Pros and Cons of Independent Sites for Global E-commerce: A Real Solopreneur's Experience
An in-depth analysis from a real independent site seller: 4 major advantages and 5 disadvantages of independent sites to help newcomers understand the global selling model.
Background
Currently, I'm running a pure white-hat independent site alone as a solopreneur. It's been a little over a year, with average weekly revenue around 15k RMB, ROAS around 3, and profit margin around 40%. Social media followers have accumulated to 9.2k.
Since I put more energy into content creation and related services, my daily effort on the global e-commerce independent site accounts for at most 10%! (I consider it equivalent to a side hustle)
Interested readers can check my previous weekly reports:
The reason I'm sharing this background is to clarify that the following content comes from a real independent site seller, different from pure service sellers (though I sell too), pure media perspectives, or pure employee perspectives. I'm confident my content will help those who are actually hands-on.
Problems I hope to solve: Newbies often ask: Can independent sites work? Are they easy? Should I do platforms or independent sites? I hope this inspires you.
Reminder again: Don't be like the pony crossing the river, don't have high eyes but low hands. This content is purely subjective personal opinion. Please view it dialectically according to your own conditions.
What Are the Advantages of Independent Sites?
We've seen people with various identities entering independent sites in recent years. They can be:
- Newbies like me who are poor and don't want heavy investment
- Mature domestic new consumer brands
- New brands that choose overseas directly because they find domestic market too competitive
- Platform veteran sellers
- Many second-generation factory owners, etc.
Why? What attracts them?
1. Stability, Controllability, and High Autonomy
This is especially attractive to platform veterans. Compared to being constrained by platforms and various restrictions, independent sites are entirely under your control—your return policies, most products don't need various certifications, etc.
How free are independent sites? They can even completely fail to fulfill orders! This is also a cancer in the industry—they play the non-delivery game, endlessly creating new sites, endlessly marking low prices, driving traffic with ads, and not delivering after users buy.
They make money, while white-hat independent site players suffer:
- First, ad costs surge because non-delivery players have no product shipping costs, so they can advertise more aggressively
- Second, users are educated—the trustworthiness of independent sites is already fatal for new sites and brands, and one non-delivery site after another makes foreigners distrust independent sites again
I often receive customer questions: "Why haven't I received my goods yet? Are you a scam?"
As for other "free" play methods, just imagine—selling replicas, fakes, black hat products. As long as you have the ability and are slightly profit-driven, independent sites can give you "opportunities."
2. Low Cost to Some Extent
Unlike platforms' restrictions on inventory, most newbies are discouraged by Amazon and other platforms' heavy upfront product investment. Independent sites can ship directly from China without stocking up, buying only after orders come in or using dropshipping.
Of course, newbies please note—I'm saying "to some extent." For those without operational capabilities, you may save on product costs, but you have no idea about time costs and later promotion costs.
No blogger online will tell you the real situation in such detail because every day you only see content like "Organic traffic exploded, side hustle newbies can do it too"—content that harvests kidneys.
3. Sustainable and Accumulable
This is personally what I think is the most attractive aspect of independent sites:
- SEO is accumulable
- Social media is accumulable
- Data is accumulable
- Users are accumulable
Platform players fear sudden traffic restrictions, fear someone targeting them, fear sudden link removal and instant annihilation, etc.
But independent sites—as long as you don't play dirty and work deeply—their trajectory will be forever upward. Remember, forever.
Social media followers always belong to your own social media accounts, SEO always belongs to your domain.
4. High Ceiling and High Barrier
The operational ceiling of independent sites is extremely high, which is why many brands going overseas must do independent sites—because operational strategies around independent sites can more comprehensively market your brand.
Or conversely, when we want to operate a new brand overseas, instead of dumping all traffic into a third-party e-commerce platform, why not sink into my own independent site and private domain? Thus achieving continuous brand growth.
Therefore, the higher ceiling gives individuals or teams with stronger capabilities and resources more room for development.
Correspondingly, its barrier must be higher than platforms. High barriers are good for some people because this filters out some inferior coins and mindless competitors.
What Are the Disadvantages of Independent Sites?
