Double 11 started "global battle": vying traffic, grabbing the market, and Amazon front PK

On October 29th, at the grand double 11 launching ceremony held by Ali Express (hereinafter referred to as AE) in the Plaza de Espana in Ali, a Spanishman who won the first prize felt like a drop in the sky - he smoked In the middle of a Chinese-made Kia car. The activity was thus pushed to the climax. This is a rare business event on the Plaza de España, where thousands of people gather to participate in the lucky draw. On the day of the European time double 11th, promotional advertisements and sweepstakes will be played every hour in the most famous TV stations in the area.

This is also the first double 11 experienced by Wang Changhui, the general manager of AE's Spanish business, after taking over the European business. After his financial career, he decided to strengthen offline operations and improve the visibility of AE brand after consulting the European market. In the eyes of many local brands and young people, AE is still a wholesale website selling Chinese cheap goods. Compared to the slow-heating Europe, Lazada, which was invested by Ali, is the vanguard of the double 11 Southeast Asian market. After one hour of opening, six countries in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand) received more than 3 million orders, breaking last year's record, the overall number of buyers, orders and sellers increased by at least one year. Times. The Double 11 was sold for only 80 minutes. A consumer in Malaysia received the first 11 parcels at 10:20 am (10 minutes faster than last year). Olivier Petra, CEO of Lazada Malaysia's LeL (Lazada E-logistics Malaysia), sent a brand new Samsung Galaxy A70 phone purchased by consumers to her doorstep.

In Russia, which is spread across Europe and Asia, AliExpress has already seized the local market and become the Top 1 e-commerce brand. Russia is sparsely populated and requires a large amount of imported products. In March 2018, the rookie opened the first e-commerce intercontinental regular route from Hangzhou to Moscow. The cargo charter on this route is full of goods from all over China. It will arrive in Moscow via Novosibirsk and Riga, Latvia, and will be scheduled for 1-3 flights per week in the first week. Last year, the Double 11, AliExpress combined with the rookie to invest 19 small aircraft and two 747 aircraft for Russia, shipping flights from once a week to twice a week. Ali's own brand camp is also expanding. In September 2019, Tmall International acquired Netease Koala for $2 billion.

In an interview with the media, Liu Peng, general manager of Tmall International, stressed the importance of the "double-brand" strategy: On the day of the double 11 day, the koala will synchronize the live broadcast and overseas traceability to strengthen its authentic image. This is the first year that Koala has joined the Double 11 as an Ali, and the storm of the acquisition has been less than three months. The synergy and operational capabilities will be greatly tested. Amena Manor Wines is headquartered in the port of Santa Maria in the southern Spanish town. In 2016, Koala's business development team found the brand, enabling this medium-sized winery to enter China with pure e-commerce channels. In order to prepare for the double 11, Emena's staff often have to prepare the goods four months in advance, preparing for the double 11 has become a higher priority than the holiday, they hope that the winery can welcome new in this year's double 11 Growth opportunities.

At present, domestic competition is becoming increasingly fierce, and “deep farming stock market” has become an industry consensus. Alibaba globalization is no longer a slogan, but a solid source of double 11 in 2019. AliExpress entered the Ali Double 11 for the first time in 2014. This year, due to the international time difference, AliExpress’s double 11 started from 4 pm on the 11th of Beijing time and ended at 4 pm on the 13th, for a total of 48 hours of carnival. Will fully demonstrate Alibaba's global ambitions.

Similar to the strategy of opening online stores to activate offline markets, AliExpress has also opened the world's first offline store in Madrid. Chen Gang, head of Spain's AE innovation business, told the interface journalist that the 730-square-meter store had poured in more than 5,000 people on the first day of its opening on August 25. The Xandu Shopping Centre, where the store is located, is located in the southwest corner of Madrid, about 40 kilometers from the city. Although the distance is farther away, this is the mall of the entire Spanish TOP 3, which is on the high-speed road from Spain to Portugal. The first Apple Store in Madrid is also open here. As soon as you enter the store, the double 11 logo hangs prominently in the store, reminding people that the promotion has been opened. Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung and other 3C digital products are listed on both sides of the gold shop. Going further, it is a gathering place for some small and medium-sized Shenzhen brands that specialize in 3C class.

