Therefore, there is plenty of time for products. On the bright side, the product team can slowly prototype and write documents, and I also have the time and experience to write today's personal summary. The downside is that the team will slowly lose enthusiasm and patience because of procrastination. When the project is concerned by the upper level, the task view is likely to overwhelm the initiative.
More is not the long-term impact of good or bad. During this period, we have an understanding of cross-border export from 0 to 1, which will be more or less reflected in product design and our future career.
First, let's get down to business.
The one-generation model was not initiated by us. Before we started this project, it was already on the market.
The first batch of seed users we defined were China people who set up shop in foreign e-commerce platforms and had little strength. From their point of view, there is no so-called supply chain, so the first thing we envisage is to solve their supply chain pain points and achieve it by solving their supply chain pain points.
The solution is a generation.
We now simulate Uncle Martin's POV perspective and role replacement, and set up usage scenarios from the standpoint of these seed users. In cross-border practice, there are basically two kinds of business ideas, one is to spread goods and fish, and the other is to acupuncture.
The core operation idea of phishing users is to publish as many goods as possible to as many online stores as quickly and efficiently as possible, because there will be no other burden except the cost of opening a store and the time cost of distributing goods, and every order generated is profit. This is an extensive business, simple and rude, and has no high requirements for operators. As for whether the transaction can be completed, it depends entirely on luck.
Acupoint users have obvious cross-border operation ability, and can use tools such as facebook and google to actively drain their online stores. This kind of users have certain market trend prediction ability and know how to do marketing according to foreign folk customs and events, so they have their own eyes on product selection. Before publishing goods in online stores, they will look for data to find reference stores and reference goods, so as to estimate the profits that should be generated in the future.
Facing these two types of users in the first generation mode, the services to be provided should be different from the perspective of platform design and future operation.
In order to serve fishing users, what we need to do is convenient, fast and insensitive operation. A problem that can be solved in one step should never be divided into two steps. When you are finished, leave, and don't make meaningless stops. This is the idea of integrating the distribution of materials and goods when I designed the first edition, and it is also the starting point for me to cancel the logic of dividing orders in my dream. I can sacrifice some experiences in order to achieve efficiency.
In other words, efficiency is the first user experience.
Starting from the needs of acupuncturists and users, it is the most valuable work that our platform should do and the most interesting thing in product design to provide them with a large amount of data to make decisions when choosing products, and to use web crawler technology to pull the largest data from the e-commerce platform in time and feed it back to users after cleaning.
Unfortunately, judging from the company's current positioning of this platform and our current ability accumulation, it is the most operable to serve the phishing users first. It is later to go deep into the data level and establish the market profit model of goods.
Our products and projects are now in the stage of starting from 0, fishing first. Don't let go of a user, an opportunity. This is the attitude we should have when starting without background. In the outdoor products industry, XXX has a sufficient scale, but in the cross-border e-commerce field, XXX, as a legal person, is as insignificant as us.
This is why I was very opposed to real-name authentication at the beginning of this product design. Real-name authentication is actually self-limited.
Second, let's talk about the market.
I used to do cross-border import, and this is my first contact with the export market. Judging from the experience during this period, mature cross-border e-commerce platforms leave few opportunities for pure distribution sellers.
Take Amazon as an example. At present, almost no individual sellers' applications for opening stores are accepted worldwide, and enterprises are required to have their own brands to tilt the flow of sellers who use FBA services. Facebook banned many personal marketing numbers some time ago, requiring sellers who put advertisements to make service promises, marking the service promises and opening user rights according to scores.
The branding of goods and the quality of service are the characteristics of the overall environmental evolution of cross-border e-commerce. The path taken by e-commerce in China will be copied by Amazon, ebay, lazada and Lotte in the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa. The difference lies in the length of the process.
From the perspective of God, this process evolves step by step with the economic development level of a country/region. The difference in steps is the time difference, and this is our opportunity. Whether we can make good use of this time difference is the key to whether our products can be made.
America and Europe are developed markets of developed countries. Starting from XXX's cross-border e-commerce strategy, these two places are the first things we have to face, to help our users avoid the disadvantages of distributing goods and meet the potential requirements of the local market environment for cross-border sellers. This is also an important starting point for the product team when designing this platform.
Fishing users choose the business model of distributing goods, coveting simplicity, convenience and zero cost, and come with a speculative mentality. Brand and quality need cost, which can only be digested by the platform.
Therefore, in the first version, we designed online brand authorization and material purchase services. The former is to help users quickly complete the branding needs of e-commerce platforms, and the latter is to help users solve the platform punishment problem caused by intellectual property trauma that may exist when online shop decoration is released.
But neither of these two functions can completely solve the problem they want to solve. In the upcoming version, brand authorization and material purchase services are experimental. We don't know whether the market needs them. We can only assume the user's needs within our power, and then plan a more rigorous implementation logic when the user has data after going online, and then eliminate hidden dangers from the system level.
Hypothesis-experiment-adjustment is my basic idea in doing this project. When a large number of requirements and solutions emerge, the first thing a qualified product owner should do is to weigh, weigh what needs should be met, weigh what needs should be met, and even assume that he is the boss, and weigh the gains and losses that may be brought by multiple solutions in practice.
Third, it's time to face up to the problem.
Up to today, payment and return logistics are two major problems that we have not solved yet. In the face of these two major problems, our solution space is not large, leaving us a narrow room for manoeuvre.
There are many cross-border payment solutions in the market, such as continuous payment, Wan Li remittance, and later learned that PayPal and Easy Link Payment are domestic companies, which are unable to receive and pay US dollars directly due to the political environment of China and the United States. VISA, MASTER, JCB and other credit cards have the defect of delayed arrival time; Paypal has a wide range of users and can receive accounts in real time. There is no limit to the currency of receipt and payment, but the rate is surprisingly high. The handling fee of 4.4%+0.3 USD per order directly cuts the profit leverage of the seller by half.
The logistics of returning goods is because the warehousing service provider needs to charge the service fees of re-receiving, unpacking and sorting, which may lead to two logistics-warehousing costs for a commodity. With the current return rate of e-commerce platform 15%, this is also unbearable for our potential users.
In the first half of this year, I went to Yiwu almost every Saturday to chat with people who are new to cross-border e-commerce. So far, there are almost no solutions to these two problems.
In business practice, if the goods with low customer unit price are returned, the seller will give up the right to the goods and simply refund them; Only when the goods with high customer unit price are returned, the buyer will be required to send them back to the warehouse for re-inspection and tally for secondary sales. Our embarrassment is that the customer's unit price is in the middle zone, and giving up the cargo right will cause great losses. If the goods are returned to the warehouse, the profit from resale cannot completely cover the warehousing and logistics costs.
With regard to payment, we simulated many solutions in the product design process. Both the advance payment and the deposit have entered our consideration. After consulting the financial personnel, we designed the implementation plan and gave it up one after another, which is still not in line with the company's financial policy and the original design intention of the platform. The most likely thing is to use paypal, I think.
Aside from these two problems, only at the system level, the first version of product design has the disadvantage of tight coupling. This is my pot. Later, when designing the direct mining function, I tried to use decoupling structure. As long as I have time after going online, I will rearrange the category attributes and order to achieve page-level reuse.
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