Facebook raises the censorship stick, are cross-border e-commerce independent sites entering a reshuffle?

A few days ago, a message was circulating in many groups that Facebook’s policy team was reviewing the advertisements of all sellers on the independent station SaaS website building platform XShoppy.

Yesterday, XShoppy officially refuted the rumor.

Although the matter has been concluded, I still think it is necessary to talk about it.

The rumor at the beginning of the article mentioned that a large number of sellers have switched from Shopify to XShoppy. Looking at the domestic cross-border e-commerce industry, since Shopify entered China in 2015, it has attracted a large number of sellers to enter. The rapid rise of independent websites in China has also attracted a large number of website building platform players to join. In recent years, with the rapid rise of domestic website building platforms, a large number of sellers have begun to switch to domestic independent website platforms. According to industry insiders, among these local Chinese website building platforms, XShoppy is currently the industry's big brother, and it ranks first in the industry in terms of seller scale and GMV. Therefore, XShoppy was innocently caught in the crossfire this time, which is somewhat like a tree attracting wind.

So why do domestic sellers switch from Shopify to local website building platforms? There are several main reasons:

In fact, even for overseas sellers, Shopify has many things to criticize. On the Danish e-commerce review service website TrustPilot, Shopify's score is only 2.6. Many users commented that its service is "very bad", and some even said it is a "complete" scam, with sellers "asking for exorbitant prices, not shipping, and unable to contact after-sales service."

Shopify is well aware of these chaos, but it is unable to do anything about it. This year, Shopify began to ban a large number of Chinese sellers, setting off a wave of store closures, but many people did not notice that some sellers in China have also experienced store closures. According to reliable sources, XShoppy has banned hundreds of illegal sellers in recent months, creating a precedent for domestic independent station platforms to close stores in batches, which will definitely offend many people! It is inevitable that people will wonder if this will become the fuse of this incident?

Although everyone is working hard to create a greener and healthier ecosystem for the industry, the reality is that the industry is still in its early stages, the degree of standardization is not high, the risk control capabilities of major platforms are generally weak, and the market is flooded with a large number of non-standard sellers, which is difficult to completely rectify in a short period of time.

When talking about the chaos in the independent website industry, we have to mention the famous website group model. The website group model originated from the COD (cash on delivery) single page in Southeast Asia. After several iterations, the most popular one is the " SaaS website building + social media traffic " website group model.

The core of the site group model is "traffic + hot products". After using SaaS site building tools to build sites in batches, use traffic channels such as Facebook and Pinterest to test products. After testing the hot products with high ROI, increase the amount of advertising to bombard users in all directions. Many sellers do not have their own supply chain. They use advertising materials to attract customers to place orders and then go to purchase, and the suppliers send the products on their behalf.

This brings up two problems:

The result presented to users is a large number of duplicate websites and landing pages with rough content, which provides a very poor user experience.

The profits of the site group model are very considerable. Many big sellers have increased their annual revenue from a few million to billions in just two or three years. Their myth of making money has attracted a large number of new sellers to enter the market, but some sellers do not have the corresponding operational capabilities at all. They just want to make a quick buck and leave the market, which has further given rise to chaos in the industry. For a time, the sale of counterfeit and shoddy products, black five categories of products, empty packages, and non-delivery were common.

Although there are various chaos in the industry at present, we should not be too pessimistic, nor should we overly blame the site cluster model or site building platform. The site cluster model and site building platform are essentially tools, and it depends on how you use them. It should be noted that SaaS site building has indeed greatly lowered the technical threshold of the independent site industry, allowing thousands of small and medium-sized sellers to have the opportunity to participate in the competition, and also broadened new channels for Chinese manufacturing to go overseas.

From nothing to something, from chaos to order, is the inevitable law of the development of any industry. In the process of rapid development of the industry, bubbles will breed. When the bubbles develop to a certain extent, they will naturally burst, and the industry will return to healthy development. In fact, today's independent station industry is the same as the early Taobao and Pinduoduo. Ten years ago, Taobao was called the largest black shop in China, but today, free shipping in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai has made countless people love it.

