Many sellers on the AliExpress platform will encounter a bottleneck in order volume, that is, although there is a stable order volume every day, it is difficult to continue to increase. The store scale always remains at the same level, unable to open up new markets and achieve sustainable development. If this situation continues to remain unchanged, the seller’s order volume may even decline, and the existing market share will gradually be lost.
When encountering this problem, many large sellers on the AliExpress platform often expand their development space by optimizing the original supply chain system, such as creating popular products and then handing them over to factories for customized production; reducing the cost of purchasing goods to increase their own profit margins, etc. For AliExpress stores that have just started operations, the first step is to select products, which can be based on the following three ideas:
(1) Find a market suitable for the product
Traditional foreign trade manufacturers often adopt this idea when transforming into cross-border e-commerce. The products of these foreign trade manufacturers are originally aimed at the international market. Therefore, compared with domestic sources, their products are more in line with the preferences of foreign customers; and these manufacturers have also accumulated a group of long-term cooperative customers in the development and operation. Therefore, compared with other types of cross-border e-commerce, these traditional foreign trade factories generally do not have to worry about inventory issues and can directly put their products on the AliExpress platform.
At the same time, these sellers can also accurately locate the countries and customer groups with the largest number of orders based on the relevant transaction data on the AliExpress platform, so as to carry out long-term cultivation and maintenance of the market that is most suitable for their products; in addition, these sellers can also use their supply chain advantages to develop high-end customization and wholesale on the AliExpress platform.
(2) Find products suitable for the market
That is, by analyzing the specific situation of the target market and customer groups, select the most suitable products. For example, Russia’s light industry is underdeveloped, and clothing consumption relies heavily on imports. If Russia is the target market, the clothing preferences of people of different age groups can be analyzed to select products favored by the local market, thereby greatly improving the conversion rate of store products.
Therefore, product selection is to focus on the target market customers and choose product categories according to their needs and preferences. Just like food, people in different places always have different preferences. What sellers have to do is to choose products to sell according to the preferences of target customers. At the same time, in order to more comprehensively and accurately understand the consumer demand of the target market, sellers are advised to use some local websites to obtain more market information, such as hot-selling products in the area, or product categories that are collected by many customers, so that their product selection is more in line with local market demand.
(3) Follow-selling
Follow-selling means to see which category is most popular in the market, and then put the same products on the shelves in the store to compete with other sellers for traffic. The market for hot-selling products is large, so follow-selling will be helpful in increasing store traffic, but this is a “cheap” way of selecting products.
If sellers want to expand and strengthen their brands, they should still conduct in-depth product selection analysis based on the attributes of popular categories and the characteristics of target market customers, so as to use differentiation strategies to avoid fierce competition in popular categories, create their own store’s characteristic products and brands, and effectively attract customers’ attention.