Black Friday attracted tens of thousands of orders in 7 days! Industry sellers are making money in SHEIN's peak season

Lisa, who lives in Los Angeles, is a loyal fan of SHEIN. The shoes and jeans in her bedroom, the eggshell opener and portable apple peeler in her kitchen are all from SHEIN. She estimates that she spends at least $75 on this platform every month. And it all started when she logged into the platform and bought $2 earrings after seeing a Facebook ad.

Lisa also plans to buy holiday gifts for her family and friends at SHEIN this year. Browsing her shopping cart, she can see that most of the items are much cheaper than those in offline retail stores. As a result, the total cost of this shopping trip is only about $200, which is more than half of the $500 she spent in other stores in previous years. However, despite the reduced cost, she still managed to buy a variety of products such as T-shirts, jeans, and casual shoes of good quality.

During the just-concluded Black Friday promotion, many overseas consumers like Lisa, who are keen on pursuing the ultimate quality-price ratio, flocked to SHEIN like a tide. During this period, the sellers' orders also exploded. Seller Aze said that the sales of his two stores on SHEIN increased significantly, and the store with the best sales performance had the highest number of orders of nearly 2,000 orders in one day. In view of the store's usual performance and the sales on Black Friday, he decided to shift the focus of operations to the SHEIN platform next.

Nowadays, Chinese sellers who place their hopes on overseas markets have different backgrounds. Some are deeply involved in the traditional foreign trade field, while others are struggling in the domestic e-commerce track. Many of them have been stuck in growth bottlenecks, but eventually saw the dawn of growth after entering SHEIN.

Qingdao jewelry sellers won the first battle of the peak season with tens of thousands of orders sold in seven days

The origin of jewelry can be traced back to ancient times, when early humans began to use simple natural materials such as stone, bone, tooth, feather, etc. to make ornaments, mainly for instinctive decoration and self-display. In modern times, jewelry consumption has gradually become a fashion and cultural phenomenon, and the product variety has become more abundant, including various metal jewelry, plastic jewelry, glass jewelry, etc.

Qingdao is one of the three major fashion accessories production bases in my country, forming a tripartite situation with Guangzhou and Yiwu. The development of Qingdao's accessories industry can be traced back to the 1980s, when it was mostly simple processing in the form of small workshops and family factories. Since the 1990s, with the establishment of the Qingdao Korean Investment Enterprise Association and the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea, many Korean-funded accessories companies have set up factories in Qingdao Chengyang District, and the industry has since entered a rapid development track.

Today, Qingdao's fashion accessories industry has shown a flourishing development trend, with annual exports earning more than 10 billion yuan. In particular, the production of raw materials is at the global leading level, and the production of clothing chains and jewelry buckles and necklace buckles accounts for 85% of the global market share.

During the peak sales season in the second half of this year, Qingdao’s jewelry factories were bustling with activity. Yan Hui, a SHEIN seller who has settled here, had already begun preparing for the year-end promotion in late summer, especially developing new autumn and winter models in advance. Therefore, he achieved an expected good result in the first round of the peak season promotion.

In the United States and other Western countries, "Black Friday" is usually seen as the beginning of the year-end shopping season that lasts more than a month. During the Black Friday heat stage, Yan Hui's jewelry store on the SHEIN platform has achieved sales of most styles in three or four digits in a week, and dozens of "hot items" can sell 5,000 or even tens of thousands of orders in a week.

In fact, not only on Black Friday, Yan Hui feels that his sales performance has always been remarkable. In the first week of entering SHEIN, although more than 200 products were launched, "almost all of them were sold out at once", "I was labeling and shipping from morning to night, and there were several large boxes of ready-made goods shipped in one day." Even though more than two years have passed, this scene is still vivid in Yan Hui's memory. This was just the beginning. Since then, his store has been able to produce several particularly popular niche products every year, such as the anklets two years ago, the closed-loop collars last year, and this year's marine series elements.

The key factor that helped him stand out from the crowd was just three words: "product strength".

Yan Hui's entrepreneurial journey began in Yiwu, where he and his companions opened a stall to receive jewelry orders, and then handed them over to the cooperative factory in Qingdao for supply. However, at that time, traditional orders in the jewelry industry were already very involuted. There were too many sellers and too little porridge. In order to get orders, many sellers did not even accept deposits. Customers would even take the sellers' new products and ask for a higher price. If they did not agree, the other party would give them to other companies to make large quantities of goods. In such an environment, most of Yan Hui's energy was spent on pleasing customers and collecting payments, and very little thought was spent on product research and development and design.

Although the business was very large at the time, he realized that this was not a sustainable development path. So, in 2018, Yan Hui abandoned this business model of drinking poison to quench thirst, came to Qingdao to build his own factory, and began to compete in the jewelry track with product strength. He believes that in the jewelry export track, the winners who finally settle down must be calculating long-termism.

