Financing tens of millions of US dollars! Local website building platform FunPinPin received investment

Amazon's ban has led to another big boom in independent sites. In this process, some website building platforms have attracted the attention of capital. At the end of 2021, FunPinPin, an independent site building SaaS service platform founded in 2020, announced that it had received a US$10 million Series A financing led by Innovation Works.

Independent website building platform FunPinPin completes tens of millions of US dollars in Series A financing

On December 28, China's independent website building SaaS service platform FunPinPin announced that it had received tens of millions of US dollars in Series A financing led by Innovation Works. The funds will be mainly used for product research and development and market expansion, with a focus on empowering DTC sellers and Amazon boutique sellers. Wanshi Capital served as financial advisor for this round of financing.

Founded in 2020, FunPinPin is an independent website building service platform with marketing genes, which can provide Chinese merchants with a one-stop solution from website building to marketing. At present, FunPinPin has successfully served more than a thousand cross-border e-commerce customers, including the female anti-aging brand MISSPEP, the high-end personal care brand JOVS, and the global consumer-grade AR glasses leading brand Nreal.

Since 2020, the epidemic has catalyzed the rapid development of global e-commerce, and a large number of Chinese sellers have started cross-border e-commerce businesses relying on the advantages of efficient supply chains. Unlike the market monopoly of major domestic e-commerce platforms, overseas platforms have a lower market share of e-commerce, and users are more accustomed to shopping on independent e-commerce websites. Currently, Shopify has surpassed established e-commerce platforms such as eBay and Walmart, and has become the second largest e-commerce platform in the United States after Amazon with a market share of 8.6%. With millions of merchants, Shopify created a historical record of sellers' highest sales per minute of nearly US$3.1 million on Black Friday this year.

Focusing on the overseas independent station SaaS market, in addition to the mainstream Shopify, there are also a large number of merchants using open source or previous generation website building tools such as WooCommerce, WordPress, and Magento to build websites. WooCommerce data shows that only 26% of online stores worldwide use Shopify to build websites in 2021. According to the ResearchAndMarkets report, the global SaaS market size is expected to grow from US$225.6 billion in 2020 to US$272.49 billion in 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 20.8%, and will reach US$436.9 billion by 2025. The independent station SaaS market has huge room for growth, and FunPinPin, with a global vision team, is one of the most powerful competitors in this field.

Ruan Fei, investment director of Sinovation Ventures, said: "FunPinPin started with building independent websites and quickly occupied the market by combining the two core needs of independent website sellers, building websites and attracting traffic. It has become the leading website building service platform in the market. I believe that in the future, FunPinPin will be able to develop more imaginative products based on the existing cross-border sellers and overseas user data. Sinovation Ventures is very optimistic about the capabilities and execution of the FunPinPin team, and is also optimistic about this track. There is a chance that a company with a market value of more than 10 billion US dollars will be born in the future."

Zhou Shuang, Chief Strategy Officer of FunPinPin, said: "The founding team of FunPinPin is naturally multicultural and global in vision, with traffic genes, and most of the team members are serial entrepreneurs with rich successful experience in entrepreneurship and capital operation. At the same time, we also have a strong product development team. We can not only implement technical solutions that are not inferior to international competitors, but also combine our team's understanding of traffic and China's supply chain to develop winning products. We hope that excellent investors like Sinovation Ventures will join us to work together to explore the overseas market of Chinese e-commerce. "

Chinese local independent website building tools understand Chinese brands better

1. The only way for Chinese brands to go global: choose a website building tool that understands Chinese sellers better

The epidemic has brought many impacts on the global economy, but it has also stimulated the rapid development of the e-commerce retail industry. Especially in the post-epidemic era when the foreign production economy has almost stagnated, China, as the world's factory, has become the largest "supplier" of global e-commerce products .

According to customs statistics, in the first 11 months of 2021, China's total import and export value was 35.39 trillion yuan, of which exports were 19.58 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21.8%. In November alone, China's total export value reached 2.09 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16.6%.

