Imagine Amazon sellers as a group of students preparing to walk into the exam room, and their "big exam", the annual Amazon Prime Day sale event, has been greatly drawn on the July 11-12 calendar out of a circle.
However, this year's "pre-examination review" is a bit different. The sellers are no longer discussing trivial matters such as inventory and storage, but verification issues. .
why? This stems from the "Consumer Notification Act" issued by the United States, which requires third-party e-commerce platforms such as Amazon to collect, verify and display the identity, bank account, business address, email address, phone number and taxation of certain third-party sellers. information.
Feedback from sellers is also varied. Some people's information has yet to be verified, and some people reported that "unverified" was displayed after the verification was successful.
If you think this is all Amazon's headaches in the past six months, you're wrong. In fact, there is a deeper problem behind it, that is, some disadvantages of the cross-border e-commerce platform model.
The operating models of cross-border e-commerce can be roughly divided into two types: one is the platform model, which is like selling on third-party platforms such as Amazon and eBay, which is a bit like opening and selling on e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com. a small shop.
The other is the independent station model, which is like building a website store for sales, a bit like an official mall that only sells its own brand products.
Buyers also have different shopping habits under the two modes.
If you want to buy a pair of socks, you may open Taobao or Amazon, search, click, and you will buy what you want, which is "people find goods". But if you see an advertisement for a certain product on a social networking site, you may click directly into the website, search for the style you like, and then click to buy it. This is "finding people from goods".
These two models have their own advantages and disadvantages, and they are also a multiple-choice question for novice sellers entering cross-border e-commerce: choose the platform model or the independent station model?
Although sellers on the e-commerce platform can enjoy the traffic brought by the platform and relatively simple operation methods, problems such as vicious competition, rising protection fees, and inability to obtain customer data have also followed. Moreover, the competition among commodities is like a draft that only depends on the price, and the winner is all based on the low price.
Different from the platform model, independent stations can provide customers with a more friendly user experience and establish their own private domain traffic. Through user data, brands can more accurately anchor customer consumption needs, so as to formulate targeted activities and enhance user stickiness.
When you establish your own independent website, your product is no longer just a choice among massive commodities, and you no longer need to rely on low-price strategies to win customers. You can avoid the competition under the hot sun, and you can better manage your cash flow.
In general, the construction and operation of independent stations are no longer so difficult, and the threshold is gradually lowering. However, there is still a big difference between the operation method of independent stations and the platform model, which requires us to abandon the old way of thinking and learn new operation methods.
Opening up new channels and deploying independent stations has become the general trend of cross-border e-commerce. However, returning to the essence of business, the reason why independent stations can provide consumers with higher-quality products and a better shopping experience is always the three core factors of "users", "profits" and "brands".
