Recently, many Hui members have begun to ask about the construction and promotion skills of Huiwang's independent stations, and there are more and more independent stations built and operated by Huiwang. From our point of view, although Amazon's platform involution has been greatly improved this year, everyone seems to have strongly realized that all eggs cannot be put in one basket, and compared to the increasingly competitive platforms, the independent website Seems like a new direction.

At the same time, Amazon’s strict control of customers and internal platform regulations has not only made all sellers have lingering fears, but has also begun to hinder their own development more and more obviously.

Amazon has officially admitted that in the third and fourth quarters of last year, customers began to return to offline physical stores in large quantities, and the sales of independent brands represented by Shopify increased by leaps and bounds after joining forces with platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Walmart, which also impacted Amazon’s market share.

However, Amazon is Amazon after all. Last Thursday in the United States and last Friday in China, Amazon suddenly launched a new service "Buy with Prime" (Amazon Prime member settlement), and announced that all independent sellers can use this service. A new service allows customers to place orders and ship them through Amazon FBA.

Does the launch of this policy mean that Amazon has changed its long-standing policy of prohibiting direct contact between sellers and buyers, and what impact and impact this policy will have on the future cross-border e-commerce landscape? Today Huiwang will tell you in detail. read.

Part 1: Indie beats Amazon

First of all, we use the word "complete victory" to make it clear to everyone that in terms of sales and scale of sellers, the independent website has greatly surpassed Amazon. The obvious representative is the rising star of the global fashion industry – Shein from Nanjing, China .

Two weeks ago, on April 11, major overseas economic and business headlines rushed to report news about Shein's new round of financing. After this round of financing was completed, Shein's market value had exceeded 10 million US dollars, and Shein's share of The global market share has exceeded the sum of the two time fast fashion giants Zara and H&M. And Shein, just 10 years after its founding, has become the most expensive startup in the world, second only to ByteDance and SpaceX.

Here Huiwang needs to remind everyone to pay attention, because this is closely related to the positioning and long-term development of our company:

Comparison of Shein and Anker

1. Anker and Shein are both proud e-commerce brands that have gone from China to the world, but these two companies have chosen completely different development directions. Anker has chosen to focus on Amazon, and the traffic of independent sites is imported into Amazon, while Shein chose the independent station as the main one. Amazon is only one of all sales channels. Today, after a few years, you can see that Anker seems to have gradually faded out of everyone's vision, but Shein has become the world's #1 fast fashion brand .

2. Shein's initial global competitors were Zara, H&M, Uniqlo, which are internationally renowned brands with a small number of digits. Today, Shein has become #1, and everyone needs to know that clothing is one of the three largest categories of sales on Amazon's platform. Amazon itself has nearly 20 self-operated brands (not counting "our brand program"), but the sales of Amazon's official self-operated fast fashion products simply can't compare with Shein. Let's take another look at Anker. It used to be the #1 seller of mobile power banks. Today, whether on Amazon and other platforms or offline markets, Anker's competitors are more and more domestic small and medium-sized sellers. In other words, Anker's brand has been severely diluted by other small and medium-sized sellers on Amazon's platform. Imagine if Shein also chose to use Amazon as the main sales channel at that time, maybe now Shein has been beaten by Amazon Bascis and our brand, as well as countless sellers who stare at Shein's popular styles every day.

3. Looking at the amount of financing and market value, Xu Yangtian, the founder of Shein, may not be familiar to everyone, but his worth is now second only to Elon Musk and Zhang Yiming. Let's take a look at the top sellers on Amazon who invested more money in Amazon's inventory and various promotion methods after financing, but they were bloodbathed by Amazon last year.

After comparing the two companies, it may bring some thoughts to the future development of the company.

Part II: Which sellers are suitable for independent website development?

Although Shein has become a topic and role model for almost every Chinese seller, Huiwang still wants to remind everyone that an independent website is not an option for every seller.

Hui.com has built thousands of independent sites so far, and there are also a lot of independent sites being promoted. We now share with you which sellers are suitable for independent sites based on our experience.

