Characteristics of Dunhuang.com’s 10-year development:
1. The target market has expanded from the United States to the global market.
China’s cross-border e-commerce initially chose the United States as its target market. For example, “Lattice Semiconductor” started its retail business in the United States. The reason for choosing the United States is the huge purchasing power of the United States and the mature online consumption habits of Americans. The super popular Taobao and Tmall “Double Eleven” every year is a copy of the American “Black Friday” shopping carnival. According to Dunhuang.com’s official statistics, in 2014, Dunhuang.com had more than 1.2 million platform suppliers, providing about 30 million kinds of consumer goods. For a long time, orders from the US market exceeded 80% of the total orders.
Developing from the United States to the global market is also an important feature of China’s cross-border e-commerce. The more mature the cross-border market, the wider the target market. Dunhuang.com, which has been developing for 10 years, has expanded its business markets in many countries. The shopping market in the United States has also dropped from the original 80% to the current 51%. At the same time, the consumption proportion of the United Kingdom has risen to 11.2%, and the share of Canada accounts for 4.86%.
2. The product categories have developed from a single category to a full category, and the transaction scale has risen rapidly.
The development of China’s cross-border e-commerce platforms all started with a single hot-selling category. The product categories of the Dunhuang.com platform have maintained rapid growth. From the beginning, it was mainly based on traditional cross-border products such as consumer electronics and wedding dresses, and has developed to more than 30 million products, almost a full-category development. The richness of the platform categories is a sign of the maturity and development of a platform. With the popularity of cross-border e-commerce shopping models, sales have also grown rapidly in recent years. Taking the hottest cross-border product category, mobile phone screens, as an example, in 2014, it increased by 65% compared with 2013. These all show the development of cross-border e-commerce represented by Dunhuang.com in the Chinese market.
3. Focus on the cross-border B2B market.
Another very important feature of DHgate is that it focuses on the cross-border B2B field, helping Chinese suppliers to expand overseas markets through cross-border small-scale exports, and the nature of the buyers is mostly small B and B-type customers, which is very different from many retail platforms that rely solely on B2C, such as eBay, Wish and Alibaba’s “AliExpress”, which focus more on the B2C market. DHgate has been committed to helping Chinese manufacturing companies export overseas for marketing since its inception. This differentiated positioning also distinguishes DHgate from competitors such as eBay.
Why DHgate positioned the platform as a cross-border B2B is related to the founder Wang Shutong’s understanding of e-commerce. Wang Shutong believes that China will become the world’s most important cross-border e-commerce market in the future. The core reason is that she believes that China will remain the world’s manufacturing center for a long time, and cross-border B2B can directly bring export sales to these suppliers, and sales are the most concerned issue for every Chinese supplier.
Whether the future development direction of China’s cross-border e-commerce is B2B or B2C, I think it should be a development model where both coexist. The future development direction of cross-border B2B is more to help traditional Chinese OEM manufacturing companies achieve a leap from cheap manufacturing to high-end manufacturing. For the majority of traditional manufacturing operators, the cross-border B2B model is more suitable for the development of enterprises.