Category Archives: Trend Insights

Facebook for Fun and Facts

June 23, 2010

Over the last year, the team at DHgate have been investing a lot of time and energy into making our platform easier, and generally more enjoyable, to business with. We’ve implemented countless improvements to the site based on extensive feedback and customer insights information. We’ve added chat tools that connect with a live team member to answer any immediate questions or queries. We’ve introduced new customer service policies that make the dispute process simpler, quicker and more generous. We’ve hosted training seminars all over China to teach our suppliers about service etiquette, best practices and long-term customer relationship methods. We’ve improved search, payment, logistics, vale-added options. We’ve launched a resource driven microsite www.introducingsuccess.com to provide free, helpful insights into starting and running an e-business. And that’s just to name a few of our recent initiatives.

In short, we have been trying really hard to make our brand promise equal our user experience.

Of all our activities, no where has taught us more about our customers, and allowed us to understand the way they work, their personalities, their issues and their preferences more than our social media presence.

We host competitions, offer special discounts, arrange giveaways, deal with questions, provide reviews, etc in a multimedia format that get’s our buyers talking. They talk because we listen and – crucially – we act.

Our promise equals our customers experience.

We have a way to go in making improvements to our business, but we are letting our customers know that we are working for them. And they appreciate it.  Transparency is key and 2.0 is the perfect channel to keep all informed and ask for feedback.

Have you been using social media to connect with your customers? If so, what approach do you find works?

visit www.facebook.com/dhgate to see what we’ve been up to lately.

Also posted in Business News, DHgate, Know-How – 0 Comments

How to Import from China

June 6, 2010

As part of my business at www.dhgate.com, I make it a point to constantly keep in touch with my customers and clients, whether they are Chinese suppliers and manufacturers, or foreign importers and sourcing companies particularly new market entrants and established SME’s. This enables me to continually refine my website to improve the customer service and add new innovations.

As part of this process, I hear many success stories of overseas customers, more than often from the US, who have successfully started a new business through importing product from China or have significantly reduced their costs or increased their product range via this method. I am also often asked about the best ways of starting to import from China and what pitfalls to look out for.

Some of the emails I receive from DHgate customers in the US give me examples of their initial experience in importing from China, and often it was not initially that successful. Usually this is as a result of choosing the wrong supplier, not doing your homework and rushing into product order and underestimating the nature of international trade. I want to share it with you over the next couple of posts some of my thoughts and tips to make sure your experience is successful.

Choose Your Supplier Well

One of the most fundamental errors is to pick a supplier without a thorough review process. Check whether they are the actual manufacturer or merely a wholesaler as you always want to deal directly with the source. Check the supplier’s website to see whether it’s in English which is always a sign that they do business with foreign companies. Ask the supplier for testimonials and references, and then check them up. Use a China-based verification company if the size of the order warrants it, or read customer reviews. For example on my site, www.dhgate.com, we have a number of verification methods like a 3 tier rating system and a Feedback scores from other buyers.

Don’t Rush; There’s Plenty of Time

Next, don’t rush into anything. Although there is pressure from both sides to get it done as soon as possible, it’s best to give yourself a long lead time to do proper research, complete perfect product specifications and shop around. The product will always be there, and it maybe cheaper next month or with a different supplier.

Don’t Underestimate Time and Costs

Although international delivery these days is very efficient even for smaller product orders, it’s probably wise to always work on the basis that the delivery will be late, so factor it into your plans. Also, it is probable that the landed costs will be higher than quoted or you have estimated. Eager buyers have a tendency to underestimate the time and costs of importing from China.

Don’t Pay Purchase Price Upfront

Never pay the purchase price or a substantial part of it upfront. If you do this, then it will be highly unlikely you will get your money back if there’s a problem with the quality of the products or there’s a severe delay in the shipping. If a supplier demands you do this, it’s probably best to find a new supplier. At www.dhgate.com, we use an escrow payment system where you don’t pay the supplier until you’ve received your shipment and are fully satisfied with it.

In my next post, I will give some more tips on how to deal with Chinese suppliers and basics on how to import from China especially in relation to understanding cultural differences, maintain product quality and dispute resolution.

Also posted in DHgate, Know-How – 0 Comments

Blog of the Month: China Realtime Report

June 3, 2010

The Wall Street Journal continues to produce excellent content in their China focused blog “China Realtime Report”, and May was particularly juicy. Read this post here or see below.

Your thoughts are welcome, as always!

John Lin, chief technology officer of eBay’s Asia Pacific operations, thinks eBay’s marketplace may yet make a comeback in China.

The company, which used to have a domestic Chinese consumer-to-consumer, or C2C, auction website, largely pulled out of the market in 2006 after Alibaba Group’s Taobao.com gobbled up its market share by undercutting its fees. Taobao executives say they plan to continue allowing merchants to sell without paying commissions, and Taobao still has the lion’s share of the online C2C market, but the rivalry between two companies has since taken a more friendly turn, with Alibaba Group’s wholesale platform AliExpress acceptingonline payments via eBay’s PayPal, and with executives on both sides saying cooperation and competition can go hand in hand.

