China'S Cross-Border E-Commerce Needs To Speed Up Under The Enabling Of Digital Technology

Under the enabling of digital technology, China's cross-border e-commerce has developed rapidly, giving birth to a number of "micro multinational enterprises". According to customs statistics, China's cross-border e-commerce import and export has increased nearly 10 times in five years, reaching 1.92 trillion yuan in 2021, an increase of 18.6%. Industry experts believe that cross-border e-commerce, as a new form of foreign trade with the fastest development speed, the greatest potential and the strongest driving force, has become a new driving force for foreign trade development, a new channel for transformation and upgrading, and a new starting point for high-quality development. So, what is the secret of China's cross-border e-commerce "speeding up"?

　　 "Small order quick return": building flexible supply chain

In recent years, a Chinese cross-border e-commerce company called SHEEN (Chinese Name: Xiyin) has become popular in Europe and the United States.

In May 2021, sheen surpassed Amazon and topped the list of American shopping apps; In 2021, the revenue scale of sheen exceeded 100 billion yuan, while in 2016, the number was only 1 billion yuan

Many overseas users say that the biggest reason why they are attracted by sheen is that their clothes are fast, fashionable and cheap. How fast is sheen launching? You might as well make a comparison with the international fast fashion Giants: UNIQLO takes an average of half a year for a garment to be designed, patterned, produced and put on the shelf, while sheen only takes 7 days. In addition, sheen can launch 10000 new products in a week.

This is unimaginable in the view of traditional clothing enterprises. Is it not afraid that such a high-intensity new speed will be crushed by inventory? The method of sheen is to build a flexible supply chain by the way of "small order and quick return", that is, to launch small batch products first, and then decide whether to replenish and mass produce according to the feedback from the market.

The difficulty of this mode is that on the one hand, there are trivial orders and on the other hand, fragmented factory capacity. How to integrate the two efficiently? Sheen has designed a set of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, access to all suppliers, the system can automatically place orders for each supplier according to the back-end sales volume and inventory data, including how many fabric accessories to order, which factory to send, and how many pieces and sizes of products to be produced. Compared with the past use of forms and e-mails to process and follow-up orders, the efficiency of suppliers has been greatly improved, and the error rate and cost have been reduced.

Like sheen, China's cross-border e-commerce companies, backed by a complete industrial system and imbued with cutting-edge Internet technology, have brought the domestic supply chain advantage of "more, faster, better and cheaper" to the extreme.

More and more Chinese enterprises are digital enabling their supply chain. For example, Pat has developed a set of orders management system for pat in the cross-border supply chain. Not only will production orders be automatically allocated to factories with surplus capacity, but enterprises can also track the time-consuming of goods from production to warehousing through the system, so as to continuously optimize. With this system, patpat manages more than 800 suppliers and has more than 20 million users.

　　 Traffic operation: know what users want

Managing the domestic supply chain is the optimization of the production side. On the demand side, cross-border e-commerce also needs to know what overseas consumers want, which is the role of operation.

Liang Xiaoran, who is engaged in the operation of Tianjin honest technology company, told reporters that due to the physical distance from overseas consumers, China's cross-border e-commerce has to use technical means to understand consumers' preferences and even predict their needs. It is understood that her technical tools are digital plug-ins purchased by the company, which can quickly carry out flow disassembly, shopping feedback analysis and page analysis of goods.

"The hardest part is the selection." Liang Xiaoran said that it has become one of her daily tasks to track Amazon's hot sale lists and hot search lists, analyze why the products are hot, and then propose a more optimized selection scheme for her company. "For example, through big data analysis, some products are easier to be searched by users because of their good keyword settings, so we need to add these keywords to our own products. In some users' evaluation, we repeatedly praise a certain performance characteristic of the product, and we will urge the factory to optimize and develop the product accordingly."

On the one hand, fine operation and timely feedback of information at the front end and flexible management of supply chain at the back end constitute a closed loop, which makes the competitiveness of China's cross-border e-commerce continuously improved. But as Liang Xiaoran said, in this increasingly competitive market, when you analyze the hot list, you may be "already slow". It is better to predict in advance.

Sheen, for example, bought Google's trend finder service, which can track in real time what fashion elements are popular in which countries. By analyzing the changes of key search terms of color, fabric and style, sheen accurately predicted the popularity of summer lace in the United States in 2018.

At the same time, China's cross-border e-commerce is also trying to update the operation mode, such as live delivery. In 2021, the transaction volume of shuoyin e-commerce will reach more than 800 billion yuan, becoming an e-commerce platform with rapid growth in China. Can live delivery be popular in China, but not overseas? Under this expectation, tiktok launched e-commerce service for the first time in 2021. Today, tiktok e-commerce has been launched in Southeast Asia and the United Kingdom, with monthly sales of more than $100 million in Indonesia.

　　 Good policy: online service "no closing"

The development of China's cross-border e-commerce not only has its own innovation and breakthrough, but also can not do without policy support.

At the national level, in July 2021, the general office of the State Council issued the opinions on accelerating the development of new formats and models of foreign trade, which clearly proposed supporting the use of new technologies and new tools to enable foreign trade development, improving the supporting policies for cross-border e-commerce development, and cultivating a number of excellent overseas warehouse enterprises. There are 132 cross-border e-commerce zones established by the State Council (including 132 cross-border e-commerce zones) and 6 cross-border e-commerce zones, which are supported by the State Council.

Many places have also introduced supporting policies and measures. In the cross-border e-commerce innovation service center of Anhui Province, the public service platform of cross-border e-commerce in Anhui Province, which was launched on January 1, this year, has begun to provide online services of "no closing" for more and more enterprises.

"By enabling technologies such as big data and blockchain, the platform can provide all-round services, such as online training, cross-border payment, international logistics, customs clearance and law, to meet the comprehensive needs of all links in the cross-border e-commerce industry chain, and improve the digital level of the entire cross-border trade." Sun Wei, deputy director of Anhui cross border e-commerce Innovation Service Center, said.

In Guangzhou, Huangpu District and Guangzhou Development Zone will allocate 50 million yuan each year to support cross-border e-commerce enterprises in the zone to expand import and export business and support the development and growth of cross-border e-commerce entities. Enterprises that meet the requirements of building international logistics distribution center and global central warehouse will be given a one-time support of 3 million yuan; Enterprises building overseas warehouses will be supported by up to 1 million yuan per year

Policy dividends continue to be released, real gold and silver direct to enterprises, and China's cross-border e-commerce business is booming. Enterprise survey data show that there are 33900 cross-border e-commerce related enterprises in China. Among them, 10900 enterprises will be added in 2021, with a year-on-year increase of 72.2%. According to the Ministry of commerce data, in the first quarter of this year, China's cross-border e-commerce import and export scale reached 434.5 billion yuan, and there were more than 2000 foreign trade comprehensive service enterprises.

"On the whole, cross-border e-commerce and other new formats have shown the phased characteristics of steady improvement in quality and gradual optimization of structure and layout." Li Xingqian, director of the foreign trade department of the Ministry of Commerce, said that the Ministry of Commerce will focus on the industry pain points and solve common problems in the development of cross-border e-commerce, such as export returns and exchanges, overseas warehouse tax rebates, intellectual property protection, etc., which have been paid attention to by the policy side.

"For the development of new foreign trade formats such as cross-border e-commerce, overseas warehouses, market procurement, comprehensive foreign trade services and bonded maintenance, we have taken measures to encourage them to continue to grow into new growth points of foreign trade." Wang Shouwen, Deputy Minister of international trade negotiations of the Ministry of Commerce, said.

(source: People's daily)