Let's start with Shein, many members often ask us what we think of Shein when communicating with us. We believe that their success is due to several hardware factors:

6 elements behind Shein's success

1. A sub-category vertically instead of becoming a mall across categories

2. Accurately benchmarking all first-line brands. A successful rule for e-commerce is called the "law of inclusion". That is to say, the styles sold by the A brand are not sold by the B brand, and the styles sold by the B brand are not sold by the A brand, so the C brand If the styles of both brands A and B are put on the shelves, C has a greater chance of winning;

3. Strong supply chain advantage, Hui members in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangzhou told us that a local town or the entire clothing fabric market is supplying Shein, and Shein pays very quickly, but the price is very low.

4. Ordinary products are refined. In fact, many overseas customers who receive Shein products think that the quality of Shein products is not good, but because the price is too cheap, they will continue to buy them. At the same time, Shein pays great attention to the art of each product, and makes an ordinary cheap product feel like a first-line brand through visual effects. This is what everyone needs to learn;

5. I invested heavily in traffic marketing. I was fortunate to meet Joshua Schulman, CEO of Michael Kors (former CEO of Coach and Jimmy Choo) at an event, and talked to him about Shein's success. He said that every brand is following a certain The marketing laws will be successful, but mainly depends on how long they can follow these marketing laws.And the marketing law he said is that every year, Shein will invest most of the funds in fashion shows, red carpets, celebrities, models, celebrities, advertisements and many other high-traffic fields.

6. Strong investor structure. In fact, after seeing the above, I believe everyone will think that Shein is backed by huge funds. These investors not only need funds, but also resources to introduce Shein to different channels. When Shein is sued for various issues such as infringement, it will not affect the market value of the entire company. Perhaps from this point, it is not difficult to understand why Shein transferred the main body of the company to Singapore 2 months ago.

After reading the above content, you may ask, who else can do Shein? In fact, our suggestion to everyone here is that no one thought that such a company would be successful before Shein succeeded. At the same time, everyone should not think that they have to learn from Shein or surpass Shein from the beginning. Just stop and think about the following points. Know if you need to do stand alone:

Self-Assessment: Is Standalone Right for You?

1. Do you have a lot of product SKUs, such as clothing and jewelry categories, if many Amazon's FBA stocking methods will make your capital flow and inventory tight, you should consider the independent station model;

2. Whether your product has entered the top 10 of Amazon's accurate category BSR, and has continued sales. If it is, it is very likely that many customers will search for your brand on Google. Without an independent station, you will lose many orders and opportunities;

2. Whether the monthly sales of your main products on Amazon has exceeded 500,000 US dollars, if you suggest that you take a look at the Anker mentioned above, it is recommended that you build your brand image more through independent stations;

However, everyone needs to know that the independent station is not necessarily faster than Amazon in terms of the number of orders or the rate of increase of orders, but the investment and risk are almost small, and the profit will be higher than that of Amazon, and the competition is far less fierce than that of Amazon. Therefore, before starting an independent station, everyone needs to understand that although the investment of an independent station is not as large as capitalized operations, and there can be effective promotion methods with little investment, it is a continuous work.

Part 3: Why is Amazon targeting independent sites now?

After understanding the development of independent stations, now we will take you to learn more about Amazon's new "Buy with Prime" for independent stations.

According to Hui.com, Amazon’s launch of this project at this time was a last resort and carefully planned.

First of all, we have to admit that the comparison of various platforms will find that Amazon's order conversion rate will be higher than other platforms. The main reasons here are 2:

Why is Amazon's conversion rate higher?

1. The "rule of inclusion" introduced above gives Amazon the clear upper hand. Customers looking for products or comparing prices basically only look on Amazon, because Amazon's current product SKUs are much larger than other platforms.

2. Why are some platforms with obvious price advantages such as eBay and wish excluded by most consumers? The reason is that Amazon can provide customers with a unified standard delivery guarantee, that is, 1-day and 2-day delivery for Prime members.

In a word, Western consumers don't value low prices, but pay more attention to delivery timeliness.

