Tag Archives: china ecommerce

TRYX(TR100) again! this time selling TRYX to China is more competitive

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A month ago, I summarized my experience of selling Casio TRYX EX-TR100 camera on Taobao in China. If you have read that article at that time, you might be thinking selling TRYX to China is easy and you can make a lot of money. But this time, I would say no.

Casio TRYX price trend in China

First, it is the disadvantage you will never avoid when selling on Taobao. It does not matter if you are the first seller ever of this TRYX camera. The fact that you are the first seller of this camera on Taobao does not have any affect to make sure you make the most money of it! This is almost true to everything selling on Taobao in China. Especially for C2C sellers like me, every one else has the right to sell the same product and every one else has the access to buy a TRYX camera. This makes the competition high! Well, at least here is the lesson we learn! To be the first seller of a potential hot product is not really a big advantage unless you have enough money in your pocket to keep yourself dedicated on selling this product! This way, you can dominate the quantity of the products e.g.TRYX on Taobao. The quantity gives buyers great confidence to buy the same product from you but not from your followers who start selling TRYX later than you do.

Second, many pro-sellers have so many means to buy the products from wholesale. They have the confidence to sell TRYX at a lower price. This eliminates competitions from small and medium sellers.

Third, pro-sellers are willing to pay ads on Taobao. This drives them more traffic than most small and medium sellers.

Fourth, pro-sellers will import a huge stock of TRYX without a fear! This is something no small and medium Taobao sellers can do. After the cameras arrive in China in there warehouse, people are more willing to buy from them because they don’t need to wait very long time compared to buying directly from US.

The last reason why TRYX is no longer a place for small and medium Taobao sellers to be in is the fact that TRYX’s production has not stopped!

So the question is where is the next Gold Rush? Mini-TRYX? Kindle Fire? To dominate the selling of a potential hot product is always the key on Taobao.

10 Sina Weibo Marketing Tips

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Weibo, alson Known as the Chinese “Twitter”, is becoming one of the most important marketing tools for online Chinese eCommerce sellers. It is a richer version of Twitter with more capacities and functionalities. Weibo, the micro blogging system, has shown us the sign that it will pass the influence of other Chinese SNS sites such as renren(xiaonei), Tencent, and Sohu. There are more leads generated by Weibo and more successful examples. Personally, my weibo experience tells me that a successful Weibo will help you sell effortlessly! ( see my weibo at http://weibo.com/dreamsberry and http://weibo.com/zeefish). My Taobao Store drives 20% of its traffic from weibo. However the 20% of the traffic is always the top quality customers to visit my Taobao store.

Now I am going to list 10 Tips to manage your Weibo Account and get more people to view your micro blog! At the same time, these tips will increase the number of followers on your account dramatically. First 7 of the 10 Tips are stated by Sina officially.

1.Use customized Weibo Logo.

weibo china ecommerce

2. Use short sentences in Chinese and provide large amount of info. in your Micro Blog. Include the product as the keywords in Weibo.

sina weibo tips3.Raise questions, and induce readers involvement.(comments, repost…)

weibo marketing4. Scheduling the time sending out Weibo

Don’t send  10 weibos in 2 minutes.

time frame sending tweets

5. Follow back on your followers!Choose some people to follow, and request them to follow you! This is an important strategy. Big weibo account owner will help your account in many ways if the owner decides to follow you.

follow back6.Use comment to increase followers and other drive people’s interests on your weibo account. This is another important strategy. An exciting well crafted comment on a hot Weibo may result in a good discussion under that Weibo. People who find you interesting are very likely to be your followers!

comment on tweets7. Use free prizes/lottery prizes to ecourage people becoming your followers and repost your weibo! This is a hot trick people are using to increase their weibo account influences and reaches! Weibo officially support such functionality to assist weibo owners to count who repost the weibo, and draw the prizes from them.

8. Use @ a lot! @ famous people, and @ your customer are both great strategy to lead to more attention on your account.

9. Organize events! Offline events may be a good idea for you to group your customers together!

10. Post Deals! There has been many successful examples for Taobao sellers posting deals on Weibo. They will get followers quickly, and eventually they will post the deals from their own store and leads to tremendous sales.

In the End, Dreamsberry is always happy to assist you to sell well online to China! There are many other tricks to assist you selling online, and Weibo is one of them.

QianPin- new localized ecommerce experience in China

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As most sellers are still crazy about group buy in China eCommerce market. Data shows group buy already slows down in China.

This post is from http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/10/26/qianpin-localizing-ecommerce-china/

Written by Willis Wee

While group-buying has slowed down in China, upcoming start-up Qianpin is focusing on making e-commerce a localized experience. No group-buy or auction here, but instead Qianpin makes an effort to get merchandisers on board, offer discounted items (which can be purchased by oneself) and localization.

In an interview with Sohu, Qianpin says that group-buy growth in China has dropped in recent months, and Chinese consumers are getting less impulsive and more rational when buying online. Qianpin explains that group-buying can no longer meet consumers’ demand and believes that offering a localized e-commerce experience will benefit users more.

Qianpin’s idea is to build a “location-based Taobao” concept in each city in China. Besides direct online purchase from merchandisers, Qianpin also offers free downloadable coupons and location-based deals which are sent directly to users’ mobile. It will also be introducing its Android and iOS apps by year’s end.

qianpin-screenqianpin.com

Qianpin just concluded a round of funding and now has more than 3,000 merchandisers on board and is looking to bring that figure to 10,000 by year end. To do that, it has over 200 employees who will help offline businesses come aboard for free. While the process is spoon-fed to start, the e-commerce company is also hoping to give merchandisers full control over how they manage their stores on Qianpin.