PLAZA Chinese has the meaning of “shopping center”. There is a special PLAZA channel in Ali Express, which can be understood as the overseas version of “Taobao Mall”, which supports local delivery and return through the rookie warehouse. These brands are closely cooperating with AliExpress, and the development is relatively mature, which has become the first batch of products on the offline store. “More than 80% of sales in the European market are still online. We hope to improve the minds of users and make Spanish buyers feel that AE is actually close to them. It is a local e-commerce platform.” Chen Gang told the interface journalist.“New retail” has been developing rapidly in China, and both concepts and technologies are ahead of other markets. AliExpress clearly sees the gap between overseas markets and domestic markets, and hopes to copy domestic experience to the international market. Spain became the first stop in Europe. The southern European country, separated by the Pyrenees, has an open national character. In 2016, there were 75.3 million inbound tourists, more than 46 million people in the country.

In the retail market, a German 3C chain brand MEDIAMART became the Spanish version of "Suning", the largest business is the French country Love. This is a country that can fully accommodate foreign entrepreneurs, new companies, and inclusiveness. Ali's business in Europe is advancing very fast, and the offline store's plan is implemented in 2-3 months. The AliExpress Spanish local team has a total of more than 100 people. To be an offline market, it is necessary to consider its own positioning, DNA, process personnel and other factors. The final direction is - the offline store as a gathering point, will continue to enlarge Ali's online capabilities.

This gathering point bears the responsibility of showing the Ali business, and it is a process of brand mentality building. Since its inception in 2010, AliExpress has been developing in an orderly manner and is neither the fastest growing business of Alibaba nor the most attractive sector. On the contrary, it is slow and heavy. Due to the differences in the environment and localization of countries, AliExpress needs to constantly try and try. It must compete with local brands in certain markets, and the other hand must deal with the giants such as Amazon and eBay.

AliExpress's English name is Ali Express, which is mistaken for many foreigners to be a courier company. Because the cost of changing the name is too high, the name has been used. Another widely circulated piece is that Ma Yun once happened to hear the name of Ali Express from a foreign friend when he went abroad, only to know that Alibaba had such an international business. There are two main ideas for the selection of AE offline stores: one is a Chinese brand with a high market share in Spain, such as Xiaomi Samsung Huawei OV, which quickly drives sales through them; the second is the Chinese brand of the backbone. For example, like iLife, you can use the offline store to do sales stimulation. The 3C category is mostly in line with lifestyle products, making AliExpress's offline store look a bit like a famous product, but "it is actually a Spanish version of Xiaomi." Chen Gang corrected. AliExpress hopes to quickly enter the European market through this positioning.

In the 2019 Double 11 Media Center, Tmall and Taobao President Jiang Fan emphasized in his speech that "Live Streaming has become the core sales method of the Double 11". In the past year, the volume of transactions led by Taobao live broadcast reached 100 billion yuan, driving high-quality offline resources in factories, farms and markets into the e-commerce cycle system. Taobao live broadcast also promoted Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya and other super anchors. According to the data provided by Alibaba, it is expected that in the next three years, Taobao Live will drive the scale of 500 billion transactions. Similar to the Southeast Asian market, most of the European network red started from social platforms such as ins and Facebook, and has a core fan base. But unlike the network red that grew up on the Chinese e-commerce platform, traffic is concentrated on social media, making conversion difficult. 

Alba Duch has been in Instagram for 4 years and has a total of 152,000 fans. It is a well-known small net red in Spain. She is also performing performance studies. In her cognition, Net Red is not as respected as an actor. She will do the out-of-box evaluation of the product on the ins, live broadcast to make a complete set of Look, but the frequency will not be too high, she is surprised at why China Net Red can be so diligent. China's online red is a mode of bringing goods, in fact, it is CPS (by helping merchants to sell products to earn a certain commission), the prosperity of this model has produced a deformed competitive situation, and there are many people who work more than 8 hours a day. However, the overseas red market is a commission model. Each merchant will give a fixed fee. The live broadcast for two hours will give you 5000 or 10,000, depending on how many fans you have, not how many conversions you can bring.

