Introduction: Cross-border e-commerce has entered a new stage of intensive cultivation.
As one of the important areas for Chinese enterprises to go overseas, the cross-border e-commerce industry has been developing rapidly in recent years. According to data from the Ministry of Commerce, China's cross-border e-commerce exports will reach 1.55 trillion in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 11.7%. From January to February 2023, the total import and export volume of cross-border e-commerce will increase by 15.8% year-on-year.
On May 18, 2023, at the Amazon Cloud Technology Cross-Border E-Commerce Summit, Amazon Cloud Technology announced that it will focus on new bases, new experiences, and new ecology to empower cross-border e-commerce companies to explore the global market.
After the epidemic, what new changes will China's cross-border e-commerce industry face? How can cross-border e-commerce companies use cloud computing and artificial intelligence to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and accelerate global deployment? Recently, Liang Yan, general manager of the Digital Native Division of Amazon Cloud Technology China, and his team shared their insights on cross-border e-commerce going overseas to the domestic media.
Liang Yan, General Manager of Digital Native Division, Amazon Cloud Technology China
From "Made in China" to "Chinese Brand", the new trend of cross-border e-commerce development
In the past few years, the development of cross-border e-commerce in China has been inseparable from two major dividends: one is the product dividend made in China; the other is the traffic dividend of Internet development. However, after the epidemic, the development logic of cross-border e-commerce has undergone new changes.
In this regard, Liang Yan shared several new trends that he and his team observed:
First of all, Chinese companies going overseas are slowly transitioning from "Made in China" to "Chinese brands". Brand building and refined operations have become a new trend for Chinese companies going overseas in the past two years.
According to data from Amazon Cloud Technology, more than 60% of Chinese companies going overseas have deployed in more than three continents and regions, and 14% of companies account for more than 50% of their overseas revenue. In addition, more than two-thirds of Chinese companies have carried out various cross-border businesses overseas. With the acceleration of going overseas, the cross-border e-commerce industry is also facing new qualitative changes.
"Before the epidemic, many Chinese companies went overseas to pursue high GMV and rapid growth. In recent years, we have seen many cross-border e-commerce companies start to build brands, shifting from exporting Chinese costs and prices to building Chinese brands." Liang Yan said.
Secondly, vertical category brands and independent websites are developing rapidly.
Taking the U.S. market as an example, the market share of independent retail e-commerce has been increasing in recent years. The independent station model ultimately relies on continuous product innovation and refined operations of existing customers to win the market.
"Thanks to China's strong supply chain, in many fields such as fast fashion, home furnishing, and furniture, some diversified vertical categories will explode with very distinctive independent stations. For example, in the wig market, China's independent stations headed by Xuchang, Henan Players occupy the vast majority of the global market.” said Wu Lingfeng, general manager of the e-commerce industry of the Digital Native Division of Amazon Cloud Technology China.
Third, cross-border e-commerce competition is intensifying, and more and more companies are focusing on differentiation.
According to the data from Qichacha, there are 14,700 enterprises related to cross-border e-commerce in my country. Among them, 3,201 new cross-border e-commerce related companies will be added in 2020, 4,789 will be added in 2021, and 4,061 will be added in 2022. When more and more companies are pouring into the cross-border e-commerce track, brand power, channel power and operational power have become key elements to measure core competitiveness.
Xue Jun, Director of Solutions Architect of Amazon Cloud Technology China’s Digital Native Business Unit, believes that “a big trend this year is that competition is intensifying, and a lot of traffic is converging to giants. Many sellers who conflict with giants may have a greater impact on their business. Therefore, Everyone has more and more reached a consensus to be a brand and make a difference.”
Help cross-border e-commerce to meet three major challenges
Under the circumstances of global economic uncertainty and intensified market competition, how to use new technologies such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence to improve quality, increase efficiency, and accelerate innovation has become the consensus of Chinese cross-border e-commerce companies.
Liang Yan said that relying on Amazon's more than 25 years of retail e-commerce innovation experience, Amazon Cloud Technology has a large number of products and services specially built for the e-commerce industry, providing a solid cloud technology foundation for Chinese e-commerce companies to go overseas.
