Foreign trade work is hard, and e-commerce operations are even harder. What is the experience of cross-border e-commerce combined with the two? There are external factors such as time zones, languages, and regulations, as well as overtime, daily work, and peak seasons such as the end of the year. The overwork rhythm also applies to logistics companies. It must be said that practitioners all earn hard-earned money.
It is easier for those with foreign trade experience who are proficient in the entire trade process to enter cross-border e-commerce, but the operation is still more complicated than domestic e-commerce, such as the Brazilian Olympics marketing opportunities, Brexit, pound drop, and the US election. The design of supporting products, as well as religious taboos, exchange rate fluctuations, extreme weather, aviation strikes and other major and minor issues do not need to be considered. It is an all-weather, all-round operation.
Cross-border e-commerce is a miniature form of international trade. If you are a novice, you need to consider more when preparing to start this business, from selecting product categories and suppliers to multi-platform operations, cross-border payments, and collections. Foreign exchange settlement, cross-border logistics, various foreign trade risk prevention, and mastering platform service level assessment, etc.
Although it is easy for individuals or small teams to engage in cross-border e-commerce in SOHO, from the perspective of platform rules and long-term development, it still needs to be operated by a normalized formal company, especially procurement, taxation, accounts, and freight. , legal affairs and other requirements. If it is a manufacturing factory or a brand enterprise, the first thing to consider is not “what to sell” but “where to sell it”. You must also conduct seller pain point surveys, product research, advertising and marketing, establishing customer groups, OEM, etc. If you want to do day business “A thousand cuts and a thousand euros”, other operational processes still need to be considered as a whole.
Take the simplest three-person team investment as an example, but also need to assign many roles. Large cross-border sellers have been subdivided into more detailed links such as photography, custom design, multi-language translation, through train, SNS marketing, ERP, payment collection, customer service, data analysis, warehousing and inventory, logistics and order tracking. Moreover, once e-commerce starts, it requires sustained attention and unremitting investment. It is impossible to accumulate orders for three days of fishing and two days of surfing the Internet.
In addition, if you have the resources and conditions, you must carry out multi-channel distribution and multi-platform operations. There is a “soft three yuan” concept in cross-border trade: a commodity with a retail price of four yuan costs only one yuan to produce, and the remaining “soft three yuan” is distributed in all links of the supply chain. Lean operations are also the source of profits. Obstruction in the circulation link. Even if cross-border e-commerce moves to an invisible link online, without 30% gross profit support, it will be almost idle. Lack of operational skills, ignorance of platform rules, blind distribution of goods, and excessive marketing are all mistakes. Big taboo.