Overseas shopping has been popular in recent years, driving the development of the cross-border import e-commerce industry. Many festivals have been turned into shopping festivals by e-commerce. For example, “Double 11” has become a national shopping carnival, and “Black Friday” has also become a cross-border shopping carnival. Major e-commerce companies have also launched various promotional forms. Among them, the transaction volume of Tmall Global and Yangmatou has grown rapidly.
The China E-Commerce Research Center said that the current overseas online shopping distribution layout mainly includes three modes: overseas direct mail, overseas group mail, and bonded import. Consumers mainly shop overseas through cross-border import e-commerce platforms, individual sellers purchasing agents, and overseas e-commerce platforms. Since the introduction of the new policy, the bonded model has suffered a heavy blow. The news that the new policy will be postponed for one year has caused cross-border e-commerce companies to switch to direct mail or overseas warehouses.
Accenture Consulting Company and Alibaba Research Institute predict that more than 900 million people in the world will shop across borders in 2020, and the largest market will be China. The demand of domestic consumers for imported consumer goods will be gradually released and tend to be stable in the next few years. Going out to expand overseas markets has become the only choice for domestic sellers, which is also an important task for domestic e-commerce companies in the past two years.
The data on the current layout of overseas markets by various platforms show that the old giant Alibaba has the most comprehensive global layout and the most actions. For Alibaba, overseas brands entering the Chinese mainland market through Alibaba’s retail platform is only the first step in its global new retail layout. What Alibaba wants to do is to fully open up global trade routes. As the growth rate of the Chinese market slows down, the next step is of course to go global.
At present, some cross-border e-commerce companies have successfully expanded the markets in Europe, America, Latin America and other regions. Under the goal of increasing the proportion of overseas revenue to 50%, Tmall launched “Globalization 2.0” on the 8th “Double 11”, leading merchants to collectively go overseas and taking the first sale as a pathfinder.
15.2.3 New opportunities brought by the “Belt and Road”
The countries along the “Belt and Road” account for 43.4% of the world’s population (about 3.21 billion), contribute a total economic output of 25 trillion US dollars, 50 million online shopping consumers, and the total trade volume accounts for 22.8% of the global trade volume, and it continues to grow at a rate of 30% every year. This means that the “Belt and Road” is a new opportunity for the cross-border e-commerce industry.
According to the “One Belt, One Road” Cross-border E-commerce Consumption Report, through e-commerce platforms, China’s e-commerce products have been sold to dozens of countries along the “One Belt, One Road”, including Russia, Thailand, Egypt, Ukraine, Poland, Saudi Arabia, etc.