21 de June de 2024 - zeumat
They don’t know since when it started, but “代购（dài gòu）”has become a “thing of the past”.
What is “代购（dài gòu）”?
“代购（dài gòu）” is a person or a group of people who buy foreign products for Chinese customers, in a foreign country. For example, a group of people in Spain selling Spanish products to Chinese customers.
Nowadays, you can buy foreign products on online cross-border e-commerce platforms at similar prices. Prices in physical shops, e.g. in airports, duty-free shops no longer have a competitive economic advantage.
What exactly is the reason for this?
According to some industry experts, cross-border e-commerce platforms are booming because they provide sales opportunities for all foreign brands, especially niche brands, and at the same time also offer more choice to domestic consumers.
Foreign brands can “test the waters” on the cross-border e-commerce platform, and after getting to know the Chinese market better, subsequently enter traditional international trade sales channels.
As consumers can get to know foreign brands through various channels on the Internet. People are no longer satisfied with “getting a foreign product” but also want to make a purchase that has a good price-quality range. Therefore, the traditional “代购（dài gòu）” no longer competes with the cross-border e-marketplace, as they cannot offer the same diversity of products.
Lao Guling, the director of the e-commerce research centre at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, believes that another key contradiction of the “代购（dài gòu）” is that it is difficult to distinguish the authentic from the fake.
The Chinese government has implemented a positive list of products allowed to be imported through cross-border retail e-commerce. That is, products that are not on the list are not allowed to be imported into China.
This also means that cross-border e-commerce platforms must introduce cross-border products from legal sourcing channels, along with the cross-border e-commerce platforms’ own regulations and after-sales service. All these initiatives have considerably reduced the risk of consumers buying counterfeit products.
The cross-border supply chain system is becoming more and more complete; buying a foreign product is just like buying from a local shop. Today, there are more than 100 integrated bonded warehouses across China, with most cross-border product orders arriving the next day to consumers.
Thanks to the development of bonded warehouses in recent years, the product reaches customers more quickly.
Bonded warehouses are warehouses authorised by customs for the storage of imported goods and will not be subject to customs laws and import control regulations.
Imported and stored goods may be modified, classified, sampled, mixed and reprocessed within the warehouse under customs authorisation and control. These goods will be duty-free if re-exported. And if they are sold in China, through cross-border e-commerce, they do not have to pay duty on the goods.
Since the term “cross-border e-commerce” was first introduced in the “Government Work Report 2014”, a decade has passed. In 2023, the size of China’s import cross-border e-commerce market was 551.77 billion yuan, grew by 3.9% compared to 2022 figures. As of today, cross-border e-commerce accounts for 5.7% of China’s goods imports and exports, compared to 1% in 2015.
Gao Jiang, Gao Jiang, Research Assistant at the Institute of World Economy, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said that the constant changes in cross-border e-commerce policies are to adapt to the needs of the market and at the same time, encourage the development of the cross-border e-commerce industry.
As China opens up more to the outside world, the cross-border demand of domestic consumers will diversify. At a new starting point, in the next decade, cross-border e-commerce must continue to seek new changes to find new growth points.
Written by Wenyang Zhong
Source: Knews
