Too sudden, this hot product is not selling well this year! Amazon sellers: I can only sell at low prices to beat competitors

For cross-border sellers, perhaps the most painful thing in the world is: mistakenly thinking that they have caught the trend.

The cross-border market is changing rapidly, and many consumer booms only bring short-lived benefits to sellers. For example, heating products, which were once popular in the European market, are now a huge burden on these sellers.

Heating products are not selling well

As we all know, due to the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in the winter of 2022, heating products such as electric heaters, electric blankets, hand warmers, and heated clothing were sold out in Europe, allowing many cross-border sellers to make a lot of money.

Based on this, in 2023, sellers continued to increase their inventory, and other people who smelled business opportunities also continued to pour in. However, the market at this time had undergone new changes.

As European natural gas prices fell, Europe and the United States experienced the warmest winter in recorded history in December 2023, resulting in a large amount of inventory. Many sellers could only sell their heating products at a discount and did not make any money at all.

According to meteorological forecasts, the next three years will be warm winters. Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, once pointed out: "We know there will definitely be a heat wave in 2024, but we cannot predict when and where it will occur."

However, according to market research, these sellers are continuing to expand their inventory despite the warm winter weather, which indirectly shows that sellers in the heating category have no intention of leaving the table this year, and even hope to squeeze their opponents out through a low-price spiral.

Low-price spirals kill competitors

Many sellers said that as the cold wave in Europe passed and the temperature gradually rose, the warm-keeping products that were once snapped up by consumers in the European market are no longer hot-selling. Although the peak of demand has passed, a large number of sellers who stocked up for this purpose have chosen to clear their inventory at low prices on the one hand, and on the other hand, they are expanding their production scale, hoping to use the low-price spiral to eliminate other competitors by using the routine of low-price internal volume and small profits but quick turnover.

A hand warmer supplier said that his customers believed that it was because they did not do a good job in their operation plan, and more importantly, they did not join the low-price spiral team early, which led to the ranking and sales not being able to rush up before the peak season in December, so that in December and later, in order to clear the huge inventory, they sold crazy low prices. Therefore, this year they are preparing to continue to stock up a large amount of inventory, lower product costs, and sell at low prices before the peak season begins.

There are many sellers who share the same idea. Currently, suppliers and sellers still have a large amount of goods in stock, and the inventory of many peers is basically above 20%, which means that before the next winter comes, a large number of products on the market have already entered the waiting state in advance.

The less than optimistic market conditions, coupled with the eagerness of cross-border sellers, have shown the extent of the price involution of heating products this winter.

Frankly speaking, the current situation also proves how difficult it is for cross-border sellers to keep up with market trends and strive to incubate popular products.

Who would have thought that not long ago, the craze of "Europeans buying up Chinese electric blankets" was still strongly impacting the cross-border e-commerce industry!

However, the market demand for seasonal commodities such as heating products changes with changes in various external environments. Things are different now!

The seasonal hit that makes people love and hate

An industry insider told Cross-border Knowledge that when the cold winter comes every year, the demand for related warm products in the market will increase, and such products are often called "seasonal hot products."

But precisely because they are seasonal hot products that people both love and hate, whenever the climate changes, these seasonal hot products will fall into the embarrassing situation of a sharp decline in sales, or even no sales.

Some sellers make a rational analysis and believe that what seasonal hot-selling products need most is quick response and fast supply chain, and the funds and strength must keep up, otherwise there will be a "hangover effect". If they want to make a fortune by following the trend but fail to exit the market in time, the profits they made previously will be lost.

In other words, it is a great test of the seller's information gap, product selection and supply chain capabilities.

Moreover, if you are not a seller who has been deeply involved in related categories, you should not blindly choose to enter the market just because seasonal products are popular.

In short, sellers who want to increase sales during the peak season need to have a certain market foresight, think in advance about how to combine these waves of hot spots and traffic with their own products, make good production and sales plans, and remember not to replenish stocks blindly, so as not to generate a large amount of unsaleable inventory and eventually be "swept" out.