For Chen Qiao, who seized the business opportunity of going overseas on cross-border e-commerce SHEIN in 2020 and made the first entrepreneurial project, the domestic policy guidelines to encourage enterprises to go overseas in recent years are the "God of Wealth" for his life, and the vast overseas consumer market is his "blessed land".
Chen Qiaoyuan is a middle-level department in a Fortune 500 foreign company. Jin Ling has been doing it for more than ten years, Chen Qiao feels very tired, if he continues to wait for an old fritter in the workplace, and loses his life goals and enthusiasm, what will be the point. Later, when he saw a friend making money making beauty brushes, he was also tempted and began to do some e-commerce part-time, wholesale beauty brushes, beauty eggs and puffs and then sell them through e-commerce platforms, and since then he has entered his own business.
In 2020, Chen Qiao heard that a company called Shein began to cooperate with third-party sellers, and they could make the sea together. Chen Qiao, who already has experience in the field of e-commerce, chose to seize this new-sounding opportunity and set up his own company to concentrate on running it. In just three years, Chen Qiao's entrepreneurship has entered the track of rapid development, from "Xiaobai" to "Mr. Chen", Chen Qiao has been able to sell 20 million products a year, and his life status has changed since then.
It's just that in the eyes of more ordinary manufacturing factories and sellers in China, the overseas market is still like the deep sea, but now under the wave of cross-border going to sea, choosing the right platform can make going to sea "twice the result with half the effort".
Cross-border e-commerce 2023, the awakening, struggle and independence of manufacturing enterprises
In 2023, the U.S. e-commerce industry experienced its slowest growth since the 2009 recession, with Amazon accounting for 40% of U.S. e-commerce**, but only 4% of the country's entire retail industry. Not to mention other overseas markets and those overseas countries and regions that are sinking deeper. In other words, compared with the penetration rate of domestic e-commerce, the other side of the ocean is still a vast blue ocean suitable for doing business.
Since the first year of cross-border e-commerce in 2014, China's manufacturing factories and cross-border sellers have been connected to the macro situation of the manufacturing industry on the one hand, and hundreds of millions of overseas consumers on the other, which are the basic force to jointly promote the development of the industry. However, until last year, many sellers still had to face great uncertainties: unstable sales, the risk that orders may be cancelled by foreign investors at any time, and still do not understand the ...... of overseas consumer demand
In addition, the practice of taking goods and selling goods lacks uniqueness and innovation, which intensifies homogeneous competition and leads to fierce wars. At the same time, some cross-border sellers lack brand building, lack of visibility and reputation, and it is difficult to gain the long-term trust of overseas consumers and obtain loyal repeat purchases.
How to make a stable and sustainable cross-border business is not only the need for domestic factories and sellers to generate income, but also the foundation for making hard-won cross-border business opportunities bigger and better.
Shein is a giant with a huge global e-commerce and social network presence, and has more followers on Instagram than Amazon and Walmart combined. Chen Qiao first felt that the hundreds of millions of young fashion consumers gathered on SHEIN were the most suitable users for him, and he didn't even need any additional screening costs. SHEIN has a sensitive sense of the global market, it not only pays attention to fashion trends, but also has studied market preferences in different regions and different cultural backgrounds - these proven market experience has enabled SHEIN to quickly capture subtle new changes in the market, and timely inform sellers to adjust products and market strategies, to ensure that sellers are always at the forefront of consumer trends.
