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According to a recent recruitment information from AliExpress, the responsibilities of this position include: responsible for the management of the Shopify independent station operated by TP; assisting the operating TP to optimize advertising on Facebook, Google, Youtube, Instagram and other platforms; docking Various assistance teams such as internal procurement and contract performance, etc.

It is worth noting that this recruitment notice clearly states that it is necessary to recruit personnel with more than 2 years of experience in the operation and promotion of Shopify independent or self-built websites.

Why does Ali use Shopify to build a website?

A service provider speculated that this may be Ali’s exploration of Shopify and the ecology of independent cross-border e-commerce sites. “Try it for yourself first, and then make bigger plans after you figure it out.”

In this regard, Alibaba’s relevant business departments have not given a clear conclusion. The reply that Yibang Power received after verifying with the official was: “The recruitment information is true, but there is no specific action in the business, and it is also paying attention and understanding.”

In the independent station business, Chinese e-commerce companies such as JD.com and Youzan have already taken steps.

When China’s powerful commodity supply chain continues to overflow, more and more brands, traders, and factories are starting to consider not relying on the platform to be a “seller”, but adopting private domain traffic when looking for a way to go overseas. Become an independent brand site.

What Ali is good at is the platform economy. In terms of cross-border exports, it is similar, such as AliExpress, Ali International Station, Tmall Overseas and Lazada… Do you want to be an independent station? This seems to be something that Ali needs to make decisions now.

01

Large market with 100% growth

make different money

At present, on the cross-border export e-commerce card table, Amazon is as stable as Mount Tai; Shopify, known as the largest “arms dealer” on the independent stand ecological side, is making rapid progress, but Chinese merchants only account for about 5% of its total market share.

“Faced with Amazon, AliExpress and Lazada under Ali can only wave their fists in some or emerging markets.” Zhang Feng, founder of women’s clothing brand RG, pointed out, “Instead of blessing the independent station ecology, maybe it will open up a new world.”

Zhang Feng began to switch from opening a store on the platform to an independent station last year. Although the traffic source problem has not been effectively solved, his order volume has grown significantly, especially the repurchase of old customers. At the same time, he started his own brand, RG.

According to the data of the main payment institution port of an independent station, the transaction volume of China’s cross-border export independent station in 2020 increased by about 50% year-on-year, and this growth rate was the highest in history.

When more and more cross-border export sellers are looking forward to independent stations, one Shopify is obviously not enough. As a result, Chinese local Shopify-like people have sprung up.

Even the domestic e-commerce giant JD.com, which is generally regarded as relatively conservative in recent years, has been revealed to be forming a team to plan an independent SaaS service.

“It’s not surprising that Ali wants to enter the market.” The CEO of a cross-border e-commerce start-up company said, “Large companies have numerous large and small projects every year, and there are also many investment and acquisitions. It depends on how big the market is and whether the growth can be achieved. expected.”

However, what needs to be considered is that Ali e-commerce is good at platform model, traffic realization and transaction commission are always the biggest source of revenue for the platform. For example, Taobao’s core profit model is “external traffic procurement + internal traffic distribution”. Therefore, what Taobao needs to think about is how to keep the cost of traffic procurement low enough and standardize the tools for internal traffic distribution high enough.

The profit model of the independent station SaaS service is completely different.

Take Shopify as an example, its business has two major segments – SaaS subscription solutions and non-SaaS business solutions. The former mainly charges subscription fees (monthly fee/annual fee), as well as the theme design fee, domain name registration fee, application market APP purchase fee and other extended service fees; the latter is based on the payment, finance, logistics, warehousing and distribution provided for merchants Other services charge handling fees, loan interest, service fees, etc.

In other words, Shopify meets the needs of merchants of different scales or business scenarios through different SaaS subscription plans. In addition, continue to develop businesses other than SaaS products to expand the market.

The financial report shows that in 2020, Shopify’s total revenue for the whole year was $2.9295 billion, an increase of 86% over 2019. Among them, subscription solutions revenue rose 41% to $908.8 million, while merchant solutions revenue increased 116% to $2,007 million.

This type of revenue is something that Alibaba has not tried in other business scenarios (except for Alibaba Cloud services).

Notably, Shopify supported $119 billion in transaction value in 2020, a 96% year-over-year increase. Its size is 40% of the Amazon marketplace. Two years ago that figure was just 25%.

What matters is not whether Amazon and Shopify are comparable, but whether brands are willing to sell directly to consumers.

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Shopify’s market value of US$100 billion is verified by capital. Who can resist such temptation?

02

Can’t rely on Lazada?

Three trillion new growth points are within easy reach

The survey agency Grand View Research predicts that by 2025, the global decentralized e-commerce market will reach $557.9 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 28.8% compared to 2020.

Equivalent to RMB, in five years, this will be a big market of two to three trillion. The key is all incremental.

“Ali’s starting point for cross-border export is actually the earliest, but relying on the “old three” is difficult to cover the high-speed growth of the independent station market.” Zhang Feng said.

The so-called “old three”, namely Ali International Station, AliExpress and Lazada.

A domestic brand owner who is expanding its overseas business said bluntly: “In Ali’s cross-border export e-commerce territory, Ali International Station belongs to the B2B category, AliExpress is only big in Russia, and Lazada is overwhelmed by Shopee. At this moment, Ali needs to find a new breakthrough.”

