New opportunities for cross-border e-commerce, and branding has become an important outlet for cross-border enterprises

The report on the Development of Cross-border E-commerce in 2020 was released recently, which provides the direction for enterprises going abroad to seize opportunities. Enterprises with efficient management and operation ability can take this opportunity to open the overseas e-commerce consumer market, break through the difficulties, and achieve secondary growth.

According to statistics, the size of China's cross-border e-commerce market in 2019 has exceeded 10 trillion yuan, accounting for 33.29% of China's total import and export value of 31.54 trillion yuan that year. In 2019, the import and export through the cross-border e-commerce management platform of customs reached 186.21 billion yuan, up 38.3% year on year, and the average growth rate exceeded 50% in the four years from 2016 to 2019. Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the import and export of cross-border e-commerce was sluggish in 2020 and turned positive in the third quarter, while the import and export of cross-border e-commerce increased against the market. The import and export of cross-border e-commerce supervision platform of customs in the first three quarters was 187.39 billion yuan, which has exceeded the whole year of last year and increased by 52.8%, making outstanding contribution to the stability of foreign trade.

The report shows that although Europe and the United States are still the most important markets for cross-border e-commerce, ASEAN has become China's largest trading partner, with nearly 40 percent of enterprises entering Southeast Asia, surpassing Japan, South Korea and Russia. In addition, less than 20% of enterprises have entered markets in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, which will have great room to expand in the future.

The head of Ebon think tank said that, compared with the highly concentrated e-commerce platforms in China, overseas markets generally have a low concentration of e-commerce, and the cross-border industry structure is relatively dispersed. There is certain competition space for long-tail platforms, independent stations and other aspects. Driven further by the COVID-19 epidemic, cross-border e-commerce has entered the stage of three-dimensional channel layout, and many enterprises have opened or are planning to set up independent stations. Compared with third-party platforms, independent cross-border e-commerce sites have prominent autonomy and growth advantages, which have become an important channel for enterprises to break the business ceiling or expand new markets. Meanwhile, more and more export sellers have set their sights on independent sites.

"In the future, branding will become an important way out for cross-border enterprises. With the in-depth development of cross-border industries, it is difficult to sustain low-level homogeneous competition, while branding, with its autonomy and premium ability, has become the recognized way out for the industry. According to the General Administration of Customs, China exported 2.9 trillion yuan worth of self-branded goods in 2019, up 12 percent and accounting for nearly 17 percent of the country's total export value, up 1.1 percentage points from 2018." However, at present, the branding of cross-border enterprises is still facing difficulties, such as lack of brand awareness and operation ability, habit of fixed short-term profit thinking in the OEM mode, prevalent counterfeit and shoddy goods, driving bad currency out of good currency, serious industry homogenization competition, limited design ability, lack of high-end and core technology.

The report points out that cross-border e-commerce has gone through the era of extensive operation, and in the future, innovative marketing methods will occupy a greater weight in the factors of enterprise survival and development. In addition to the conventional means of marketing promotion and optimization in the industry, intelligence and social networking have become two new trends in the field of cross-border e-commerce marketing in recent years.

With the help of big data and intelligent algorithms, it can realize the automation of marketing decisions and marketing processes, making it possible to generate and optimize automatic ads, put integrated intelligent ads, and automate customer service operations. Intelligent marketing can satisfy the consumption experience of users in full time, full domain and full scene. It greatly speeds up the purchasing decision-making process of consumers and also improves the value of users' life cycle. Therefore, cross-border e-commerce is developing in the direction of intelligence.

Li Jinling, CEO of Zhuozhi Cross-border e-commerce, said that in the early stage, cross-border e-commerce relied on centralized platform to quickly gather traffic. Products selling large standard products could quickly form high transaction volume and solve the problem of platform going from zero to one, but in the later stage, it was difficult to obtain continuous increment and profit. At this time, the advantages brought by social e-commerce through trust relationship and social fission are quickly reflected -- the trust and information dissemination of social group or fan effect can bring high gross profit and high added value to products, and solve the problems of cross-border e-commerce in the later development that it is difficult to make sustainable profits and obtain traffic.