Fully embrace the new era of cross-border e-commerce by 2025

Fully embrace the new era of cross-border e-commerce by 2025

The approaching saturation of the domestic e-commerce environment has driven the strong Chinese supply chain to launch a massive wave of cross-border e-commerce, resulting in its prosperity. But after the initial dividends in the market fade, the same challenges repeat themselves in different markets.

 

In the past, selling goods could make a profit, but with the influx of a large number of merchants and the intensification of product homogenization, cross-border e-commerce, which used to easily make money, is now facing fluctuating profits, increased operational difficulties, and increasingly fierce competition.

 

The extensive growth is slowly approaching the ceiling, and intensive cultivation has become a necessity for current and future development. Digging into growth from existing resources and finding a way out in the game is driving the cross-border e-commerce ecosystem towards deeper waters.

 

By utilizing constantly evolving algorithms to reconstruct business logic, space becomes the most feasible path in terms of efficiency. Similar changes have already occurred on major e-commerce platforms.

 

The trend of 'Touliu' has changed

 

Who wouldn't know when it comes to the first party? But in the field of e-commerce investment, being the first party is really a technical job.

 

A series of terms such as purchase rate, ad views, clicks, and click through rate (CTR) can easily confuse people. Even if they master these, they can only be said to have just touched the door to investment flow. Because a qualified investment flow operator must also consider product selling points, users' golden three seconds, product titles, data associations, and other details to find the most suitable traffic for the product, in order to turn the invested flow into an effective investment that can bring transactions and conversions.

 

Shopping centers consider flow nodes (entrance, atrium, main stores), flow ends, and secondary flow lines when laying out stores. Each node carries the responsibility of the shopping center's facade and foot traffic, so there are different considerations for which stores to place on different floors and locations.

Similarly, in the long-term development, e-commerce platforms have formed different traffic scenarios such as search and recommendation, each corresponding to consumers with different purchasing power and preferences. Whether a product is more suitable to appear in the search or live streaming scene sometimes determines whether it can become a popular product and also determines the success or failure of a business.

 

The purpose of traffic flow is to manually operate and rely on data feedback to find the most suitable traffic for its brands, stores, and products, in order to achieve maximum conversion.

 

In the stage where traffic dividends are abundant and competition is not yet saturated, this approach is logical, because the emergence of every new scenario means new traffic and new opportunities. When the market guards its stock in the red ocean and competes for increment in the blue ocean, the divide and conquer investment strategy will inevitably encounter the results of efficiency decline and cost increase.

 

Viewing all platform traffic in different scenarios as a whole, starting from the characteristics and competitiveness of the product, as well as the core demands of the seller, to plan a comprehensive investment strategy, so that every investment is spent on the cutting edge. This is also the inevitable transition from extensive investment mode to refined operation.

 

As the demand for more efficient matching of people and goods in the market becomes increasingly clear, technological advancements have made ideas possible at the right time.

 

Recently, Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Shopee has launched a major "full site promotion" to help merchants reach a wider range of traffic and enhance sales potential.

 

The so-called Shopee full site promotion refers to the use of algorithms to automatically allocate traffic, intelligently adjust bids in real time, reach high potential audiences, and assist sellers in achieving better return on advertising investment (ROAS). For advertisements with good advertising effectiveness, the system will adopt aggressive advertising strategies to help sellers expand their volume and generate orders more effectively; At major promotion nodes, the system will automatically adjust its advertising strategy flexibly based on changes in traffic and explosive orders, in order to win traffic and expand business scale.

 

If the advertising placement before the upgrade was more like a pitcher manually driving a car, crossing the river and heading towards the destination (GMV) without navigation, then the Shopee promotion after the upgrade directly upgraded the experience to the highest level of autonomous driving - automatic route planning, reaching the destination in the best way possible (merchant sales target). E-commerce investment has entered a new era.

Open the 'God's Perspective'

 

The key to achieving the streaming effect of advanced autonomous driving through Shopee's full site promotion lies in three words: global perspective.

 

If the platform is viewed as a map, then search scenarios, recommendation scenarios, etc. are all landmarks on the map. With these landmarks as the center, the platform is divided into smaller parts and regions. Traditional streaming is the process of selecting a specific area and reaching out to a single group of people in order to achieve conversion. This will inevitably have the side effect of giving up the entire forest because of one tree.

 

The biggest feature of Shopee's full site promotion is that it does not limit the scope of capturing traffic to a certain area, but combines product characteristics and seller demands, and focuses on the entire map of the platform. To put it more vividly, promoting on the entire site is like opening up a god's perspective, connecting traffic from different scenarios, and making use of all traffic in the entire area.

 

With the continuous development and maturity of the market, businesses must expand their traffic sources as much as possible in order to discover more potential customers. Shopee's full site promotion can activate global traffic, which is a scarce resource urgently needed for current operations.

 

By activating the overall traffic and knowing the terrain of the entire map, the promotion of the entire site can easily plan the best path to achieve the goal. After the system has analyzed, mastered, and understood the most difficult things, things become very simple in practical operation. In the past, store operations may have required a sizable team to monitor data dashboards, switch between different dimensions, and make real-time adjustments based on results. However, now, what sellers need to do has been simplified into three steps - selecting products, setting budgets, setting goals, and leaving the rest to the entire site for promotion. This can greatly save operational manpower and improve efficiency.

 

Due to the intelligent full site promotion, redundant and inefficient links in previous operations have been eliminated, and the full chain operation of merchants has also been improved. Some merchants with strong product capabilities but lack e-commerce operation experience, after opening Shopee full site promotion, not only have the order volume rapidly increased, but also the measurement time and stocking cycle have been greatly shortened.

 

A larger traffic pool, more efficient operation manpower, and more controllable return on investment together bring the growth value brought by Shopee's full site promotion, which has been verified on different product categories.

 

In November 2024, a home and lifestyle brand upgraded its promotion across the entire site, achieving a 2.7-fold increase in store ROAS and a 43-fold surge in daily order volume in a single month. The return was higher, but the cost decreased. According to calculations, the brand's advertising cost per order (CPO) decreased by 70.5%.

 

At an important promotional event, a certain fashion store used full site promotion, with 24/7 intelligent advertising and rapid response during the event, bidding farewell to the history of manual data monitoring and operation, and exceeding GMV. Some small and medium-sized businesses also shared on social media and launched a full site promotion for a month, and for the first time, the data became popular across the board.

 

In the current market and business environment, the deterministic growth brought by Shopee's full site promotion is particularly valuable.

Summary of Kapoklog Logistics

 

In March, Shopee launched corresponding incentive strategies for both new and existing merchants, including the return and subsidy of advertising funds.

 

In the eyes of some cross-border e-commerce sellers, Shopee's launch of a site wide promotion incentive plan is equivalent to deeply binding platform interests with seller interests. The reason is that Shopee needs to prove the effectiveness of advertising in order to continuously obtain budgets, and the AI operation mechanism determines the amount and effectiveness of data input, which will affect the accuracy of subsequent algorithms. The seller's interest demands are consistent with the platform's interest orientation.

 

Therefore, whether it is at the operational or technical level, full site promotion is essentially a transformation of the power relationship in the e-commerce industry chain. For sellers, it will not only bring new growth possibilities, but also subtly reshape the business environment.

 

The March incentive plan launched by Shopee is not only a concentrated training for the platform, but also an excellent window for merchants to seize opportunities.

 

Looking back at the development history of the e-commerce industry over the years, some underlying principles have remained unchanged: for businesses, embracing new things and seizing new dividends is the best path to doing business well and getting more cake.