1. High Learning Cost, Large Information Gap, Getting Harvested or Giving Up Upon Entry
There isn't much effective, real information about independent sites on the domestic internet. I always joke that despite my large community and lively online discussions about global e-commerce independent sites, almost all are newbies brainwashed by "misleading" content who are just watching. Few actually follow through.
Online content is constantly:
- "This site has tens of millions in revenue, what did they do right"
- "Post-00s selling xx, half a year for a luxury apartment"
- "Newbie side hustle blew up on TikTok in one month"
- "SEO free traffic is so good, 100k+ monthly passive income"
And this content's misleading and destructive power to newbies is incredible, giving them extremely unrealistic expectations for global e-commerce independent sites.
At this point, slightly rational people will look for more authentic and reliable information sources to continue watching or even try lightly—but you'll see, 99% do it without making a sound.
Less rational ones immediately ask for guidance and materials, then angrily pay 9999. You think you bought a ticket to riches, but you actually just bought a second-hand iPhone 8 and a garbage template tutorial from the seafood market at 1 yuan per GB.
And your "teacher" may not even know what an independent site is. Their only skill is weaving various dreams for online韭菜. They harvested personal IP incubation yesterday, global e-commerce today, and AI tomorrow. The套路 never changes,韭菜 forever follow.
2. For Some People, Too Much Freedom Doesn't Suit Some Chinese Temperaments
Especially for traditional "good students" and screw-type workers—because most of our education and work environments are rule-following, step-by-step, doing things according to established rules. Once this束缚 is gone, people反而 become uncomfortable and feel directionless.
Not to mention active exploration—let's put it this way: 90% of newbies don't even use Google search to find and answer their questions.
Back to independent sites—too much freedom means independent sites have very diverse play methods:
- It can be a buyer dropshipping store selling many杂货, or a single-product store
- It can be building your own small brand from 0-1, or selling replicas or even not delivering
- It can be TikTok爆款 one-wave wealth, or SEO deep cultivation
Therefore, this causes most newbies (including me initially) to be confused and at a loss, seeing countless choices and directions but not knowing where to start, feeling like they want to do everything but can't get results anywhere.
3. High Requirements for Comprehensive Operational Capabilities
Compared to platforms, cross-border e-commerce platforms mostly have standardized processes and兜底 traffic, allowing newbies to at least quickly see and touch results by following processes.
Independent sites are different—no兜底 traffic, no pre-built infrastructure (like payment, logistics, etc.).
Therefore, you need complete 0-1 setup, 0-1 driving traffic to your own site. The chain is long, business content is complex, solopreneurs can't have obvious weaknesses, and teams need to complement each other.
4. Unfriendly Environment for Chinese
This refers to two types: hard restrictions and foreigners' "stereotypes" of Chinese.
Hard restrictions include network environment, qualifications to open various platforms and tools, etc. In my earliest stages, the most helpless and崩溃 moments were various restrictions I couldn't solve through personal effort.
Initially, ChatGPT couldn't be used normally,科学上网 suddenly stopped working, various platform bans, etc.—any of these problems would block you for 1-5 days. During these days, you'd feel particularly helpless. Why is it so hard to do legitimate and compliant things properly? I believe most newbies will experience this stage—too desperate and painful.
As for foreigners' "stereotypes" of Chinese, I won't elaborate much, but I've received similar evaluations multiple times: "This is Chinese dropshipping garbage, please don't buy"; some even directly called me a scam.
On one hand, I'm angry at being wrongly accused but still try my best to explain and process refunds for customers. On the other hand, I understand them because I know too well how many Chinese people deceive foreign customers in cross-border e-commerce through non-delivery, fake goods, and no after-sales service.
5. Facing Impact from Various Emerging Platforms and Capital, the Existence Meaning of Independent Sites is Questionable
This is an open topic for me, and also the core reason why most domestic players feel质疑.
With the heavy impact of several emerging domestic e-commerce platforms in recent years and their penetration of overseas users' e-commerce shopping mentality, will there be a day when foreign users heavily rely on mainstream e-commerce platforms and abandon the independent site shopping format?
I don't know.