In essence, because the population base in the European market is small, the volume of transactions brought by a live broadcast is limited, and the fixed salary is safer and less risky. Over time, it has formed industry habits. In addition, overseas social networks and e-commerce platforms are a form of decentralization. There is no large monopoly platform. Some people sell things online on ins, and others sell them on Facebook. AliExpress has always wanted to bring the domestic CPS network red model overseas, and stimulate the network red to have more work motivation. In the 2019 double 11, there will be a total of 1200 live broadcasts on AliExpress. It is called AE Carnival, and all the merchants and net red will participate. In 2019, more and more MCN institutions began to emerge in the European and Russian markets. Four months ago, Alba Duch began experimenting with local apparel business Lucas to create its own brand, GreyModa. Lucas signed an appointment with the organization where Alba Duch was located.

Born in Barcelona, Lucas is the second generation of the European clothing supply chain. His father is a producer of Inditex (Zara parent company) and Prenatal (European TOP mother and baby brand). Influenced by the family, Lucas's early career began around Inditex, where he worked as a designer, manufacturer and fabric supplier with a wealth of channel supply chain resources. When Spain's supply chain gradually moved to Asia, Lucas decided to open the store online, for more than 10 years. His shop is located in Barcelona's most prime shopping district, close to big-name shops. The supply chain behind it is Europe's fast-disappearing clothing, which is new and fast, with less inventory, keeping up with the trend and low prices. However, with the expansion costs and operational risks of the offline, he also found that online channels slowly infiltrated in Spain. He opened the official website, and at the same time accumulated fans on the ins, looking for cooperation network red.

On August 6, 2019, Lucas began experimenting with AE, and his new brand, GreyModa, officially opened in AE. At the beginning of September, Lucas invested in fashion resources to build a team, modeled and photographed the product, established an operations team, started the warehouse, and changed one of his stores into a professional studio. On October 23rd, GreyModa hosted a web red conference in the art district of Barcelona, inviting more than 30 European nets to participate. At the press conference, dancers wearing GreyModa descended from the sky, and a fitting mirror allowed the net red to be matched on the spot. Lucas then gave the previous 140,000 ins account and 1.5 million Facebook ID to GreyModa, which will further incubate its fast fashion + social model on the AE platform, expanding its fan count and store conversion.

Europe has the world's largest and most complete supply chain for fast-moving apparel, spread across Spain, France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, among which the Prato industry in Italy is the largest – producing 1.7 billion garments last year (Zara parent company) Inditex has 600 million pieces a year). The huge fast-moving apparel flexible industrial chain covers the major European cities through offline distribution, satisfying the supply chain needs of local online and offline small and medium-sized brands and small and medium-sized retailers. The fast-moving apparel flexible industry chain not only provides the design that represents the cutting edge of European fashion, but also provides high-performance products for small and medium-sized European brands and sellers with new speeds and extremely low batch numbers every week, which reduces the inventory risk of merchants. Even sellers can do zero inventory. This is why there are a large number of fashionable luxury brands in Europe, as well as large chain fast fashion brands such as ZARA, MANGO, HM, ASOS, and a large number of low-cost fast fashion small brands coexist.

In Spain, there are not a few merchants like Lucas who are well versed in the operation of supply chain. However, few people know how to use good marketing methods to obtain online traffic. It is still very difficult to develop online and offline brands. To this day, many Spanish merchants' perceptions of e-commerce are still at the stage of opening a store's official website, a bit like China's five years ago - Amazon and AE add up to less than 10% penetration in Spain.

Zara's app is the ultimate in e-commerce that they can imagine, thanks to the heavy operating model of Zara's former store. In the local market, Zara can make online orders for the day, return is free, and reverse logistics pays itself, so Zara is strong enough not to enter any e-commerce platform. GreyModa will participate in this year's Double 11 with its low price, fast consumption, and cooperation with Net Red. And a planned and organized fast-moving apparel supply chain is the real fast fashion. In the future, China's flexible supply chain experience will also support GreyModa's manufacturing process. In the international market, Double 11 is a good consumer node. It happened to be after the end of the European holiday, before the arrival of the "Black Five". Europe and Americans have a preconceived impression of Black Five, and Double 11 needs to do more mental construction in the international market.

In recent years, Amazon has also begun to participate in the Double 11, which has a broader market – Amazon has a leading position in North America, South America, Europe and Southeast Asia. In the non-US market, Amazon adopts a comprehensive replication strategy, heavy operations, and All in the local market. After more than six years, Amazon has deployed nearly 150 warehouses and nearly 2,000 employees in a place like Spain with a population of less than 50 million and a land area equivalent to a Zhejiang province. This is equivalent to bringing all the capabilities to the local, re-engraving the US version, warehousing, configuration, Prime membership system, etc. - one loss, but the success is the rolling type. There are two main shipping methods for Amazon: FBA (Fulfillment by Aamazon) and FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant), which are Amazon shipments and merchant shipments. FBA is one of Amazon's core profit points. It requires merchants to send a batch of goods to Amazon's overseas warehouses. Amazon is responsible for the entire logistics and after-sales service of buyers.