Yan Hui is undoubtedly a good hand at making products, but he lacks an accurate grasp of popular trends and consumer preferences, which are precisely SHEIN's strengths and the reasons why he chose SHEIN.

With years of intensive cultivation in the international market, SHEIN has long been able to accurately analyze the fashion preferences and purchasing trends of consumers in different regions and age groups. Combined with predictive analysis, it can quickly capture the popular changes in fashion elements, such as the rise in popularity of a certain pattern, color or style, so as to guide sellers to adjust product design and production plans in a timely manner to ensure that the product styles launched are always closely aligned with the current fashion trends.

This year, buyers from the SHEIN platform team visited Yan Hui's Qingdao factory twice to provide targeted suggestions on product selection, design and fashion trends based on the characteristics of the factory.

Three months in advance, Foshan clothing sellers aim to increase their sales by 2.5 times

While Yan Hui was preparing for the Black Friday promotion, more than a thousand kilometers away in Foshan, seller Sun Junjie was also making intensive preparations. Guangdong is a major province in China's textile and clothing industry, and Foshan, located in the central and southern part of Guangdong, is one of the main gathering places for leading companies in the clothing industry in Guangdong Province. There are many industrial belts gathered here, including the Chancheng Zhangcha knitting industrial belt, the Chancheng Zumiao children's clothing industrial belt, and the Nanhai Xiqiao textile and clothing industrial belt. Among them, Zumiao is the earliest birthplace of children's clothing in China and has been rated as a "Chinese children's clothing town."

A few months before Black Friday, Sun Junjie's multiple clothing factories in Foshan were already busy preparing for the big sale. In the peak season preparation plan agreed upon by him and his team, the development of "Black Friday" styles should be carried out three months in advance, and the first wave of products should be ready 50-60 days in advance. In the end, the overall order volume increased by more than 2.5 times compared to normal days.

Such orderly planning and preparations make people realize that this is only his second time participating in the Black Friday promotion. Strictly speaking, Sun Junjie is still a novice seller in the overseas market, and only took the first step in cross-border e-commerce from the SHEIN platform last year. However, his strength should not be underestimated. At present, the monthly sales of overseas retail business alone have successfully exceeded 24 million yuan, and the sales in the first year of overseas sales have exceeded 100 million yuan.

During the conversation, we learned that Sun Junjie had worked in domestic e-commerce for 8 years before officially going overseas. At that time, the sales of his stores on several platforms combined could stably reach 4 million yuan in turnover per month. Perhaps it was precisely because of this experience that he was able to get started much faster when doing cross-border e-commerce.

However, although both are online businesses, there are still significant differences between domestic and foreign e-commerce. First of all, the market scope is wider. Although most SHEIN sellers can sell their products to more than 150 countries and regions around the world with one click through the platform, in fact, this is extremely challenging for ordinary cross-border sellers, because consumer preferences in different countries and regions vary greatly, and product selection is difficult. Secondly, the cross-border e-commerce supply chain is relatively complex. In addition to the problems of production itself, it also involves cross-border transportation, customs declaration, payment settlement and other links, which is extremely difficult for most sellers, especially cross-border newcomers.

More importantly, cross-border e-commerce requires higher efficiency and production flexibility to adapt to the changing needs of multiple overseas markets. In this case, even though Sun Junjie has many years of experience in domestic e-commerce and has multiple factories to support him, he still faces many challenges. The digital business tools provided by the SHEIN platform to sellers provide great support for him to prepare goods accurately. According to reports, as long as 100 pieces of each new model are tested first, the efficiency and flexibility of the factory will be fully mobilized.

"In the past, domestic e-commerce sales were basically concentrated on a few hot models. Now, among the more than 800 models on sale at SHEIN, about 40% of them can continue to sell well. Such a large volume of sales cannot be calculated manually, and it must be supported by a digital system," said Sun Junjie. Overall, in less than two years since going overseas, Sun Junjie's sales have increased by 6 times.

In recent years, the growth of domestic e-commerce users has gradually peaked. In order to attract more consumers, e-commerce platforms and merchants have started price wars, using low prices as the main means of competition, which has made the profit margins of goods smaller and smaller. Before the layout of overseas markets, Sun Junjie also encountered bottlenecks in his development in China. In view of this, he has now shifted the focus of his business to the overseas track and deepened his cross-border e-commerce.

Earlier, business software company Salesforce predicted that Chinese shopping apps would account for one-fifth (21%) of purchases during this year's holiday shopping season (November 1 to December 31). Its analysts said they expect global sales outside of China to reach about $160 billion. In the remaining half month of the sales season, it is believed that more sellers will have the possibility of explosive orders and grab a larger share of the shopping cart.

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