Introduction: Nanny-level stationery market cross-border e-commerce entry guide online!
As a typical "small product, large market", the stationery industry has unknowingly reached hundreds of billions of market size. The stationery industry is highly competitive, with large companies showing their own talents, and small companies each having their own housekeeping skills, especially in the United States, where the market is most mature.
It stands to reason that the American stationery market has become saturated and is not suitable for new sellers to enter, but to this day there are still many international students complaining that American stationery and Chinese, Japanese and Korean stationery are expensive and difficult to use, indicating that some segments of the American stationery market still have opportunities, although it is unlikely to breed giants, but ordinary sellers should not be a problem to mix food and clothing.
Of course, blind entry is not advisable, and most cross-border has also done a series of stationery market analysis to help everyone understand the market.
Click "Behind the Henan College Entrance Examination Pen Incident: How Profitable is the Stationery Business?" "Going to the United States to Sell Stationery (1): Understanding the US Stationery Market from Scratch" reviews the past content.
As the final article in this series, Mosta Cross-Border will start with crucial consumer insights to help sellers understand how to enter the U.S. stationery market.
American stationery consumers
From the perspective of consumer groups, the consumer groups of the stationery industry are mainly students, office workers and stationery enthusiasts. The consumer group of stationery category is mainly women, the frequency of repurchase is high, female students are keen to buy good-looking stationery, and mothers will also buy necessary stationery for their children.
U.S. consumers aged 34 and under, as a generation that grew up with the Internet, do not tend to write letters to communicate with people, but still occupy a significant market share of the stationery market, according to IBIS World, American stationery consumers aged 34 and under account for 14.7% of stationery market revenue.
However, the stationery products they buy are mainly school supplies, including scribed notebooks, high-gloss pens, pencils, school bags, etc. The improvement of the level of handicrafts has made the current student stationery more and more aesthetic and interesting, which has revived the interest of young people in stationery, and a large number of stationery enthusiasts have appeared.
U.S. consumers aged 35-54 tend to play their social roles, including family roles, friends and colleagues, etc., which promotes many formal and casual written communication, and has a relatively high degree of dependence on stationery products, accounting for an estimated 27.3% of stationery market revenue in 2018. Some of them will buy high-priced stationery for their children as gifts, some will buy office stationery, such as folders, signing pens, etc., and some will buy stationery as a simple collector's item and hobby, creativity is the primary factor that attracts them.
Consumers aged 55 and older tend to use tangible means of communication, such as writing letters, sending bills to companies, and sending formal invitations to parties. As a result, consumers aged 55 and over constitute the largest segment of stationery product sales, accounting for approximately 29.5% of stationery market revenue in 2018.
In addition to the retail market, enterprises and government enterprises are also important markets in the stationery products retail market. They buy all kinds of stationery that they need for the workplace. Its SMEs account for a significant portion of the market, as they usually do not have the purchasing power to buy directly from wholesalers of office supplies, so they prefer to buy office supplies from large shopping malls and online. Large enterprises can reduce costs by purchasing directly from distributors in bulk, but the online market has little outstanding performance and accounts for a lower market share.
In addition to students and offices, common stationery use scenarios include gift packaging, star chasing, handbooks, etc., sellers can choose subdivisions according to their own conditions, and prepare new goods in advance.
How to start a stationery business in the United States
Cost: According to the US business website Step by Step Business, the cost of starting a stationery business in the United States is about $2250 - $15600, and the profit potential is between $40000 and $210000, the advantages and disadvantages are clear.
In addition to the high demand for stationery, there is also room for creativity and uniqueness, and sellers can try some interesting new models at any time. Another advantage of selling stationery products online is that they are smaller and easier to transport. Therefore, selling stationery online is a good business idea.
There are also barriers to entering the stationery industry, and the biggest challenges sellers need to face mainly come from two aspects:
- This is a competitive market that is declining, not very suitable for sellers with huge ambitions, more suitable for those who simply want to make money and run a small business of their own;
- The competition in the stationery industry is extremely fierce, and new stationery brands are likely to stand out from the battle of big brands. This is because people love unique, quirky stationery. Sellers, on the other hand, need to have the skills to create great custom designs, both in terms of price and creativity.