Specifically, Amazon cloud technology can provide support for the three major challenges that cross-border e-commerce companies generally face:
First, refine operation, improve quality and efficiency
Improving quality and efficiency has always been the core appeal of cross-border e-commerce companies, and cloud computing naturally adapts to the business characteristics of cross-border e-commerce such as high flexibility and uncertainty.
"The trial and error cost of doing business on the cloud is relatively low. With the help of the cloud itself, you can quickly pull up the application of cross-border e-commerce business and try it out quickly."
Liang Yan emphasized that for cross-border e-commerce companies, security compliance is still the top priority, and it is also the biggest challenge that all Chinese companies face when going overseas. Amazon cloud technology covers 245 countries and regions around the world, operates 99 availability zones, and has obtained security compliance certifications from many countries and regions around the world. Choosing Amazon cloud technology means that Chinese e-commerce companies can greatly reduce security compliance costs and risks.
In addition, Amazon Cloud Technology's partners all over the world can provide cross-border e-commerce companies with rich vertical segmentation services. Taking the cross-border tax declaration scenario as an example, Amazon Cloud Technology’s partner, Oshuitong, can provide SaaS services for e-commerce companies exploring the European market to achieve fast tax declaration.
Second, accelerate business innovation based on data intelligence insights
Wu Lingfeng believes that e-commerce is one of the industries with the most application scenarios of new technologies such as machine learning and AIGC. Based on the machine learning service Amazon SageMaker and the large-scale model Amazon Bedrock, Amazon cloud technology can provide e-commerce companies with rich and practical AI technologies, including intelligent marketing, intelligent search, digital human and other fields.
At present, the price of global traffic is rising day by day. How to maximize the value of advertising and realize the maximum return on investment has become a pain point for many e-commerce companies. The consumer electronics brand Anker Innovations and Amazon Cloud Technology have cooperated in the field of smart advertising, realizing an automatic advertising price adjustment and bidding mechanism, transforming advertising from a manual/rule mode to an intelligent mode, optimizing the effect of advertising display, and increasing efficiency by 33%.
The B2B cross-border e-commerce trading platform Dunhuang.com has used Amazon IVS (an interactive video service) to test the water broadcasting business of digital human beings, realizing AI one-click product selection, AI one-click generation of live speech skills, personalized live broadcast room decoration, and live broadcast room Selection and other functions.
Third, accelerate global deployment and build a global brand
At present, Amazon Cloud Technology has more than 120,000 partners around the world, covering more than 150 countries. Based on Amazon cloud technology, many partners have developed a wealth of e-commerce industry solutions, covering all aspects of cross-border e-commerce operations, including independent website building, operational insight, marketing promotion, immersive experience and AIGC, cross-border payment, search recommendation, Supply chain and logistics warehousing, customer service, safety and compliance, etc.
In addition, the global business system including Amazon e-commerce, Amazon advertising, Amazon logistics, and Alexa intelligent voice service is also a major factor attracting Chinese e-commerce companies.
Take Buy with Prime, the latest service of Amazon Cloud Technology as an example, which realizes the opening of the Prime membership system to independent e-commerce sites. "When consumers place an order on an e-commerce company's independent website that has joined the program, they can press the Buy with Prime button and enjoy the same warehousing, logistics and delivery experience as Amazon Prime members. This is how we empower independent website customers A new service." Liang Yan said.
According to IDC's latest "China Public Cloud Service Market (Second Half of 2022) Tracking" report, in the second half of 2022, Amazon Cloud Technology will be in the market where Chinese companies go overseas (received in China's market share) and use overseas public cloud IaaS resources. , accounting for nearly 80% of the market share. In other words, Amazon cloud technology is still the first choice for Chinese companies going overseas.
In the post-epidemic era, cross-border e-commerce has entered a new stage of intensive cultivation. How to establish their own unique competitive advantages in the process of going overseas, Chinese cross-border e-commerce companies have already made choices on the cloud.
The picture comes from photo network
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This article is the original work of "Intelligent Evolution".