New opportunity is here! Billion-dollar Amazon sellers never engage in price wars

"Don't engage in malicious price wars, which is a lazy behavior. Focus on long-term value and concentrate on your customer preferences. Everyone has room to survive and develop." When Liu Jingkang, founder of Insta360, said this, the audience seats of the Amazon Global Store Opening and Cross-border Summit were boiling. This expressed the voice of many Amazon sellers.

How to avoid price competition has become an urgent problem that Amazon sellers need to solve. At the Amazon Global Selling Cross-border Summit , outstanding brand sellers such as Insta360 and Baleaf shared their practical experiences, allowing sellers of different types to see the possibility of unlocking new sales on Amazon.

Focus on studying customer needs and making long-term plans

On December 12, tens of thousands of people gathered at the Shenzhen venue of the Amazon Global Selling Cross-border Summit. The theme of the summit was new industry layout and high-quality overseas expansion. At the meeting, Amazon announced that one of the five strategic priorities for 2024 is to empower brand building. How to successfully build a brand and where new opportunities for Chinese sellers will be in the future, the practical experience of several outstanding sellers is worth learning from.

Founded in 2015, Insta360 is a world-renowned smart imaging brand based on panoramic technology. In 2020, the company's panoramic camera brand "Insta360" had a global market share of 35%, ranking first . It is a well-known brand on Amazon. Its founder Liu Jingkang is also a well-known post-90s engineering CEO.

When talking about the current achievements, Liu Jingkang believes that it is because of staying focused on studying customer needs and making long-term technical plans and preparations.

Specifically, there are two points: First, Insta360 will focus on a group of people to study their needs and continue to dig deep into the scenarios they represent; second, based on customers' current needs, it will predict customers' future needs, make good technical reserves, prevent competitors from easily imitating, and maintain the company's profitability to continue synchronous research and development.

When asked how to find the customer's pain points earlier than the customer, Liu Jingkang gave an example. If you ask a person who buys a carriage what kind of carriage he needs, he will say a faster car with smoother wheels. But if you ask why he needs a carriage, he will say he hopes to get from point A to point B faster. As a cross-border seller, if you want to solve the customer's needs from point A to point B, you don't necessarily have to provide a carriage, you can provide a car, which is the definition and creation of a brand new category.

Next, you ask the customer why he needs a car to get from point A to point B faster , and he tells you that he needs to go to work. We can also provide customers with a new way of communication to work remotely.

So demand is an infinite game that can never be satisfied. We can keep researching and finding needs that customers are not aware of, and then design product solutions for them.

As a company headquartered in China, how does Insta360 know the needs of global consumers and build an international brand? Liu Jingkang humorously said that the meaning of a brand is to make consumers buy your products with their eyes closed.

A key word for a brand is trust, and the foundation for building trust is good products. Another key word is value proposition. One day we will provide homogeneous products with our competitors, and the point of customer choice is the resonance between the brand and the customer.

Liu Jingkang's thinking is full of engineering flavor. Yang Jun, head of corporate purchasing for Amazon Global Selling in Asia Pacific, believes that in the next ten years, China's engineering dividend will be further released, and more and more companies like Insta360 will emerge as leaders in their niche markets.

Focus on core product lines to avoid homogeneity and price wars

Baleaf, which is also in the sports track , is also rushing on the road of branding. It is a sportswear brand affiliated to Xiamen Junyi. After the brand was established in 2014, it quickly grew into a leader in Amazon's yoga and outdoor products field. In 2019, it won the "Amazon's Most Popular Brand Seller of the Year" with sales exceeding 300 million, and sales exceeded 1 billion in 2021.

Many people think that it is impossible for Chinese clothing brands to sell well and sell at a high price. In the view of Xu Muxuan, the founder of Junyi, selling well and selling at a high price are not contradictory, provided that the product is good. This is a question of brand positioning. Another dimension depends on the user. The core of the brand is to fully understand the target users and help them solve their pain points and meet their needs through products and services.

Focusing on unmet needs and developing products in a targeted manner can avoid homogeneity and blind price wars, which is the killer weapon for the success of the Baleaf brand.

Since then, Baleaf has expanded to multiple sites and achieved very good results. As a clothing brand, it is very difficult to expand globally. Baleaf also encountered many pitfalls in the early stage and later began to adjust the layout of its products.

