The factory expanded 15 times to welcome the peak season. SHEIN's small order quick response helps cross-border sellers set sail overseas

Transforming and going global does not mean winning by simply piling products on overseas shelves.

From the usual monthly sales of more than 15 million yuan, the sales have reached more than 26 million yuan in November. For Sun Junjie, the owner of a garment factory in Foshan, it is like "joy from heaven."

Photo provided by the seller

"I never expected that we would be able to develop the overseas retail business so quickly . It's no exaggeration to say that several operations managers in our company are going crazy with joy. " Thinking back to his decision last year to abandon his domestic online store and devote himself to cross-border e-commerce, Sun Junjie is still glad that he made the decisive "transformation" at that time .

Before opening a cross-border online store on SHEIN , Sun Junjie was a domestic e-commerce veteran who had worked for eight years. At that time, the sales of several online stores combined could generate a stable turnover of three to four million yuan every month.

However, when he opened his first SHEIN store in July last year and took the first step into cross-border e-commerce, Sun Junjie felt that he had experienced a completely new experience - now, his single SHEIN store's monthly sales have exceeded 20 million yuan, more than 6 times his previous revenue.

At present, Sun Junjie has allocated almost all of his production capacity to cross-border online stores because he believes that his energy is limited and he can only temporarily choose the more profitable side.

This is also the second year that Sun Junjie has participated in the global " Black Friday " . "I develop new models three months in advance, produce and prepare stocks 50-60 days in advance, and prepare 2.5 times the usual amount of goods." Especially in November, he closely followed the sales fluctuation curve of his cross-border online store.

Based on last year's experience, the peak period of "Black Friday" will last about 10 days, but from October to December the sales volume is higher than the daily sales. Sun Junjie said that compared with domestic promotions, the global Black Friday shopping festival lasts longer and the order volume is more stable. Because the purchasing habits of people in different countries are different, the peak season will have a longer brewing time.

Sun Junjie's feelings actually reflect the development and changes of SHEIN, an e-commerce giant. The biggest difference between SHEIN and other cross-border e-commerce platforms is that it started as an independent brand and then developed a platform model. Today, SHEIN is also the world's most visited clothing and fashion website. SHEIN, which understands both overseas expansion, brands, and industrial belts, has naturally become the first stop for many factory owners to go overseas.

Entering the peak season, the new generation of "cross-border people" shows their magical powers

Market research shows that this year's Black Friday sales record may set a new record, and this tempting pie is still expanding. However, traditional retail giants are not willing to be outdone, and a number of emerging e-commerce companies, brands and emerging platforms are also pouring in, and an unprecedented "commercial war" has entered the sprint period .

An American expert who specializes in studying consumer behavior said that with the emergence of Internet technology, online shopping convenience and competitive commodity prices, the "Black Friday" pattern has changed. For example, the global luxury goods industry has been cold, which in a way also shows that young people are no longer willing to continue to buy flashy goods, and rational consumption has become a new consumption trend. Another major trend is that overseas shopping behavior continues to shift to online. Deloitte's survey found that 71% of consumers said they would be very happy to buy online this year.

These emerging consumer demands are good opportunities for domestic cross-border people to "re-cut the cake". During the Black Friday shopping season, it is likely that the international brands will no longer fill the shopping carts of foreigners with high-quality and low-priced goods, but the "price-performance king" ready to go - the factories at the source of the industry.

In Zhejiang, there is a tradition that everyone wants to be a boss and everyone can be a boss. For example, new generation private entrepreneurs like Wu Jinsong, born in the 1990s, are increasingly coming to the fore.

The family factory inherited by Wu Jinsong was one of the first to discover the business opportunity of cross-border e-commerce. In the past, the business model of the older generation was to meet foreign trade customers through offline stalls of dozens of square meters in Yiwu, and then sell the sports protective gear produced by the family through foreign trade orders one by one.

As he came into contact with more and more foreign customers, Wu Jinsong realized that the overseas market was very standardized and that overseas customers also had a strong sense of professionalism. For example, many customers would ask, "Does your product have qualifications?" and "Does it have a brand?" If this trend continued, Wu Jinsong judged that the "three no" products would be eliminated sooner or later.

As the second generation of foreign trade factory owners, Wu Jinsong made two important innovative decisions after taking over the factory: the first was to register his own brand and strengthen qualification certification and standards; the second was to open a store on a cross-border e-commerce platform, directly reach a wider range of overseas C-end buyers through SHEIN, and narrow the distance with the international market.

From the sales of various products on the SHEIN website, we can see that outdoor sports is still a fast-growing fast lane. From the beginning of 2024 to the present, the transaction volume of sports products and sportswear has increased by more than 500%.

For most factories, developing overseas markets from 0 to 1 often means high cost investment, professional differentiated operations and complex cultural adaptation. The use of cross-border e-commerce platforms can significantly rewrite the traditional sales method of "first shouting, then selling goods".

