Social e-commerce in Southeast Asia has suffered frequent setbacks. How can foreign traders find new tracks to achieve a jump in performance?

According to authoritative report data, the traffic of short video e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia will increase by 100% every two months in 2022, and the traffic growth will increase by 100% every quarter in 2023. Hot traffic is pouring into the platform. When many merchants sniff on the short video platform When it comes to new opportunities and performance growth points, under Indonesia's new e-commerce regulations, the good start may be reshuffled.

Recently, Indonesia's Trade Minister Regulation No. 31 issued in 2023 officially came into effect, which explicitly prohibited social media platforms from prohibiting goods and trading activities. It has undoubtedly had a huge impact on the plans of many foreign traders who want to take advantage of the short video e-commerce trend for customer acquisition and promotion.

Enterprise transformation track

Is it feasible to switch to B2B?

From the perspective of merchants in industry segments, B2B business has lower customer acquisition thresholds and lower cost investments than B2C. Cheng Zhen, general manager of Foshan Xincode Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., believes that B2C merchants face users directly and are better at providing services. B2B merchants generally focus on subdivided vertical fields, but this is not a conflict. On the contrary, B2C merchants have the advantage of having many categories, providing them with more choices, and they have also done business through B2B export channels such as Alibaba International Station. She believes that if B2C sellers have no problems with their own products, then as long as they are familiar with and master the customer acquisition rules of the B2B platform, returning to B2B business can be regarded as a "dimensionality reduction blow."

Move to B2B business

It not only expands business opportunities for foreign traders but also promotes local development.

There are mainly two reasons to support it:

First of all, B2B is economic and trade exchanges between countries, and it is also the largest form of trade. In particular, Southeast Asian countries have signed a number of international multilateral free trade agreements with China and other regional countries, including the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which have become the cornerstone and guarantee for the continued deepening and development of B2B trade exchanges. The B2B form can effectively drive the local real economy, and the B2C model based on social platforms will indeed seize a large amount of traffic from local e-commerce platforms.

Secondly, the short video platform e-commerce was banned by Southeast Asian countries this time. The root cause is that this sales model is not recognized. Before short video platform e-commerce became popular, many companies selling on other social media platforms were affected by this ban.

Deeply explore areas of industry expertise

More conducive to developing B2B business

Cheng Zhen believes that B2C merchants often have the advantage of having many categories, providing them with more choices. The B2B market still has huge potential in Southeast Asia, especially in cross-border trade and supply chain cooperation. Therefore, it is reasonable for some merchants to consider returning to B2B to seek more stable and sustainable business development opportunities.

In fact, since the end of last year, Foshan Xincode Technology has made strategic plans in advance. Through the big data analysis platform on the platform, it has discovered that consumption in the Southeast Asian market is on the rise, and has invested in more advertising in this market. Over the past year, the number of business opportunities and customers in Southeast Asia has increased significantly.

This impressive number undoubtedly tells us that no matter what channel we choose, it is unrealistic to expect short-term profits. For the future of the company, we need to consider a long-term business model. Therefore, choosing channels with forward-looking attributes means more profit possibilities for merchants. The future development and growth of enterprises requires not only advance deployment and planning, but more importantly, the use of operational data to combine with the current operation status of the enterprise, so as to use data to drive the positive development of the enterprise.