EBay’s current operations in China remain small compared to Alibaba Group and other Chinese e-commerce companies like DHGate, but like PayPal, the company has refocused its energies on export-oriented merchants in China who want to reach overseas buyers on its international websites. In the years since giving Tom Online control of its Chinese marketplace, eBay has created a Chinese Web portal, ebay.cn, a customer support team and a suite of value-added services to acquire more of these types of customers.

Since refocusing eBay’s China business, “business has been growing pretty nicely,” Lin said in an interview at the company’s Shanghai office on Wednesday. He declined to say what percentage of eBay’s marketplace transaction volume came from Chinese merchants, but said that China makes up an increasing percentage of the company’s $60 billion overall transaction volume, with more than double-digit growth every year.

Like most other e-commerce companies in China, eBay’s approach to Chinese clients requires much more hand-holding than would be needed in other markets. Lin says the local customer support team, which consists of dozens of people, must constantly call and otherwise stay in contact with Chinese merchants to advise them on how to improve their global listings. The support team makes recommendations to customers about discontinuing the sales of products that infringe on intellectual property, and about creating free shipping policies, which are more attractive to U.S. buyers. EBay also negotiates with logistics operators and translation companies to provide better rates for merchants who want to use their services.

“In the domestic market today there is still no monetization” because the standard practice, set by Taobao.com, is not to charge merchants commission for listing, Lin said.

“EBay was very frustrated with the low margins in the domestic market in China. I hate to say this, but it’s not a public service,” he said. “We specialize in high margin business,” and cross border trade is “highly profitable.”

He added that eBay’s Chinese merchants, which are predominantly small to medium-sized businesses (in contrast with the high percentage of consumer sellers in the U.S. who aren’t full-time merchants), pay slightly higher rates than U.S. domestic sellers do.

While eBay clearly doesn’t buy into Taobao’s “free” strategy, however, the Chinese website has continued to grow at warp speed in terms of transaction volume, and is, in fact making revenue by other means including sales of keyword-advertising. Analysts estimate Taobao earned between $200 million and $250 million in revenue last year.

Lin and eBay Marketplace Development Director Dandan Cheng argue that price-cutting can lead to a never-ending vicious cycle, in which Chinese companies may never find a way to charge customers, especially if competitors are waiting to undercut their prices when they finally do. Lin says that by building its brand among export-oriented merchants, eBay is “well-positioned for future development in China,” in both the cross border and domestic markets.

Also posted in Blog of the Month, Events and Happenings – 0 Comments

Maturing eCommerce Means Web Retailers Must Think Differently

April 14, 2010

I saw a very interesting article on the Financial Times online today and thought I would share it here.  Entitled “Maturing ecommerce means web retailers must think differently” Michael Ross, director at eCommera, put some interesting points forward for small businesses.

Read highlights below or the full article here

...But the indicators of ecommerce’s problems are not so obvious as long queues or a tired looking store front are to a physical high street retailer.

For online retailers, store layout means optimising the position of their most popular and most profitable products; check-out queues equate to the ease and speed of completing an order and the time from order to delivery. For the friendliness of the affable village butcher, online retailers must think about their after sales care and the tone and tailoring of their outreach.

Online, a company with a compelling and competitive service has an almost infinite catchment area, and it is often the big names who are investing most in understanding the science of effective retail and will prevail in the land grab.

So to avoid going the way of local stores, squeezed out by the major players – the supermarkets of the physical world – online retailers of all sizes must monitor and understand the importance of several key metrics.

First comes the number of visits and orders, and the source of traffic. This allows more sophisticated analysis than physical in-store footfall as it not only reveals total consumer number but also how they are finding the site – whether driven by direct marketing, banner ads, affiliates, search or other means…

And finally, the most obvious KPI for businesses to monitor – customer satisfaction. Many say they do so but their methodology is often based on the wrong metrics.

Businesses need a holistic view of end-to-end customer service and the efficiency of the website and back-end in delivering what those consumers want, when they want it…

