How much does it cost to start a cross-border e-commerce business? Which platform is better?

Now many friends want to do cross-border e-commerce, but because of lack of experience, facing the current cross-border e-commerce platforms, they don’t know how to choose. Want to know how much it costs to start a cross-border e-commerce? Which cross-border e-commerce platform is more suitable for novices? Let’s take a look at the comparison of several platforms!

1. AliExpress - suitable for beginners

As an important strategic product for Alibaba's future internationalization, AliExpress has become one of the most active cross-border e-commerce platforms in the world. Relying on Alibaba's huge membership base, it has become one of the platforms with the richest product categories in the world.

The characteristics of AliExpress are that it is relatively price sensitive and has an obvious low-price strategy. This is also related to Alibaba's strategy of importing Taobao sellers as customers. Many people's current AliExpress store operation strategies are similar to those of Taobao stores in previous years.

AliExpress focuses on emerging markets, especially Russia and Brazil. For the Russian market, nearly 16 million Russians log in to the AliExpress server every month, and registration is even more popular now.

AliExpress is a platform product of Alibaba. The entire page operation is simple and neat in both Chinese and English, which is suitable for beginners. In addition, Alibaba has always had a very good community and customer training system, which can help you get started quickly.

The AliExpress platform is suitable for entry-level sellers, especially those whose product features are in line with emerging markets, whose products have high cost-effectiveness, and who have supply chain advantages. Sellers who seek price advantages are best to purchase goods directly from suppliers and sell them.

2. Amazon: Product is king

As the originator of global e-commerce, Amazon has a huge influence on the world. The first cross-border e-commerce platform that Chinese foreign trade people came into contact with was also Amazon, whose main markets are the United States and Canada.

Amazon has higher requirements for sellers, such as product quality and brand, and the procedures are more complicated than AliExpress. For mature Amazon sellers, it is best to register a US company or find a US agency, and then apply for a federal tax number.

Choosing the Amazon platform requires a good foreign trade foundation and resources, including stable and reliable supplier resources, local American network resources, etc. Sellers are better off having a certain amount of financial strength and a long-term investment mentality.

If you choose to do business on Amazon, it is best to have good supplier cooperation resources. The supplier quality needs to be very stable, and it is best to have strong R&D capabilities. In addition, it is recommended that newcomers who are preparing to enter the industry receive professional training and learn more about store opening policies and knowledge.

Traffic is the key to Amazon stores. Amazon traffic is mainly divided into internal traffic and external traffic, similar to Taobao in China. At the same time, we should pay attention to the marketing of SNS communities, and marketing methods such as soft articles are also more effective.

3. The key to success for eBay sellers is product selection

The understanding of eBay is basically equivalent to Taobao in China. For foreign trade people engaged in international retail, eBay still has huge potential, because eBay's core markets are in the United States and Europe, which are relatively mature markets.

Compared with Amazon, the procedures for opening a store on eBay are not particularly troublesome. However, there is one problem that eBay needs to pay attention to: the rules are heavily biased towards buyers. If the product has serious after-sales problems, it is easy to have problems.

The most important issue for doing business on eBay should be the choice of payment method. Most people choose PayPal, but it also has certain risks, especially for eBay. There are often such actual cases that when encountering a transaction dispute, eBay ultimately sides with the buyer, causing the seller to suffer heavy losses.

The key to eBay's success is product selection, and its main markets are the United States and Europe. Therefore, before doing eBay, it is best to do a market research and study the culture, population, consumption habits, consumption levels, etc. of the European and American markets to select potential products; find some hot-selling products on eBay.

eBay is relatively simple to operate, with low investment, and is suitable for people with certain foreign trade resources. It is free to open a store, but there will be a certain fee for listing products. At the beginning, you need to accumulate reputation through auctions, and the order cycle is relatively long. If you encounter complaints, it will be the most troublesome thing, so the quality must be up to standard.

4. Wish - the only mobile platform

Wish is an emerging App-based cross-border e-commerce platform that attracts customers mainly by offering good quality and low prices. It is very popular in the US market. Its core categories include clothing, accessories, mobile phones, gifts, etc., most of which are shipped from China.

97% of the orders on the Wish platform come from mobile devices, and the average daily download volume of the App is stable at 100,000, reaching 200,000 at peak times. Given the current advantages of mobile Internet, Wish has huge potential in the future.

Wish is the real king of mobile e-commerce in the future. Its characteristic is that it only sells goods on mobile terminals and uses smart push technology to push products that App customers like, truly achieving point-to-point push. One advantage of Wish is that it displays a relatively small number of products at a time.

Through such precision marketing, sellers can achieve a surge in sales in a short period of time. In fact, Wish was originally just a tool for collecting and managing goods, and later developed into a trading platform, which became more and more popular.

For small and medium-sized sellers, the success of Wish has made everyone understand the real potential of mobile Internet. Now AliExpress, Amazon and other platforms have also launched mobile apps. However, Wish is more inclined to trust customers, so sellers suffer more in return disputes.

Seeing this, do you have the answer in your mind? In fact, whether it is Wish or Amazon, the registration fee and process for opening a store are the same as those of ordinary Taobao stores, but the requirements for entering the cross-border e-commerce platform are more stringent, and you need to upload relevant records of import and export permissions, so you can prepare in advance!

Recommended reading:

What is the difference between Taobao and cross-border e-commerce? Which one is better?

What qualifications are required for cross-border e-commerce on Taobao? How to open a store?

What products are good for cross-border e-commerce? Any good recommendations?