With the overall industry situation improving, the wave of Amazon account bans has left many merchants with no way to complain. However, overseas consumption upgrades have led to the rise of DTC brands that pay more attention to consumers' personalized needs and provide unique products. Chinese independent websites represented by SHEIN and PatPat have been popular, giving the cross-border e-commerce industry more room for imagination.

The Amazon account suspension incident has made many cross-border e-commerce people realize that relying on a single platform will bring many risks. Taking into account the multi-channel layout of platforms and independent websites will be an important strategic means for cross-border e-commerce to reduce risks and build a global brand image in the future. However, Chinese merchants have gradually discovered that the overseas website building SaaS platforms they have cooperated with in the past lack local Chinese service capabilities, and some problems that arise during the operation process are difficult to be quickly and effectively resolved.

Zhou Shuang, Chief Strategy Officer of FunPinPin, said: "It is difficult for overseas website building platforms to meet the specific needs of Chinese merchants. As China's independent website building SaaS platform, FunPinPin understands the operating rules of overseas traffic and the real needs of Chinese sellers. We have strong global operation and localization capabilities. Now, we also have strong capital support. Such FunPinPin will definitely escort Chinese sellers on the road to cross-border expansion."

Peptide Micro Technology, a brand of biological health care products on the Amazon platform, chose to cooperate with FunPinPin during the process of transforming to an independent website . Liao Liang, CEO of Peptide Micro Technology, said: "After many exchanges with FunPinPin, we gradually gained a new understanding of independent website construction and brand building. In the end, we chose FunPinPin. The excellent delivery team not only saved our team's construction costs and time, but also effectively improved our website construction and advertising efficiency."

2. Tailor-made for Chinese sellers, FunPinPin creates a complete closed-loop service of "website building + traffic diversion"

In response to the core pain points of Chinese sellers in website building, marketing, ecological resources, data security, and localized operation support, FunPinPin has created a full-link website building service platform that is more suitable for Chinese sellers to help Chinese sellers carry out global layout more efficiently.

In terms of website building, FunPinPin helps merchants quickly solve the urgent needs in the early stage of website building through professional products, such as 3-minute fast website building, website opening in seconds, one-click import of multi-platform product information, and meeting various settlement processes in different overseas markets. It also helps sellers easily increase the average order value through rich combination marketing functions. For boutique sites, FunPinPin also provides POD category-specific plug-ins, exquisite templates that meet various vertical categories, and an exclusive membership system to help vertical and brand customers to layout and accumulate private domain traffic, and provide full-platform traffic layout functions such as online alliance SEO.

In terms of marketing and customer acquisition, FunPinPin is well aware that traffic is the key to independent websites. Therefore, unlike other website building SaaS tools, FunPinPin combines overseas marketing services with website building services as the core, empowering high-quality merchants around the world with rich marketing experience, and providing an integrated "independent website building + traffic diversion" closed-loop service including website building, Facebook/Google/TikTok advertising account opening, advertising optimization and advertising credit line services, helping merchants solve the core problems from website building to traffic diversion.

In terms of ecological resources, FunPinPin opens up cooperation channels with top traffic providers such as Google, Facebook, and TikTok for merchants, helping them obtain resource support from traffic providers, enjoy VIP-level advertising and marketing services, effectively ensure the stability of advertising accounts, apply for direct customer manager support, obtain advertising quotas, and help merchants avoid advertising policy minefields. In addition, FunPinPin is also actively expanding in-depth cooperation with payment tools such as PayPal to provide merchants with effective payment solutions.

What is more noteworthy is that in the first quarter of 2022, FunPinPin will release its self-developed FunPinPin application market, becoming the first website building platform in China with an application market. FunPinPin will connect global developers through standardized API interfaces, allowing more mature plug-ins in the Shopify application market and other ecosystems to access the FunPinPin platform without barriers. At the same time, in order to meet the localization needs of merchants, FunPinPin will also provide merchants with secondary development services.

