"This year, customers are conservative, service providers are having a hard time, and the professional threshold is higher."

"The whole industry has not grown, the strong among service providers still have profits, and the weak have fallen behind."

Since August, the author has opened a circle of friends, and can brush friends' feelings from time to time. Recently, a selected software service provider stopped working, and the news that tens of thousands of trademarks of a trademark agency were invalidated also made the industry chilling.

Once upon a time, "selling with excellent service" prevailed in the cross-border export electric business circle, and everyone yearned for "the seller's end point is the service provider". However, since the second half of 20021,sellers generally have a hard time, and the service providers whose income revolves around sellers are also struggling.

Previously, "Four Seas Trading" mentioned in the article "Cross-border E-commerce Worth Doing Again" that "sellers were washed last year and service providers were washed this year".

So what kind of baptism is the service provider going through from 2022?

What kind of service providers can survive the cycle?

Will the seller's destination be a service provider in the future?

Directory:

0 1 The seller's "locomotive" slowed down. Amazon's Open Plan 03 Service Provider's Sorrow 04 Launches a New Map of Service Provider. 05 brand's offshore infrastructure contains huge business opportunities.

As usual, anxious friends, look directly at the conclusion of 0405.

The seller's locomotive slowed down.

Over the years, when it comes to cross-border export e-commerce, Amazon comes to mind first.

According to third-party data, since Amazon opened its global site to China sellers in 20 12, there are at least 3 million China sellers on Amazon.

Within the first group of domestic cross-border export e-commerce, an ecological pattern of "sellers earn money from overseas consumers and others earn money from sellers" has been formed for many years.

Around the needs of Amazon sellers, from front-end preparations such as training and store registration, to mid-end operations such as product selection software, marketing services, traffic delivery and payment, and then to tail-end delivery such as logistics, overseas warehouses and customer service, various service providers relay services. Of course, in a broad sense, foreign trade factories can also be regarded as a part of service providers.

Later, with the continuous rise of sellers in Southeast Asia, independent stations and Tik Tok, the original Amazon eco-service providers also expanded horizontally to provide supporting upstream and downstream services for sellers.

Over the past ten years, sellers have made a lot of money by selling goods to earn the difference, and all parties have followed suit. The seller is the locomotive of the whole industry. However, this growth logic, which has supported the vigorous development of the industry for more than ten years, has been squeezed and changed by various forces in the past two years.

The first thing to bear the brunt is the global consumption downturn under the shadow of high inflation and various uncertainties. Huawei Zheng Fei's internal article "The management policy of the whole company should shift from pursuing scale to pursuing profit and cash flow" has passed on the coldness to non-Huawei people, so I won't repeat my complaints here.

The downturn in overseas demand is directly reflected in the shipping price, which makes logistics service providers begin to feel the pain. After the global shipping price reached its peak in June 5438 +2022 10, it began to fall endlessly because of the sharp drop in freight volume.

Take the price of Chinese and western routes as an example. The price of 40-foot containers on this route dropped from $ 654.38+0 million in June this year to $4,000, plummeting 60%. If compared with the average price of last year's highest point of 20 thousand dollars, the decline is as high as 80%.

"There is a certain surplus in overseas warehouses and cross-border logistics." Some insiders have analyzed that the current shipping price has exceeded the long-term agreement price at the beginning of the year, and the shipping price has not stopped falling, which may last until next year.

With the sluggish consumption, there is also an increase in transportation costs. "E-commerce is simply a door traffic business, and it is necessary to calculate the input-output ratio." An investor said that the time when facebook and google invested 1 yuan to generate 5 yuan traffic dividends has passed, and now many ROI accounts are uneven.

The impact of the rising cost of overseas marketing traffic is directly reflected in the latest financial report of Blue Cursor, the largest marketing company in Asia. In the first half of this year, the net profit attributable to shareholders of Blue Cursor was only 8.37 million yuan, down 98.55% year-on-year. We should know that even though the company introduced strategic investors and spun off its international business last year, according to the equity ratio, 34.5 1% of its international business income is still included in the investment income of the blue cursor.

The downstream head service provider has been hit so hard that the upstream seller's situation can be imagined. Take Amazon data as an example. Amazon's financial report shows that the proportion of sellers in China has dropped from 48% in 202 1 to 42% in May this year.

The weakness of locomotive is undoubtedly the first heavy blow to service providers in 2022.

Amazon's open plan

The second crit that service providers have to face directly is the ruthless conspiracy of the e-commerce platform that is deeply dependent.

Since last year, Amazon has gradually opened some selection data to third-party sellers, which were previously only "exclusively for" VC suppliers.

In February of this year, Amazon further launched the official commodity selection tool "Business Opportunity Detector" for some sellers. According to Billion Power, Amazon recently opened its data to small businesses by invitation. The new tool will open up a larger measurement depth, range and amplitude, far exceeding the ability of most current product selection tools.

Amazon's initiative to open platform data is undoubtedly a blow to third-party data service providers, but "I ruined you, but it has nothing to do with you."

A big seller told Trading Everywhere that with the rise of e-commerce in Tik Tok, many people divide e-commerce into two camps: shelf e-commerce and interest e-commerce. But in fact, shelf e-commerce is not a chess game. Amazon and Taobao Tmall are completely different e-commerce models.

The seller, who has lived in the United States for a long time and conducted business on multiple e-commerce platforms, analyzed that Taobao Tmall, which is "thousands of people and thousands of faces", provides consumers with a huge choice of goods, which can theoretically carry almost unlimited businesses and goods. On the contrary, Amazon, which originated in the United States, hopes to reduce the categories as much as possible according to the shopping habits of European and American consumers, so as to make consumers' choices simple and efficient.

Miss Ren's Cross-border Brand Research Institute once analyzed 30% product data of all categories of Amazon, and found that as of February this year, the number of all categories of Amazon was 35,723. In the data released by Amazon in the same period, the number of Amazon sellers with annual sales exceeding $6.5438+0 million is 60,000. In other words, each category is only enough to support two pits with annual sales exceeding one million dollars.

According to Miss Ren's statistics, there were 9.7 million sellers in Amazon in 20021year, of which10.4 million was added in 20021year, but compared with 2020, the number of sellers with annual sales exceeding one million only increased by 4,000.

This is basically consistent with the cognition of many old sellers. "To become Amazon, you must be in front of the category bestseller list 100. If you can't squeeze into this category, you can basically give up. " Huang Kangxiang, the founder of Cross-border Borderless, also told Four Seas Trading that Amazon is doing business with long slopes and thick snow by accumulation, and some old sellers can make long-term profits by occupying some categories of pits.

For Amazon, the opening of total data and the recommendation mechanism of similar products on the follow-up and details pages are all aimed at introducing catfish. Only when the competition among sellers in the same category is more intense and the limited category is given to stronger sellers can Amazon's supply side remain dynamic and continue to "provide rich, high-quality and cheap products for global buyers" and promote the flywheel.

This is an open plan of Amazon. In the eyes of the industry, what Amazon needs more is a supplier that can stably export high-quality and cost-effective goods and services. In fact, since many countries and regions in Europe and America implemented tax reform on cross-border e-commerce last year, allowing platforms such as Amazon to withhold and pay taxes to cross-border sellers, from the perspective of local laws, cross-border sellers are essentially Amazon suppliers.

It is an inevitable conspiracy to regard sellers as suppliers, including Amazon, Shein, tume and other e-commerce platforms with buyers' marks. But for service providers, it is necessary to think about what role they can play in the face of this dual structure of "platform-supplier" and whether they can integrate into this closed-loop ecology.

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