How can cross-border merchants do business well? Here is the key information

New Zealand steaks, Korean cosmetics, French wine ... These products are sold all over the world. You and I can place an order with just one click and have them delivered within a few days.

Nowadays , "global shopping" has become commonplace. Behind this, cross-border e-commerce has also experienced more than ten years of rapid development. Not only has a good business environment gradually formed with the efforts of all parties in the industrial chain, but consumers have also become accustomed to conveniently shopping around the world online and looking for cost-effective products.

At the 2023 Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping Industry Ceremony, Douyin E-Commerce President Wei Wenwen also gave a set of data: In June 2023, the average daily search for Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping related e-commerce intentions exceeded 7.88 million; in the year from July 2022 to June 2023, the number of users placing orders for Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping increased by 43% year-on-year, and the GMV of Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping increased by 80% year-on-year.

The growth opportunities for cross-border e-commerce business are already clearly visible on Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping.

2023 Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping Industry Ceremony

Marketing and operation are integrated, which is the core business position of more than 170 brands

Although most e-commerce platforms currently have cross-border e-commerce businesses, and overseas brands can choose any platform to enter or have full coverage, objectively speaking, doing business in the Chinese market still has certain challenges.

First, consumer preferences are changing rapidly, and demands are becoming more diversified and personalized, which places higher demands on the overall capabilities of overseas brands from products to operations. Second, China's e-commerce has rapidly evolved from traditional shelves to live-streaming e-commerce and global interest e-commerce, which also tests brand merchants' understanding and follow-up capabilities of localized operations.

Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping has now become the first choice for many cross-border merchants. From July 2022 to June 2023, the number of merchants has increased by 111% year-on-year.

This is primarily because of user advantages.

Douyin has more than 600 million daily active users, with a large number of young and high-value users. They are very receptive to overseas products and trending new products, which means that different types of brand merchants can find their audience again. That's why we see such results: Take HECH, a food merchant, as an example. After entering Douyin's e-commerce global shopping, it has achieved monthly sales of more than 100 million in May 2023 by focusing on brand self-broadcasting, talent matrix, and membership operations.

In addition to its user advantages, Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping is also a platform for integrated marketing and operations.

Pu Qinglu, the managing partner of Deloitte Technology, Media and Telecommunications Industry in East China, shared a major industry trend at the 2023 Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping Industry Festival: social media has become the primary channel for users to discover "good products", and good content is the key to attracting users' attention and planting grass. The advantage of Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping lies in this - pictures, short videos and live broadcasts have the ability to stimulate interest and resonate emotions. Combined with the social fission attribute of the platform, brands can quickly break through the circle and increase their influence, and their main products can also become hot products faster.

Dermalogica, an overseas functional skincare brand, is a typical example. Dermalogica has been deeply involved in Douyin e-commerce global shopping for nearly three years. During this period, the brand has continuously optimized its content strategy by scientifically building a matrix of influencers, leveraging IP activities and e-commerce nodes, and using both self-broadcasting and Da-broadcasting to help the brand achieve transformation and promotion. During last year's 618 shopping event, it ranked first in the list of best-selling quality facial masks.

From the perspective of business management, global interest e-commerce is a major foundation. Merchants can make videos and live broadcasts in the content scene to encourage conversions with content; do a good job of search and mall in the shelf scene to reach more users with "people looking for goods" needs, and provide merchants with a business field to accumulate fans and operate brands; content and shelves drive each other and will also play a synergistic effect.

According to Lin Tao, the person in charge of Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping, Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping has now formed two major business models: POP (third-party merchant operation) and quasi-self-operated/self-operated.

Lin Tao, Head of Douyin Global Shopping

In the POP mode, Douyin Global Shopping is an open platform for merchants of multiple categories. Merchants can choose various marketing capabilities and marketing scenarios such as influencers, live broadcasts, and searches based on their own marketing needs, taking into account both product effectiveness and user assets. Currently, more than 170 brands have made Douyin Global Shopping their core business position.

In the self-operated /self-operated model, Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping has cooperated with more than 300 brands to quickly increase the richness of supply, cooperated with more than 5,500 influencers of different types, and put more than 650,000 shelf items on the shelves, and the shelf penetration has exceeded 35%.

Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping relies on the global interest e-commerce model and has perfect supply chain logistics capabilities, which is sufficient to build a business operation position. In addition, as cross-border e-commerce is booming, Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping continues to iterate its platform management methods, which is also helping global shopping merchants achieve certain growth and continuously inject development momentum.

From "product" to "experience", strategic upgrades boost growth

For brand merchants, running a good business often requires a "funnel" model that runs through the entire sales process: the opening is to acquire customers, and the closing is conversion. A good marketing strategy is to expand the opening and attract more users; but the next problem to be faced is how to take over these user flows, let them move to conversion faster, and then be precipitated as brand assets to continuously bring repeat purchases.

To put it bluntly, if you want to retain consumers for long-term consumption, or even to form long-term recognition of the brand, it is not enough to have a stable business field with goods, but to provide a good "experience" with consumers at the center. This logic also coincides with the core strategy of Douyin's e-commerce global shopping this year - from importing "goods" to importing "experiences".

Specifically, this core strategy includes four aspects: new products, good content, good activities and new products.

Consumers now have too many options to choose from, and if they want to stand out, "new products" are the key: "new" here refers to, on the one hand, coming up with products that meet or lead consumer trends, and on the other hand, finding new and efficient ways to launch products.