FunPinPin COO Zhong Yang said: "FunPinPin App Market is also a global open technology exchange platform where everyone can showcase their technology development talents. We welcome outstanding developers from all over the world to create win-win situations with FunPinPin."

In terms of seller data security, FunPinPin provides triple security measures for merchant data encryption:

First, FunPinPin's products have a rigorous data architecture planning, which ensures the integrity, security and independence of merchants' backend data from the bottom of the system. During the cooperation period, merchants can manage all their own backend data, including customer, product, order data, etc., and permanently support full data export or migration.

Second, FunPinPin will set up a data security fund of tens of millions to protect the data security leakage issues that independent station merchants are worried about. If merchant data is leaked, they can get effective compensation.

Third, FunPinPin’s risk control team focuses on the independence of merchant brands. Once they discover that our merchants are infringed by other merchants in the system, they will immediately close the infringing merchant site after identification.

In addition, in order to better provide merchants with a full range of localized services, FunPinPin adopts the independent station "iron triangle" team service model of "production and research + sales + AM", providing merchants with three-to-one full range of technical, operational and marketing support, "not rejecting any small demand."

Take JOVS , a high-end personal care brand that focuses on solving medical beauty home care problems, for example. After entering the global personal care market with its popular hair removal device and initially achieving its overseas expansion plans in Europe, the United States, Japan, South Korea and other countries, the German market has become JOVS's next important strategic goal. Alice, co-founder of JOVS, said: "JOVS is very rigorous in selecting partners. We conducted a series of investigations on FunPinPin's integrated product drainage service solution and found that their rich overseas expansion experience can help us improve the efficiency of our brand overseas expansion. We finally chose FunPinPin as one of the important partners in our overseas expansion plan in the German market.

3. Empowering Amazon boutique and DTC sellers, FunPinPin launches Global Plan 2.0 to help brand transformation

Currently, FunPinPin has launched the Global Plan 2.0, focusing on supporting DTC and Amazon boutique sellers.

First of all, FunPinPin will build websites for merchants free of charge, freeing up merchants’ operational staff, enabling easy store transfers, and helping merchants decorate their stores.

On the marketing side, which is of concern to merchants, FunPinPin will assist merchants in applying for stable Google GMC accounts/Facebook accounts from Google and Facebook, and provide merchants with a $100,000 advertising credit line, which allows them to spend first and pay later, easily solving the pressure of marketing expenses and financial turnover. In addition, FunPinPin will also provide customers with a week of free global precise e-commerce network traffic to continuously promote independent station customer acquisition.

In response to the current shortage of talent in cross-border e-commerce operations, FunPinPin has launched a free 30-day practical training camp for advertising placement to train merchant operators on practical issues such as targeted advertising on Google and Facebook.

Ruan Fei, investment director of Innovation Works, pointed out that more and more vertical, high-quality, and R&D-focused sellers are entering the cross-border e-commerce market. Even many domestic brands that already have excellent products are trying to find new growth points overseas. The overall average product quality of cross-border e-commerce has improved significantly compared to last year.

In the future, independent sites will play an increasingly important role in the cross-border e-commerce industry, becoming one of the important means for cross-border merchants to break free from platform constraints, occupy the minds of users, and establish global brands.

FunPinPin has always been committed to becoming a "website building service platform more suitable for Chinese sellers", and has continuously upgraded to an independent station ecological service platform to enable cross-border sellers in the entire chain. After obtaining the A round of financing, FunPinPin will continue to improve its product research and development capabilities, and invest more funds to help Chinese DTC brands go overseas smoothly, help Amazon boutique sellers transform, and help Chinese brands break the stereotype of "low quality and low price" and truly move towards a new stage of brand globalization.

FunPinPin

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Independent website

SaaS Service Platform