Second business opportunities during the epidemic: from losses to earning millions of dollars a year | Sellers say

Today, the cross-border e-commerce seller friend interviewed by WorldFirst is Dianhu, a seller from Hangzhou.

It is worth mentioning that when Dianhu started its business in 2016, it had already become a client of WorldFirst.

After graduating in 2014, Dianhu came to Shenzhen, the capital of cross-border e-commerce, to work in foreign trade-related fields, from project management to sales. At that time, his classmates started their AliExpress journey and achieved monthly sales of 100,000 US dollars not long after graduation.

Faced with the huge contrast, Dianhu began to think about his future direction. After a long period of thinking and learning from his classmates, in 2016, he made up his mind to resign, registered his own company, and started his cross-border e-commerce journey.

Although he had friends working on platforms like AliExpress who could provide him with guidance and help, Dianhu ultimately still chose Amazon as his main platform. “I wanted to take it easy. At that time, many platforms required us to pack and ship products by ourselves, which was too much for us.” Obviously, the FBA model was more suitable for him.

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By outsourcing operations and many other aspects, Dianhu has more time to think about product selection. The first product was just launched online, and within 2-3 weeks, it had already reached the top 50 in the category.

He has his own experience and understanding of product selection:

Avoid products with too much competition. Products such as screen protectors and power banks were the most popular categories at the time. Since you cannot compete with big sellers, you would rather give up and choose relatively unpopular categories, such as Home-related categories.

In addition, he is also good at making some "micro-innovations" and small changes. For example, ice pads for cooling pets used to be solid colors, but he chose to make some patterns, which is very popular in the European market.

2019 was a dramatic year for DianFox.

“Those with annual sales of less than 10 million US dollars are small sellers”, so he set a small goal for himself in 2019: to achieve sales of 10 million US dollars. He has been stockpiling a lot of goods since the beginning of the year, but as more and more people enter the cross-border e-commerce industry, competition is fierce, and the price advantage is getting smaller and smaller. He can only be forced to cut prices, and the profit has fallen sharply, from more than 25% at the beginning to only 6%.

To this end, he stopped to think about how to proceed next? The subsequent epidemic gave him a second business opportunity! "During the epidemic, it is really possible to sell without advertising, and people will still buy even if the price is doubled." In 2020, the overall sales also reached several million US dollars, and the key point is that the profit is far greater than ever before.

Dianhu was not blinded by this "prosperous age". "This was a year when demand was not very real and the volume surged very high." He was also prepared for a decline in orders after the great test of time.

Of course, more importantly, he also has new thoughts and plans for the future.

After so many years of doing this, there is not much accumulation.

Next, we will focus more time and energy on "brand", delve deeper into some niche areas, and try and explore new markets and platforms.

In addition to deepening the Japanese and North American markets, he also focused on some new markets. "I also opened some new markets and platforms through WorldFirst's global voyage plan. WorldFirst's green store opening channel is different from other service providers. It does not require any fees or commissions. It is completely free, so I recommended it to many friends." Including building his own independent website, studying his own buyer portraits, and increasing the repurchase rate are also his next focus.

Like Dianhu, many sellers will move to other markets as competition in the North American market intensifies. As one of Amazon's main sites, the European site is also an ocean that many sellers want to expand. The European market economy is relatively mature and has a considerable size. Citizens generally have a high standard of living, have a certain level of consumption power, attach importance to product quality, and are not very sensitive to prices. According to sellers, the profit is considerable~

From deep cultivation to expanding into North America, from losses to annual profits of millions of dollars, Electric Fox has achieved its transformation step by step, and the market it focuses on is also gradually expanding.

Sellers who are interested in the European market, please take a look!

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"WorldFirst Sellers Say" is a platform for cross-border e-commerce sellers to share and communicate. Here, you can freely talk about your thoughts, your personal experiences, your success stories and small lessons learned.

Cross-border e-commerce sellers who have something to say are welcome to add Xiao Wan’s WeChat account (worldfirstwan) and share your stories.