The data shows that from January to December 2020, the accumulated transaction volume of Ali International Station increased by 101% year-on-year, and the number of orders doubled year-on-year. However, given the background that the global epidemic in 2020 has forced traditional foreign trade to switch to online, there is still great uncertainty as to whether this growth rate can be maintained. In August last year, Ali strategically invested in Xiaoman Technology, a CRM SaaS company. Since then, Xiaoman Technology and Ali International Station have carried out “strong synergy”.

Since its birth in 2010, AliExpress has opened 18 language sites, covering more than 220 countries and regions (the main market is Europe), with more than 600 million installed downloads and more than 150 million active users. But this is still far from Amazon’s 1.1 billion European monthly active users and eBay’s 390 million European monthly active users. In order to lower the threshold for Chinese merchants to try to go overseas, AliExpress also reformed the overall tariff standard last year, switching from tariff method to deposit method to help merchants start with “zero threshold”.

Lazada’s annual active consumers exceeded 80 million last year, and GMV has maintained a growth rate of more than 100%, but the pressure of competition is enormous. According to iPrice, since the fourth quarter of 2018, Shopee’s traffic has surpassed Lazada, and by the fourth quarter of 2020, Shopee’s monthly traffic in Southeast Asia was more than three times that of Lazada.

In Zhang Feng’s view, the first choice for cross-border B2C platforms is Amazon, but if Ali appears as an independent SaaS service provider, the situation may be different.

In his view, various independent SaaS service providers in China are still relatively small, and they have not built a complete ecosystem service system like Shopify. Although Shopify is far ahead in the European and American markets, it has not focused on the Chinese seller market. This gave Ali a great opportunity.

In addition, ByteDance is moving very fast into globalization, and TikTok is rushing towards e-commerce. The story of Douyin’s e-commerce closed-loop is being staged overseas.

“From this perspective, Ali must act quickly to avoid the ’embarrassment’ situation between Douyin and Taobao in China,” Zhang Feng added.

The above-mentioned brand owners who are doing overseas business also pointed out a key point for attracting Ali to enter the SaaS service of independent stations: just like himself, domestic brand owners are currently waiting to see or have already deployed cross-border overseas. Domestic brands pay more attention to the growth of private domains than ordinary sellers, so in addition to choosing to settle on the platform, everyone will consider building a brand official website (independent station).

“On the one hand, the acceptance of independent stations in the European and American markets is very high; in the United States, platform e-commerce only accounts for 50% of the market share of retail e-commerce, and independent stations of various sizes occupy half of the country. , the homogenization competition of platforms is becoming more and more serious, and most of them are cost-effective, which is not conducive to merchants who take the brand route.” He said.

In Europe, independent stations have a higher market share.

Alibaba’s Tmall + Taobao is still the largest brand resource pool in China. When these brands want to “independently” welcome overseas consumers, apart from the highly anticipated overseas version of Tmall – Lazada, is Ali willing to gamble on the ecology of the independent station?

03

traversal mode

“Three Questions”

Whether it is Amazon’s firm seat at Diaoyutai, Shopee’s pressing step by step, TikTok’s external outflanking, or the rapid rise of independent stations, Alibaba cannot ignore it.

As the world’s largest e-commerce platform, it seems that Ali will not watch the seller’s market be “divided up”.

However, if you enter the SaaS service of an independent station, there are three problems that Ali must face:

1. For Chinese merchants or for global merchants?

“If it only targets Chinese merchants and earns some money to build a SaaS website, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to Ali. If it enters overseas for global merchants, the localization process will have great risks and difficulties.” A senior e-commerce company The person said, “AliExpress has gone from helping Chinese merchants sell to Russia to introducing local Russian merchants. The cost is huge, but the results are mediocre (as of September last year, there were about 14,000 local Russian sellers).”

Look at the competition. According to the statistics of e-commerce data platform Store leads, as of December 2020, Shopify’s paid merchants are located in North America (62%), Europe (21%), Asia (7%), Oceania (6%) and other places. More than 1 million merchants around the world support its annual GMV of $119.6 billion and total annual revenue of $2.9295 billion.

2. How to balance the conflict between the independent station service and the platform business?

For merchants, entering the platform and being an independent station has never been a “choice of two”. But for Ali, who is used to playing the role of a platform, this problem is not simple.

On the one hand, Ali cross-border e-commerce is used to the business model of a centralized platform, which requires a steady stream of merchants;

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This contradiction has also appeared in Amazon’s history. From 2013 to 2015, Amazon ran an independent website building tool called Amazon Webstore, which was a critical period for Amazon’s platform business to expand globally. Ultimately, Amazon had to shut down the business.

3. Where does the traffic come from?

The biggest advantage of the platform model is that it has aggregated traffic, which is why merchants want to open stores on Taobao and Amazon. But doing SaaS services is, in the final analysis, “tools”, providing technical support, and the lack of traffic is obvious, so merchants need to solve this lifeline problem by themselves.

The core reason why Taobao is invincible in the domestic retail market is that it blocks the traffic of Baidu’s product search.

However, when WeChat social and Douyin content, which takes up more user time, come, Taobao will have to become an “open closed loop” in order to obtain more traffic.

Similarly, if you want to do SaaS services for independent websites, you must master a certain amount of traffic, otherwise you will be subject to traffic channels such as Facebook, Google, and TikTok.