Specializing in small B customers and launching SaaS products, the old cross-border e-commerce player Dunhuang.com wants to tell a new story?

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Reporter | Xu Shiqi Reporter | Xu Shiqi There are Amazon and Lazada on the left, Ali International Station and AliExpress on the right. Although Dunhuang.com, which was founded 17 years ago, is a veteran player in the cross-border e-commerce platform, it has not squeezed into the top camp. “It was very popular in the first few years, and I have rarely heard of it recently.” People in the industry often have such an impression of it. Dunhuang.com, established in 2004, is China’s first B2B cross-border e-commerce platform. Its founder Wang Shutong was once the CEO of Joyo.com. Today, Dunhuang.com specializes in market segments under the attack of giants: B2B of small and medium-sized enterprises, with fast-moving consumer goods as the main category. In other words, Dunhuang.com plays the role of the Yiwu wholesale market, and its customers are mainly self-employed and small wholesalers. “It is true that Ali is under great pressure, but Dunhuang.com has persisted for so many years, and there is still a resilience.” Liu Sijun, vice president of Dunhuang.com, said in an exclusive interview with Jiemian News. This company had rumors of an IPO as early as 10 years ago. In March of this year, it again reported that it would go public in Hong Kong. In this regard, Dunhuang.com’s response to Jiemian News was “no comment.” A person familiar with the matter commented: “It has been so many years, it is time to go to the (market).” The popularity of cross-border e-commerce in the epidemic has given Dunhuang.com a wave of dividends. According to the foreign trade import and export situation in the first quarter of 2021 released by the General Administration of Customs on April 13, my country’s cross-border e-commerce import and export totaled 419.5 billion yuan in the first quarter, an increase of 46.5% year-on-year, of which exports were 280.8 billion yuan, an increase of 69.3%. The relevant person in charge of Dunhuang.com revealed that the company’s Q1 performance far exceeded 70% compared with the same period last year, and many popular categories such as small household appliances and sports goods have increased by 3-5 times.

Under the market dividend, in August 2020, Dunhuang.com also followed the trend and launched a SaaS product: MyyShop. Users can select sources, products, distribution and sharing on this platform, and they can also build independent stations like Shopify. Internet celebrities or “micro merchants” who have their own private domain traffic overseas can use this to make money.

MyyShop is also a new story told by Dunhuang.com since last year. The company wants to realize the “two-wheel drive” of the two platforms.

If Dunhuang.com is a traditional centralized platform, both buyers and sellers must enter this transaction scenario, and MyyShop is a decentralized platform where end consumers buy goods through social recommendations, and the platform acts as a “drop-in delivery”. The role of. Dunhuang.com has as many SKUs as possible, while MyyShop pays more attention to accurate services to buyers.

Liu Sijun used an example to describe the advantages of a decentralized platform: “For example, if you sell something for 10 yuan on a traditional platform, it sells very well. Soon a big seller will come to imitate it, and you will get free shipping if you sell it for 9 yuan and 5 yuan. He beats you to death first, and then slowly raises the price. But if you are distributing through social platforms, this problem rarely arises.”

He said that Chinese products have gone through the stage of “every penny has to be squeezed to death”. In the next stage, product premiums and independent brands will become possible.

It is understood that the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Italy are the top 5 markets for the platform, and the US market accounts for approximately 56% of Dunhuang.com’s business. With the increasing trade friction between China and the United States and the tide of anti-globalization, how does Dunhuang.com respond?

In this regard, Liu Sijun told Jiemian News: “Although frontal friction cannot be avoided, we directly penetrated the capillaries of the other party and connected with the smallest local retailer. Such penetration cannot be stopped.”

In terms of business model, the platform’s annual operating income mainly comes from commission income and value-added service income (such as big data intelligent marketing, intelligent logistics, etc.). Dunhuang.com currently has more than 2.3 million registered suppliers, more than 32 million online products, and more than 35.5 million registered buyers. It covers 222 countries and regions around the world, has customs clearance capabilities in 58 countries, and more than 100 logistics routes. There are more than 10 overseas warehouses, 65 currency payment capabilities, and global business offices in North America, Latin America, Europe and other places.