteran of the cross-border e-commerce industry and a "master" in the mouth of newcomer Li Xiang. In the early days of the growth of domestic cross-border e-commerce more than 10 years ago, he was already engaged in the business of overseas shopping transfer companies. Today, their company has opened up the business of Amazon, Walmart and independent stations with a flagship product, the universal remote control.
We don't do general goods, and we have been selling two or three products developed by ourselves. We will choose niche products with high technical thresholds and low sales ceilings, and the monthly sales of high-end remote controls on Amazon are only 8,000 to 10,000 pieces, and no big sellers can look at them, and they are not worried about the fierce competition in the market. He said.
Speaking of the difference between domestic and foreign market demand, Jiang Bo remembered an extreme case, he recalled: ".We have a foreign user, there are 27 devices at home, power amplifier, audio, projector, Xbox game console, Tianlong CD**, etc., domestic families generally only have about 3 remote control equipment, so the demand for remote control at home and abroad is completely different, to re-develop it, we also built a private cloud for this purpose.
In Jiang Bo's view, it is no longer the barbaric growth period of cross-border e-commerce, and businesses that can live for a long time must hold scarce products and establish their own "moat". "At present, high-end remote controls are mainly sold by us, before Logitech Harmony monopolized overseas offline supermarkets, with sales of nearly 100 million US dollars a year, but now it has been out of the market for 2 years. ”
According to their assumptions, the universal remote control will inevitably develop in the direction of the smart remote control, for example, as long as you say to the Amazon virtual assistant Alexa: "I want to watch a movie", then the projector screen will be automatically lowered, the speaker will be turned on, and the movie channel will automatically be displayed in front of your eyes, everything is intelligent.
In addition to the iterative upgrading of fist products, they will also tap new needs in the long-lasting overseas market, such as cute pets have no borders, and pet products have always been a popular category for cross-border e-commerce. As a result, Jiang Bo's company is developing a cat toilet, ready to go on sale on Double 11 next year.
Starting in 2023, Temu, TikTok Shop, AliExpress and SHEIN, known as the "Four Tigers of China's Cross-border E-commerce", will form a group to "roll" Amazon, and Chinese manufacturers will also sell higher-end products to more developed markets. Cross-border e-commerce practitioners always pay attention to the hot-selling list of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce platform, and Temu, the new cross-border e-commerce platform that dominates the list, because there are many products that break the cognition here, and there are also "ways to get rich" when going to sea.
According to the General Administration of Customs of China, in 2023, the "new three" products of electric manned vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and solar cells will be exported in total06 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 299%, the export of "new three" products exceeded the trillion yuan mark for the first time.
In recent years, in Amazon, AliExpress and other major lists, the popular products of "Chinese goods" that are often mentioned overseas are white appliances (refrigerators, washing machines), sweeping robots, small kitchen appliances, personal care small appliances, smart cameras, smart door locks, portable energy storage products, electric bicycles, two-wheeled battery cars and new energy vehicles.
Behind these lists, there are not only small sellers such as Jiang Bo and Li Xiang, but also China's major industrial chains.
In 2020, under the double attack of the epidemic and foreign trade, the export of large and small household appliances in Shunde broke out against the trend, and it was difficult to find a container container. In Galanz Zhongshan Factory, more than 8,000 refrigerators are shipped from the Guangdong factory in China to the United States, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and other countries and regions every day, and Galanz's own brand home appliances have maintained more than 100% growth in the top five retail channels in North America, and orders have been scheduled to the first quarter of the second year. Another astonishing data is that Galanz, the domestic microwave oven giant, has reached about 70% of its home appliance exports.
Only by doing a good job of domestic and foreign dual circulation can we stabilize the rice bowl in our hands", a red slogan hung at the door of a home appliance factory in Shunde. It was also from that year that people began to become familiar with small household appliance Internet celebrity brands such as Mofei, and transformed from export processing to independent brands that walked on two legs at home and abroad. In 2020, the overseas market of Mofei's parent company, Xinbao, accounted for 70% of the company's overall market.
In the next two years, the reporter of "IT Times" came to the Shunde industrial belt many times and found that accessories, designers, and foundries are readily available, and the fastest cycle of a small household appliance from design and development to production is one month, and the entire industrial chain is accelerating.
In 2021, the chairman of a sweeping robot company in Shenzhen was digging a shop outside the upstream ** business factory to grab goods, he said: "The factory is basically out of stock, and as soon as it is produced, it will be pulled away to sell."
At that time, more than ninety percent of the world's sweeping robots were "made in China". In the European and American markets, where eighty percent of families use carpets, one is the foreign high-end sweeping robot represented by irobot, which is generally only acceptable to middle-class families; The other type is low-end products, and there is a fault in the middle. Chinese companies such as Roborock and Ecovacs want to cut into this market segment to open up the overseas situation. In 2021, Roborock's revenue in overseas markets reached 336.4 billion yuan, not only with 58% of the revenue accounted for the company's main income**, but also in the three years of compound growth rate of 241%.
In 2022, TikTok Vietnam will start live broadcasting, and the first batch of products in the official selection pool are mostly from MINISO. The main products of the selection pool are controlled below $5, and the low unit price can shorten the hesitation period of users.
Li Ming (known as Uncle Li in the industry) has been going to Vietnam to develop the live streaming market since 2019, and is the live broadcast MCN agency of TikTok Vietnam, and 60% of its products come from the selection pool. According to his observation, in this market where logistics costs are three times more expensive than in China, and more than 80% of users are accustomed to cash on delivery, users are indeed accustomed to choosing products with low unit prices, such as snacks and cosmetics.
When Southeast Asian markets such as Vietnam tried to replicate China's live streaming, China's industrial chain also opened another opening to the sea. Behind the cross-border e-commerce "Get Rich", there is also a hidden password for Made in China to go overseas.
Typesetting Ji Jiaying.
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