Import Retail Business: Savage Growth, Opportunities Are Not Small.

What are the market prospects of the import retail business? What are the limiting factors? What are the risks facing? What are the different modes of play in the industry? What are the future facing different models?

1, the market is yet to be nurtured, and high speed growth can be expected.

IResearch "cross border online shopping survey 2013" shows that among the 9300 online shoppers who participated in the survey, the proportion of users who had purchased online goods overseas and regular cross-border online shopping was only 25.2% and 3.4% respectively.

This reflects the fact that the penetration of cross-border online shopping in China is still very low, and the cognition of mass consumers to cross-border online shopping is yet to be developed.

Compared with the overall market size of China's e-commerce 9 trillion and 400 billion yuan (see chart 1) and the market scale of China's cross-border electricity supplier's 3 trillion and 100 billion yuan (see Figure 2), the market size of China's imports of retail electricity suppliers in 2013 was 74 billion 400 million yuan.

This situation is consistent with the current low market penetration.

However, from the 2009-2013 five year market compound annual growth rate (CAGR), the annual growth rate of the import retail business reached 98.7%, leaving the cross-border electricity providers (31.1%) and the entire electricity supplier industry (24.5%) behind.

This trend shows that with the gradual popularization and deepening of the understanding of cross-border consumer shopping by ordinary consumers, the market penetration and market scale of imported retail business will continue to increase rapidly and expand in the next few years.

2, high quality and low price of overseas goods are the main reasons for attracting young consumers.

The iResearch report shows that consumers' preference for cross-border shopping is obvious.

Among the factors that drive consumers to cross border online shopping, the top three are quality assurance, domestic websites and cheap prices.

This reflects the consumer's quality of the product itself, the ease of use of the website and the friendliness of the shopping process; the three most important concerns are cross border price comparisons.

In terms of category preference, the degree of concentration is relatively high.

Consumers are most keen on buying five categories of consumer products: skin care cosmetics, infant food, clothing, health care products and electronic products.

3, cross border supply chain management is a key factor limiting the development of the industry.

In operation, if effective cross border supply chain management can not be achieved, consumer interests can hardly be guaranteed and the market will be difficult to grow.

At present, the two most important problems in cross-border supply chain management are overseas supplier management and cross border logistics execution.

In management, the main problem now is investment difficulty.

Some regional brands have limited capacity and no intention to enter the Chinese market.

For some international brands, opening up cross-border retail e-commerce channels is likely to conflict with its existing international agents and channel layout.

Due to the high quality of investment, many importing e-commerce platforms have relatively weak control over overseas sources.

The counterfeit and imitation phenomenon caused a lot of negative impact on the whole import business.

There are two main problems existing in the implementation of cross-border Logistics: one is the speed of goods circulation; the other is the ability to optimize customs clearance.

The completion of cross border logistics links by pport companies can easily lead to the breakup of the supply chain in three streams, which will have a significant negative impact on the speed of goods circulation.

The optimization capability is reflected in customs clearance and tariff control, and the lack of customs clearance and expected management capability will directly reduce consumer experience.

Take mogujie.com as an example. In the lead of CEO June, mogujie.com launched the Korean apparel overseas purchasing channel in September 2013, but the channel quietly rolled out in just three months.

Although some Korean suppliers were supported at that time, mogujie.com's grasp of the procurement side was still weak.

A more important reason is that mogujie.com's difficulties in the implementation of cross-border logistics and customs clearance are not expected to be enough. Therefore, we must not stop the cross-border business in time.