There are certain bottlenecks in the development of cross-border e-commerce enterprises on third-party platforms. First, there are many sellers on third-party cross-border e-commerce platforms, and the products are highly homogenized, which is basically undifferentiated competition. To obtain customers, unless there are irreplaceable product features, otherwise, there is only one way to compete on price, and the profit is getting thinner and thinner, and the financial pressure is getting greater and greater. Many sellers have sales of over 100 million, but the profit is only a few million.
Secondly, due to the resources of third-party B2C platforms such as Amazon, eBay and AliExpress, as well as the rule design, there are certain bottlenecks in the development on the platform. Taking Amazon as an example, the traffic of cross-border e-commerce enterprises’ products can be divided into two categories: free traffic, mainly Bestseller (explosive products) traffic; paid traffic, mainly CPC (Cost PerClick, charged by clicks) traffic in the station. For free traffic, the traffic of BestSeller is the maximum that sellers can achieve. CPC delivery in the station has the obvious characteristics of diminishing marginal benefits, that is, after reaching a certain traffic value, the input-output ratio brought by increasing keyword bids is decreasing. Therefore, there is a natural bottleneck in the traffic that Amazon’s big sellers get from the platform, which is why Amazon also encourages sellers to do social marketing and off-site traffic diversion. However, from the seller’s perspective, there will be the following traffic distribution paths for off-site traffic diversion for Amazon, which will greatly reduce the diversion effect and ultimately make the platform a wedding dress.
In addition, not all category sellers have the opportunity to enter the platform e-commerce to conduct sales. Based on the law and its own category management policies, each platform generally has some banned categories. In this case, independent foreign trade mobile cross-border e-commerce platforms can also serve as an effective channel for enterprises to expand overseas sales.