Products often dominate the top 1! Doctor sellers become the best sellers

On August 26, the finals of the Alibaba International Station North Business Elite Competition were held in Hangzhou , and 7 representatives of northern foreign trade companies competed in the final. Among them, Chen Yu, CEO of Liaoning Tengao Technology , is known as the "Doctor of Science who sells matches". He is good at using digital marketing tools to quickly create hot products. At the finals, Chen Yu shared two secrets of creating hot products with doctoral thinking , which are worth learning from for cross-border sellers.

A PhD in Science started a cross-border business and became a top merchant in three years

Chen Yu is one of the few cross-border sellers with a high degree of education. After graduating from Nanjing University with a doctorate in 2012, he entered a public institution. Tired of predictable jobs, he decided to apply what he had learned to practice. In 2016, Chen Yu started his own business, starting with traditional domestic trade and opening several offline stores in Shenyang.

In 2017, Chen Yu started to get involved in e-commerce, but he found that the domestic market was seriously involuted at the time and profits were falling sharply. In 2019, Chen Yu came into contact with Alibaba International Station by chance. He thought that he could develop foreign trade to test the waters, which was also in line with the logic that walking on two legs could make one walk more steadily and faster.

After switching to foreign trade, Chen Yu put his own factory's scented candle products on the shelves, and a week later, he closed a small order of several hundred dollars. This gave him a big surprise. Later, without deliberate and meticulous operations, the order volume of this channel continued to rise, and the inquiries after three or four months had reached the industry average level.

This change surprised Chen Yu, so he decided to strike while the iron was hot, invest energy and manpower in the foreign trade track, study the platform in depth, and learn systematically from the platform. Hard work pays off, and his foreign trade business has grown rapidly since then, and in less than three years he has become a top merchant in the industry. He set up a company in Shenyang to do cross-border e-commerce business, and now the foreign trade team has more than 20 people.

Chen Yu's company's products often occupy the top 1 in the sub-industry on the international site , and the number of inquiries has always been twice the industry level. Relying on multiple popular products, Chen Yu's company's sales on the platform exceeded RMB 30 million last year. When talking about the main reason for the rapid growth of the business, Chen Yu said frankly: It is closely related to his thinking of using digitalization to create popular products.

Two secrets to creating hit products through digitalization

In Chen Yu's view, digitalization must be based on humanity, form efficiency through data statistics and scientific algorithms, and gradually feedback and recycle, constantly circulating for precise digitization to make it more humane.

Based on his own understanding, Chen Yu believes that there are two secrets to using digitalization to create hit products.

1. Gain insight into industry trends and customer needs

Chen Yu said that it is important to understand customer needs, which involves how to position the product. As for the candle category, through repeated communication with customers, we can understand the urgency of customer needs. Some needs can be obtained through keywords. Try to put products that customers may be interested in in the store to test what kind of keywords are attracting traffic.

Demand can also be obtained through insight into industry data. We can refer to industry rankings to see the market size, market growth rate, tool ratio, conversion status, etc. of different industries under each secondary category, and analyze our own status in the market accordingly. For example, for scented candles, the number of buyers is gradually increasing year-on-year, and the conversion rate is not low, so we can make such products.

In addition, we need to understand our own products, which potential products can be tapped and which potential products can be replaced. We also need to regularly evaluate each single product, analyze its keywords, visitor regions, traffic sources, and prices, so that we can have a clear idea and know ourselves and our opponents.

2. Build your own products carefully

Chen Yu introduced that the key to making a hit product is to use the following five steps to create your own product.

1. Grasp the basics first. First understand the properties of hot products. First, look at what the top products in a category look like. Study the main picture, real-life picture, display detail picture, video length and other details. Then do a digital survey based on these, select products, do the basic work well at one time, then match the display window, regularly analyze the display window effect, promptly eliminate products with poor conversion, retain good products, and conduct repeated tests.

2. Stratify potential hot products. Stratifying hot products can save transaction costs and increase transaction efficiency. By using more accurate data, you can get what you want as soon as possible, improve transaction efficiency and reduce costs.

3. Open a through train. After the potential hot products are stratified, we open a through train for new products and classic products respectively, give them corresponding budgets every day, and see what the click-through rate is. If the conversion rate of some classic products is greater than 3%, we consider them to be potential hot products.

4. Optimize the marketing mix. Whether a product is good or not can be screened by the click-through rate. Products with a relatively high click-through rate should be kept and budgeted. In addition, it is necessary to put the advantageous categories on the top display so that people can search for us through related words at the first time. Top display requires creativity, and we will evaluate the creativity. If the click-through rate is less than 3%, we will consider replacing it.

5. Repeated conversion of traffic. We need to maximize the role of traffic, communicate with customers face to face through live broadcasts and short videos, increase trust, and effectively convert orders.

In addition to creating popular products, Chen Yu said that other factors contributing to the company's stable and rapid business growth are increasing product added value and expanding new product categories.

Expand new product categories and increase product added value

Chen Yu's company not only has many hot-selling products, but also has high added value. He said that his relative's factory makes the same candle products as mine, and the normal shipping price of one of my candles is more than 30 yuan, while the products of his relative can only be sold for a few cents.

High added value is the reward for Chen Yu's continuous thinking and service improvement through digitalization. First, based on the needs of high-end people in Europe and the United States, Chen Yu will add some popular fashion elements to improve the aesthetics of the products; second, under the trend of order fragmentation, he never picks and chooses orders, from tens of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and treats them equally. Sometimes some large orders are often obtained through small orders in the early stage; finally, the products and packaging gift boxes provided can be customized.

In addition, Chen Yu is also constantly developing new products. One of his successful examples is matches. Matches have become a hit, accounting for 23% of the company's foreign trade orders. Chen Yu himself is also known as the "PhD in Science and Engineering who sells matches."

When talking about selling matches, Chen Yu said with a smile: "I didn't want to sell matches either. It was really an accident. One day a customer said, I need matches to light candles. Can you help me get some matches and bring them over? Since the customer has a request, we will meet it. Later, other customers have the same need."

Based on customer needs, Chen Yu investigated market data and found that there was a certain demand for matches, but the craftsmanship of the small match paper and match heads was quite complicated. He used his expertise as a doctor of science to conduct continuous research and finally produced a variety of products with different lengths, colors and packaging to meet the diverse needs of customers.

When asked about the advantages of working in cross-border business as a PhD candidate, Chen Yu said that the thinking logic and the direction of considering problems may be different. With his exploratory way of thinking and the support of digitalization, Chen Yu has created his own world in the field of foreign trade.

Beishang Elite Competition

Aromatherapy candles

Digitalization

Cross-border e-commerce