5 Things That a Local Partner Will do for You to Sell to China

With the evolving of cross-border eCommerce and the policy support from the government, selling to China has never been so easy. Many local solutions and services providers are now helping overseas retailers in various ways. A qualified local partner plays a pivotal role in your expansion to China. What a local partner offers will help you break the barriers and save you all the nuisances of ground work. No matter what forms this help may take, several core operations are indispensable to launch a successful business in China.

As observed by Azoya, there are mainly 5 things a local partner can help you advance your business in China.

1. IT support.

If you want to get your brand directly exposed to the China market, you will need to sell products with your own branded Chinese version eCommerce site. A local partner can not only help you with the setup process but also help you maintain the site on a day-to-day basis.

For example, when Chinese customers place orders, the order information will be synchronized to your fulfillment IT system. A local partner can help you build an API and make the process seamless and reliable. This is extremely important because a delay in order synchronization will probably result in failure of delivery, and therefore bad customer experience.

2. Product Selection

Product selection is vital for customer acquisition, customer engagement and customer retaining.

One of the most common practice in customer acquisition is to attract customers with hot items. Identifying potential hot items are the first step, which requisites intimate knowledge about the local market demand and shopping trend. After the customers are drawn to your site, an experienced local partner will recommend to them long-tail products that cater to their needs.

Chinese customers’ shopping preferences can change very quickly. Product selection has to keep in line with the unpredictable change to stay ahead of the trend. A well-considered product selection can boost customer engagement and surprise them constantly.

3. Localized Marketing Campaign

Marketing in China can take a very different approach. It has to be localized and tailored.

In eCommerce marketing, campaigns are usually coupled with the selective product featuring. In order to catch more eyeballs, the campaigns will feature most popular items. By doing so, sellers can boost traffic and create their own niche products at the same time.

Choosing right channels to feature the right products is, needless to say, very important. Moreover, sellers also need to create engaging and tailored marketing contents in different channels, for different channels cater to different demographic groups.

4. Stock Forecast and Management

No one knows the marketing needs better than a local partner with operational experience. They can forecast the sales performance and advise you on stocking accordingly. If they foresee there will be a demand boom or decline in certain products, they can share you this information and enable you preparing in advance.

5. Customer Relationship Management

The customer journey is dynamic and leaves prints for you to analyze and utilize. By observing customers’ behavioral patterns, you get the insights of under which scenario they will most likely to buy, what they want to buy together with certain products, their likelihood of repurchase.

Another aspect of CRM is to keep the customers happy all the time. It’s common that what they want to buy happens to be out of sales. So you have to cancel their orders. However, you still need to reduce the inconvenience brought upon them to the minimal. So you need to devise a rule of cancellation.

For example, if the out-of-sales products are the main products they want to buy, the rest of the parcel is just bought in order to reach the delivery free limit, then it will hurt the customer to send him the products he doesn’t want the most.