Cross-border e-commerce is a marketing model that has emerged with the development of the Internet. Because countries did not regulate it at the beginning, cross-border e-commerce is in a state of “wild growth”. On cross-border e-commerce platforms, what consumers see is not necessarily true, and counterfeit and shoddy products can be seen everywhere.
This “wild growth” model not only harms the interests of consumers, but also affects the reputation of e-commerce platforms. If sellers on a platform sell counterfeit and shoddy products, and the platform does not manage them, then over time, the platform sellers will sell counterfeit and shoddy products, which will cause consumers to equate the platform with counterfeit and shoddy products, and consider whether to shop on the platform, which will eventually lead to a decrease in platform traffic.
Relevant statistics show that the main problem facing cross-border e-commerce is product quality. During the inspection, my country’s customs found that many products exceeded the standard, and some products were discolored, and the ingredients did not match the labels.
Guangdong Province, one of the main centers of cross-border e-commerce, has issued a survey report on monitoring the quality of consumer goods. The report pointed out that when the Inspection and Quarantine Bureau conducted random inspections on imported consumer goods, it found that imported consumer goods had serious quality problems, with a failure rate of up to 67%. CCTV’s “3.15” also reported that some cross-border e-commerce sellers even sold food from nuclear contaminated areas.
Whether it is food or daily necessities, quality problems will cause losses to consumers. In order to prevent sellers from damaging the interests of consumers and platforms, e-commerce platforms have set up a series of regulatory conditions for settled sellers.
When sellers settle in cross-border e-commerce platforms, the platform will ask sellers for a series of certificates, and will only approve sellers to settle in after relatively strict review. In response to this, many platforms have even restricted the identity of sellers, such as not being able to register as sellers as individual industrial and commercial households. Once it is found that the products sold by sellers are counterfeit and shoddy, the sellers will be punished by blocking their accounts.
Customs has also continuously adjusted and strengthened supervision of imported and exported consumer goods. At present, customs in many places have implemented four regulatory modes: online shopping bonded import, direct purchase import, general export and special area export, and have made further efforts to protect the interests of consumers.
15.1.4 Deepening the refined operation of vertical fields is the future development direction
Some cross-border e-commerce companies have a misunderstanding: traffic represents everything. Traffic means the number of customers. Offline retail has always emphasized that there will be business only if there are customers. On the Internet, traffic is expressed as the number of users and the number of UV visitors. But business is far more than just patronizing.
Many times, e-commerce companies feel that the traffic is not enough, so they spend money to buy more traffic. However, improving the user purchase rate is what e-commerce companies need to focus on: the business logic displayed on the page, the pictures and descriptions are attractive, the products are rich, the services are in place, the shopping process is smooth, etc. These cannot be solved by simply increasing traffic. For example, the current purchase conversion rate is 1%. As long as the conversion rate is increased to 2% through more refined operations, it is equivalent to getting twice the traffic for free.
By the same token, e-commerce companies also have such loopholes: search – users cannot find products; product display – pictures and descriptions cannot arouse consumers’ impulse to buy, or consumers’ questions about the details of the product cannot be fully answered; payment – payment and delivery make consumers feel inconvenient or uneasy. E-commerce companies often overemphasize the number of logged-in users, while ignoring problems such as consumer churn during the purchase conversion process.
With the disappearance of the Internet population dividend, this extremely low purchase conversion rate must be fundamentally improved from an operational perspective, which means that the era of refined operations has arrived.
Refined operation management includes six cores.
(1) Sales conversion rate. Sales conversion rate refers to the ratio of the sales volume of a product to the number of times it is exposed.
(2) Exposure rate. Exposure rate refers to the proportion of the click-through rate of a position in the entire webpage click-through rate, assuming that all the products on a webpage are the same.
(3) Causes of churn. First, we need to understand the natural churn of each level of the platform we belong to and the natural churn of each position in the category page. Secondly, after mastering the data under normal circumstances, we can deal with abnormal situations and reduce the loss at each level.
Through the analysis of the previous question, we can basically find out the products with problems, and we can also further determine the attribute differences between products that sell well and those that sell poorly, and adjust certain indicators to bring better results (such as the sales of brands, colors, and styles in terms of time attributes).
(4) Traffic indicator system. It includes magnitude indicators, basic quality indicators, and visitor type ratio indicators. Magnitude indicators involve different platforms. The Web side mainly looks at the number of visits, PV and UV, and the APP mainly looks at the number of launches, DAU and NDAU. Basic quality indicators include the average user visit time, the average number of pages viewed per session (visit depth) and bounce rate. Sellers can use these indicators to judge user activity.
(5) Multi-dimensional traffic analysis. Website traffic analysis mainly focuses on the source of visits, landing pages, advertising placement, etc. The source of visits includes direct visits, external links, search engines, and social media. The landing page is the entrance for users to reach the website. If users are directed to invalid or irrelevant pages, there will generally be a high bounce rate. The analysis content generally involved in advertising includes advertising sources, advertising content, advertising formats (clicks, pop-ups, effect guidance) and sales share, etc. We need to optimize advertising through multi-dimensional analysis.
(6) Channel optimization configuration. Low-cost, high-quality channels need to increase their investment, high-cost, high-quality channels need to evaluate their costs, and low-quality channels also need to be evaluated. In general, based on comprehensive conditions such as cost and traffic conversion, it is necessary to optimize the channel configuration as a whole.