Independent stations are very important for the foreign trade industry.
No matter whether there is B2B platform business, independent stations must be completed before business, and must have high quality and content. It is a very important part of building customer trust.
Independent station VS paid B2B platform
In my opinion, some foreign trade bosses think that it is very wrong to pay for the B2B platform because there is no independent station. The reasons are as follows.
Both B2B platform and independent stations need to upload materials and content, and every day after the platform goes online should not be wasted, so it is necessary to fully display the product information on the platform with high quality as far as possible before the platform goes online. The B2B platform is primarily aimed at displaying products, which is not enough for buyers to fully understand and build trust in sellers. At present, B2B platform has the trend of C-end, and is not friendly to the promotion of customized products. Due to competition from many companies, the transaction rate is low and the profit margin is low. Another trend of the B2B platform itself is that the buyer's cake can no longer be made bigger, and only rely on the site search rankings to select sellers. Therefore, the platform has become a tool to maximize the platform's own interests by using the method of internal volume among sellers. Various packages and promotion methods have forced export enterprises to obtain customers with higher costs and more fierce competition. The natural traffic obtained by the independent station in the search engine is lower in cost, higher in quality and less competitive. It is an incremental market rather than a fixed market of the platform. In contrast, independent stations with better optimization effect have higher cost performance. Once the fee is not renewed, the stores on the B2B platform will be closed directly, and all content will be cleared and cannot be retained; Once the independent station is completed, the subsequent maintenance cost is very low. Some companies will build their websites on the B2B platform by third-party companies. In this way, materials need to be provided to the B2B platform and a preparation process is also required; Similarly, the independent station also needs to prepare data. However, the product information uploaded by third-party companies is often lack of industry knowledge, and the description terms of many information are not professional, resulting in the low quality of the content on the final website. The effect after the website is launched is also very ordinary, wasting money. Many products on the B2B platform can be seen by each other, and can not make the competitiveness of special products. Once there are new products or unpopular products, they will be copied and released by their peers soon. Whether they have reliable supply channels or not, they will certainly reduce the original competitiveness of these products and bid at random, or sellers will try to lower prices when they see more than one supplier. In contrast, when independent stations receive inquiries, the competition is very low, which can ensure a considerable profit margin, and competitors seldom pay attention to such special products.
Therefore, I strongly recommend foreign trade friends to build independent stations.
Self built station VS commissioned station
The construction of independent stations can be entrusted to professional companies. As the case may be, some station building companies can hand over all data and backstage of the website after the contract expires, while others do not retain the website after the contract expires; The company will have full control of the website if it has built its own website, and can make various adaptations in the future.
To put it simply, it is easy to build a self built website. A novice can spend 2 days, up to 16 hours, to create a website expertly. Later, he can slowly fill in content and optimize it.
Brief process of self built station
The following is a brief introduction to the process of the self built station, and there are many details that need attention behind each step (those are the essence). We will talk about them later, or welcome readers to leave a message to discuss.
preparation. The preparation of materials mentioned above is a very important link, which directly determines the performance of the website after it goes online. It includes: prepare a comprehensive Chinese company profile, high-quality photos, product catalog, independent and detailed product specifications and other information according to product name and classification, and high-quality product photos. Processing data. This includes translating all the above materials in professional English or other languages, and optimizing the pictures (including PS, picture size optimization). Register the domain name. Alibaba Cloud is recommended. Its domain name resolution service is better than other domestic service providers. There are multiple overseas domain name resolution servers in the free resolution service, which is more friendly to overseas access. Purchase server. For cost sensitive friends, it is recommended to purchase overseas lightweight application servers. The demand of lightweight enterprise stations is sufficient, and the bandwidth is also high. In terms of server area selection, it is recommended to use Hong Kong servers. The access speed in mainland China is very good, and there is an international bandwidth outlet. Global access is faster than mainland servers. In Hong Kong, it is recommended to use Tencent Cloud's lightweight application server. I have used Alibaba Cloud's Hong Kong server for about two years, but the access speed in China is very poor, mostly in the telecommunications network. After replacing Tencent Cloud, I felt that it was the same as visiting domestic websites. Select the LINUX system of the pagoda panel when purchasing the server, and all versions are available. It is not recommended to use WINDOWS. The system itself occupies a large amount of disk space. Install the system environment required for station building in the pagoda panel. Generally speaking, it is SQL+PHP+(NGIX/Apache/LITESEPEED, one out of three)+PHPMYADMIN. My current website uses OPEN LITESEPEED as the engine, which has the advantages of lighter weight (less system resource consumption) and better performance. This scheme will be introduced below. Install WORDPRESS and MEMCACHED, and select the appropriate template. My WORDPRESS has the following important core plug-ins installed, as shown in the figure below. Please search or explore their roles for your reference. Register the website administrator tool account of GOOGLE/BING and submit the website map. Consider the difference in access speed caused by different regions of global visitors, and use CDN services. For example, I have used Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and CLOUDFIRE before, and I recently used QUIC embedded in the LITESEED CACHE plug-in The CDN service provided by CLOUD is basically free. The advantage is that it is easy to manage when integrated into plug-ins, and it can provide free LETS ENCRYPT encryption certificates and automatically renew them. This is mainly because the SSL certificate management on the previously used pagoda panel is very messy, and sometimes inexplicable access problems occur. At the same time, it is not convenient to configure the SSL certificate on the CDN. At present, this method can not encrypt between the CDN and the server, but only encrypt between the client and the CDN by the CDN, which is also friendly to search engines.
Write at the end
After the website is built, remember to make more backups!!!
There are also many other CMS websites on the market. I have also used Mito, which is also an excellent content management system, but it is not suitable for websites with more ideas. The flexibility is relatively poor, but I still do not deny its excellence.
There are still many experiences of website building that cannot be shared here. Many experiences are accumulated slowly. When encountering problems, search more and learn more about SEO knowledge and skills.
Finally, I wish all foreign trade friends a thriving business and great success!
#Foreign trade# #Cross border e-commerce# #Alibaba# #Xi'an#
