The first is the premise of product selection, including one’s own interests, weight and volume, category fit, and whether there is infringement.
The second is the product selection method, which includes online and offline channels. Online product selection is divided into on-site selection and off-site selection, while offline product selection includes professional wholesale markets and factories with cooperative intentions.
(1) Online product selection: on-site selection
The advantage of this method is that sellers can easily find hot-selling products, traffic-generating products, platform activity products and other product categories that are highly attractive to target customers, so that the store can effectively obtain traffic in the initial operation; the disadvantage is that it aggravates the homogeneity of products on the platform, causing the growth space of small sellers’ stores to be severely squeezed by large sellers, thereby affecting the overall benefits of the store and weakening the store’s positioning effect.
(2) Online product selection: off-site selection
watchcount and watcheditem are two commonly used off-site selection tools. The former can obtain information such as sales volume, title, price and similar models of products corresponding to keywords on a certain site, thereby helping sellers to better select products; the latter helps sellers to select products by displaying product models corresponding to keywords on a certain site. At the same time, these two off-site selection tools can also help sellers who have just set up a store to better learn how to draft product titles.
(3) Offline selection of professional wholesale markets
Product selection in professional wholesale markets has some similarities with product selection in regular stores, and is also based on the store’s positioning and the market’s supply. However, for cross-border e-commerce merchants, this method of product selection requires relatively high capital and it is difficult to freely control inventory.
(4) Offline product selection of cooperative intention factories
Compared with product selection in professional wholesale markets, product selection in cooperative intention factories is more targeted and can order goods based on the store’s positioning. But like product selection in professional wholesale markets, this method of product selection also requires relatively high capital.