As traffic channels such as Facebook and Google continue to tighten their policies, more and more big sellers have realized that the industry must find a healthier and more sustainable business model for long-term development, such as building a boutique website based on vertical categories. Currently, big sellers such as Appen are trying to make changes.

Appen said it will take two years to build a supply chain system for design, fabric, pattern making and production; strengthen factory integration, unify management and control quality; use big data to predict hot products and improve independent design capabilities. Data released by Appen shows that the cycle from design to shipment of new products can be shortened to 7-15 days, and the annual inventory turnover can reach more than 15 times.

The boutique site model has high requirements for sellers' supply chain, product development and brand marketing capabilities, and only a few top sellers have this strength. However, it is more small and medium-sized sellers who are causing the chaos in the industry today. They operate in violation of regulations precisely because they do not have enough high-quality resources to support them to make profits through legal and compliant means.

Therefore, how to include more small and medium-sized sellers and help them find a way to survive and develop is the fundamental way to eliminate the chaos in the entire industry.

As for the protagonist of this incident, I learned some information about XShoppy at a seller gathering a few days ago. Since several independent sellers around me are using XShoppy's website building tools, I also took the time to study this platform.

According to a seller who was once close to XShoppy’s senior management, XShoppy is building a S2B2C ecosystem , and is currently realizing his vision in three stages.

In the traditional retail chain, manufacturers first produce goods, and then distribute them to terminal stores in various markets through distributors at all levels, waiting for users to buy them. The entire chain is particularly long, with low inventory turnover, which easily leads to inventory backlogs.

In XShoppy's S2B2C ecosystem, as the business flow data accumulates to a certain level, it can accurately predict what kind of goods a consumer will buy at a certain time point, thereby reversely driving the upstream supply chain to produce in advance and deliver it to the place closest to the consumer. In this way, after placing an order, overseas users can also enjoy the ultimate online shopping experience of domestic e-commerce delivery on the next day or even the same day.

At the Shenzhen Cross-Border Trade Fair in September this year, I also heard the head of XShoppy's ecology share XShoppy's plan for its ecological risk control system. According to its head's sharing, XShoppy launched the cloud stack ecological service to connect products, advertising, payment, warehousing, logistics, customer service and other links. By monitoring the seller's products, it ensures that the products sold by the seller are real and safe products. By monitoring warehousing and logistics, it ensures that the seller really sends the product. Then, through the detection of after-sales customer complaint data, the seller's after-sales risk is controlled. Once the customer complaint data exceeds a certain value, the platform will restrict the seller's store function.

At a time when all major platforms have made "no account blocking" one of their marketing and promotional focuses, XShoppy is constantly controlling sellers' behavior. From this point, we can see the unremitting efforts made by Chinese people in transaction compliance! Let's not talk about whether XShoppy's risk control system is good or bad, but at least I have seen the efforts of domestic website building platforms to comply with regulations. Cross-border e-commerce is a mixed field. In the context of today's rapid technological development, how to control the transaction risks of the platform at the system level, remove non-compliant sellers from the platform, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of sellers who do business honestly, XShoppy has at least taken the first step.

In the past, sellers could only deal with violations after the fact, but with the help of big data, in the future, platforms will be able to predict and intervene in violations in advance. By then, a green, healthy and sustainable industry ecosystem will naturally be formed.

Although the rumor about Facebook's tightening policy has been debunked, we still hope that it can serve as a warning to the industry and accelerate the industry's healthy transformation. As for XShoppy, the protagonist of the rumor, we also hope that it can play the role of the big brother among local platforms, set a better example for the industry, and implement the S2B2C blueprint as soon as possible.

(Note: Cross-border Knowledge is only a publishing channel and does not represent any opinions or positions!)