B2B trading platform has always been an important marketing channel for general foreign trade enterprises and cross-border e-commerce enterprises. Its main advantage lies in the fact that cross-border B2B trading platform has a large number of registered members with buying and selling intentions, as well as the buying and selling transaction information released by these members. This information makes the platform contain unlimited business opportunities, and the marketing effect is more obvious. The value of the market lies in the buying and selling power in it. The stronger the buying and selling power, the more prominent the market value.
Secondly, the services provided by cross-border B2B trading platform can greatly reduce the transaction costs for both importers and exporters. For importers, they can purchase goods from multiple suppliers at the same time, obtain a large amount of detailed information, facilitate search and price comparison, and realize large-scale and one-stop purchases. For exporters, they can use trading platforms to carry out corporate publicity, develop customers at low cost, improve customer relationship management, improve production and delivery efficiency, and facilitate global marketing.
In addition, the additional services provided by cross-border B2B trading platforms, including information services, blogs, forums, bidding, and advertising, not only effectively expand the functionality of the platform, but also enhance customer cohesion, gather popularity for the platform, strengthen the original market sales function of the platform, and make the platform more ecological. However, due to the large number of similar companies flooding the platform, product competition is extremely fierce, resulting in relatively low profits.
However, B2B trading platforms also bring new problems to both importers and exporters. For example, importers will come into contact with unfamiliar suppliers and find it difficult to compare the suppliers’ services and credit. For exporters, old customers will turn to competitors, so price competition will be more intense and more value-added services will need to be provided. In addition, in order to obtain customers, they need to pay certain transaction fees and advertising fees, which may result in large costs.