China’s Import Market - The Cross-border E-Commerce and The“Grey buyer”

Abstract

With the development of the Internet and the globalization of economy, at the same time, In china people's income growth and the consumers' purchasing power is growing, they have a higher demand for high quality life, thus the new way of purchasing "haitao(海淘)" can make consumers spend less money in foreign countries to buy more high quality goods, this huge demand for foreign goods stimulates the overseas’ purchasing agency, which known as “daigou(代购)” also called buyer. Some overseas daigou are individuals, who enter the country can help relatives and friends to buy the goods according they need. Some others act as professional purchasing agency, that is, they resident abroad for a long time or they often travel abroad for buying the goods required by consumers, because the goods has not been listed in China or cross-border price difference is bigger, they make profit by selling these goods little higher than the original price, then carry back by Courier or in baggage directly to consumers. According to the data, there have been about 100,000 overseas daigou sellers in China over the past two years, and the overseas purchasing market has been trading at more than 100 billion RMB. Of course, there are some problems with overseas purchasing. On the one hand, there are few cases where the daigou is punished for the type or quantity of goods brought into the country in violation of customs regulations; On the other hand, the main body of overseas daigou is a person, which decides that it is unable to form scale operation and become thrive. Along with the rapid development of electronic commerce, the Chinese cross-border e-commerce platform such as Tmall Global, JD.com Global, Kaola, emerge as the times require under the support of national policy in China, when these e-commerce company turned to overseas, obviously those weak overseas individual daigou will be squeezed, not only market space is occupied by cross-border e-commerce, but also many of the original overseas buyers has conveniently been recruited by the e-commerce platform. At present, there are over 5,000 cross-border e-commerce platform enterprises in China, and more than 200 thousand enterprises are involved in cross-border e-commerce through various platforms. The number of cross-border e-commerce transactions in China reached 6.3 trillion yuan in 2016, more than double the amount of 2013, and expects to reach 8.8 trillion yuan by 2018. In recent years, China's retail cross-border e-commerce platform has been set up one after another, they continue improving the user experience in the fierce competition to promote the continuous and steady growth of cross-border e-commerce transactions. This paper will describe and analyze the existing cross-border e-commerce market and the overseas personal grey daigou, and try to give solutions to the existing problems.