Unleashing new opportunities in cross-border e-commerce, Wish’s innovative solutions provide “new momentum” for merchants and users

In the past few years, China's cross-border e-commerce has experienced explosive growth. According to customs data, China's cross-border e-commerce imports and exports have increased nearly tenfold in five years. Data released by the Ministry of Commerce also showed that China's cross-border e-commerce maintained a steady and rapid growth in 2022, with cross-border e-commerce import and export transactions increasing by 28.6% year-on-year in the first half of the year.

At the same time, Chinese products have ushered in the best opportunity to go overseas with their strong supply chain and manufacturing capacity advantages. Wish, a global mobile e-commerce platform, provides cost-effective and interesting shopping experiences for tens of millions of consumers around the world. With its own technology and data analysis capabilities, and the innovative "discovery" shopping model , Wish has become the choice of more merchants and users going overseas.

On December 15, the 2022 Wish Global Annual Seller Summit was held online. The summit aims to explore the transformation and development of cross-border e-commerce, how to provide stronger support to advancing e-commerce companies, and provide users with better quality and more considerate services.

The theme of this year's summit is "Dare to innovate, dare to W", and several Wish executives will share the platform changes and future plans in the past year. They will also invite many industry experts and representatives to discuss the development of the Wish platform in 2022 from multiple perspectives such as the market, supply and demand, and the ecological chain, in order to comprehensively enhance the service experience of users and merchants, continuously explore and optimize shopping methods, and welcome a new future in the midst of change.

Wish's new strategic transformation aims at three growth pillars

With the rise of cross-border e-commerce, more and more companies are planning to expand overseas. However, the increase in raw material and logistics costs caused by the epidemic and war has led to a gradual increase in supply chain costs. It is no longer possible to maintain long-term growth by relying solely on product cost performance. Therefore, cross-border sellers need to introduce an efficient supply chain system, improve product quality and category advantages, and shift from "high-quantity development" to "high-quality operation."

Influenced by this trend, the Wish platform has implemented a number of optimization and improvement measures, continuously innovating from system tools to APP interfaces, in order to enhance user experience, deepen relationships with merchants, and achieve operational excellence.

In terms of user experience and to better guide consumers' shopping journey, Wish focuses on all-round upgrades in four aspects: category management, diversified marketing, product quality, and logistics timeliness.

Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer Vivian Liu said at the summit that Wish will focus on promoting lifestyle and home products, including fashion, beauty and health, home furnishings, hobbies, electronic products, etc. 2,700 merchants and 160,000 selected products have joined the Wish Fashion project, and the strategy of category operation will continue to be promoted in the future; Wish's Interim CEO Joe Yan said that Wish is committed to building a global shopping platform with rich categories and interesting content, and using its personalized and diversified ecological construction to continuously reach consumers.

While user needs are met immediately, Wish's second pillar is to deepen its relationship with merchants. "Merchants are the cornerstone of everything Wish does," said Vivian Liu.

Faced with a huge merchant base, Wish began to establish an invitation-based entry mechanism in early January 2022 and launched Wish Standards to provide growth space for more high-quality stores, help the platform and merchants build an increasingly close cooperative relationship, and cancel dynamic price increases, establishing a fairer, more transparent, and healthier business environment for merchants.

In addition to optimizing the external environment, in order to further enhance merchants' ability to cultivate internal strength, Wish continuously guides merchants to analyze and delve into customer groups, pay attention to data at various nodes in operations, and establish personalized product barriers, from track selection to category screening.

At the summit, Vivian Liu emphasized that users and merchants are equally important on Wish, and that in the future, the company will continue to focus on improving operational efficiency and enhancing the platform's core market competitiveness.

Strengthen merchant connections and enhance the platform's core competitiveness

Today, global online shopping is experiencing rapid development, and the trend of online retail is accelerating. Not only are more new e-commerce consumers emerging, but there is also a trend of diversified purchase categories. In order to help merchants create popular products more accurately, Wish tracks and analyzes the differences in category preferences in different countries and regions, and uses this as one of the important bases for formulating platform strategies.

Wish's financial report data from Q1 to Q3 of 2022 shows that home gardening, women's and men's clothing, jewelry accessories, sports and entertainment, auto parts, and 3C electronics categories have great purchasing demand on Wish; and categories such as home furnishings, 3C, and auto parts perform particularly well; home furnishings, women's clothing, and jewelry accessories have high conversion rates and repurchase rates on the Wish platform.

These insights into shopping trends serve as data support for Wish to provide price range guidance to merchants. Wish launched the "Merchant Promotion Platform" this year to empower merchants with more independent marketing rights, allowing merchants to submit promotional products independently through the platform system according to their operational plans.

In order to encourage merchants to adhere to long-term strategic layout, under the Wish Standards system, store tiered management (including four levels: platinum, gold, silver, and bronze) dynamically evaluates the store's development capabilities and potential through multiple comprehensive data, and continuously encourages merchants to operate stores with a healthy, stable, and long-term goal.