While improving the quality of service, the FBA model also means that businesses need to pay higher costs. The cost of Amazon FBA is often adjusted and has been on the rise. A 3C accessory merchant tells the interface journalist that Amazon's FBA is more expensive. If you use your own warehouse, the cost will drop by 30%. Another invisible clause is that Amazon will tilt better traffic and resources to businesses using FBA services. But AliExpress has begun to fight with Amazon. Amazon charges a rate of 8%-15%, and AliExpress simply drops to half of it: 5%-8%, which was even completely free in the early days, only to attract investment. As the rookie warehouse gradually spreads, AliExpress's express delivery speed can start to reach the day and the next day. AliExpress hopes to achieve optimal conditions in terms of cost input and output. A 2018 study by the Israeli e-commerce company Feedvisor shows that AliExpress is one of the alternative platforms for Amazon's seller transformation. The study shows that at least 2% of Amazon sellers have listing on the AliExpress platform.

Amazon's product listing is relatively simple, because the global purchase is the main, there is almost no complicated display. And AliExpress began to bring Taobao to the content of the way into Europe, in addition to live broadcast, AliExpress also has a variety of discounts and illustrated products. All this makes the European business dizzy. At first they felt helpless and could only rely on AliExpress's merchant training to learn by little by little. Estela Ye, the head of investment at the AliExpress Spanish market, believes that when businesses really work hard to make better-looking graphics and video, they can see that they have more incentives to strengthen their operations. "Aesthetics are human nature. The platform is to be a systematic, product-oriented tool," Estela Ye said. Beginning in the second half of 2019, AliExpress has released a more aggressive strategy to allow businesses outside China to sell on their platforms and is now open to local businesses in Russia, Turkey, Italy and Spain. This shows that Alibaba is increasing its pace with Amazon to compete for international business, and it is also the most notable feature of this year's double 11-speed sell-through – it has really “fallen” to the local area.

This also satisfies the demands of overseas sellers - with AliExpress and the Chinese market to establish contacts, to achieve "one-click global sales", understand the Alibaba system, and more business cooperation. "This year is our first year of implementing the 'local to global' strategy," said Dai Shan, one of Alibaba's founders, in an interview with the media. "This strategy is closely related to Alibaba's broader globalization strategy. ” Daishan has AliExpress as a pioneering platform for globalization strategy. The strategy also includes Lazada and other subsidiaries – Ali also holds stakes in Indonesian Tokopedia and Indian Snapdeal. On March 30 this year, nearly 20 small and medium-sized beauty brands from Spain, Germany, Italy and France flew to Europe from Europe and signed a new year's strategic cooperation plan with Tmall International. This is also a continuation of Alibaba's large import strategy. On March 21, Alibaba announced the official launch of its large import strategy and established six major procurement centers around the world, including Europe. As one of the main businesses of the strategy, Tmall International has identified three major goals for the next three years: attracting 10,000 Millions of overseas consumption backflow; serving 200 million consumers; helping 100 global small and medium-sized brands to go public.

In the past year, benefiting from the national “One Belt, One Road” policy, AliExpress has maintained a strong momentum and strong growth in the “One Belt, One Road” emerging markets such as Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In Eastern Europe, where Poland is the core, its market growth rate exceeds 50%. Poland is already one of the fastest growing markets for AliExpress, while AliExpress is the second largest e-commerce platform in Poland. Polish business media Puls Biznesu said that one out of every four Poles uses AliExpress for online shopping. The Middle East market, which is dominated by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, is becoming the new blue ocean in AliExpress’s “One Belt, One Road” national market. For example, AliExpress’s “828” shopping week, the transaction volume in the Middle East rose by 252%. In the 2018 double 11, a total of more than 230 countries and regions of consumers participated in the double 11 through AliExpress, one-third of the number of countries and regions buyers doubled, "foreign warehouses on the day" has become a foreign "hands Party" standard. This year's double 11, AliExpress may hand over a more eye-catching answer.