If you want to summarize the annual keywords of cross-border e-commerce in 2021, the independent station must have a place.
The epidemic has swept the world, bringing many impacts to the global economy, but also stimulating the rapid development of the e-commerce retail industry. Especially in the post epidemic era, the foreign production economy has nearly stagnated. As the world factory, China has become the largest "supplier" of global e-commerce products.
According to customs statistics, in the first 11 months of 2021, China's total import and export value was 35.39 trillion yuan, including 19.58 trillion yuan of export, up 21.8% year on year. In November alone, China's total export value reached 2.09 trillion yuan, up 16.6% year on year.
Against the backdrop of the overall situation of the industry being better, the arrival of Amazon's number blocking trend in May this year left many businesses with painful words and no way to appeal. According to incomplete statistics, more than 50000 businesses have been affected by the number closure tide, and the loss of domestic cross-border e-commerce is estimated to exceed 100 billion.
Amazon's event has made many cross-border e-commerce merchants begin to realize that relying on a single platform will bring many risks. Taking into account the multi-channel layout of the platform and independent stations, it will be an important strategic means for cross-border e-commerce to reduce risks and create a global brand image in the future.
At the same time, the upgrading of overseas consumption has led to the rise of DTC brand, which pays more attention to consumers' personalized needs and provides unique products. China's independent stations represented by SHEIN, PatPat, etc. have been popular, giving the cross-border e-commerce industry greater imagination.
What is an independent station? An independent website is a website built by an enterprise, operated independently and used to carry out e-commerce business. Independent stations have considerable autonomy. They can not only collect buyer data in a timely manner, but also develop customer resources and market resources through data analysis to enhance the understanding and expansion of the seller's market. It is understood that there are more than 200000 independent stations in China.
At present, there are three kinds of independent stations on the market:
First, independent construction of enterprises. Such websites need professionals to design, code and develop, and enterprises need to invest a lot of manpower and material resources.
The second is to rely on open source software for development. At present, open source software on the market includes Mangento, Opencart, WordPress, etc. However, at present, open source software has high technical requirements for development teams, and enterprises still need to build technical teams for development.
The third is an independent station based on SaaS system development. This kind of independent station building system is convenient to operate and often cooperates with social platforms, so it is the way for most sellers to build stations on the market.
However, Chinese merchants have gradually found that the SaaS platform for overseas station building, such as Shopify, that they have cooperated with in the past lacks the local service capability in China, and it is difficult for merchants to quickly and effectively solve some problems in the operation process, such as high commission and low service efficiency.
Therefore, many SaaS platforms have emerged in China, and FunPinPin is one of them.
FunPinPin, founded in 2020, is an independent station building service platform with marketing genes, which can provide Chinese merchants with a station building and marketing solution. Most of the FunPinPin team are serial entrepreneurs with rich experience in entrepreneurship and capital operation. Among them, Zhou Shuang, the chief strategic officer, has many years of overseas work experience and has his own understanding of cross-border and cross-cultural business management. Zhong Yang, the chief operating officer, once worked for Toyota, Mercedes Benz and Didi, and has accumulated a lot in organizational capacity building, sales and marketing.
Zhou Shuang, its chief strategic officer, said to Chuangye Bang, "It is difficult for the overseas platform to meet the specific needs of Chinese merchants. As an independent station building SaaS platform in China, FunPinPin not only understands the operating rules of overseas traffic, but also understands the real needs of Chinese sellers. At the same time, it has a strong ability to operate globally and localize."
At present, FunPinPin has successfully served more than 1000 cross-border e-commerce customers, including female anti-aging brand MISSPEP, high-end personal care brand JOVS, global consumer class AR glasses leading brand Nreal, etc.
Chinese cross-border e-commerce sellers generally have core pain points in terms of lack of experience in website building, overseas marketing, overseas resources, data security, and local operation support. For this reason, FunPinPin has created a full link website building service platform more suitable for Chinese sellers.
In terms of website construction, FunPinPin helped merchants quickly solve the urgent needs of the initial stage of website construction through professional products, such as building a website in three minutes, opening the website in seconds, importing multi platform product information with one button, meeting various settlement processes in different overseas markets, and helping sellers easily increase customer price through rich combined marketing functions.
For brand stations, FunPinPin also provides POD (Print on Demand) category specific plug-ins, exquisite templates to meet the needs of each vertical category, and a dedicated membership system to help vertical and brand customers with private domain traffic layout and precipitation, and provides online league SEO and other full platform traffic layout functions.
