Compared with other domestic e-commerce giants, Suning has made some unique explorations in cross-border e-commerce. This is reflected in three aspects:
First, layout of cross-border e-commerce O2O. In 2015, cross-border e-commerce experience stores in the O2O model were blooming all over the country.
However, these experience stores are mainly dominated by entrepreneurs and traditional department stores, and domestic e-commerce giants rarely get involved. Suning, which has both online and offline layouts, boldly launched cross-border e-commerce O2O business and embedded it into Suning Cloud Store. As a star product created by Suning, Cloud Store will be rolled out nationwide. This also means that Suning’s cross-border e-commerce O2O experience stores will be spread all over the country.
Second, layout of customs declaration and international express delivery. As early as February 2014, Suning obtained the first international express delivery business license for domestic e-commerce companies. Although Suning has not made much progress in this field, it provides convenience for its future entry into the cross-border logistics and distribution industry of express delivery. In addition, Suning also established its own customs declaration agency, Suning Logistics Customs Declaration Agency Service Co., Ltd., in early 2015. In other words, Suning hopes to control the import customs declaration link of cross-border e-commerce to ensure the timeliness of customs clearance.
Third, deploy an independent APP for overseas shopping. This has been mentioned in the previous article, namely the “Little Sea Lion” launched in October 2015. Whether it is Alibaba’s Tmall Global or JD’s Overseas Shopping, they are all supplementary businesses of the original e-commerce platforms and are not completely independent. Suning not only opened an “Overseas Shopping” sub-channel on the Suning.com e-commerce platform, but also deployed an APP separately on the mobile terminal, which can be said to be another new attempt.
From the above introduction, it can be seen that Suning has a strong desire to break through in the field of imported cross-border e-commerce. In the field of domestic e-commerce, Suning has a big gap with Alibaba and JD, and there is almost no hope of surpassing them. Now that it has encountered the cross-border e-commerce boom, Suning.com has deployed multiple points to seek a single point breakthrough. From a strategic point of view, this move couldn’t be more correct.