China’s total import and export trade volume has grown rapidly, from RMB 4.13 billion in 1949 to RMB 30.51 trillion in 2018. In 70 years, China’s total trade volume has increased 7,387 times.
Compared with traditional foreign trade B2B export e-commerce, cross-border B2C export e-commerce can effectively reduce circulation links and improve operational efficiency. In traditional import and export trade, the goods of country A finally reach the hands of consumers in country B, generally going through producers, exporters, importers, wholesalers, retailers and other entities. The entire transaction process is complicated, with price increases at each level and taking a long time, so the final transaction price and time efficiency experience of consumers are poor. The emergence of cross-border e-commerce has greatly improved operational efficiency. In addition to moving transactions from offline to online, cross-border e-commerce has also greatly streamlined the entities involved. Goods produced by factories only need to be matched through e-commerce platforms to reach the hands of final consumers. On the one hand, streamlining links reduces circulation costs, benefiting both producers and consumers; on the other hand, the threshold for foreign trade transactions is lowered, and more companies can “go global” and expand the scale of foreign trade. In addition, compared with traditional trade distributors, cross-border e-commerce provides a greater variety of products and a greater variety of optional categories, with a faster product update speed, which is more in line with the pain points of overseas consumers.
In recent years, the cross-border e-commerce industry has been thriving, providing new impetus for the development of my country’s foreign trade. On March 12, 2015, the State Council issued the “State Council’s Approval on the Establishment of the China (Hangzhou) Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zone”. On January 6, 2016, the State Council’s executive meeting decided to establish the second batch of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones in 12 cities, including Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hefei, Zhengzhou, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Dalian, Ningbo, Qingdao, Shenzhen, and Suzhou. On July 24, 2018, the State Council agreed to establish cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones in 22 cities, including Beijing, Hohhot, Shenyang, Changchun, Harbin, Nanjing, Nanchang, Wuhan, Changsha, Nanning, Haikou, Guiyang, Kunming, Xi’an, Lanzhou, Xiamen, Tangshan, Wuxi, Weihai, Zhuhai, Dongguan, and Yiwu. As of July 2018, my country has a total of 35 cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones. Through institutional innovation, management innovation, service innovation and coordinated development, the pilot zones have solved the deep-seated contradictions and institutional problems in the development of cross-border e-commerce, built a complete industrial chain and ecological chain for cross-border e-commerce, and gradually formed a set of management systems and rules that adapt to and lead the development of global cross-border e-commerce, promoting the rapid development of the cross-border e-commerce industry.
The “2018-2019 China Cross-border E-commerce Market Research Report” shows that from 2016 to 2018, the scale of China’s cross-border e-commerce transactions continued to rise, from 6.3 trillion yuan to 9.1 trillion yuan, with a user scale of more than 100 million people, and is expected to reach 10.8 trillion yuan in 2019, and this growth trend will continue.