Qianpin is currently available primarily in Beijing and Shanghai. On top of its official Weibo account, it also has dedicated weibo accounts for Shanghai and Beijing.

The team is made up of members who used to work for tech giants like Baidu, Taobao, and Jingdong.

People like us-list of services helping you to sell on Taobao

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The title is “People like us”. Thus we are talking about many similar services out there providing consulting and shipping mixed service to help foreign sellers to sell on Taobao. This might be helpful if you want to find Taobao Agent to help you selling on Taobao. These services have the same ideas as Dreamsberry’s services. Basically we all want to help foreign sellers to make use of the vast Chinese eCommerce market. Here are some of the interesting facts about us.

1.simple websites, simply listed what we could do and pricing. all of us looked unprofessional.

2.vague definition of the services. Basically, there is no standard nor model for this type of service. Like Dreamsberry, we are just utilizing some of our selling experience in China and language skills to help sellers to succeed.

Typical mixed services including: Taobao store setup , product listing on Taobao, Shipping and stocking in China, Buy from Taobao…

3.No apparent successful stories. (Dreamsberry received emails from some eBay sellers from time to time, but there is no huge successful stories.)

Now I am listing here many of them:

1.http://www.sellontaobao.com/

this is a one-page website! the simplest website you will probably see nowadays!

2.http://mz-hosting.com/taobao.php

this is a hosting company, but somehow it provides assistance to sell on Taobao.

3.http://www.chinabuydropship.com/wholesale/sale-on-taobao

very simple, they just list the items according to your specification. When order comes, you just need to ship it.

4.http://www.taobaobuying.com/

Also very unprofessional designed website in terms of functionality. It helps people buying from Taobao.

5.http://taobaofocus.com/

Dropship service. Help you to buy from Taobao.

6.http://www.cwkcommerce.com/index.php/cwk-commerce-home

claim to be the leader in China eCommerce marketing and research. Unprofessional site. No Success stories. No clients.

To conclude this post, all these services are telling us that people are thinking about this idea for a long time, but no one is making it really happening. Dreamsberry is trying hard to be the pioneer connect the American sellers and Taobao.

Selling Palm Pixi,Pre, and Veer to China. (case study 2)

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Last time we talked about one crazy case about selling unwanted TRYX camera to China making some profit. The casio camera TRYX TR-100 later proves my belief that it is not just an odd case in Chinese eCommerce market. Now here comes the unwanted Palm cellphones. They are selling very well on Taobao, and many smart phones online community. The difference is that this time, Chinese buyers online are buying the Palm phones not just because they like it, but also because the phone is cheap though unwanted in US.

 

First, we all know that HP touchpad’s fire-sale story right?? If it’s a okay spark for US buyers, then it’s a huge earthquake for Chinese ecommerce market. People there are used to the expensive iPad2. But suddenly, they got the news that HP touchpad is selling for only 99 dollars. Well, most sellers like us, we thought touchpad is the great opportunity for us to make some money online. But it turns out that Palm phones, also abandoned by HP, also have their great potential to sell well in China.

When people here in the US are treating Palm phones like trash, online Chinese buyers are trying there best to get a cheap smart phone like Palm’s pixi plus. You could find CDMA Verizon Palm pixi plus selling for only 37 dollars, and unlocked Pre2 selling for only 100 dollars eBay. This time, Palm’s Veer, Pixi, and PRE2,PRE3 find their value in Chinese online market such as Taobao, and many discussiong forum. Zoopad.com is a smart phone discussion forum, and many buyers there are posting request buying a Palm phone. Here I think it’s worth mentioning the size of Chinese market. Usually within one day, your post with fairly interesting topic on a popular forum will attract more than 1500 views. I think it’s a pretty good number.

Selling palm phones are not 100% the same as selling TRYXs to Chinese young buyers online. This time, you are facing more experienced geeky buyers who know more than you do about Palm and the price trend. But still, it is a good chance to make little money, because there is no one who wants Palm in US. The profit may be only 10%, but the demand in China is great! I think if I were a wholesale company and I have a full stock of palm phones, I will contact dreamsberry.com and ask dreamsberry to take care of the selling part. Well, this is just an ads I put here for myself. But it is just like the old saying goes, products like trash here maybe gold there.

One last very interesting phenomenon is the rise of Palms phone after its initial price cut. This phenomenon happened to TRYX. The camera first got a price cut in the US market due to its poor sales performance. But after Chinese start buying huge numbers of TRYX cameras from US, the price went up from 199 to 320 now. Despite the fact that many american ecommerce sellers are still wondering where the huge demand is coming from, they know they need to raise the price because the camera has some hidden demand. The same price rise happened to HP products like touchpad and palm. There is always connections between Chinese online market and American online market when some american products became hot in China. There is also always a delay of about 3-7 days before american sellers all start to realize there are some one out there buying the products. I assume the 3-7 days period is the best time you get as many orders as you could from China, and start selling as much as you could.

Tryx and Palm phones are not typical cases showing products in US can be sold well in China, but they are the extreme cases. To this point, I also know better than before that whoever controls the social voice online controls the Chinese online market. In another words, social selling is a prominent feature in China.