When Chinese consumers have become accustomed to same-day, next-day, or even one-hour delivery, what kind of online shopping education are experienced by foreign consumers who are plagued by the pandemic?
The special year of 2020 will have a profound impact on the global economy. Under the pandemic, the manufacturing industries in many overseas countries have stagnated and the offline consumer market has been affected. As a result of this trend, the overseas consumer market has begun to rely on Chinese manufacturing to a greater extent, and consumption habits have shown an obvious “from offline to online” trend.
Chinese fast-fashion brands that design fashions for black women have almost occupied the entire European-African-American market; offline to online launches of Chinese “smart” building block merchants sweeping Europe, creating a 500% growth rate in Germany; focusing on families The TOP merchants of cleaning appliances are determined to let people all over the world know how to become “lazy”…
The consumer’s home trend means all-round innovation in all aspects of consumption scenes, commodity circulation paths, and online shopping experience. Faced with the aggressive penetration of e-commerce, are overseas markets ready? How do Chinese brands find their own rules of survival in this general trend?
The “home economy” is fierce
In 2020, the economic growth of most countries in the world will be negative. Over the years, the economic development of many European and American countries has been weak, and the unemployment rate of young people has remained high. Under such circumstances, the pandemic has superimposed the pandemic, and the economy of many countries has worsened.
However, consumption may not be upgraded, but the desire to consume will always exist.
When the home is boring, most people have similar pastimes. They are nothing more than watching videos, playing games, teasing cats and dogs. The commodities needed to support these entertainment activities contain brand new and differentiated markets.
The implicit logic of these needs is changing from “I need this product” to “I need this function.”
The most obvious is the consumer’s demand for tablet electronic products-a tablet computer lying in the user’s home may be playing video more than 90% of the time. And a cost-effective product that can meet the core demand of “playing video” will become the choice of consumers under the pandemic.
Teclast, which has been cultivating in the Chinese market for more than 20 years, began to enter overseas markets through AliExpress seven or eight years ago. “China’s competition is fierce, and the first-tier brands are nothing more than Xiaomi, Huawei, Apple, and Samsung.” And overseas consumer electronics products. The market is more mature, and the relative consumption stratification is more obvious. The cost-effective products have clear marketing scenarios. “Our tablet customers are priced around US$180, and our laptop customers are priced around US$330.”
Shi Enrong, head of Teclast’s cross-border e-commerce, told the “Seller” reporter that electronic products have high requirements for warehousing and logistics. During the pandemic last year, through the AliExpress “overseas warehouse + optimized warehouse” service, the delivery time limit for the European market was 3 -10 days. Teclast’s brand flagship store on AliExpress has only opened for one year, and sales have increased by 200%.
“Last year, when the population of homes at home and abroad became larger, the market demand for cleaning, disinfection, and pandemic prevention inevitably increased.” Dreame is a brand of cleaning appliances. Its main products are sweeping robots and handheld vacuum cleaners. Demand, you can continue to dig deeper into the scenarios, people, and even mentality of product use.
Dreame’s overseas marketing director Wang Kai told the reporter, “Our goal is to make consumers lazy. For lazy people, there are robots that automatically wash clothes; for women, there are lightweight vacuum cleaners; for pets, there are treatments. A specially customized brush head for pet hair loss.”
“Obviously, more people keep pets. The rate of keeping pets in the U.S. is 78%. This year in China, it has risen to about 27%. Pets will shed hair. If they shed hair, they need to be cleaned. They need sweeping robots and vacuum cleaners.” According to Kai, this is a natural process of market expansion.
Last year, Dreame’s overall overseas port revenue increased by four times. Its main focus areas include France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Poland, Spain and other European countries, which coincides with the tentacles of AliExpress.
Instant gratification
The satisfaction of consumer desire, in addition to the “delayed gratification” in the use scene, the speed of receiving the package determines whether it is an “instant gratification”.
After joining AliExpress in 2017, Kliou, who specializes in women’s clothing in Europe and the United States, has been operating a fast-fashion brand. Relying on its own factories, it can achieve a flexible supply chain, take a differentiated route, and quickly create unique styles of explosive products.
The fast fashion industry requires a very fast speed of new innovations, but the difficulty in the early stage of the business is to control inventory-the first batch of production is too much, and it may not be sold, and the production is less, and the cost of replenishment is high.
The strategy adopted by the boss Luo Pan is to put the samples on the shelves directly after the design is completed, and then decide whether to put them into large-scale production based on the performance after the shelves. This speed is faster, but to ensure that European customers receive the goods within a week, the pressure on cross-border logistics is even greater.
For some hot items, Luo Pan chose to put them in the preferred warehouse of AliExpress in Dongguan. “The preferred warehouse can basically guarantee the delivery within a week, and now there are logistics subsidies. I actually want to stock all the goods in the preferred warehouse, but The platform has requirements, and it must be an explosive product before it can be placed in the optimal warehouse.”
During the pandemic, Kliou’s marketing grew by nearly 180%. At a difficult time in foreign trade, Kliou achieved growth against the trend by building its own style brand and supply chain advantages.
Logistics can be said to be the life gate of the e-commerce market. It is not only related to the user experience of consumers, but also related to the speed of business capital turnover. Currently, AliExpress will set up additional overseas warehouses in the UK and Germany on the basis of its overseas warehouses in Spain and France. It has also established a network of optimized warehouses in Dongguan, Weihai, and Hong Kong, and expanded the optimized warehouses in Yiwu and Xuchang to ensure that the products in the warehouse reach overseas consumers within a week.
Many players compete for new markets
Since last year, the penetration rate of overseas e-commerce has been accelerating.
Take the Russian market as an example. In the past few years, the penetration rate of e-commerce in the Russian market has stagnated at about 3%, but the penetration rate of e-commerce increased to more than 6% last year. This is also true in many other countries. European developed countries that have maintained single-digit penetration rates for many years, such as Spain and France, have risen to more than 15% last year, basically completing the pace of development of the past few years in one year. The rapid increase in e-commerce penetration has undoubtedly brought huge opportunities for all cross-border e-commerce. Brazil is China’s fourth-largest trade deficit country, and its economy is heavily dependent on China.
Six months ago, AliExpress announced its entry into the Brazilian market, but the infrastructure layout in logistics and payment has already begun. In the past period of time, many infrastructures in the Brazilian market have made rapid progress: in the past six months, Brazil’s logistics costs have dropped by nearly 20%, and the customs clearance speed has increased by an average of 1.2 days, becoming one of the most potential emerging markets for AliExpress.
The rapid increase in overseas market penetration requires an increase in the proportion of local employees in staffing.
“Let the people who hear the gunfire make the decision. By strengthening the localization team and localization investment, can we have a deeper understanding of local consumers, solve local logistics problems, and make the localization experience better, and then bring faster growth,” said Wang Mingqiang, vice president of Alibaba. “We are still expanding our local team when the Russian pandemic is very serious. There are now nearly 1,000 people in Russia, and hundreds of people in Spain and France.”
The biggest advantage of China’s supply chain is its abundance. For many overseas local offline businesses and local e-commerce companies, the biggest problem is that the products are not rich enough. How to present China’s supply chain to overseas consumers in a full and complete form is the problem that AliExpress needs to solve.
Source: Seller