Profits up to 30%, annual sales of 2 million US dollars! What did they do right?

As cross-border expansion enters the second half, moving towards the next incremental market has become a new challenge for everyone.

In the context of repeated epidemics and changes in platform policies, platform sellers have been dubbed as the king of involution, the king of losses, and philanthropists. To break through the siege of reality, more and more people are turning their attention to independent sites outside the platform.

At present, whether it is the numerous big-selling financing news or the stories of earning millions a month, they all prove that independent websites have a bright future. However, the other side of the reality is that there are still a large number of independent website players who have fallen in the invisible place and died silently. Overall, independent websites are the trend of the future and a hot spot that cannot be ignored, but they also have the disadvantages of burning a lot of money and slow results.

How independent site players balance profits and costs is a top priority.

Independent sites are on the rise, and Shopify has added about 2.6 million online stores

Independent websites, which are still growing rapidly, are the inevitable product of the times.

In the second half of cross-border overseas expansion, the living environment of sellers has undergone earth-shaking changes. When the traffic dividend disappears, the rough and brutal fighting style is being abandoned by the market. Everyone has begun to explore more directions, and brand management has also been put on the agenda. The emergence of independent stations is just in time. The biggest feature of DTC independent stations is that they face consumers directly. For cross-border e-commerce sellers, using DTC independent stations to cultivate brand loyalty and increase brand influence can truly take root in overseas markets.

Yien.com has learned that many sellers who have already set up independent websites have reaped the benefits of the market. Xiao Zhang, who switched from a platform to an independent website three years ago, is one of them. He believes that independent websites are more interesting from the perspective of the company's long-term development, so he switched from a platform to an independent website three years ago. After in-depth understanding, he found that independent websites can not only help build brand barriers, but also get rid of the current situation of price competition.

"From a personal perspective, the profits from independent sites are definitely higher than those from platforms," ​​Xiao Zhang discovered that independent sites have more rights to set their own prices, and their independent site products are generally priced higher, so their gross profit data is also better.

Like Xiao Zhang, another seller also said that independent station products have higher profits. It is reported that his monthly sales can reach 35,000 US dollars, with a profit of up to 30% , which means a net profit of 10,000 US dollars per month .

Under the trend, a large number of players continue to flock to independent sites. Research by Genus AI shows that the number of stores on Shopify increased by 201.53% from March 2020 to January 2022, with approximately 2.6 million new online stores added in less than two years.

(Source: Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Commerce)

Independent websites are really popular, and local governments have introduced many support policies. Last year, the Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Commerce was all over the news that it would subsidize independent website sellers up to 2 million yuan. The Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Commerce followed suit with preferential subsidies, indicating that it would provide financial support to enterprises that use cloud service (SaaS) tools provided by domestic enterprises to build overseas independent websites and have actually carried out retail export business.

All these measures show that the country encourages foreign trade enterprises to build their own independent websites.

Behind the scenes, independent website sellers are fighting for survival

Many sellers, with the mentality of "I cannot miss the opportunity since others are doing it", act on impulse and blindly aggressively, so they are doomed to fail when they enter the market.

How to attract traffic has become the primary constraint for independent website players. Independent websites themselves have no traffic and can only attract traffic through other websites or social media platforms. One type is free and the other is paid. Whether it is free or paid promotion, it is a long process and a huge test for manpower and other costs.

70% of consumers now shop online more than before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the path to purchase is increasingly diverse, with some purchases taking more than 500 digital touchpoints. This complexity can increase the cost of acquiring digital customers, which in turn can hurt business profit margins.

In reality, a large number of cross-border sellers thought that setting up an independent website was as simple as spending money to hire people and place advertisements, and that they could get lots of orders by spending money. However, they not only failed to make money, but also suffered huge losses. Currently, the cross-border circle is full of news like "My boss spent 500,000 on advertising a month, but it didn't bring any conversions."

"The ROI of independent websites is too low now, 1:3 is relatively good," said Li, a cross-border seller. Advertising traffic for independent websites is a highly technical job, especially for sellers who are used to the platform's in-site advertising model. It is difficult to handle a wide variety of advertising formats when starting an independent website. At the same time, problems in every link, such as pitcher experience, advertising materials, and product selection, will increase advertising costs. When sellers are building independent websites, they must pay attention to advertising costs and the stability of advertising accounts .

