Awesome! A cross-border seller sold 180 million yuan worth of goods on a niche platform in half a year

Recently, the cross-border e-commerce giant Zhiou Technology released its financial report for the first half of 2024, bringing a niche cross-border e-commerce platform back into the public eye. The last time it attracted attention was because its wholly-owned subsidiary opened its platform to Chinese sellers, and that platform is OTTO.

According to the semi-annual financial report released by Zhiou Technology, its sales in the OTTO channel reached 185 million, accounting for 5.04% of its main business income, a year-on-year increase of 97.11% . Last year, OTTO accounted for only 3.61% of its main business income, with sales of 93.84 million.

As a niche platform, OTTO’s performance in Zhiou’s financial report is noteworthy.

According to data, OTTO is an e-commerce platform owned by OTTO Group, which was launched in 1995. The platform's product categories include home furnishings, clothing, 3C products, etc. According to data, the number of active users of the OTTO platform reached 11.3 million in 2023, and the number of products provided reached 14.5 million; the age of platform users is mainly concentrated between 25 and 55 years old, of which 62% of customers are high-income married women. It is reported that in Germany, OTTO has covered 45% of households.

OTTO (9th) is also among the top 10 cross-border e-commerce platforms in the world listed in the "2023 Cross-border E-commerce Development Report" jointly released by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and other institutions . At the same time, OTTO is also the only European platform to be among the top ten.

Currently, OTTO still uses an invitation system for sellers to join. Sellers must meet multiple conditions, such as: a local German company business license (the legal person can be Chinese or foreign), the legal person can be contacted, the company needs to hold a passport for KYC review, the company needs to handle VAT and have a Bescheinigung §22f e-commerce certificate, and the local German overseas warehouse delivery . OTTO China CEO said in an interview earlier that "(the platform) strictly controls the number and quality of sellers. For many years, it has insisted on manual verification and invitation system to approve a limited number of high-quality third-party sellers to join."

However, because the German e-commerce market is in a downturn, OTTO has also been affected. The company's financial report shows that in the 2022/23 fiscal year, OTTO's total GMV is 6.3 billion euros, a year-on-year decrease of 8.6%; OTTO Group's global e-commerce revenue fell 9% year-on-year to 10.8 billion euros, but it is still higher than the approximately 8 billion euros before the new crown (2019/20 fiscal year). OTTO said that the group's international e-commerce sales will still fall by nearly 9% in the 2024/25 fiscal year; but by 2025, its e-commerce sales will return to growth and may show more significant growth.

At present, when the Amazon track has been involuted to the point where it can no longer be involuted, Zhiou Technology's achievements in OTTO have also provided new ideas for many cross-border sellers - try niche platforms, work together on multiple channels, and carry out a full-scale, multi-initiative layout, so as to hope to bring more growth and possibilities to their cross-border path.

Cross-border sales

Niche Platforms

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