The C2C cross-border e-commerce model, namely the overseas purchasing model, is the original model of the import cross-border e-commerce industry. We know that after 2000, more and more people went abroad to study, travel, and do business. They often took advantage of the opportunity to stay abroad to help their relatives and friends buy some overseas products. As the Chinese people’s demand for overseas products increased, overseas purchasing gradually evolved into a profession. Some Chinese who have lived overseas for a long time use blogs, Weibo, QQ, WeChat and other professional forums to promote, use Taobao as a trading platform, and specialize in purchasing business.
This type of purchasing business has grown so big that Taobao opened up a special area for this purpose in 2007, namely “Taobao Global Shopping”. If you have to trace the pioneer of the import cross-border e-commerce industry, then Taobao Global Shopping can get this honor. According to feedback from the industry, the transaction volume of Taobao Global Shopping was about 18 billion yuan in 2015. In fact, the transaction volume of purchasing within the Taobao system is in the scale of 100 billion yuan, which is far greater than Taobao Global Shopping. The reason for this is that many Taobao merchants engaged in purchasing have not settled in the Taobao Global Shopping section.
In the field of C2C cross-border e-commerce, in addition to Taobao Global Shopping, there are also companies such as Yangmatou, Meilishuo HIGO, Taoshijie, Haimi and Jiemi.
Yangmatou started with cross-border logistics and then entered the cross-border e-commerce field in 2011. It is an early player in the industry. However, its e-commerce business really started to take off after 2013. In 2014, Yangmatou’s annual GMV reached 330 million yuan, nearly six times that of the previous year. By 2015, Yangmatou’s annual GMV was about 1.5 billion yuan, continuing to grow exponentially. Compared with many entrepreneurial C2C cross-border e-commerce companies, Yangmatou is a leader. But compared with Taobao Global Shopping, Yangmatou’s size is very small.
Meilisuo HIGO is a C2C overseas shopping project incubated internally by Meilishuo, which started in September 2014. Relying on the import of Meilishuo’s own traffic and the 338 million yuan sponsorship of “Running Man 3”, Meilishuo HIGO has grown very fast. As of August 2015, the transaction volume of the platform has exceeded 100 million yuan, and the average customer price is as high as 500 yuan. After that, Meilishuo HIGO spent a lot of money to invite the popular actress Angelababy to endorse it. It is worth mentioning that Angelababy is also an investor of Yangmatou.
It can be seen that Meilishuo attaches great importance to the HIGO project. In January 2016, Mogujie and Meilishuo merged, but Meilishuo HIGO was not included in the merger agreement. Given that the merged company will be led by Mogujie founder Chen Qi, Meilishuo founder Xu Yirong is likely to lead the HIGO project for a second venture.
Like Meilishuo, Mogujie also explored cross-border e-commerce very early. Unfortunately, Mogujie’s own overseas shopping business has not made much progress. Therefore, Mogujie adopted the equity investment method and led the investment in the C2C cross-border e-commerce platform Taoshijie. Taoshijie APP was launched in June 2014, and successively received angel investment from Cherubic Capital and Series A from Source Code Capital. As of July 2015, Taoshijie had 5 million registered users, more than 8,000 buyers, and a monthly transaction volume of 30 million yuan. Obviously, Taoshijie is also growing rapidly, but it still lags behind Yangmatou and Meilishuo HIGO in terms of scale.
Haimi Global Shopping, which also uses the C2C model, was launched in November 2014. Its founder Xu Jun is a very successful serial entrepreneur. As for Jiemi Overseas Shopping, it was launched almost at the same time as Haimi. Its founder Wang Yang previously worked for Alibaba. In March 2015, Jiemi received a multi-million dollar Series A investment from IDG. From the perspective of the model, although Jiemi is a typical C2C, it also launched an overseas shopping transfer platform APP “Jie Mi Da” in June 2015.