Cross-border e-commerce independent website operation – the five essential elements

Five essential elements for operating an independent cross-border e-commerce website

As e-commerce sellers, we all know that e-commerce models can be divided into two types: e-commerce platforms and independent websites, both of which can provide consumers with convenient shopping experiences.

As a platform with its own traffic, e-commerce platforms provide a convenient trading channel for many sellers, making transactions easier to achieve.

As merchants who have joined the platform, sellers must strictly abide by the rules and standards set by the platform to ensure the smooth progress of transactions. Therefore, the development of e-commerce platforms must have corresponding legal norms and systems to guarantee it. Currently, mainstream e-commerce platforms include domestic ones such as Taobao, Jingdong, Pinduoduo, and cross-border e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, eBay, and Wish. These platforms have become the mainstream of the e-commerce industry.

Building an independent trading website for buying and selling transactions, such as cross-border independent sites (such as SHEIN, Anker, etc.).

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Compared to e-commerce platforms, the advantage of independent websites is that they can independently formulate platform rules without any restrictions, thereby effectively avoiding the risk of platform bans. The independent site is a new model independent of the e-commerce platform, which operates as an independent entity and achieves profit goals through cooperation with the e-commerce platform. However, the drawback of this platform is that it needs to conduct self-traffic guidance, which requires a lot of time to establish and maintain the brand and website.

In order to gain profit on e-commerce platforms, we need to have a deep understanding of the platform’s operation mode, and pay attention to avoiding potential risks, and then formulate the best operation strategy. Independent stations are a very distinctive e-commerce model, which has changed the traditional marketing methods of e-commerce and brought new development space to many small and medium-sized enterprises. If you want to become an excellent independent station, the seller must have a variety of literacy and skills. How to improve their competitiveness in the e-commerce platform? For sellers, optimizing operation and maintenance is a crucial task.

Essential Elements

1. Product Selection Independent station operations often choose products that capture non-mainstream, novel and other features. It is not recommended to sell popular ordinary goods on mature platforms. However, in addition to popular products, it is important to note that if you choose popular products, you will face the problem of difficult product selection again after a wave of high sales. 2. Landing Page Focus on the operation of the product detail page, the theme page, and do not recommend the website homepage as the landing page, which obviously leads to a significant increase in bounce rate. When copying photos, tables or text from other websites or editors, the compatibility of the landing page must be taken into account, whether it can be displayed normally on the mobile phone, such as whether it is too large or will automatically shrink, etc. 3. ROI (Return on Investment) For short-term popular products, the return on investment is not always good. If the popularity of the popular products fades away, don’t insist on it anymore. The seller needs to use the parabolic method to advertise. It’s time to develop the next popular product. For long-term repeat purchase brand products, the return on investment is divided into attracting new customers and promoting activities. To attract new customers, attention should be paid to the matching degree of traffic and products on the landing page, and the ROI should be improved through advertising optimization and precise traffic delivery. Buy-back coupons through various promotional activities to encourage multiple purchases by old customers. Sometimes, loss of ROI is not necessarily a bad thing. This depends on the seller’s operational strategy. 4. Conversion Rate It is recommended to take the following measures:

• Integration of one-click payment methods, such as PayPal and local third-party credit card channels.
• Integration of localization settings, automatically matching the most suitable payment and shipping calculation methods based on IP.
• Choosing a mature system is important, but it’s even more important to have access to consulting and technical support systems.

5. Repeat purchase rate Sellers can create more added value for buyers. A good customer experience, such as standardized sizing, logistics prices, shipping times, product updates, new product releases, etc. Membership systems, the establishment of member groups, targeted automation marketing through CRM systems, can have a certain promoting effect on increasing the repeat purchase rate. Give customers a surprise, for example, unconditionally offering customers a small gift.

Operational strategy

1. Good independent site operation type and positioning Building a good platform and operating an independent site is not easy. Although it may seem simple, it can be divided into several types, such as boutique/popular independent sites, brand self-built sites, site group self-built sites, mobile e-commerce, and COD self-built sites. When operating an independent site, it is important to consider not only immediate benefits but also long-term development. Therefore, it is important to have a good independent site operation type and positioning, and among them, boutique self-built sites and brand self-built sites are the two most mainstream models today. 2. Reasonable layout of the operation team With the increasing strength of website building tools, it is no longer a problem to build an independent site with a smooth user experience. The core barriers and breakthrough points of independent site operation have shifted to traffic operation and team management. Independent site operation requires independent operational logic, from website construction, payment, products, operation, logistics, delivery, to supply chain and overall backend services, all aspects of the team, resources, etc., need to be in a complete state. Therefore, the division of labor in independent site operation is more detailed, and the comprehensive quality requirements for team members will be higher. 3. Attract traffic and build high-quality independent sites Self-built sites are different from cross-border e-commerce platforms, and traffic needs to be self-introduced by sellers. Since self-reliance is needed, more effort needs to be spent on advertising. The main popular ways of attracting traffic now are email marketing (EDM), SNS social platforms, and internet celebrity marketing, attracting traffic through multiple channels to build high-quality independent site operation. 4. Improve the operation conversion rate In different stages of product development, the focus of marketing is different. In the early stage, sellers may need to focus more on expanding the market, while in the later stage, they need to focus on stabilizing the market and reducing customer churn rates. When there is a certain amount of traffic but the conversion rate is not very high, how to get sellers to pay is the key, after all, payment is the order, and the order is the conversion rate. 5. Find a professional payment method For cross-border independent sites, the success rate of payment is directly related to the actual conversion rate of orders, and the success rate of payment is the key indicator of business growth! Sellers work hard to attract traffic through advertising, but in the end, due to problems in the payment process, the final conversion is not achieved, wasting a lot of traffic costs. Therefore, when operating an independent site, it is important to choose a good payment method. Sellers need to carefully manage every step from product to after-sales service when operating an independent site. An independent site is about building your own brand. Only by building the brand can you have more loyal customers.

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