Also posted in Business News, Know-How – 1 Comment

The Future is Social Media

March 19, 2010
Social Media
As you’ve likely read recently, lots of big corporations are trying to harnass the power of social networks to help grow their sales. But even if you’re not a huge retailer, you can still leverage social media to share information about your products as well as to communicate with your customers. I like to think of social media marketing efforts as one part of a larger strategy. Lots of people (your potential customer base) like to communicate in different ways. Some will browse to your website for info, others are on email all day and respond to electronic promotions over anything they get in the mail, and others still prefer to rely on recommencations from friends and family that they might find on social networks.
One important thing to remember about the various social networks is that each has distinct functionality and users log on for different reasons. Here’s a quick overvoew of three extremely popular platforms.
Twitter
Twitter users (aka Tweeters aka Tweeple) use this service to share 140 character long updates with everyone who follows them. You can log into Twitter on any web browser, or you can send and receive updates through text messages on a mobile device. Because of the character limit, messages tend to be in shorthand and often reference short links created on tinyurl.com or bit.ly. For companies that want to use Twitter to gather followers, here’s some advice.
First, don’t use the service only to blast out messages about promotions and products. Followers will view your messages as spam and will stop following. While it’s okay to use Twitter to share links to products and special deals, be sure to spend some time seeing what other users are saying about or to you, and engage them in conversations about relevant topics. It’s also a good idea to follow the competition and companies that sell complementary items. There fans will make for great potential customers.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is generally considered the more business/career focused version of Facebook (see below). You’re highly unlikely to find photos from last weekends bar crawl or pot luck dinner and users log in and update statuses less frequently. You’ll find more information about educational and professional backgrounds and users can write recommendations about their colleagues or other business contacts.
The best way for you to take advantage of LinkedIn is to use it to connect to potential suppliers and customers through your existing connections. It’s also a great place to post about job openings ors make requests for contractors and other vendors.
Facebook
Facebook is quickly becoming a one-stop-shop for a wide array of online tasks. It’s 300+ million users previously relied on tools like gmail, snapfish, message boards and blogs to get the same information that’s now available all in one place. Facebook users are more likely to regularly post status updates, links, video clips and other media and the platform makes it easy for anyone to comment on or share information that they find on Facebook or the wider web.
All this makes Facebook an ideal spot to engage with customers and potential customers in a variety of different ways. Companies can do this by creating a Public Profile that represents the brand. One key thing to remember, however, is that if your brand doesn’t have a lot of awareness, there is very little reason to for people to become a fan of your public profile. What you’ll be best served by doing is creating a page that’s purpose is to share useful information about a topic that relates to your business. So if your company, Irene’s Custom-Made Handbags, only has a small group of loyal customers, make your public profile have mass appeal by sharing information about all sorts of trends and information about custom made purses and other accessories. If you become the go-to place to find out which independent bag makers, chances are, you’ll develop a list of followers that will be great to market to.

As you’ve likely read recently, lots of big corporations are trying to harnass the power of social networks to help grow their sales. But even if you’re not a huge retailer, you can still leverage social media to share information about your products as well as to communicate with your customers. I like to think of social media marketing efforts as one part of a larger strategy. Lots of people (your potential customer base) like to communicate in different ways. Some will browse to your website for info, others are on email all day and respond to electronic promotions over anything they get in the mail, and others still prefer to rely on recommencations from friends and family that they might find on social networks.

Twitter.com/DHgate

Twitter.com/DHgate

One important thing to remember about the various social networks is that each has distinct functionality and users log on for different reasons. Here’s a quick overvoew of three extremely popular platforms.

Twitter

Twitter users (aka Tweeters aka Tweeple) use this service to share 140 character long updates with everyone who follows them. You can log into Twitter on any web browser, or you can send and receive updates through text messages on a mobile device. Because of the character limit, messages tend to be in shorthand and often reference short links created on tinyurl.com or bit.ly. For companies that want to use Twitter to gather followers, here’s some advice.

First, don’t use the service only to blast out messages about promotions and products. Followers will view your messages as spam and will stop following. While it’s okay to use Twitter to share links to products and special deals, be sure to spend some time seeing what other users are saying about or to you, and engage them in conversations about relevant topics. It’s also a good idea to follow the competition and companies that sell complementary items. There fans will make for great potential customers.

Checkout www.twitter.com/dhgate to see what my marketing team are doing here.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is generally considered the more business/career focused version of Facebook (see below). You’re highly unlikely to find photos from last weekends bar crawl or pot luck dinner and users log in and update statuses less frequently. You’ll find more information about educational and professional backgrounds and users can write recommendations about their colleagues or other business contacts.

The best way for you to take advantage of LinkedIn is to use it to connect to potential suppliers and customers through your existing connections. It’s also a great place to post about job openings ors make requests for contractors and other vendors.

Facebook

Facebook is quickly becoming a one-stop-shop for a wide array of online tasks. It’s 300+ million users previously relied on tools like gmail, snapfish, message boards and blogs to get the same information that’s now available all in one place. Facebook users are more likely to regularly post status updates, links, video clips and other media and the platform makes it easy for anyone to comment on or share information that they find on Facebook or the wider web.

All this makes Facebook an ideal spot to engage with customers and potential customers in a variety of different ways. Companies can do this by creating a Public Profile that represents the brand. One key thing to remember, however, is that if your brand doesn’t have a lot of awareness, there is very little reason to for people to become a fan of your public profile. What you’ll be best served by doing is creating a page that’s purpose is to share useful information about a topic that relates to your business. So if your company, Irene’s Custom-Made Handbags, only has a small group of loyal customers, make your public profile have mass appeal by sharing information about all sorts of trends and information about custom made purses and other accessories. If you become the go-to place to find out which independent bag makers, chances are, you’ll develop a list of followers that will be great to market to.

Check out www.facebook.com/dhgate to see what my company is up to in this exciting space.

Read more tips on promoting your business at IntroducingSuccess.com and let me know what you think!

Also posted in Know-How, Personal Insights – 0 Comments
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