US e-commerce giant Amazon.com is rolling out a number of initiatives as part of a new strategy to help Chinese merchants sell overseas, as Chinese-founded rivals such as Shein and Tem gain momentum. Introduced.
The move includes establishing the Asia-Pacific region's first innovation center in the southern technology hub of Shenzhen, which will integrate the company's industry, expert and supplier sources, and provide distributors with Amazon said it will help companies “build their brands, promote their products, and digitize their operations.” at a four-day event in the city that began Tuesday.
It also added Brazil to the list of destinations for Chinese merchants, increasing competition in Latin America. In April, fashion unicorn Shine named Brazil as the region's manufacturing and export hub, and Tem, an emerging online shopping platform owned by PDD Holdings, set up in the country in June.
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Amazon said it would allow them to use its supply chain network, including warehouses, distribution and couriers, to attract Chinese sellers. Additionally, Amazon will consider using artificial intelligence to upgrade its sales platform and facilitate “easy, efficient and legitimate business,” it said in a statement Tuesday.
The decision comes as the company sees growing potential for the “Made in China, Sold on Amazon” community. In the year to the end of September, the number of products sold from China through Amazon increased by more than 20%, and the number of sellers with revenue of $10 million increased by nearly 30%, the company said.
Cindy Tai, Amazon's vice president of global sales for Asia, said the company is “honored to work with Chinese sellers to sell high-quality Chinese products to the world.” “The cross-border e-commerce industry is increasingly becoming a new driving force for China's foreign trade.”
Despite making big bets on cross-border e-commerce, Amazon has lost some of its other businesses in China, including third-party products on its marketplace, its Kindle e-book service, and a local app store. Abandoned.
With new initiatives, the American retail giant is winning back Chinese sellers who were hit hard in 2021 when Amazon began cracking down on fake reviews. In September of the same year, the company revealed that it had closed about 3,000 online sales accounts backed by about 600 Chinese brands. After the crackdown, Chinese sellers saw their share of Amazon's top sellers fall from 40% at the beginning of 2021 to 33% by the end of 2021, according to data released by Marketplace Pulse.
At the same time, Chinese rivals such as Shein, Temu, and ByteDance's TikTok are taking competitive competition to a new level. The Chinese-founded, now Singapore-based company's net profit reached US$2.5 billion this year, compared with just 1 billion yuan (137 million yuan) in 2019, Bloomberg reported, citing sources. This is an 18-fold increase from US$ 10,000,000.
Shein's pop-up shop inside Forever 21 in Times Square, New York. Photo: Reuters alt=Shane's pop-up shop inside Forever 21 in Times Square, New York. Photo: Reuters>
Tem, which only started operating in the U.S. in September 2022, had more than double Shein's sales by September of this year, according to transaction data analysis provider Bloomberg Second Measure.
ByteDance, the Beijing-based company behind the short video hit TikTok, introduced its live commerce business model overseas in 2021. Currently available in markets such as the US, Singapore and Indonesia, the company has just invested US$1.5 billion in GoTo Gojek to revive its operations. Tokopedia is the country's largest e-commerce platform. Indonesia was one of TikTok's best performing regions with 124 million users.
In October, the city of Jakarta banned online shopping on social media sites to protect small businesses and user data, forcing TikTok to temporarily shut down its e-commerce service TikTok Shop.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative news organization on China and Asia for more than a century. For more stories from SCMP, explore the SCMP app or visit SCMP on Facebook. twitter page. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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