Selection: Stationery is a broad term that includes different office and school supplies, and sellers are faced with a large number of choices when selecting products, in general, they will choose from the following categories:
However, the selection of stationery is the most taboo "one-click copy", after all, different markets and different user groups will produce different consumption preferences. Understand the target market and target users in order to develop the best product selection plan. In recent years, there are some significant characteristics on the consumer side of the stationery market that can be used by many sellers to refer to.
- The design is biased towards simplicity and practicality: simplicity and practicality are future-proof design themes, and the same is true in stationery product design. However, simple design does not mean shoddy production, it also needs to be in line with aesthetic characteristics, lines and colors are very important. Some Japanese and Korean simple style stationery is very popular in the United States.
- Office stationery is gradually gentrified and intelligent: At the moment when everything is "digital", office stationery intelligence seems to be the general trend, but it needs to be reminded that it may sound very futuristic, but the practicality of this trend has not been verified, and the input cost is also high, a wiser choice is to maintain the balance of electronic and traditional stationery products.
- Toy creative stationery: In recent years, the design of creative stationery has become more and more close to the direction of toys, because in addition to meeting the basic practicality, more consumers pay attention to the packaging and culture of stationery itself. Stationery that is more and more like toys is very "lethal" for children, and it is easy to get good sales in the school season.
- Sustainable, eco-friendly products are a megatrend: Western consumers are very fond of eco-sustainable products, especially among millennials. Stationery such as "planting pencils" and "endless pencils" have been popular on TikTok, and in addition to being fun, environmental protection is also a major driving factor.
Sourcing: In addition to product selection, the supply chain is also the key to success in overseas business. As the "small commodity capital of the world", Yiwu is an important distribution center for stationery exports. According to statistics, at present, in the Yiwu market, the annual scale of stationery factories reaches 11 billion, of which 7 billion are foreign trade and export orders, and 4 billion are domestic trade and brand OEM.
Not only Yiwu, in the mainland, with Ningbo as the leader, Ninghai as the base, plus the surrounding Wenzhou, Taizhou, Lishui, Yiwu, Tonglu and other places, Zhejiang Province has formed the world's largest stationery industry circle. In addition, the Chaoshan region of Guangdong, including Shantou, Chaozhou, Jieyang and other places, is also the stationery production base of the mainland. In these places, sellers are sure to find the right supplier.
Pricing: So how much does stationery cost in the United States? Normally, American stationery sets range from $200 to $1,000 or even more. Stationery on Amazon isn't cheap either, with a box of erasable pens selling for $15.99 at a discount, and a notebook selling for $22.95.
Sales: As a profitable market, the online sales channels of the stationery industry are also very wide, which can be mainly divided into 3 categories: e-commerce platforms, independent websites, and social media, which also have their own advantages and disadvantages.
E-commerce platforms bring their own traffic, and various promotional activities drive sellers' store traffic, correspondingly, sellers need to pay "protection fees" to the platform, restricted by platform rules, not conducive to brand building, and fierce competition, may face malicious competition from peers;
Independent website is the seller's own official website sales platform, compared with the e-commerce platform, independent site restrictions are less, the degree of freedom will be much larger, can carry out private domain traffic operation, improve customer repurchase rate, conducive to brand building, but how to attract traffic is a big problem;
Now many social media platforms have opened e-commerce channels, which are more conducive to building brands than e-commerce platforms, attracting traffic more than independent websites, and driving conversion rates to a greater extent through videos. However, sellers also need to consider consumer acceptance, although there are many explosive myths on social media represented by TikTok, but social media in the eyes of European and American consumers is more of an entertainment platform, and excessive advertising bombardment may be counterproductive.
Marketing: In terms of marketing, sellers can choose from many ways, and the combination of appropriate social media platforms, SEO strategies and marketing methods can achieve double results with half the effort. For stationery products, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok are all good social media platforms, while the common marketing methods in the US market are as follows:
1. Face-to-face sales – selling stationery at local markets, trade fairs;
2. Post videos - post videos about the product, wonderful videos will go viral like a virus;
3. Sample trial - provide disposable stationery for user experience;
4. Email marketing – send personalized emails to customers and prospects on a regular basis;
5. Blog marketing – start blogging and publish regularly, modify the content according to the tonality of the publishing platform and share it on multiple sites;
6. Seek referrals – provide incentives for old customers to refer new customers;
7. Paid advertising on social media – select social media that can reach the target market and deliver targeted advertising;
8. Pay-per-click marketing – Use Google AdWords to improve search performance, taking care to research product keywords first.
From large numbers across borders