In 2014, with the weakening of international market demand, the rising cost of domestic labor and production materials, and the change of exchange rate, the traditional foreign trade model has become increasingly exhausted, and cross-border e-commerce seems to have become the most promising blue ocean market overnight. Traditional foreign trade factories, suppliers, and manufacturing companies have entered cross-border e-commerce one after another. With the advent of the cross-border e-commerce era, the application and demand of data by small and medium-sized cross-border e-commerce companies have increased unprecedentedly, because in the cross-border e-commerce era, only the effective use of data can make it possible to operate cross-border e-commerce well.
Ms. Wang of Zhejiang Xiekai Import and Export Co., Ltd. is my friend for many years. She has been engaged in foreign trade for more than 10 years. The core channels for developing customers are Alibaba International Station and Alibaba’s Chinese Supplier English Station. Since 2014, she has found that traditional foreign trade business is becoming more and more difficult, and the effects of traditional Canton Fair and overseas exhibitions are getting worse and worse. The Alibaba e-commerce platform she is familiar with has undergone a series of changes. The most obvious feature is that Alibaba is no longer just a simple information trading platform. By 2016, she found that more than half of her company’s $6 million in transactions were completed through Alibaba’s cross-border trading platform One-touch, and Alibaba’s data credit tool “Credit Guarantee” was becoming more and more valuable in daily international transactions.