At the same time, Shopify’s sales surged on Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday last year, which also shows that more and more Western consumers have become a little bit tired of cheap products, and are more interested in high-quality emerging brands and personalization stronger commodity. The independent website created by Shopify can display products in any form that sellers and brands want, and even Google Shopping, Facebook stores, Instagram product tags, and TikTok stores have made Shopify the standard or even the only e-commerce platform for each platform. At the same time, Shopify's partnership with Stripe, the new payment platform that knocked Paypal out of the throne, has given both companies a boost in business.

On the first day of Amazon's launch of the "Buy with Prime" program, the market broke the news that Shopify was preparing to acquire Deliverr, an American warehousing and logistics company that our Chinese sellers are already very familiar with. We all know that Deliverr is the main partner of Walmart's self-fulfillment, providing almost the same service as Amazon's FBA, and once this acquisition is completed, Shopify will pose a huge threat to Amazon.

And we say that the reason why Amazon launched this policy is a meticulous plan, that is, to see with Amazon its huge number of Prime members in Europe, America and Japan, efficient FBA delivery advantages, and to use Amazon Pay as "Buy with Amazon" and will intercept large amounts of payments and data from independent stations.

Part 4: Explaining Buy with Prime in detail

Now let's take a look at the specific features of Buy with Prime:

From Amazon's promotional page, we can see that Amazon emphasizes 3 points:

Three advantages of Buy with Prime

1. The independent station will have the same timeliness and service guarantee as Amazon FBA delivery

2. Amazon will not interfere with your independent website operation and customer acquisition and communication

3. It is specially proposed that for Amazon FBA sellers, the setting will be very convenient

Next, Amazon continued to respond to several questions that sellers were concerned about:

1. Countries covered

Open to all countries in the world where Amazon FBA has delivery services, this will cover: US, Canada, Mexico, UK, EU, Australia, Southeast Asia

2. Charge standard

Shipping and service fees Amazon’s statement is vague, we think the related fees will be more expensive than FBA delivery fees, but they are similar to the fees for sellers to ship orders through Amazon FBA themselves. At the same time, Amazon pointed out that the relevant fees will include the cost of returning the goods to Amazon.

3. Customer retention

You can obtain, retain and use customer information through Buy with Prime, which is a major breakthrough for Amazon, allowing sellers to directly use Amazon's Prime member contact information

4. Settlement Standard

From the choice of settlement method, Amazon said that this is only a payment option and will not force sellers to only use Amazon's Buy with Prime.

5. Registration process

In terms of the registration process, Amazon requires sellers to register 2 accounts, one is a Buy with Prime logistics account, and the other is an Amazon Pay account. Huiwang is asking Amazon to verify whether it is safe for Chinese sellers to register for Amazon Pay, because we have seen whether there are any Few Chinese sellers have their accounts reviewed immediately after registering for Amazon Pay. After receiving an exact answer from Amazon, they will notify Huiwanghui staff.

Part 5: Buy with Prime and Promotion on Amazon

Perhaps everyone will also be concerned about whether customers placing orders through Buy with Prime can improve the ranking of Amazon's Listing. Although Amazon has not stated in the official document, we believe this is unlikely. Because this is like placing an order for everyone's FBA inventory in the background to deliver the order outside the Amazon site, and it will not bring conversion to the front-end Listing.

However, from an objective point of view, we believe that Buy with Prime will greatly promote the development of independent stations, because it will allow independent stations to have the functions and standards of FBA, and the probability of customers placing orders on independent stations will be greatly improved. At the same time, coupled with the above-mentioned connection between the independent station and Google Shopping, Facebook store, and Instagram mall, it will drive the sales of the independent station to increase rapidly.

In the promotion of Amazon's Buy with Prime, a special item was added: Let Amazon's customers become your own customers. This sentence can be said by Amazon. We really think that the trend of independent stations may be really unstoppable. .

If you need to register for Buy with Prime, you can fill in the form directly. Amazon will provide a green channel for FBA sellers. The link address is:

At the same time, please note that Shopify does not currently provide account manager support for customers registered at the front desk. If you need an account manager in case you encounter an audit in the future, you can submit the information to Shopify for everyone through Huiwang to complete the registration.