AliExpress was established in April 2010. It is a cross-border e-commerce platform launched by Alibaba for the global market. It is also an online foreign trade trading platform integrating orders, payment and logistics to help small and medium-sized enterprises contact terminal wholesalers and retailers, sell in small batches and batches quickly, and expand profit margins. As of August 2018, the number of overseas buyers of AliExpress has exceeded 150 million, with more than 200 million monthly visiting users worldwide, and mobile terminal transactions account for more than 55%.
With the deepening of Alibaba’s layout in the global cross-border e-commerce market, the development of AliExpress has also ushered in a large wave of dividends. In addition, AliExpress has been busy with platform branding reforms in the past two years, which has also virtually promoted the transformation of many Chinese products to “branded, high-quality and low-priced”. At the same time, more and more Chinese sellers are considering the issue of store positioning. What preparations do they need to make?
Store positioning should focus on creating a unique store style and high standards of professionalism. The store style includes two modules: product style and store decoration style. The product style is mainly to find products suitable for the development of your own store, and unify the planning of the styles of products and sub-category products; the store decoration style can be personalized according to product attributes and brand tonality; high standards of professionalism require sellers to do a good job of brand display and service, such as highlighting the branding characteristics of the store and providing more refined user services.
Common store positioning includes traditional distribution type, whose survival space is getting smaller and smaller; brand type with a certain degree of popularity, which requires more investment and energy; and the rapidly rising “small and beautiful” type, which is suitable for the majority of small and medium-sized sellers and has a flexible and agile business model.
At the “Yiniao Summit”, AliExpress emphasized the need to create a Chinese “quality manufacturing” brand, focusing on “quality” rather than “quantity”. “Small and beautiful” stores are in line with this concept and will surely become a future development trend. “Small and beautiful” will become the final foothold of store positioning. So how should a “small and beautiful” store be run?
1. “Small and beautiful” store management strategy
“Small and beautiful” means flexibility and agility, but its “small” is not a simple, single “small”, but a “small” that has both gains and losses, a sense of tension and relaxation, and “lightweight”. In the rapidly developing cross-border e-commerce market, “small and beautiful” stores or companies are the current demand and trend.
2. Mainstream operation strategy of stores based on “small and beautiful”
(1) Price brand
Positioning with price as the attack point, relying on price to impress and attract customers. Its strategy is: parity policy, using low prices to drive high prices. For example, creating traffic-generating and profit-making models.
(2) Professional brand
Positioning with high-quality and professional services as the attack point, retaining customers through the seller’s expertise and patience. Its strategy is: making full use of the store page to show the seller’s professionalism.
(3) Featured card
Find out the features of the product as the attack point for positioning and arouse customers’ interest in buying. The strategy is: deeply explore the store’s features.
(4) Additional card
Increase the value of the product or service in the customer’s mind, form differentiation, so that it will be remembered by customers and can continue to buy. The strategy is: increase product variety, beautify the store, give gifts, improve services, etc.
In addition to the overall style positioning of the store, operational positioning is also very important. As we all know, a successful marketing can quickly attract traffic, increase sales, and greatly improve brand awareness. However, it should be noted that the style, content and method of the marketing activities must be in line with the preferences of the target customers. For example, through Facebook, adding customers as friends and establishing a fan circle is not only conducive to product promotion and traffic, but also conducive to retaining old customers. It is a marketing skill that cross-border sellers need to learn. In addition, the fundamental purpose of sales is to activate customers’ desire to buy and improve customer experience. If AliExpress stores want to become bigger and stronger, overseas warehouses are an inevitable choice for future development. Because the control of the logistics process is also a kind of experiential marketing for customers, it is worth the seller’s attention.