Xinhua Insight: Cross-border e-commerce luring Chinese shoppers, global traders

In a conference room at the international exhibition center in the southern coastal city of Xiamen, Phil Teng, vice president with Amazon Global Logistics China, is answering questions about cross-border delivery services.

From deliveries during peak season to border clearance, representatives from over 100 countries who attended an event on cross-border e-commerce during the ongoing 19th China International Fair for Investment & Trade were keen to find ways to improve their services.

International e-commerce is a huge market, and competition to attract global consumers, especially Chinese shoppers, is fierce.

"Global trade growth has been slower than economic growth for four years while in comparison, cross-border e-commerce grew fast because it reduced trade costs and streamlined the international trade chain," said Lu Pengqi, deputy head with China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

China's total transaction volume was 5.4 trillion yuan (810 billion U.S. dollars) in 2015, up 28.6 percent year on year, according to Lu.

Estimates say this will hit 12 trillion yuan by 2020, when half of China's digital shoppers -- or more than a quarter of the 1.4 billion who live here -- will be buying foreign products online.

A report released by Alibaba and consultancy firm Accenture last year predicted that international e-commerce retail transactions would post a compound annual growth rate of 27.3 percent by 2020.

Alibaba's proposal for an Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP) was mentioned in the communique of the just-concluded G20 Hangzhou Summit. The communique declared support for policies that would encourage firms to take full advantage of the global value chain and improve their online presence.

"By promoting digital trade, we will accumulate transaction data, which will help improve enterprises' credit performance and efficiency, thus, helping them with financing and other resources," said Ren Geng, general manager with Alibaba's cross-border division.

For small-and-medium-sized enterprises, international e-commerce means new market opportunities and a larger customer base, while the fledgling business-to-business (B2B) international e-commerce market has yet to fully capitalize on the opportunities, observed Scott Ferguson, CEO with the World Trade Centers Association.

Anna Kuzmina, chief commercial officer with Yandex Money, a leading payment service provider in Russia, said that Russia's e-commerce market had exploded in recent years thanks to e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba.

Localization remains crucial to cross-border e-commerce development in foreign markets.

Chinese companies should be aware of foreign consumers' shopping habits and commercial culture, adjust their marketing strategies and work with local companies along the industrial value chain to help them expand into the local market, Kuzmina said.

"At the end of the day, business is something between people. Human interaction will never become obsolete even when information and technology are changing our world," Ferguson said. Endi