Did you know online marketplaces that allow cross-border trade are enormous drivers of economic growth? The coronavirus pandemic has drastically altered consumer behaviour since social distancing has brought the digital universe into people’s lives to a much greater degree. Now it’s high time to say more about people and companies that impact cross-border ecommerce.
When it comes to marketplaces, who should you pay attention to? Which trends should you follow? Check our key takeaways from the report created by The Paypers.
#1 Learn Brazilian marketplace insights from Bexs Bank
Bexs bank is a Brazilian bank focused on providing cross-border payment services and performing FX transactions for global digital businesses, SaaS, and investments. They help big and small companies to connect with customers in the digital world. Why is it so important?
In Brazil, banking services are generally quite expensive. Fifty-five million Brazilians have no ties to these institutions. They have limited access to credit cards and use payment slips. Another local reality is that only 5% of Brazilians have credit cards that can be used internationally, so very few can make purchases in foreign currencies.
For Bexs Bank, this market is attractive. After all, Brazil has more than 210 million people, and around 100 million of them make online purchases, meaning it is a large consumer market. The ecommerce segment has seen annual double-digit growth and achieved revenue increase of 16.3% in the last cycle. What’s more, in 2019, the ecommerce cross-border segment’s revenue grew 67% to the previous year! Plus, the number of Brazilians making purchases on international sites in 2019 rose 18%.
#2 Alibaba.com reintroducing payments
It’s the first business unit of Alibaba Group who wants to make it easy to do business anywhere. Alibaba.com is engaged in services covering all aspects of commerce, including providing businesses with tools that help reach a global audience for their products. It serves millions of buyers and suppliers from over 200 countries and regions around the world.
Companies such as Alibaba.com offer services that can help de-risk global trade, such as a digital freight service, so that companies can compare, book, manage, and track ocean and air freight in real-time and seamlessly arrange bulk shipments, as well as escrow and online payment, for buyers and sellers to transact with peace of mind. But Alibaba.com has something more. They introduced Alibaba.com Payment Terms, which provides 60-day payment terms on invoice to help with the cash crunch that comes from the longer lead and transit times involved in global trade.
#3 Jumia tackling cross-border ecommerce
Jumia is a leading ecommerce platform in Africa. Jumia is built around a marketplace, Jumia Logistics and JumiaPay. The marketplace connects hundreds of thousands of sellers to millions of consumers. Jumia Logistics enables thousands of partners to deliver millions of packages. JumiaPay facilitates online transactions for Jumia’s ecosystem. Jumia’s goal is to become the go-to online platform for African shoppers by addressing this future online cross-border market.
Cross-border ecommerce is gaining ground as well, with African consumers displaying a big appetite for items from abroad, which are mainly ordered via ecommerce platforms. Online commerce between the African markets has massive potential, and it is expected to further develop in the next ten years. Africa has a large share of the unbanked population, with 62% of Sub-Saharan Africans not having a bank account. The good news is that technological advancements, smartphone affordability supplied by Jumia, and mobile connectivity have enabled those in the region to manage their money without opening a bank account. Despite this, Jumia must face problems like lack of credit card circulation, lower card acceptance rates versus mature markets or paying in cash.
#4 Be | Shaping the Future to boost the growth
It’s a management consultancy and transformational digital engagement and solutions firm dedicated to the ever-evolving financial services ecosystem. They serve clients by helping them to shape their journey through offering specialist content advice, digital services, and innovatively orchestrating end to end solutions.
Be | Shaping the future helps in various areas. They reckon that marketplaces should consider the two separate exposure areas – seller onboarding and transactional fraud management – as part of the overall platform service and think about offering tools for managing these risks.
The added value will enable the instruments to reduce losses while increasing returns. Marketplaces can employ fraud management experts, which smaller sellers would not be able to do if they handled this directly.
#5 Vanessa Culver to reduce operational costs
Vanessa Culver leverages her 10+ years in financial and payments operations and strategy for global ecommerce companies to deliver a broad view of both merchant and payment provider perspective to generate billions in additional revenue and save millions in operational costs.
As the world has become a global economy where online marketplaces enable purchasing power across countries, it poses an excellent opportunity for merchants to expand their global footprint. Vanessa Culver is aware of this and helps others to understand it. She tells about various payment method offerings globally like Adyen, who currently offers almost 100 payment methods across the different payment channels: credit and debit cards, cash and ATM payment methods, direct debit, online banking, open invoice, prepaid, and wallets. Given the variety, it is essential to curate for best fit to ensure what is above the fold is the most relative to that customer base and does not create decision fatigue. She claims merchants have a lot to consider with payment offerings when serving a global customer base. The strategy stretches across both treasury and platform, and the level of abstraction relative to each area will be correlated to the merchant’s maturity within the respective site.
Źródło: Cross-Border Payments and Ecommerce Report 2020-2021
#6 Zalando marking its position
Zalando is Europe’s leading online platform for fashion and lifestyle, and Floriane Gramlich is the Director of Product for Zalando Payments. As Europe’s most fashionable tech company, they want to find digital solutions for every aspect of the fashion journey: customers, partners, and every valuable player in the Zalando story. Their goal is to become The Starting Point for Fashion and a sustainable platform with a net-positive impact on people and the planet.
Zalando knows that the Payment Services Directive (PSD) impacts everyone dealing with payments. Introducing this solution was needed as more and more ecommerce business models emerged, and hence ecommerce was growing fast. Fintechs, neobanks, wallet providers, and merchants like Zalando from all over Europe not only recognise the challenges but also work hard on reducing the friction that comes with the new regulatory directive. Ultimately, it is also about the safety of the entire process.
To sum up
This report provides many valuable pieces of information about cross-border ecommerce. It shows the cross-border business is increasing in importance for many countries. Finding the right online global commerce strategy is the key to long-term business growth.
Check key takeaways from the report created by The Paypers.
