New Opportunities in the Cross-border E-commerce Industry

Amazon's Account Ban Causes Industry Shock

2021 is referred to as a turning point for the cross-border e-commerce industry. Amazon has shut down more than 50,000 accounts, involving about 1,000 companies, with sales privileges of over 600 Chinese brands being revoked. This move is expected to bring over a hundred billion yuan loss to Chinese brands.

During the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, some Amazon sellers posted on a cross-border forum that overnight they had 16 accounts scanned and all were cleared. The suspended accounts were mainly due to Amazon's inability to verify seller account information, or not receiving any listing and sales history information, similar situations have also occurred with other sellers.

On the eve of last year's Member Day, Qingming Festival, and Labor Day, many sellers' accounts were also cleared. It has become a common practice for Amazon to scan accounts during Member Days and holidays. Specific reasons for account bans include being determined to be associated with others, long periods without updating activities, infringement, and various other reasons.

The Rise of Independent Stations, the Transformation Path of Cross-border Sellers

The accelerated development of cross-border e-commerce industry has made homogeneous competition increasingly fierce, and many sellers are beginning to seek transformation. The rise of third-party platforms such as Shopify has provided new development opportunities for independent site model, making self-built e-commerce platforms possible.

According to data, the market size of China's independent cross-border e-commerce sites was only 0.2 trillion yuan in 2016, increasing to 0.8 trillion yuan by 2020. As of 2021, the total number of independent sites has reached approximately 200,000, and it is estimated that the market share will reach 41% by 2025. In the next three years, the number of Chinese independent site sellers is expected to exceed 500,000.

Advantages of Independent Sites

Compared to third-party platforms subject to strict regulation, independent sites have higher autonomy and freedom. Through self-built e-commerce platforms, brand owners and small manufacturers can better implement sales strategies and product innovation, providing more personalized products and services to global consumers.

The advantages of the independent site model include the ability to freely communicate with consumers, higher autonomy, increased product innovation efficiency, and offering more personalized products and services.

Future Development Trends

Now, the cross-border e-commerce industry is transforming from pursuing large-scale extensive development to the meticulous operation of the era of branding going global. The transformation of technology services, user groups, and traffic methods collectively drive the global layout of independent websites.

The popularity of social media and the rise of short videos are prompting consumers to prefer purchasing through grass-root recommendations. Compared to third-party platforms, independent websites can attract traffic through social media more freely, making it easier to convert consumers to sellers' private domain traffic pool.

Two modes of independent websites

There are mainly two modes of independent websites: based on SaaS site building platform and self-built using open-source site building tools with cloud servers. Cloud servers offer higher cost performance, ensuring better access quality and website stability. By using cloud servers to build independent websites, sellers can have a more personalized website and more independent and flexible operational strategies.

The importance of independent websites

For global brands, cross-border e-commerce independent websites can operate more freely, achieve secondary conversion, improve consumer brand loyalty, and brand premium conversion rate. However, it is important to choose the right platform when entering the independent website market.

Current market situation

Currently, there is a mix of good and bad website building platforms in the market, with inconsistent fees and service standards. Many sellers who try to create independent websites for the first time are unaware of the specific market situation, so they can only rely on some 'experience'. They either choose platforms with low entry barriers and costs, or blindly follow well-known platforms, often resulting in frequent 'hiccups'.

Issues with traditional cloud servers

Traditional cloud servers are mainly designed around the needs of large enterprises. Developers need to be familiar with their billing system, evaluate software and hardware configurations, select storage, network, and security products by themselves. The business control panel has numerous details, which creates high barriers, high costs, and difficulty in selection for small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as individuals.

Tencent Cloud's solution

Tencent Cloud's lightweight application server, Lighthouse, helps sellers build a ready-to-use, stable, and reliable cross-border e-commerce independent site with very low costs in just 1 minute. Lighthouse is even simpler and more user-friendly, targeted at small and medium-sized enterprises and individual users, simplifying the user experience of cloud servers and shielding complex technical details.

Features of Lighthouse

Developers only need to select the underlying basic application image to complete the initialization configuration. Pre-installed applications such as WordPress, WooCommerce, and Baota panel, as well as simple functions such as one-click remote login and remote commands, reduce the construction cycle from several days to less than 1 minute.

Advantages of Lighthouse

Lighthouse provides high-bandwidth traffic package plans that sell overall basic cloud resources, integrating popular open-source software into packages to achieve one-click application construction. The independent management console supports Tencent Cloud Web console and Tencent Cloud Assistant applet, making operations convenient.

Advantages of using Lighthouse

For cross-border sellers, using Lighthouse can help build independent sites based on open-source WordPress and WooCommerce e-commerce plugins with one click. WooCommerce is the preferred site-building tool for cross-border sellers. Using Lighthouse can quickly set up sites, saving time and costs.

Independent sites usher in new opportunities

With the gradual normalization of the epidemic, overseas consumption is gradually recovering, and China's cross-border e-commerce export industry is embracing a new round of development opportunities. In the case of serious product homogeneity, independent stations can better fit brand building, upgrade the brand through content creation, overall visual design, product packaging, etc., and help sellers find differentiated market breakthroughs.

Continuous expansion

Data from iMedia Research shows that Chinese companies have established 200,000 independent stations overseas. Tencent Cloud's lightweight application servers have served tens of thousands of enterprises going global, and more and more enterprises are pursuing the operation mode of independent stations in cross-border e-commerce, keeping autonomy and control in the hands of the brand.