Can one person do cross-border e-commerce? What problems will one encounter?

You can start a business alone, or you can call on friends to start a joint venture. If you start a business alone, you have to do everything by yourself and bear the expenses by yourself. So can cross-border e-commerce be done by one person?

It is possible to do it alone, but it will be very hard because there are many things to do and learn, and if you have high expectations for income, you will easily run into bottlenecks later. You may find that you still need a team.

What problems will you encounter?

1. High pressure to prepare inventory

The cycle from stocking to FBA is even longer, from raw material procurement, production, logistics, FBA, sales, and payment. What’s more terrifying is that trade sellers can negotiate with factories about the payment period, but individual sellers, who can they turn to? The financial pressure is huge!

2. Difficulty in product selection

"70% product selection, 30% operation", a good product determines more than half of your success, and the rest is supply chain and operation, all of which revolve around product selection. Regarding product selection, many export cross-border e-commerce companies have fallen into the following misunderstandings. First, choose according to the preferences and habits of the Chinese people; second, do not understand the cultural customs and habits of the exporting country; third, aesthetic differences; fourth, cultural barriers. Cross-border e-commerce is not a country, and the preferences of various platforms are completely different. Merchants can easily be limited to their own experience because they do not understand the local customs and culture of the exporting country and the aesthetic differences of consumers, and are unfamiliar with the product field, and cannot open their minds to expand more products and categories. For Amazon's platform that focuses on product quality, product selection should be more cautious, and the return rate of products with poor quality is high.

3. High probability of return

The return rate of FBA warehouses is particularly high, because the products shipped by FBA are handled and followed up by the customer service of the Amazon platform customer service. Different customer service staff have different levels of professionalism, and Amazon encourages returns, which easily leads to an increase in the return rate. Many sellers’ FBA warehouses have a lot of unsaleable products.

4. High operational risk

When individuals engage in cross-border e-commerce, not only do they lack operational experience, but they also have to guard against various competitors causing trouble, copying sales, posting bad reviews, malicious complaints, etc. Once there is a problem with the operation or the store is closed, the goods in FBA will become a burden to you, and it is easy to lose both money and goods.

5. High storage costs

More and more sellers are using FBA, and storage fees are rising. In this case, if your products don’t sell well, there will be a pile of unsalable inventory, and FBA will have to pay you expensive long-term storage fees! Moreover, a large number of unsalable products will affect the account index. If the index is too low, FBA will directly reduce your storage capacity.

In general, cross-border e-commerce can be done by one person. As long as you learn the methods and skills, everything else is not a problem. Especially product selection and listing, which are the key to our orders.