(Picture source: Tuchong Creative)
Cross-border e-commerce platforms have begun to pay attention to seller services?
In the past year, multiple cross-border platforms, including AliExpress, have launched the "upgrade" of seller services. Amazon has added practical product selection function, and AliExpress has made greater moves this year: on the one hand, it builds more preferred warehouses in China, allowing merchants to ship goods in China, and can also achieve logistics timeliness comparable to overseas local e-commerce companies. On the other hand, the construction of overseas warehouse is also accelerating.
In addition to optimizing logistics construction, AliExpress recently launched a full hosting service to help more sellers facing the dilemma of "marine crisis" to do cross-border business. This service allows cross-border merchants to hand over complex work such as logistics, operations, after-sales service to the platform, save a lot of learning and operation costs, and be a "hands-off boss". Merchants can focus more energy on goods they are better at.
Judging from the current investment information, this new service currently requires no commission, and there is also a 3-month after-sales exemption period. If a consumer refund occurs during the period, the platform will bear the cost.
How do you understand these new services recently launched by AliExpress?
Simply put, it is more like the official genuine "service package" of the AliExpress platform for "fighting monsters and upgrading" to Chinese cross-border sellers! The platform hopes to launch a series of corresponding solutions for most of the problems that may be encountered during cross-border operations.
In fact, similar hosting services have already existed in the e-commerce industry at home and abroad, such as domestic 1688 and overseas Amazon have similar services. As a platform mainly based on third-party domestic cross-border sellers, AliExpress has brought similar services to the cross-border field, allowing Chinese sellers to leverage hosting services on the basis of "product selection genes" and clear the "operation genes". In this way, the "road to sea" of Chinese cross-border sellers may become simpler.
01
Behind the wish of "simple going to sea" is the dilemma of "straight out" that sellers faced over the years
Although the overseas market is vast, it is different in each market when facing a large number of strange countries and regions. It will take a long time for ordinary people to just remember the names, let alone understand the characteristics of each market in detail. It will be even more difficult if they still have to "cultivate cultivation".
In addition, every slight movement in the international situation will make Chinese cross-border sellers nervous. Not to mention the major changes such as EU tax reform. Even when the domestic situation in Sri Lanka changes in July this year, Chinese sellers can't sleep in the middle of the night and get up and handle order refunds.
and so on, there has been a saying that cross-border "three mountains" has always been circulating in the circle: logistics, compliance, exchange rate . The "collapse" changes in each link will put cross-border sellers' business facing challenges. Every seller who wants to "go overseas" has to face the following "mountains" and "stumbling blocks" on the cross-border road: How to run a cross-border store? How to do logistics in so many countries and regions? What should I do if I encounter after-sales problems after selling it overseas?
Faced with these problems, cross-border e-commerce platforms have always had various services. For example, Amazon has an FBA model, which is "fulfillment by Amazon", which helps sellers to do cross-border logistics.
For example, AliExpress has established a preferred warehouse service, which is to set up a stocking and shipping warehouse for overseas markets in China. Domestic cross-border sellers can prepare the goods in the preferred warehouse in advance. Overseas consumers can order them, and AliExpress will help deliver the goods, which will accelerate logistics timeliness and avoid the risk of unsalable sales caused by stocking overseas.
(Picture: During the World Cup, AliExpress set up a World Cup dedicated line in Yiwu preferred warehouse to help domestic products go overseas)
Currently, AliExpress's preferred warehouse has 11 domestic warehouses, and warehouses can also be allocated to each other, so that the problem of whether to ship or not can be shipped when some uncertain factors occur.
However, the above services only point to the cross-border logistics field. Now AliExpress has concentrated all the various capabilities accumulated by cross-border e-commerce over the past 10 years to become a complete set of service packages to help sellers solve the "marine disaster". The newly launched full-hosted service is an important part of the service package.
02 What are the benefits of this service upgrade for domestic cross-border sellers?
AliExpress service upgrade this time, the platform not only helps with logistics, but also assists in operations and provides professional operation plans. At the same time, after-sales service can also be handed over to the platform. Sellers who join this service upgrade can only focus on studying goods in the future. As long as the goods are on the road, they can throw all the things behind them to the platform.
This will bring several benefits:
A batch of goods is very good but sellers who did not understand cross-border before can go overseas quickly and open up new sales channels;
Sellers who have been struggling in complex cross-border operations can also "liberate" them from it, making the operation easier;
For those sellers who have advantages in cross-border operation capabilities, there are more choices. For example, they can connect some of the goods to full-hosted services and save their energy to develop new products, so that the scale of the business will be easier to go up.
This is a good thing for all kinds of sellers.
cross-border platform has begun to pay attention to "silent demands", which is a good thing.
At the same time, through full hosting services, AliExpress can also quickly improve the logistics experience and after-sales service of a large number of high-quality Chinese goods, and overall enhance the competitiveness of Chinese cross-border sellers overseas.
For a long time, the competitiveness of Chinese products overseas is often concentrated in cost-effectiveness and richness, while cross-border logistics timeliness is a shortcoming: a product is shipped from China, shipped overseas, and then delivered to consumers, and it has to go through multiple links such as warehousing, trunk transportation, and local delivery. The logistics timeliness takes more than 30 days on average. Moreover, logistics costs often account for 30% to 40% of the total sales.
This restricts the competitiveness of Chinese goods in cross-border retail to a certain extent.
AliSales has proved through a lot of experience that if you can use the capabilities of the platform to provide logistics and services to consumers, it is easy to quickly open up new markets overseas.
For example, before AliExpress, it has achieved the fastest delivery of Chinese products to Korean consumers within 3 days through the preferred warehouses of Weihai and Yantai , which is comparable to the local e-commerce logistics experience in South Korea. This move also made AliExpress, the "platform dark horse", gained the position in a short period of time, becoming the number one shopping app in South Korea with the largest number of downloads, and even surpassed the local e-commerce platform Coupang.
(Picture: Alibaba AliExpress has the highest number of downloads in the Korean shopping APP ranking)
If AliExpress can copy the "Korean experience" of Paotong to other overseas markets, the growth space for Chinese cross-border sellers is actually very considerable.
Nowadays, AliExpress talks about the seller service upgrade, in fact, AliExpress gathers all the capabilities accumulated in the past and provides them to all cross-border sellers in packages. The products that choose this service can quickly achieve fast logistics and good service in many markets, attracting more overseas consumers... In this way, when the seller services provided by cross-border platforms also begin to "roll", this may be a good thing for domestic cross-border sellers.
Overall, the full hosting service is AliExpress’s overall package and upgrade of the seller services that it has been doing in the past, and quickly copy some successful experiences in the market to the world.
Cross-border business is very complicated. Cross-border e-commerce platforms such as AliExpress have begun to "turn" on platform service capabilities. What kind of growth rate will cross-border overseas travel become convenient and simple in the future? This answer remains to be tested by the market, but we hope that more can be introduced by AliExpress platform to continuously improve its service capabilities to help sellers.
