Looking back at 2021, China's export cross-border e-commerce benefited from the continuous strong demand from overseas consumers and the strong support of the domestic strong industrial chain, continuing the strong growth trend. At the same time, the impact of multiple uncertainties going deep into the world has also made the situation of the e-commerce industry "mixed". What is the real situation of China's export cross-border e-commerce industry? Liu Yaxiao, CTO of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China, believes that the blue ocean is still vast, but it is not calm, and the development of cross-border e-commerce is still absolute.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, global e-commerce penetration has seen historic growth. Whether it is "Black Friday", Thanksgiving or Christmas, this year's global year-end shopping season, the main battlefield of shopping is shifting to online, and this change in consumption habits is irreversible. According to data released by Digital Commerce 360 in November, in the United States, for example, its e-commerce penetration rate has reached 18%, an increase of more than 20% from before the epidemic.
Under the impact of the epidemic, China's strong manufacturing industry chain has made export cross-border e-commerce a strong harvester of the industry's overall business increment. Data show that last year, China's cross-border e-commerce import and export volume increased by 31.1% year-on-year, driving China's foreign trade growth by 1.3%, becoming an important force for the steady growth of foreign trade. In the first half of this year alone, the year-on-year increase in cross-border e-commerce exports has reached 44.1%.
At the same time, cross-border e-commerce is also facing the challenge of "great uncertainty in the global supply chain". For example, the cost of international logistics has risen sharply, the timeliness of logistics is difficult to control, the cost of raw materials and labor is bullish, and the fluctuation of consumer behavior under the influence of the epidemic has caused structural imbalance between supply and demand.
"Dilemma is often the catalyst for the growth of the industry", Liu Yaxiao believes that the current challenge is the transition of cross-border e-commerce from "barbaric growth" to "refined operation" and the opportunity to prepare for long-term development. The premise of "refined operation" lies in deep digitalization: through digital transformation to effectively revitalize the value of data, to achieve end-to-end visualization, manageability, predictability and collaborative iteration of the whole value chain from planning, production and sales. This allows practitioners to grasp the growth of business in the current year-end shopping season, but also means using digital insights to grasp future opportunities.
In this regard, Liu Yaxiao emphasized the construction of a digital system on the cloud to open up the "double cycle" at home and abroad. Specifically, in the "external circulation" link, assist cross-border sellers to use cloud services to integrate sales and marketing related data, form a good insight into overseas business consumers, make it guide merchants to operate in the local refined operation, and promote the "Made in China" system to gain the trust of overseas consumers; in the "internal circulation" link, feedback the needs of overseas consumers to the upstream industrial belt, drive domestic manufacturing enterprises to create targeted "digital factories" through the system to the cloud, and give play to the synergy advantages within the industrial belt. Optimize the production, operation, warehousing, supply chain and other links of local industries, achieve cost reduction and efficiency, and better play the advantages of regional industrial belts.
The role of Amazon Cloud Technology is to use the global infrastructure covering 26 geographical regions and a total of 84 availability zones around the world to achieve network connectivity, resource matching and data synchronization between regions for cross-border e-commerce, and become a solid foundation and growth platform for the "double cycle" digital system.
In practice, Amazon proposes a three-step strategy.
1. "Go to the cloud" of business and establish a more flexible, efficient, low-cost and highly scalable e-commerce operation and trading platform;
2. With the help of cloud platform capabilities, integrate the data of all aspects of the commercial full link such as production orders, finance, warehousing and logistics, and consumption, and be prepared to gain insights through data;
3. Analyze, mine and model the data, discover the laws in the data, assist customers to improve their business analysis and prediction capabilities, and drive the improvement of service levels and business response speed.
How to establish a global brand and realize the transition from "products going to sea" to "brand going to sea", from "Made in China" to "Chinese brand", Amazon gave its own answer. Amazon Cloud Technology-enabled digital insights are helping cross-border e-commerce sellers achieve this goal. By assisting sellers to improve user analysis, content analysis, traffic source analysis and other capabilities, to reach and influence overseas consumers across time, space, culture, language differences, and through more personalized, digital marketing means to achieve traffic conversion, improve cross-border brand conversion rate; on the basis of user insight and reach, Amazon Cloud Technology also provides a variety of big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other cloud services, to create digital tools for overseas enterprises, accelerate the iterative innovation of products and services. In addition, Amazon Cloud Technology has also created cloud services and solutions that allow brands to cross the boundaries of time and space and interact with overseas consumers. For example, "cloud live broadcasting" allows consumers to intuitively understand the advantages of products, and "cloud customer service" allows enterprise customer service personnel to provide fast and high-quality services for customers thousands of miles away through customer service clouding, data processing mobility, and short video information sharing.
At the same time, with the increasing global attention to data security and privacy protection, countries have introduced different relevant laws and regulations, which is becoming a "hidden worry" for cross-border e-commerce to go to sea. Amazon builds a safe, compliant and developable technology system for cross-border e-commerce from three aspects, helping customers eliminate the hidden worries of deep ploughing overseas.
First, in the infrastructure phase, Amazon Cloud Technology uses unified security hardware and software to build and operate each region. Continuous third-party verification of thousands of global compliance requirements that can be inherited by users to reduce compliance costs, provide more than 200 security services and features that are deeply integrated with other compute, storage, and data services, and truly automate security.
Second, members of Amazon's global partner network can also provide a variety of security compliance consulting services and solutions, including: investigation and interpretation of local security compliance requirements for migration assessment, design appropriate application deployment and technical architecture, and continuous optimization.
Finally, Amazon and its customers implement a shared responsibility model on Amazon Cloud Technology: Amazon Cloud Technology is responsible for protecting the infrastructure, and customers own and control their own systems and data.
In addition, Amazon Cloud Technology also provides neutral cloud services for enterprises. Users can confidently deploy their business on the cloud without worrying about data breaches or other business purposes, allowing businesses to build a relationship of trust with their customers.
The era of "extensive" has passed, and it is imperative for the cross-border e-commerce industry to transform its refined operations with the goal of high-quality development. In this industry iteration and evolution, Amazon, as the world's leading e-commerce platform, will become a booster for cross-border e-commerce customers to "expand their territory" overseas, and promote the continuous growth of "Made in China" to "Chinese Brands".
Upstream journalist Gu Li intern Chen Jiaqian
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