Digital trade refers to the use of the Internet as a basis and digital exchange technology as a means to provide digital electronic information required for interaction between supply and demand parties, and to realize an innovative business model with digital information as the trade standard. The use of e-commerce by digital trade enterprises directly shortens the time and space distance, reduces transaction costs, and improves efficiency and benefits. The result is to optimize the trade system, simplify the trade process, and increase trade opportunities. Relevant cases show that the use of digital trade can reduce costs by about 40%, and some enterprises can reach 70%, because this is different from the traditional way of using paper documents, which requires a lot of manpower and material resources to draft, modify, confirm and transmit.
The use of e-commerce makes digital trade truly face and move towards the world market, and a global marketing network can be established. Abroad, some people call e-commerce the “digital revolution”, which is no less significant than the second “industrial revolution”. Some experts believe that digital trade is the application of modern information technology in business to varying degrees and levels with the international Internet as the core. In particular, the increasing integration of computers and their network technology with modern communication technology has made people forget the concept of traditional time and space. The coordinated operation of various forces has accelerated the pace of global economic integration, making the way global business operates meet new transformation challenges. A new economic system that operates 24 hours a day, borderless and barrier-free is gradually taking shape.
For enterprises, information communication and information exchange have become the core of business operations. Whether it is product design, product production, transaction negotiation, product sales, or marketing services, quality control, and business process design, digital trade has affected all enterprises and all areas of social economy in the whole society. There is no doubt that digital trade can speed up the pace of business operations and shorten the distance between enterprises and customers. However, the significance of digital trade is not just these. It will promote the integration of different economic systems, activate and integrate new creativity, open up new market areas, create new mechanisms for corporate collaboration and alliances, and even prompt people to re-evaluate the organizational structure of enterprises and re-understand the composition of the various elements of the core competitiveness of enterprises. In a word, digital trade has not only changed the way enterprises do business, but also fundamentally changed people’s understanding of the original business concept.