1. Methods for selecting suppliers
In cross-border e-commerce procurement management, the selection of suppliers is more important than the development of suppliers. Enterprises must focus on supplier selection and find suitable suppliers from the beginning, rather than relying on products developed by suppliers later to improve performance. Only by managing suppliers well can subsequent performance be ensured. When enterprises select suppliers, it is best to adopt the “one product, one point” approach, that is, only one high-quality supplier is selected for one product, a long-term and stable cooperative relationship is established, and economies of scale are achieved, so that procurement costs will be reduced. Many cross-border e-commerce companies do not have the ability to identify the quality of suppliers, so they adopt the “one product, multiple points” approach and choose backup companies to deal with supply risks, but in the final analysis, the company’s ability to manage suppliers must be improved.
2. Procurement process
The procurement plan for the procurement process of cross-border e-commerce boutique sellers and general sellers comes from the traffic end. On the one hand, the procurement plan comes from online, cross-border e-commerce platform traffic within and outside the station, such as platform official activities, store activities, “Internet celebrity” promotion, forums, Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms; on the other hand, it comes from offline channels, such as overseas exhibitions, offline advertising, and many other channels.
For most boutique sellers, purchasing becomes much simpler after implementing supplier management. The specific purchasing process is: starting from receiving the stocking instruction, matching the supply relationship to place an order, conveying the order information to the supplier, and continuously following up on the return of the order to ensure that the order arrives at the warehouse accurately and efficiently, the goods are put into the warehouse after quality inspection, and after the order is completed, the account is reconciled according to the order and the transaction is completed. At this point, the purchasing process ends.
The biggest feature of the distribution type seller is the pursuit of no inventory distribution. The purchasing process is generally: select hot-selling items and popular trends based on big data analysis, put products on the shelves, consumers place orders, determine the purchase variety and quantity based on consumer order information or historical sales information, and purchase from suppliers.