With daily sales exceeding 200,000, how does Aopeng operate its independent website?

How can independent sites do better!

How to make the popular cross-border e-commerce exports more attractive? Building independent websites, creating leading enterprises, and establishing industry discourse power have become a consensus. Especially this year, factors such as increasingly stringent platform policies have accelerated cross-border sellers to test the waters of "independent websites" . However, while independent websites have strong money-making capabilities, they also have many difficulties and questions:

Sellers are flocking to independent sites, making competition in the independent site track more intense and traffic more expensive. Is it worth building an independent site?

Some people say that building a platform now is a 99% chance of death, but building an independent website is a 999% chance of death. What is so difficult about building an independent website?

The independent station track is now in chaos, with phenomena such as sending empty packages, not delivering goods, and goods not matching the descriptions prevalent. What harm does this unsustainable development model bring to the industry?

If sellers want to run their own independent websites, how can they master refined operational strategies and key elements ?

In response to the above questions, Xi’an Aopeng, a leading independent website seller, answered like this!

Great! Aopeng's highest daily sales volume exceeds 200,000

It is reported that Xi'an Aopeng was established in May 2014. From the beginning, it focused on women's clothing lines. Later, it also added fashion categories related to the women's clothing line, such as shoes, accessories and other product lines.

After rapid development, Appen successfully created the unique "Appen Model" and quickly established brand marketing and overseas delivery capabilities with the help of China's rapid response and cost-effective supply chain capacity. Today, Appen's revenue scale has ranked among the top domestic cross-border e-commerce companies. In 2018, its revenue exceeded 1 billion yuan, achieving a profit of 100 million yuan; in 2019, it continued to grow rapidly and maintained an industry-leading profit level. Zhao Xi, VP of International Marketing at Appen, said that the company's highest daily average volume of sites had reached more than 200,000.

Like many cross-border sellers, Aopeng's cross-border journey has not always been smooth, but these setbacks on the cross-border road have also become major events that promote the company's upgrading and transformation. "From 2016 to 2017, the company was hit by intellectual property rights and image property rights, which made the company lose important marketing channels. After appeals and improvements to the product content and images, we can continue to grow in the women's clothing line ," Zhao Xi told En.com. In addition to realizing the importance of intellectual property rights and image property rights, Aopeng also realized that the traffic model that simply relies on the rapid development of cross-border e-commerce cannot develop in the long run. In the past few years, when many cross-border e-commerce companies focused more on the DTC model oriented to refined operations , they also got on the train of this trend.

"When the company experienced setbacks, everyone stuck together and faced difficulties together. Although the team was small, everyone worked together to solve all problems, which was very impressive. This also laid the foundation for the company to double its sales and obtain Series A financing." It is reported that in 2016, Aopen completed a Series A financing of tens of millions of yuan. In 2020, Aopen received a Series B financing of 100 million yuan from Cathay Capital to accelerate the capitalization process.

In the next step, Aopeng will deepen its operations, take customer experience as the starting point, and deploy an omni-channel layout to make the road of cross-border exports wider and further.

Opportunities and challenges of independent stations!

Independent websites are a hot topic in the current cross-border e-commerce industry. More and more sellers are flocking to independent websites. In Zhao Xi's view, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity lies in the current popularity and penetration rate of cross-border e-commerce online, which makes it relatively easy for sellers to enter the market. If there is traffic, they will be noticed. The challenges lie in two aspects:

First, for sellers who entered the market early, as the number of competitors gradually increased (platform sellers switched to independent websites, offline sellers switched to online sellers) , how to maintain their competitive advantage was a major challenge;

Second, for all sellers, as traffic becomes more and more expensive , consumers become more and more educated, and their requirements for sellers become higher and higher, sellers with a unique model or excellent service consumer experience are more likely to be accepted by customers. How to do this well is another challenge.

Speaking of independent websites, the era of making money easily on this track is gradually fading away. Although independent websites are a powerful tool for building brands and allowing sellers to have their own say, it cannot be ignored that the difficulties of independent websites are also difficult to overcome. Some sellers have said that now entering the platform is a 99-9 chance of death, while entering the independent website is a 999-9 chance of death. For example, the problem of traffic acquisition alone has made people complain: "Promotion and traffic generation are too expensive", "Independent website advertising fees are too expensive, and those who have a lot of orders are spending money like crazy on advertising"...

Zhao Xi also feels the same way about the difficulty of building an independent website . From Zhao Xi's perspective, the current e-commerce environment has undergone the following three changes compared to the past :

1. Traffic becomes more expensive: When I first entered the industry, the CPC of a traffic could be as cheap as a few cents, but now it may be common to be $1.

2. Increasing competition: The independent station track is becoming increasingly crowded. Not only are there independent station sellers who are new to the market, but there are also domestic sellers who used to run brands, platform sellers, and sellers who used to only focus on offline businesses.

3. Changes in consumer consumption preferences and habits.

In fact, there are many problems in the independent station market, such as sending empty packages, not delivering goods, and not delivering the goods as shown , which are also obstacles to the development of independent station sellers. Zhao Xi said that this phenomenon not only affects the reputation of independent station sellers among consumers, third-party platforms, distributors, payment channels, etc. , but also affects the reputation of Chinese brands overseas and has a negative impact on Made in China, so these problems need to be curbed.

For Aopeng, which is located in Xi'an, building an independent website still faces the difficulty of insufficient resources. " The lack of resources mainly refers to the fact that high-end talents, information resources, channel resources, etc. are not as good as those in Shenzhen ." Fortunately, there are many new small and medium-sized enterprises in Xi'an, and there are many entrepreneurs with ideas who are trying more and broader opportunities and models, which is conducive to the renewal and replacement of this industry.

More and more people are entering the independent station market, verifying the huge development prospects of this track. How can we seize the opportunity under the trend and embark on a path of stable growth for independent stations in 2022? " If you want to do a good job in an independent station, you must understand the people, goods and places, what kind of products to sell to what kind of people in what way, means and media, and studying every link is the foundation for doing a good job in an independent station. Every link is important and interacts with each other . " It is worth noting that on December 13, at the 2021 First China Central Cross-border E-commerce Seller Brand Overseas Summit hosted by Yien.com, Zhao Xi, VP of Marketing at Aopen International , will bring a wonderful sharing on the theme of "Refined Operation Strategies and Key Elements of Independent Stations".

" Among the many marketing strategies , I would like to share with you some operational strategies that I have personally experienced. From the perspective of people, goods , and places , the content can be roughly divided into two points. One is what people, goods, and places refer to that our independent website focuses on, and the other is the key elements that the operation optimization path under the full funnel focuses on . "

If you want to go to the event and learn from Zhao Xi, VP of Marketing at Aopen International , you can scan the QR code below to register for this conference !

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