In this regard, Lin Tao, the person in charge of Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping, believes that brand merchants that have settled in the platform can focus on the simultaneous launch of new products around the world and special products that have not been introduced to China; traders that have settled in can introduce more products that have been successfully sold overseas and scarce products that are limited in time and quantity around the world. At the same time, in order to further expand the supply of goods, Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping will encourage overseas mature brands and emerging brands to settle in, and will also incubate more high-quality brands by helping celebrities build their personal IP and introducing high-quality products sold overseas by domestic brands.

As for how to launch products in the most efficient way, the first step is to further open the platform and provide a good business environment for merchants; the second step is to guide merchants to make full use of the FACT+S global management methodology to help new products sell quickly through the resonance of content + shelves.

After launching new products, the next step is to focus on creating “good content” and participate more in platform activities, such as the overseas traceability series.

From the perspective of overseas brand merchants, it is difficult to distinguish whether the goods are genuine or not, and whether they are really from overseas is the most important factor affecting consumer decision-making. Overseas experts go deep into stores, factories, wineries, etc., and provide platform users with an immersive overseas traceability experience through live broadcasts. Short videos and live broadcasts directly show the brand history, and local people appear in special scenes, which greatly enhances the credibility and fun of the traceability content.

In addition to "good content", "good activities" is a great way for merchants to balance product quality and effectiveness. It is not difficult to understand that brands can leverage marketing IP activities to connect more closely with the platform and participate deeply in it.

Currently, in Douyin e-commerce global shopping, merchants can choose different marketing activities according to their own marketing goals, including global shopping special activities, platform-level promotions, various node theme activities, platform IP activities, mall activities, etc. Integrating rich marketing capabilities and scenarios in the activities can not only enhance brand influence but also drive sales. For example, this year, Bei Oufei cooperated with Douyin e-commerce newcomers to launch new products. During the event, the brand's total payment GMV exceeded 18 million, and the brand's weekly order volume increased by more than 50 times.

The "new product" refers to the merchants providing consumers with a high-quality shopping experience from pre-sales to after-sales, and also refers to the platform optimizing its own capabilities to provide merchants with a good business experience. At the 2023 Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping Industry Festival, Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping also emphasized the need to optimize product capabilities and continue to provide good services. At the same time, merchants also need to build a fully integrated operation team to jointly help merchants and friends continue to grow their business scale.

From the above, we can see that Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping provides merchants with a high-quality business environment, allowing the platform capabilities, mature products and various industry resources to be truly used by merchants and provide support for business growth.

Experts and businesses grow together to make a better life within reach

The success of e-commerce business involves not only merchants and consumers, but also many other partners.

First of all, merchants on Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping rely on influencers to promote content. In fact, influencers continue to develop during the cooperation process and grow together with the merchants.

In the past year, Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping has broadcast 400,000 shows overseas, with the protagonists of these live broadcasts including travel experts, overseas Chinese, Chinese and foreign couples, foreign friends and international students. With their stable short video content output and live broadcast as a "bridge", these experts have accumulated fans themselves, and overseas brands have also gained a double increase in volume and sales.

For example, the expert "Tang Ma Tang Bao in the United States" has achieved a 779% increase in global shopping window GMV in 2023 compared to 2022, a 493% increase in global shopping short video GMV in 2023 compared to 2022, and a 430% increase in global shopping overall GMV in 2023 compared to 2022 through stable content output and live broadcast investment, and his personal management of global fans and stable content release frequency.

At the 2023 Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping Industry Festival, Zhang Yifan, Vice President of Douyin E-commerce Authors and Alliance Business, also provided a growth and operation guide for more overseas influencers: the platform will provide specific operation strategies for the three stages of start-up, growth and outbreak, to help influencers grow scientifically. At the same time, the platform's support plan will also cover multiple aspects, including the introduction of new creators, helping them grow their e-commerce capabilities, global operations, and overseas special activities.

Zhang Yifan, Vice President of Douyin e-commerce author and alliance business

It can be seen that this growth guide is not just to encourage influencers to bring goods, but to go deep into many key links of influencers' self-development and provide all-round support to influencers. Whether it is the improvement of personal IP operation capabilities, the enrichment of global high-quality goods to bring higher conversion rates, or finding the direction of development under the new cooperation model, these will bring growth "compound interest" and build up the influencers' personal "assets" for long-term and stable development on the platform.

Secondly, cross-border e-commerce is a business that requires heavy investment in a good supply chain. Douyin E-Commerce Global Shopping provides a stable foundation for the certain growth of cross-border e-commerce merchants through its complete supply chain capabilities.

Li Junyan, head of Douyin e-commerce import supply chain and logistics, also introduced Douyin e-commerce global shopping's related measures in the supply chain at the 2023 Douyin e-commerce global shopping industry ceremony. On the basis of the four cornerstone capabilities of full logistics, warehousing support, customs support and logistics distribution, and the three core guarantees of fulfillment, experience and marketing, the supply chain will also support professional import supply chain solutions throughout the process, helping cross-border e-commerce merchants to iterate and upgrade in fulfillment quality, cost structure and supporting services, thereby promoting further growth in transaction volume.

Li Junyan, head of import supply chain and logistics at Douyin e-commerce

To sum up, through Douyin e-commerce global shopping, users have more global products to choose from on the platform to meet their diverse needs; influencers grow steadily on the platform and gain greater long-term development space; overseas merchants not only master localized operation strategies, but also have new business markets to explore.

"There are no hard-to-sell high-quality products at a good price, making a better life within reach" is not only the demand of consumers, but also the common vision of Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping, platform merchants and influencers. From the 2023 Douyin E-commerce Global Shopping Industry Festival, we can see that a healthy business ecology has gradually taken shape.

E-commerce

Tik Tok