This Man Taught Me Global Selling in Five Sentences

1. Product Selection

For 90% of beginners, instead of studying product selection, it's more effective to focus on finding content. If you're still obsessed with traditional ecommerce product selection, think about the various small B business scenarios - one of the ways people quietly make money domestically while being suppressed by competition. This is similar to how application developers start thinking about building small SaaS products.

2. Threshold

Cross-border ecommerce is currently at the end of the "money-grabbing era": sellers of all sizes are dumping high-quality, affordable domestic products and搬运 (repurposing) various high-quality domestic content materials. The more competitive the domestic market becomes, the better the product quality and pricing, which means greater overseas红利 (dividends/opportunities).

If you don't believe me, hang out in my group for three months. You'll find that people who joined at the same time as you and are seriously discussing practical issues will gradually start getting orders. After half a year, they go silent because they're quietly making money. Those who haven't gotten orders are either people who are still watching and waiting, or those who are lazy and greedy.

With Shopify's support, almost anyone can do it - even a dog could do it. But the overseas-bound teams are ready to go, and time is running out for us.

The low threshold is relative. For those who are capable, willing to invest lightly, and have some perseverance, this is absolutely an excellent opportunity. For those who lie down wherever they go, what can I do?

3. Branding

In the current environment, brands can only emerge from two sources:

1. From experienced and well-resourced operation teams that churn out soulless so-called brands like an assembly line.
2. From product-driven or founder-driven approaches, where your product or you as a founder need to have natural product appeal. Ironically, so-called branding expertise can actually diminish this quality.

Simply put, when you start thinking "I want to systematically learn how to build a brand to create an overseas brand," you will most likely become a money-burning fool or someone wasting cross-border ecommerce红利 (opportunities). Because your chance of becoming type 1 is zero, and type 2 comes naturally without force.

For individual sellers, the only thing you can do is force yourself to 【borrow from others】 and operate across all channels, while adding some clumsy human touch. Try to make yourself look less like a scammer and more like a brand. This will differentiate you from those in Guangzhou and Shenzhen who don't even ship products.

Frankly speaking, global selling isn't competitive enough yet - white-label products with decent quality can still sell well. Real branding? Even dogs wouldn't bother.

4. Traffic

I've been emphasizing for two years plus many shares: people who pursue free traffic are either stupid or the lazy and greedy ones mentioned above (unwilling to spend time or money).

The only value of the phrase "free traffic" is for knowledge付费 (paid) influencers to use "I make millions with free traffic" as a hook to cut (exploit) foolish people (including my early self). There's nothing else - not exaggerating at all.

Other similar phrases include: dropshipping, passive income, TikTok no-source inventory. These are major trouble zones, guaranteed to confuse people. Whenever I have traffic anxiety, I browse this kind of content - one post and I catch all the targets.

And the real free traffic players' hidden efforts are much more expensive than so-called paid traffic methods - whether it's the explicit cost of advertising itself, or the various implicit costs of building teams, product research, material testing, sample testing, content testing, team testing, etc.

5. Opportunity

Look at recent news about China's new energy industry - the government stepping in to regulate excessive competition. In the comments section of various short video platforms, netizens' responses are almost unanimously: "Support their competition! The more competition, the better! Consumers benefit in the end!"

Then you flip to their profiles or moments and they're sighing "We're all living hard" mixed with complaints "It's so competitive! It's so hard! Why are Chinese people so competitive!"

Global selling is the same. You see people in groups complaining about competitors being too competitive and getting copied; then they themselves copy from the previous person, just $5 cheaper. It's the same with overseas apps - today you make 10 sites to compete for keywords, tomorrow I make 20 to be more competitive.

So what? We can still make quite a bit of money.

Enough talking - 卷 culture export is imperative.

Going overseas is almost the only opportunity for individual entrepreneurship where individuals are qualified to compete, whether it's overseas ecommerce, overseas apps, or even your single skill ability going overseas. Think about it domestically - what legitimate, low-investment businesses can individuals do? Besides personal IP, monetized content, I really can't think of anything else.

Competition? Meeting truly properly competitive merchants feels incredibly rare these days.

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