Independent sites to be shut down? Big companies face obstacles in overseas expansion

  With so many players competing in cross-border e-commerce, who will have the last laugh?

When SHEIN shocked the world with its revenue of tens of billions of dollars, domestic Internet giants also set their sights on the overseas market and entered the cross-border e-commerce market. But the reality is that some people have just started to try, some have become history, and some have risen rapidly.

Independent sites to be shut down? The current situation of large companies pouring into cross-border e-commerce

Recently, a seller broke the news that Fanno, a cross-border e-commerce platform under ByteDance, was going to be shut down, and listed several examples to support it, namely:

The number of orders has dropped precipitously, with some sellers’ daily sales falling from around 200 orders in early April to two or three orders now;

The official website has stopped advertising, and traffic in April has slowed down significantly compared to March;

In mid-April, 70% of its official team suddenly disbanded, and only a few backbone members of the team remain;

The APP Store version was previously updated 4 to 5 times a month, but the most recent update was on April 22.

However, some industry insiders speculated that it might be due to the organizational structure adjustment within ByteDance. In response, the person in charge of Fanno business said that its independent website can still be used normally and will continue to support users and merchants.

According to the data collected by the editor, in the early stage of the platform's launch, many cross-border e-commerce sellers have flocked in, filling Fanno's product line and helping it to capture the European market, especially Italy. It is understood that its shopping app ranking in Italy has risen rapidly and has reached the third place , and orders mainly come from Italy and the United Kingdom.

At that time, many sellers wanted to squeeze into the platform and seize the early traffic dividend. However, due to the Russian-Ukrainian war and the Shanghai epidemic that its operation team suffered, the sellers' orders declined. From the initial stable 200 orders, it has dropped to two or three orders or even zero orders at present. Some sellers reported that their profits mainly came from platform subsidies.

When you open the Fanno platform, you will find that it is not operated in a refined manner. The products on the homepage are messy, and many 3C products appear in the carousel advertisements on the homepage; the product prices and discount signs are confusing ; when you click on the details page, you will find that the pixels of the product pictures are not high, and even many Chinese words appear.

From this perspective, Fanno may still be on the road of testing and positioning groups and platform regularization. If it wants to develop in the long run, refined operations are the top priority. Specifically, the birth of a new platform must have a development transition process, but how to upgrade and improve the consumer experience, ensure the development of logistics and supply chain, make sellers and the platform itself profitable, and achieve a virtuous cycle is a more difficult task in the later development.

Dmonstudio, an independent women's clothing website under ByteDance , was closed and announced to cease operations on February 11, 2022, and the relevant social platform accounts have been cancelled or stopped updating. ByteDance did not explain the reason for the closure, but its official team said that it will continue to provide after-sales service to consumers who have made purchases, and consumers can also contact its team through the official email address.

It is understood that the domain name of Dmonstudio was registered on November 3, 2021, which means that its life cycle is only 101 days. Among its team of more than 400 people, nearly half of them are key personnel poached from SHEIN.

Many industry insiders speculated whether ByteDance encountered some obstacles in its transition to cross-border e-commerce. However, ByteDance has never stopped competing for the fat piece of cross-border e-commerce.

Big companies are flocking into cross-border e-commerce. Will it be a flash in the pan or a permanent presence?

According to insiders, China's e-commerce overseas expansion is still immature and needs more time to mature. After all, compared with other cross-border e-commerce companies, large companies are still doing very well in soft content, and this has to mention TikTok , which is owned by ByteDance .

As early as the end of April, TikTok officially launched its cross-border e-commerce business in four Southeast Asian countries, namely Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines. TikTok has strong confidence in entering Southeast Asia. Its downloads have exceeded 3 billion, and its monthly active users have officially exceeded 1 billion. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the most popular short video social platform in the world.

In the trillion-dollar cross-border e-commerce market, there is no shortage of covetous players. In addition to established e-commerce companies such as Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress, new independent website players such as SHEIN and Shopify are also entering the fertile land of Southeast Asia.

It is understood that as early as 2020, TikTok has cooperated with Walmart and started to test live streaming sales in the US market through live broadcasts by Internet celebrities, and later launched in many European countries.

At present, although TikTok's small store is in its infancy, its growth rate is quite impressive. In 2021, a vertical store operated by a seller on TikTok Indonesia's small store achieved TOP5 sales in Q4, and a Chinese mobile phone brand store operated by it also entered the TOP10 of the brand sales list.

At the same time, platforms with e-commerce genes such as Alibaba and JD.com also want to seize the overseas market.

As one of the earliest companies involved in cross-border e-commerce, Alibaba launched the fast fashion online retail platform allyLikes overseas in October 2021, mainly targeting the North American and European markets. Although it is still in its infancy, it has the potential for rapid growth thanks to Alibaba's strong cross-border logistics, multi-channel and platform operations.

JD.com is also continuously launching cross-border e-commerce platforms to promote its overseas expansion. Earlier, it launched the English and Russian sites of JOYBUY, and launched the Spanish site in 2018. In addition to its own platforms , JD.com also cooperates with third-party e-commerce platforms to help merchants enter the top cross-border e-commerce platforms such as Walmart.

At that time, JD.com's development trend was very good. According to the data, in 2020, JD.com Indonesia's valuation exceeded US$1 billion, becoming the sixth unicorn company in Indonesia. Among them, JD.com Thailand's GMV increased by 170% year-on-year.

But this situation has changed in 2021. According to JOYBUY's earlier announcement, it announced the closure of the existing business operations of www.joybuy.com and www.jd.ru, and terminated its cooperation with the website in accordance with the agreement with the sellers. It will be upgraded to a cross-border B2B transaction and service platform in the future , and it claims that it will not affect the sales of merchants on third-party e-commerce platforms.

As China's Internet enters the stage of stock competition, large companies are putting overseas expansion on the agenda, among which e-commerce is an important part. According to statistics from the General Administration of Customs, the total export volume of China's cross-border e-commerce in 2021 was 1,391.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.3%.

Attracted by the trillion-dollar scale, no one wants to miss out on this big pie, and each party is using its own advantages to conquer the market. Large companies with different genetic backgrounds have different paths, and their actions will bring new variables to this year's cross-border e-commerce. The traffic dividends, supply chain and logistics foundations of Internet companies themselves will also become the cornerstone of their standing in the cross-border e-commerce circle.

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