GUANGZHOU, China, August 10, 2012 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- The trend of a reduction in ad spending in 2012 will only exacerbate rather than ease. As the most fundamental part of the Internet, traffic matters to both e-commerce and non e-commerce sites. A web site will not have the basic commercial value, if it operates without an average daily IP or average daily UV flow. And, the increase in the absolute number of Internet users has now slowed down, while there's a constant big boost in the absolute number of e-commerce sites, which will just give a harder life to these e-commerce entities, since the traffic will be in short supply, and this situation will just get worse. Thus, the cost of winning traffic will by no means go down, so the final result is easy to see. The cost of online advertising will keep rising.
Ad spending shifts to infrastructure
As the cost of advertising and marketing keeps rising, some large e-commerce sites are still willing to burn money to gain market share, yet focusing not on the ads, but on the construction of their supply chain and logistics systems. These two parts can't be settled with electronic methods, yet are really crucial for commerce, and they primarily determine how competitive the site will be in the market, especially for those larger e-commerce sites. Therefore, money will then mainly be burned on the investment in infrastructure, and we'll see a restraint in the growth of ad spending.
This is also the case with SooBest, which is going to set up its branches in New York, London and Hong Kong, respectively, concentrating on warehousing, logistics, and e-marketing, and the priority will be given to building the logistics systems.
Supply chain focus on quality & efficiency
The supply chain of the traditional business fails to meet the needs of today's e-commerce. Compared with traditional business, the whole supply chain of the e-commerce goods has been significantly shortened. And, information symmetry has lead to some logistics congestion, because high-quality goods are sought after by a huge number of consumers at the same time. In addition, the growth in choices has also greatly pushed consumers' pursuit of personalization. The three points above all require e-commerce companies to have a high-speed and flexible supply system. Even a slight mistake may result in the freeze of funds on goods, and thus a sharp increase in the cost, and even worse, the funding strand breaks.
Diversified products replace single category
Things have changed a lot. Now, shops offering items of a single brand have found no increase in ROI, and customers have gotten used to buying from one-stop stores, and the e-commerce companies also found that one-stop shopping sites have higher conversion rates and strong customer stickiness than the ones providing a single category of items, so more and more e-commerce companies start diversifying their products from a single category. And this trend will continue spreading during 2012.
SooBest commits to the integration of tens of thousands of traditional Chinese manufacturers and online retailers, and sells all kinds of cheap but fine products to consumers around the world. At present SooBest is working with over 1,000 manufacturers in different industries, offering more than 150,000 kinds of commodities. The number is still growing by thousands each week, which is the case in its wedding dresses, party dresses, fashion jewelry and fashion watches, etc.
Traffic flows to hot new apps
E-mails, forums, portal sites, search engines, instant messaging tools, e-commerce platforms, SNS, group-buy sites and LBS, all are able to gather a large number of users every time new applications come out and thus affected the network traffic. In 2012, people will mainly be more active on the applications put forward by the SNSs. Although the search engine will continue to play a major role for a long time, in terms of both the concept and functionality, the SNS featuring great interactions and value of user-made information will change people's habits of dealing with information. Then the importance of search engines will go down with the more and more powerful functions of SNS. This is the trend, but there will not be a qualitative change in 2012.
SooBest is trying to become a platform that knows consumers and understands the essential quality of commerce the best. So, it sticks to building integrity, shortening the complete supply chain, perfecting the competition system and its commodity selection to recommend to consumers. All of these will continue attracting both more buyers and sellers, which means more visits to the site. Besides, SooBest also will add SNS elements to its platform according to their own understanding, to maximize the value of the interactive features and to attract more buyers and sellers to participate.