Secondly, SHEIN's own familiarity with the cross-border ** chain is almost perfect. Traditional mature cross-border e-commerce that works alone is inevitably subject to complex international logistics and inventory backlogs, while the SHEIN-style on-demand model has been successful for a long time, not only giving many subsequent cross-border operators a full demonstration, but also greatly reducing the business risks of sellers on the platform, improving the efficiency of business operations, and thereby improving overall profitability. Wang Yongxin, who has experienced a lot of cross-border frustration experience, also told ** that he has been engaged in plus-size clothing production for nearly 10 years, and he has gone through a lot of wrongful roads, such as spending a lot of money to build an independent station and build his own operation team, but he ended dismally. Until he joined the SHEIN platform in September last year, Wang Yongxin lamented that he had caught up with the best time: there was no need to build his own site, no need to market by himself, no need to deal with overseas logistics and after-sales, and he could quickly sell products. "In the past, when I made an order, I always worried that there would be no tomorrow if I did it, but now I finally don't worry. ”
In addition, Chen Qiao found in his business that the simple advantages are no longer enough to attract consumers, and the SHEIN platform will focus on helping sellers establish unique brand characteristics and impress consumers with uniqueness. This kind of leverage and shaping of the seller's potential brand power makes SHEIN not only a selling platform for him, but also the confidence and confidence to succeed.
Made in China has a trend of transformation from "made in China" to "marketed by China". Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, a well-known e-commerce intelligence company in the United States, mentioned his thoughts in a blog post. If the contribution of cross-border sellers such as Chen Qiao and Wang Yongxin to the manufacturing industry is to open up the diversification of "Made in China" overseas, then the cross-border open platform represented by SHEIN is the pioneer of China's PNP "marketed by China" action.
Following the market is the way for enterprises to go overseas and break the growth in the new stage
Fortune magazine once reported that the average life expectancy of small and medium-sized enterprises in the United States is less than 7 years. According to some public data in China, the average life expectancy of small and medium-sized enterprises in China is only 3 years, and the average life span of group enterprises is only 7-8 years - this means that even if a business development is at its peak, if it does not do a good job of long-term business reserves and paving, it is easy to decline and die.
Therefore, it is an inevitable requirement to continue to keep up with global business trends and maintain a certain ability to create. This is also the ideal of many domestic small and medium-sized enterprises, not just a meal on the outlet.
There is a ** belief that the "front store and back factory" of the real economy and the "front power and back factory" in the era of e-commerce have failed to change the essence of supply and demand: the manufacturing industry with the factory as the core will produce goods according to the plan according to the will of the enterprise, and the retail end with the store as the core will try to find the best goods, and the needs of consumers are vaguely satisfied. The advent of Internet e-commerce has moved stores online, but it is SHEIN that has really changed the manufacturing industry.
Luo Jie has an accessories factory in Dongguan, Guangdong, and she believes that the biggest difference between making her own sea through the SHEIN platform and doing traditional foreign trade is the product. Before she did SHEIN, she supplied to offline ** merchants, and there was a lot of inventory backlog during the epidemic. Others say that she will do whatever she wants, and she doesn't need to know what products are actually selling well, and she doesn't know when the next order will come. After opening her own store on SHEIN, Luo Jie found that there would be someone to guide and decide what to do, make 50-100 pieces of each new product first, and then continue to produce when she sees sales. Continuous development, look at the market sales situation every day, follow the data, and maintain the operation of low inventory and high dynamic sales. The essence of this difference is that cross-border sellers are forming a more digital and tangible insight into overseas consumer demand.
Risks and opportunities, written on two sides of the same coin. Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises still have a long way to go to sea, factories, sellers and platforms, and all parties in the industry must have "common wealth" and can withstand "common hardships". More and more factories and sellers are going out through cross-border e-commerce platforms such as SHEIN.
The story of the above-mentioned small and medium-sized enterprises successfully going overseas will not be an isolated case, those enterprises that can deeply understand the global market, continue to innovate the best chain management, and pay attention to brand building are still competing to "go global", complete the dream of global layout, and bring rich and diverse Chinese product experience to global consumers.
The impact of this trend is also far-reaching, and it reflects the overall development trend and change of Chinese enterprises going overseas: it is necessary to get rid of the path dependence of the traditional overseas model, have the courage to drive out bad money with good money, form global profitability, have the ability to innovate globally, and achieve rapid development of the industry.