After half a year after shutting down Dmonstudio, ByteDance seems to have also demonstrated its previous spirit of socializing in "repeated battles and repeated defeats and repeated defeats" in the cross-border e-commerce track. Relevant reports recently showed that ByteDance's new fast fashion independent site If Yooou has made a comeback.
However, this time If Yooou did not still choose the US market, but set its target in Europe, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and other countries. And coincidentally, SHEIN, which has been established for nearly ten years, has also targeted the European market this year, expanding its fast fashion B2C cross-border e-commerce business from India and the United States to the local area. It also appointed Jacobo García Mia, who has worked in H&M, Zarah, Burberry and other companies as its European business development director.
It is not difficult to find out from this that If Yooou's direct competitor may still be SHEIN, and the main categories of both are also fast fashion women's clothing. It is reported that most of the products in the clothing category in If Yooou are currently within 5 to 30 pounds, and users will be given a 10%-20% discount based on the total amount of the order, and even a limited-time 40% discount is provided.
But it is worth noting that in fact, if Yooou is not much different from Dmonstudio, which was closed after three months of operation. Both are independent sites that focus on fast fashion women's clothing products and focus on low-price. Therefore, according to ByteDance's previous fast-breaking and fast-tracking pace, the outside world speculates that If Yooou is most likely to be just a try.
In addition to the successive attempts of Dmonstudio and If Yooou, in fact, at the end of last year, ByteDance also launched an independent e-commerce APP Fanno to provide high-cost-performance comprehensive product categories for the core European markets. This product was once considered "Taobao/ Pinduoduo for the European market", and its task was more like competing with comprehensive e-commerce platforms such as Amazon .
In addition, with the domestic market Douyin "interest e-commerce" doing well, TikTok obviously will not ignore the huge traffic pool it has. In 2021, TikTok began to launch the live yellow car function in Indonesia , the UK and other regions, and launched the TikTokSHOP function. This function is similar to domestic Douyin stores, and can directly sell products in TikTok. It then cooperated with Shopify to test TikTok Shopping (little yellow car) in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and other places, and followed the Amazon FBA warehouse model to store some products with stable sales in local warehouses in advance.
It is not difficult to find that ByteDance's overseas e-commerce business has made certain progress in recent years, and its continuously enhanced e-commerce attributes are naturally nothing more than considerations in terms of traffic monetization and increasing revenue. Coupled with the accurate recommendation mechanism and a higher usage rate among overseas youth groups, it is obviously more advantageous than building an independent website in a completely isolated manner. Furthermore, whether it is ByteDance's European market or Pinduoduo's use of the United States as its first stop for its cross-border e-commerce business, some of the consumption habits that have been cultivated in these regions are more conducive to the development of cross-border e-commerce business of large domestic manufacturers.
But it is undeniable that the supply chain and warehousing and logistics practices that SHEIN has begun to pay attention to early are still crucial to today's platforms such as Temu and If Yooou. The management capabilities of the supply chain, the operation capabilities of the brand, and the transaction volume and repurchase rate that are more important than the number of users are not achieved overnight.
According to reports from relevant media, Temu, which has been online less than a month ago, has increased its first order discount from 20% to 30%. In addition to the low-price strategy, it has also launched three major promotional activities: free shipping, 30% discount, free returns, and the "0.01 USD" flash sale zone. In addition, relevant insiders revealed that Temu has clearly required that "the supply price must be lower than the market wholesale price", and by compressing supplier profits and platform discounts, Temu's "lowest price on the entire network" has been promoted. In this regard, some sellers said that products that cannot be sold on Amazon may choose Temu to clear inventory.
However, from another perspective, although Temu seems to have the right to pricing and like the model adopted by Pinduoduo, it also means that you may encounter compliance issues and whether too low profit margins can continue to retain merchants after the traffic dividend period. If Youoou, which is also in a low-price format, is less prominent than Temu. According to data released by data service provider Similarweb, If Yoooo has been viewing for a recent average of only 2 minutes, and the total number of visits in the past three months has dropped from 430,000 to 44,000. Temu's total number of visits in September has reached 7.5 million. Although it is still less than SHEIN's 172.6 million visits, at least its APP downloads have temporarily ranked first in the Google Play list, and even surpassed Amazon and Walmart for a time.
However, these data can only be used as a reference at best, which is not enough to show that the e-commerce overseas projects of Pinduoduo and ByteDance have been successful. At least so far, the route of domestic cross-border e-commerce business has basically not left the previous strategy of low-price traffic diversion, or in the process of promoting globalization, such as Ali and JD , it has also carried out "infrastructures" such as logistics and supply chain in the process of promoting globalization.
But in terms of performance, Alibaba International's commercial revenue from April to June 2022 was 15.451 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2%, accounting for only 7% of the total revenue. Previously, in the financial report for the 2022 fiscal year, its international commercial revenue accounted for 7% of its total revenue. Obviously, Alibaba's overseas businesses (Tmall overseas, Lazada cross-border business, and AliExpress cross-border business) have not yet shown signs of big strides. JD.com, which has always focused on supply chain and logistics advantages, seems to be still "taking small steps" in this field. At present, its newly upgraded B2B platform "JD Global Trade" is more like a SaaS service provided to merchants based on supply chain infrastructure.
Overall, compared with the independent website or comprehensive e-commerce platform that ByteDance and Pinduoduo are building, Alibaba and JD seem to have focused on helping merchants go overseas and building independent websites related services. SHEIN is more like a vertical e-commerce platform focusing on the fast fashion field and constantly polishing supply chains and warehousing and logistics. After all, "customer first" is the first line of its company's values.
In fact, cross-border e-commerce is not a new trend, but rather it is more like an inevitable choice for domestic Internet companies to explore incremental growth. And there will inevitably be bumps in the process of pursuing dreams in overseas travel. For example, when faced with the relatively low prices of products in Temu, the most mentioned question in its FAQs is "Why can Temu provide prices far lower than competitors."
and before establishing its own traffic pool, whether it is SHEIN, or the newly entered Temu or If Yooou, they are actually inseparable from the hands of Facebook, Google, and TikTok. At least the preferred promotion and traffic channel for independent website sellers is still Facebook. This means that the early CPM customer acquisition cost will only be high or low, which is like a process that requires high investment. And with the new policy of Apple on ATT Privacy Policy (App Tracking Transparency) will also affect independent website sellers who are highly dependent on digital advertising on overseas platforms to reach users to a certain extent.
Although TikTok can completely convert the traffic in the site directly, or divert traffic to Fanno and If Yooou, it currently faces certain difficulties in accurately converting and reaching its own independent website business customer base. And not long ago, not long after the EU tax reform, the United States passed the "2022 US Competition Act" with Chinese companies as the main "restriction target", which has clear requirements on imports. If cross-border e-commerce companies no longer enjoy overseas tax-free discounts, it may also mean that the low-price strategy will face an unsustainable situation, and the " tax-encapsulated model" of many sellers and service providers may also usher in changes.
Therefore, it is necessary to accelerate the transformation from the hot distribution model to the direction of high-quality products and brands, or to fight a "short-term victory" first. Perhaps all of them are under the considerations of various cross-border e-commerce companies in the next stage, and only time will give the final answer.
[The picture in this article is from the Internet]