Firstly, in different markets, we conduct product research before putting products on the shelves to cater to the needs of local consumers. Secondly, we continuously iterate and innovate on fabrics based on brand positioning, and consider enriching user choices with more styles and colors while meeting the needs of the user base. Finally, every time we enter a new market, we focus on the core product line, and after reaching a certain volume, we consider expanding into exclusive models to slowly expand the business.

The way for brands and foreign trade factories to achieve new growth

Unlike the newly-rising brand Baleaf, TCL is a household name in China and has been making global layout for 24 years. In the past few years, TCL has upgraded its strategy from the traditional e-commerce model focusing on cost-effectiveness to a brand plus word-of-mouth model for global consumers.

Li Hongwei, vice president of TCL Industrial, said that in the early days of the mobile phone business, they took some detours and brought some products from operators, hoping to make a breakthrough in e-commerce through cost-effectiveness, but it was difficult to sustain. So they made up their minds to make breakthroughs in products and market investment.

At the product level, we launched exclusive products for e-commerce, accurately timed the launch of new products, and continuously explored the layout of innovative categories; at the marketing level, we provided exclusive marketing support on e-commerce platforms to ensure that the exposure frequency of core users was sufficient. We made special adjustments to the organizational structure and turned e-commerce into a first-level department of the company as an independent business unit.

Successful domestic brands like TCL have created a new world by adapting their products to the differentiated needs of overseas users. Li Hongwei believes that Chinese companies should use existing advantageous technologies to innovate and build competitiveness in cross-border e-commerce products.

In addition, more and more traditional factories are facing the challenge of foreign trade business growth. They are trying to transform into cross-border e-commerce through Amazon. Zhejiang Linya Co., Ltd. is one of them. The company found a new growth point on Amazon and achieved its first profit in 2021. At the same time, its online and offline sales reached nearly 300 million US dollars, setting a historical high .

Zhao Yifan, general manager of LinYa Co., Ltd., said that in 2015 he saw that his father's factory was struggling to get foreign trade orders, so he decided to do his part. At the beginning, he led a team to do domestic e-commerce, selling the same products online and offline, and competing directly on price online. As a result, the entire market strategy went wrong and ended in failure.

When switching to the cross-border track, he learned from trial and error, connected the operation team and the product team, focused on product development and research and development, and conducted sufficient testing before new products were put on the shelves.

As an enterprise integrating industry and trade, testing new products will bring great challenges to the entire production line and workshop. Linya's experience is to use the factory's fixed proofing team to conduct small-batch testing and promote through different channels. When testing products, a detailed QA questionnaire is designed, and the product is adjusted based on the questionnaire and combined with the analysis of foreign designers, and the sample is re-tested.

At the same time, Zhao Yifan will also conduct product research in offline supermarkets and supplier markets in Europe and the United States, focusing on product selection and consumer experience, and using real-time consumer reviews on Amazon to iterate and upgrade products. Based on the products, he combines brand building methods to create Linya's own explosive products.

The above are just representatives of successful brands. There are many more successful Chinese brands that reach global consumers through Amazon. In 2024, Amazon Global Selling will also launch more initiatives to help sellers build their brands. Dai Xuefei, Executive President of Amazon Global Selling Asia Pacific, said that one of the things Amazon insists on is helping sellers build global brands and continuously accumulate brand value, which is a very important factor for sellers to compete on the international stage.

According to Jin Yanzhen, head of Amazon Global Selling's Chinese seller management, excellent seller brands have three common characteristics: first, independent innovation; second, deep brand development; and third, global expansion.

How can Chinese sellers successfully build their brands in the future, and where are the new opportunities for going overseas? Yang Jun gave the answer.

First, China's engineer bonus is constantly increasing. There will be more and more hard technology brands with "engineer bonus" going global. These brands' high-gross-profit products will bring high returns through Amazon, and they will continue to invest in research and development, forming a positive flywheel.

Second, industrial belts. Among the hundreds of industrial belts in China, hundreds of thousands of factories have transformed from traditional trade to cross-border trade, and only a single-digit percentage has done so. Therefore, there are great opportunities in terms of structure.

Third, Chinese brands go overseas. When domestic brands develop to a certain level, they will naturally think of global expansion. Well-known brands must go overseas to gain a larger market.

Fourth, China's young small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs. Their brands and products may not be fully mature yet, but they want to become entrepreneurs and start businesses. Many of them will invest in hard technology and manufacturing overseas and grow into brand owners.

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