Despite the complexity of overseas markets and the ever-changing consumer demands, SHEIN uses powerful digital tools to accurately predict product sales trends and activate the creative potential of sellers. Compared with the traditional heavy model of self-built logistics, operations and customer service, SHEIN's "operation empowerment" strategy just matches Wu Jinsong's original mature production line, helping him to quickly launch and promote products. With the assistance of the platform, sellers can easily sell products to consumers in more than 150 countries and regions overseas , which can amplify the certainty of revenue while reducing some waste caused by blind production and facility expansion.

It is understood that although Wu Jinsong has stepped into cross-border e-commerce, he is actually maintaining some of his original foreign trade orders. According to his feedback, with the support of cross-border stores, his online and offline businesses can share the same inventory, which is very flexible and reduces the risk of inventory pressure.

In addition, Wu Jinsong was delighted to find that while creating the myth of sales growth, his own brand influence is also expected to be cultivated . Store buyers can be transformed into product disseminators on the spot - with the help of active social networks, they like to constantly share products and post beautiful sports photos, helping good products to achieve word-of-mouth fission and quickly promote the spread of products among more sports enthusiasts.

In Europe and the United States, outdoor culture has long been integrated into people's daily lives. The outdoor sports participation rate in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France exceeds 50%. The mature sports habits overseas and the influence of sports stars in bringing goods are both boosters for the development of this industry. Wu Jinsong's business is visibly becoming more promising.

After more than a year overseas, Wu Jinsong's operations team generally feels that achieving monthly sales of more than 2 million yuan is already relatively easy, especially for the operations staff responsible for managing SHEIN stores, whose salary has increased by 50% since the beginning of this year.

Going overseas to solve the problem of "high return rate"

In the e-commerce era, merchants not only value sales volume, but also the return rate is a major issue that must be vigilant.

This worry is not groundless. Anyone who has worked in e-commerce knows that during big promotions, consumers are often attracted by big discounts and place orders to try out different styles of goods in the hope of finding the one that suits them among the vast number of options. However, this kind of "first-come, first-served purchase" is a double-edged sword, which can easily lead to a surge in the return rate of online stores. Some industry topics such as "sell ten pieces and return eight pieces" and "return rate of 95% has become a magic weapon for making up orders" have frequently appeared on hot searches, leaving merchants helpless. Especially in the clothing industry, as a category that is highly dependent on version, fabric and matching effect, there is a tendency for differences between the display effect in the online store and the actual product, especially in terms of color, feel and size, which can easily become the reason for consumers to return products.

During the exchange, Sun Junjie, who specializes in clothing, admitted that he found that buyers in overseas markets return fewer of his products than in the domestic market: "My domestic customers like to buy several styles and sizes at the same time, and return the others once they try on one they like. Overseas customers rarely return products. For example, the return rate of our SHEIN store is currently only 2%, which is usually due to size issues. However, a 15% return rate is considered normal in domestic online stores."

Not only that, clothing is a strong category of SHEIN's original independent brand, and SHEIN itself has a complete set of experience in many production links and management. In addition to providing digital management tools, the platform provides clothing sellers like Sun Junjie with a lot of upstream and downstream resources such as raw materials.

"This year (the SHEIN team) has come to my factory twice. Earlier, we also felt that the platform's quality inspection was too strict. Sometimes we didn't know how to manage the workers to raise the quality baseline. They also communicated with us about these issues ." How to improve product quality, conduct scientific production management, and increase the sales rate of new products are all issues that the platform is concerned about.

For domestic enterprises with their own factories, production management is the specialty of the "factory manager", while overseas marketing is another subject that is "different trades, different mountains", which not only requires continuous investment of real money, but also may not get a high ROI return. When production-oriented sellers like Sun Junjie want to go overseas, the platform values ​​the factory's capabilities in design, production, quality, timeliness and other sectors. Based on the quality, sales volume, user reviews and other dimensions of products and stores, Sun Junjie can also obtain a large amount of free exposure given by the platform with the quality of his products.

Talking about the shortcomings of cross-border e-commerce, Sun Junjie also revealed that cross-border e-commerce requires efficiency to keep up, and what you do is "quick response". Domestic consumer preferences are relatively balanced, and popular trends are similar in various places. However, if you want to sell to more than 100 overseas markets at the same time, not only will the volume be large, but the methods will also be more agile and flexible. If the production flexibility cannot keep up with the changes in demand, it may fall behind. However, once you adapt to the speed of demand iteration, the factory can get a huge improvement. I started to adapt and benefited a lot in the second and third months of going overseas: last year, the Foshan factory was only 1,000 square meters, but now it is 15,000 square meters, expanding to 15 times the original size.

When the industry's vision expands from the involuted domestic market to the global market, Sun Junjie and Wu Jinsong's simple wish is to help products find more suitable and broader sales channels and verify their strength in the tide . Those merchants who adhere to the concept of long-termism and the spirit of compliance with the overseas market will eventually stand out.

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