What do profitable independent website sellers do right?

Therefore, how to effectively attract advertising traffic is the top priority for independent website sellers to make profits.

Xiao Li believes that a good ad creative is the key to turning a loss into a profit . The creative can be shot by yourself or recreated with the creative of an internet celebrity. You should try more ad formats until you test out excellent creative. At the same time, it is not recommended to make large cuts and modifications to the ads on the independent site . At least let the ads run for two days with a small budget. "If you make frequent modifications, it will affect the machine learning of the ad account and cause inefficient delivery."

Xiao Zhang believes that the main difficulty in attracting traffic through advertising is in the early stage, which is mainly related to the overall planning of the product and the site . He recommends that small and medium-sized sellers adjust their budgets and analyze data based on ROI, and then gradually place advertisements to people who need to buy based on the number of transactions and crowd portraits.

It is reported that Xiao Zhang mainly uses Google Ads. He believes that compared with other promotion methods, the biggest advantage of Google Ads is that the account is stable, it can reach a wider user base, and it can reduce costs and increase efficiency.

"For the same product, Google's CPC can be below 0.5. If other promotion methods are used, a single click may exceed 3." In Xiao Zhang's opinion, although some products will have good conversions when using other promotion methods, Google can still save more advertising costs. At the same time, it is simple to operate. Usually, you only need to adjust the budget, adjust the CPC, add keywords or negate keywords, etc.

Like Xiao Zhang, another veteran independent station player also uses Google as the main battlefield for advertising. It is reported that while he is deeply engaged in a category, he focuses on how to obtain Google's search traffic. After hard work, he has pushed dozens of major keywords to the homepage. Since 2018, annual sales have been stable at US$2 million.

Profitable independent website sellers are often inseparable from strong comprehensive strength. Whether it is product selection, supply chain optimization or advertising traffic, it requires huge manpower and financial resources. In terms of advertising traffic, which is a headache for almost everyone, if there is a way to reduce the difficulty and complexity of advertising, then sellers can also save a lot of time and put more thought into product selection and other aspects, thus achieving the leap of reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

While many peers lamented the difficulty of attracting traffic through advertising, furniture retailer Joybird has easily solved the problem. It turns out that the secret of its success is the use of Google Ads' newly launched Performance Max campaign (PMax). It is reported that PMax, which combines first-class automation technology in bidding, positioning, advertising materials and attribution , has helped Joybird increase its return on advertising expenditure by 15% and also increased its revenue by 42%.

Yien.com learned that PMax is a new product launched by Google Ads in 2021. Through machine learning technology, it can make advertising intelligent, match audiences in real time and discover new potential customer groups, solving the problem of independent site traffic in one stop . Let us take a closer look at the advantages of PMax.

First, PMax allows customers to run ads on all Google Ads channels (such as YouTube, Google Display Network, Google Search, Google Discover, Gmail, and Google Maps) through a single campaign. At the same time, PMax can also perform cross-channel data-driven attribution, combining automatic bidding with data-based attribution models to help sellers' campaigns find the best options among all Google advertising resources and give the bid that is most likely to bring conversions.

In addition, PMax's automation function can also optimize sellers' budgets and bids in various channels, helping to capture new conversion opportunities in real time. Specifically, through machine learning technology, Google can understand in real time how consumers' intentions and preferences match the content of audience signal input, and discover new customer segments that advertisers may not have noticed.

At the same time, PMax can also provide excellent suggestions on how to create advertising materials. It is reported that with the help of the combination report, sellers can know how to combine material resources to create advertising materials for the best effect. Through the "Insights" page, sellers can also obtain richer data analysis to understand how the automation of the campaign works and how to improve it.

In summary, PMax can not only attract customers across Google's various channels, but also perform cross-channel data-driven attribution, real-time bidding, help obtain richer data analysis , etc. PMax can really help advertisers maximize the effectiveness of various Google advertising resources, save time and achieve goals.

It can be seen that Google Ads' PMax has undoubtedly lowered the technical threshold for independent site traffic. Through machine learning, it eliminates the basic operations of the actual implementation of programmatic advertising. It can also promote conversions while reducing advertising costs and discover new audience segments.

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