Taking Guangzhou Binheng Trading Co., Ltd. as an example, Liang Chunling, the person in charge of the company's Wish platform, said that the company started selling products on the Wish platform in 2018. During the operation, the early requirements for product selection were quality rather than quantity-selecting 3 products in each batch, and each product had 2 SKUs (such as the best-selling black and white), but not more than 10 SKUs in total; at the same time, it is necessary to ensure the quality of product selection and ensure that the purchased products are consistent with the "selected products". This move can not only reduce costs and inventory risks, but also utilize existing resources. Data shows that Binheng Trading's sales on Wish in the third quarter of 2022 increased by 74% year-on-year.

In fact, for merchants, as long as they have high-quality products and excellent customer demand analysis capabilities, they can achieve better performance in the Wish Standards project and obtain multiple preferential supports provided by Wish, such as more traffic, faster payments, lower commission rates, etc.

Shenzhen Yibai Network Technology Co., Ltd. has joined the Wish platform for eight years. From a data perspective, the GMV trend of direct warehouses has continued to rise. In October and November 2022, its direct business increased by more than 40% compared with the same period last year. At the same time, according to Yibai Network's data from January to October 2022, the proportion of its high-level stores increased from 4% to more than 15%, and promotional activities drove GMV growth of more than 40%, and some products increased by more than 90%.

In addition, Wish has also taken many measures to align with the market this year, such as changing the PB charging model to CPC billing, which can provide more data reports and feedback to merchants; the commission has changed from the past "one-size-fits-all" to a tiered approach, achieving category segmentation, further improving user engagement and price transparency on the merchant side, allowing users to purchase more cost-effective and high-quality products on Wish.

In an environment full of uncertainty, Wish continues to adapt to new trends and embrace new developments in e-commerce by deepening its relationships with merchants, while keeping abreast of changes in consumer demand.

Wish starts a new year of cross-border business with improved logistics solutions

In the post-epidemic period, the uncertainty of logistics and order fulfillment has further increased. The epidemic blockade in many parts of China has caused disruptions to the international supply chain . Domestic warehouse operations, land transportation, and international air and sea transportation have all been affected. Therefore, merchants and platforms have formulated emergency response plans to reduce the impact on fulfillment time.

Jane, Director of Global Logistics Solutions at Wish, said at the summit that compared with last year, this year's fulfillment speed TTD and on-time delivery rate have improved significantly - China's exports to the global 90th percentile TTD has been shortened from 28 days in the third quarter of 2021 to 23 days in the same period this year; at the same time, the global on-time delivery rate has increased from 80% to about 92%; in terms of logistics price levels, the average freight cost per order is basically the same as last year.

In terms of returns , Wish has introduced new goals and operating guidelines , giving greater autonomy to merchants with high trust, focusing on the overall economic benefits of merchants and Wish , and making different arrangements for returns to maximize quality and efficiency improvements, ultimately allowing customers to place orders with confidence.

At the roundtable forum of the summit, Stella Zhou, director of the supply chain product department of Shanghai Wanse, said that in order to break through the current bottleneck, it is necessary to integrate resources, improve operational capabilities, and build a good Chinese cross-border logistics brand. She also mentioned that adaptability, freight rates and timeliness are the key to creating high-quality services and the cornerstones of stable logistics companies' reliance and trust. When it comes to future development, Peter Jiang, director of cross-border e-commerce business planning at Sinotrans, pointed out that overseas warehouses, customs affairs and terminal network development businesses will receive further attention. He also suggested going out to look at the consumer market in the destination country, conducting research on product demand and logistics diversity needs, and building a good supply chain system from a C2B perspective.

In 2023, Wish will continue to promote China's forward warehouses, improve the conversion rate of Chinese products and merchant operating efficiency, enhance innovative logistics services, and work with global merchants to develop more diverse categories.

Faced with the ever-changing landscape of economic globalization, cross-border e-commerce has been around for more than a decade and is constantly seeking new opportunities and exploring ways to develop. Wish will work closely with global merchants, users, partners and other parties to achieve a comprehensive upgrade of people, goods and transportation.

Whether in North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, or Southeast Asia, competition in the e-commerce markets in various regions around the world has entered a white-hot stage. Therefore, only by having high-quality products, efficient operations, and perfect services can consumers’ trust in the platform be strengthened and it can stand out in an increasingly competitive environment. Today, quality, diversification, and refined operations have become a consensus for the development of merchants, and "quality overseas" is the main theme of Wish's 2023 investment promotion.

The " 14th Five-Year Plan for E-Commerce Development" points out that by 2025, China's cross-border e-commerce transaction volume is expected to reach 2.5 trillion yuan. Cultivating cross-border e-commerce supporting service companies, continuing to promote the construction of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones, and accelerating the layout of overseas warehouses in key markets will continue to promote the high-quality development of the industry.

Standing at the end of 2022, this summit, while exploring more possibilities and scalability of the industry, is also issuing a rallying call to future merchants, looking forward to thousands of trendsetters in the e-commerce industry to join the Wish family and jointly create a high-quality and healthy cross-border e-commerce ecosystem.

Wish

Cross-border e-commerce