For traditional foreign trade enterprises, how should they embrace the era of “Internet +”, shift from offline to online, and effectively enter the field of cross-border e-commerce? To this end, we can start from the two dimensions of market and product, and analyze them in combination with their respective characteristics.
Market regions of cross-border e-commerce
Overall, the global e-commerce market can be divided into three regions:
(1) North America, Australia and Europe are the first-tier regions of the cross-border e-commerce market
E-commerce development in these regions is relatively mature, with large consumer groups and market scale. Most cross-border enterprises can find suitable target customers in these markets and successfully carry out cross-border e-commerce business. For example, cross-border e-commerce platforms such as LightInTheBox and DX mainly started their business in these regions.
(2) Emerging foreign trade regions such as Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Southeast Asia, and India are the second market for cross-border e-commerce
As emerging economies in the world, these regions have huge market potential and good economic development trends, and are important regions for the expansion of cross-border e-commerce; however, the development of e-commerce in these regions is far less mature than that in first-tier regions, and many rules are still imperfect, requiring enterprises to have sufficient risk prediction and prevention awareness.
(3) Other regions such as Africa are “virgin land” and undeveloped areas for cross-border e-commerce
Due to the local economic development level and logistics service capabilities, cross-border e-commerce in these regions is currently difficult to carry out effectively.
Categories of cross-border e-commerce
Currently, there are three main categories of hot-selling products in the field of cross-border e-commerce:
(1) Category 1: Mainly electronic products
Most of the merchants engaged in cross-border e-commerce business on platforms such as eBay in the early days were engaged in this type of products. Electronic and 3C products have a large market space and are the entry point for many merchants to enter cross-border e-commerce. However, as more and more people join in, the competition for electronic and 3C products in the cross-border e-commerce market has become increasingly fierce, showing characteristics such as slowing growth and declining profits.
(2) Category 2: Various decorative items such as wedding dresses, home furnishings, accessories, wigs, etc.
Although this product category does not have as large a market share as 3C products, it has a high annual growth rate and is a product category that many merchants engaged in cross-border e-commerce are keen on. For example, LightInTheBox, a leading domestic cross-border e-commerce platform, initially engaged in the foreign trade of wedding dresses, and later added other products.
(3) Category 3: Auto parts related products
With the rapid popularization of automobiles, the annual growth rate of products in this category is very fast. The regional user characteristics are relatively clear and easy to localize. Compared with the first two categories, the market space for auto parts products is even greater and will become an important battlefield for cross-border e-commerce.