In the era of cross-border B2C e-commerce, the convenience and low cost of cross-border transactions have made it possible for individuals to directly consume across borders.
(1) The convenience of cross-border information flow benefits both buyers and sellers. Cross-border online shopping platforms enable consumers to obtain product information more conveniently and efficiently, and social media promotes information sharing among consumers and enhances consumers’ voice; while product/service providers can better understand their demand characteristics and preferences by directly interacting with consumers. In addition, the development of technologies such as machine translation can also help both parties to the transaction overcome language barriers.
(2) Innovation in cross-border payment models facilitates small cross-border transactions. The cross-border development of third-party payment platforms has reduced the cost of individual cross-border payments, simplified the process, improved timeliness, and promoted other payment service providers to improve their cross-border payment services.
(3) The intensification and innovation of cross-border logistics services improve consumer experience and reduce costs. Matching and prediction based on big data analysis have led to the continuous deepening of the intensification of cross-border transportation and warehousing; the overseas warehouse model has shortened delivery time.
The rapid development of the cross-border B2C e-commerce market is driven by multiple factors. In addition to economic growth, rising income levels and continuous improvement of related infrastructure, the five major factors of local industrial structure, maturity of offline retail channels, local market size, convenience of cross-border transactions and the popularity of mobile Internet are also very important.
(1) The underdeveloped local industrial structure of some countries, especially the underdeveloped consumer goods industry, has caused the unavailability of products. The underdeveloped consumer goods manufacturing industry has brought strong demand for overseas consumer goods. For example, economies dominated by primary products/energy industries and some small countries dominated by the service industry, as well as regions with an imbalance in the proportion of light and heavy industries, such as some CIS countries, are important target markets for cross-border B2C e-commerce.
(2) In regions with immature offline retail channels and underdeveloped offline retail industries, there is a large space for the development of B2C e-commerce, and the development of cross-border B2C e-commerce is also more rapid.
(3) If the local market size is small, for the sake of scale effect, niche “long tail” product providers usually only set up independent distribution channels in larger economies. Consumers in economies with smaller populations need to obtain supplies from foreign channels through cross-border consumption.
(4) In regions with a high degree of economic integration, cross-border transactions are extremely convenient, cross-border commodity and capital flows are smoother, and costs are lower, which is more conducive to the development of cross-border B2C e-commerce.
(5) The convenience of infrastructure such as cross-border electronic payment logistics will also promote the growth of the cross-border B2C e-commerce market. The correlation analysis of the factors affecting cross-border B2C e-commerce shows that the higher the penetration rate of mobile Internet represented by smartphones and tablets, the more developed the cross-border B2C e-commerce market.
Cross-border B2C e-commerce has just entered a period of rapid growth. In the next few years, the growth in total transaction volume will be mainly driven by the growth in the number of consumers. With the improvement of customer experience, the improvement of “intelligent” category combinations, and the maturity of platform operations, the per capita consumption amount of new consumers will show an upward trend year by year.