(FunPinPin POD category specific plug-in)
In terms of marketing customer acquisition, Zhong Yang, chief operating officer of FunPinPin, said: "Traffic is the key to independent stations." FunPinPin takes the station building service as the core and combines overseas marketing services to provide merchants with a closed-loop service of "independent station building+drainage", including station building, Facebook/Google/TikTok advertising account opening, advertising optimization and advertising credit line services, Help businesses to solve the core problems from station building to drainage.
In terms of ecological resources, FunPinPin opens up cooperation channels for businesses with Google, Facebook, TikTok and other top traffic parties, helps businesses obtain resource support from traffic parties, enjoys VIP level advertising marketing services, ensures the stability of advertising accounts, applies for support from direct customer managers, obtains advertising quotas, and helps businesses avoid advertising policy minefields.
In terms of seller's data security, FunPinPin provides triple security factor high merchant data encryption safeguards:
FunPinPin's products have strict data architecture planning to ensure the integrity, security and mutual independence of business background data from the bottom of the system. During the cooperation period, merchants can independently manage all their background data, including customer, product, order data, etc., and support full export or migration of data.
FunPinPin will start to establish a 10 million level data security fund to provide protection for the data security leakage problem worried by independent station merchants.
The FunPinPin risk control team pays attention to the independence of the merchant brand. Once the merchant is found to have been infringed by other merchants in the system, the site of the infringing merchant will be closed immediately after it is identified.
In addition, in terms of customer service, in order to better provide businesses with a full range of localized services, FunPinPin provides businesses with all-round technical, operational and marketing support in a three to one manner through the independent station "Iron Triangle" team service mode of "production research+sales+AM". In addition, it also provides proxy operation services for independent station users.
It is worth noting that in the first quarter of 2022, FunPinPin will release the independently developed FunPinPin application market, thus becoming the first station building platform with an application market in China.
FunPinPin will connect with global developers through standardized API interfaces, so that more ecological mature plug-ins such as Shopify application market can access the FunPinPin platform without barriers. At the same time, in order to meet the localization needs of businesses, FunPinPin will also provide secondary development services for businesses.
(FunPinPin store template)
At present, FunPinPin has launched Universal Plan 2.0, focusing on supporting DTC and Amazon boutique sellers.
First of all, FunPinPin will build stations for merchants free of charge, liberate the operators of merchants, realize easy store transfer, and help merchants to decorate their stores.
At the marketing end that businesses care about, FunPinPin will assist businesses to jointly apply for stable Google GMC accounts/Facebook accounts from Google and Facebook to solve the pressure on businesses' marketing expenses and financial turnover. In addition, for stable customers, FunPinPin will also provide free global precision e-commerce network alliance traffic for one week, and continue to promote independent stations to attract customers.
In view of the current shortage of cross-border e-commerce operators, FunPinPin launched a free 30 day advertising practice training camp to train business operators on practical issues such as Google and Facebook precise advertising.
Zhong Yang, chief operating officer of FunPinPin, judged that 2022 is very likely to be the first year for Chinese DTC brand to go abroad. Next year, there will be a large number of Amazon boutique sellers transforming, and the independent station will usher in its outbreak. The development potential of the industry has also attracted capital. Recently, FunPinPin won a round A financing of tens of millions of dollars led by Innovation Works, which will be used for product research and development and market expansion, including Amazon boutique sellers and DTC sellers. And FunPinPin also said that next year, it will start to layout the small and medium-sized e-commerce markets in Europe and the United States.
In recent years, the difficulties in the development of cross-border e-commerce mainly lie in the fact that Facebook, Amazon, PayPal and other overseas platforms have blocked the number of Chinese merchants, Apple iOS has affected the precise advertising of user privacy protection, and the EU tax reform has increased value-added tax on inbound goods. Therefore, independent stations will play an increasingly important role in the cross-border e-commerce industry, becoming cross-border merchants free from platform constraints It is one of the important means to occupy users' minds and establish a global brand.
According to the statistics of woocommerce website, in 2021, only 26% of the global online stores will use Shopify to build websites, while the online stores using more traditional website building tools will be nearly three times as many as Shopify stores. In the past decade, the global SaaS industry market has grown rapidly, with an annual compound growth rate of 25%, forming a market size of 100 billion dollars. The SaaS industry in developed countries shows a development path of universal first and then vertical.
Therefore, SaaS is an inevitable historical trend. The global independent station e-commerce market is in great need of such SaaS station building platforms as Shopify and FunPinPin, and the growth space of this track is also worth looking forward to.
