How to choose foreign trade B2B platform to develop customers?

At this stage, among the channels for developing foreign trade customers, developing customers through the B2B platform and opening up overseas markets account for a large part of them.



For our importers and exporters, the major B2B platforms provide us with a platform for releasing products and buying and selling information. Through the promotion and drainage of the platform, we promote our companies and products and obtain inquiries from foreign buyers. The three commonly used B2B platforms include Alibaba, Global Sources, and Made in China.

For the B2B platform, it is in turn using the products and trading information resources released by the supplier to attract more registered and paid members to join. Because the main profit models of the B2B platform are: first, by placing advertising revenue in the form of text and pictures on the platform; second, by collecting membership fees; third, bid ranking and transaction costs of product keywords; in addition, the B2B platform will also provide some value-added services such as email and consulting, as well as some offline services for marketing planning and corporate training.

Many foreign trade companies will require salespersons to register for free B2B platforms to publish products, buy and sell information, and other daily operations. This method will also get some enquiries, but the time and energy invested are often not proportional to the enquiry quality. The reason is that these B2B platforms are constantly developing new suppliers, but these suppliers have not been rigorously screened, and the quality is uneven.

When foreign buyers search for products and find suppliers on the platform, there is no way to distinguish the quality of the suppliers, and they can only choose the right ones through group inquiry. In addition, the price competition between suppliers on the B2B platform is fierce, and many suppliers will try to grab customers by reducing their profits. Perhaps some customers' small orders will also compete on the B2B platform. In this foreign trade environment, small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises whose products lack price competitiveness have greatly reduced their living space.

In addition, there are so many domestic foreign trade B2B platforms, including the free and the paid, and the quality of the platform and the customer base are uneven. How to judge and choose an effective foreign trade B2B platform?

The first is to look at the overseas promotion efforts of the B2B platform. Because this determines the platform's traffic, whether your product can be seen by more foreign consumers, including search engine search, advertising, marketing, and so on. Here, it is obvious that you can see the country of the customer group that visits the B2B platform. In fact, it is the proportion of Chinese suppliers visiting and foreign buyers visiting. If most of them are Chinese suppliers, the use of this B2B platform may be more general.

Second, how wide is the radiation surface of the B2B platform. How many countries and regions can be radiated by the platform, and how many potential buyers and customers will browse this platform, and use this platform to send inquiries, inquiries, etc. to suppliers.

Another point is actually closely related to our suppliers. When foreign customers search for a product, B2B platform products and trading information will appear in the search results. Customers click to see the product and supplier information displayed on the platform. If they are interested, they may register on this platform and start to make inquiries about prices, etc.

At this time, the quality of the products we publish and the internal pages of the website are critical, and we need to constantly optimize and upgrade the internal pages of our website on the B2B platform, including uploading product keywords, long-tail word associations, picture beautification, marketing copywriting, etc. This is a mutually beneficial and win-win process. On the one hand, the B2B platform is equivalent to doing network optimization and promotion; on the other hand, our suppliers have improved the quality of their products, internal pages of the website, and the probability of being searched by consumers. Of course, while we passively obtain enquiries through the B2B platform, we must also actively explore some new channels for developing customers.