U.S. merchants selling on eBay Inc.’s marketplace are getting an assist from Chinese e-commerce services provider Xiu.com to start selling products to online shoppers in China. Since November, Xiu.com has been helping U.S. eBay merchants to set up shops on Chinese e-marketplaces such as 360Buy.com, Jingdong Mall and Tmall.com, a unit of Alibaba Group, and handling their international fulfillment needs.
Alibaba Group is No. 1 in Internet Retailer’s 2013 Asia 500. Jingdong Mall is No. 3
Xiu.com created a sub-site, eBay.xiu.com, to sell items from those sellers, which the site refers to as “eBay style.” On that site, the vendor translates U.S. merchants’ product listings into Chinese and localizes the product descriptions for Chinese shoppers, eBay says. For instance, Chinese customers typically request more detailed photos of a product before they place an online order and Chinese clothing sizes differ from U.S. sizes—details Xiu.com handles for American sellers.
When a Chinese buyer orders a product from a U.S. merchant, Xiu.com buys product on her behalf and ships it to its fulfillment center in Texas. Since Xiu.com can aggregate multiple orders from many buyers and ship them all together, it helps merchants reduce the costs of cross-border shipping by as much as 40%, it says. Xiu.com says it plans to open a second fulfillment center in Los Angeles this year.
Xiu.com also employs 10 professional appraisers who inspect the products to make sure buyers receive authentic goods; they also give feedback to U.S sellers after the transaction. Chinese customers need to wait at least 10 days for products bought in the United States to reach them, the vendor says.
“The Chinese retailing industry is so fragmented that new brands can hardly find a national department store chain to cooperate with, and so the speed for expanding there would be very slow otherwise,” Wenhong Ji, founder and CEO of Xiu.com, tells Internet Retailer.
Besides eBay, Xiu.com works with other overseas online marketplaces or retailers, like South Korean online market platform Gmarket.com, U.S apparel retailer Karmaloop.com and U.S online jewelry retailer Blue Nile Inc. More than 300 brands use Xiu.com to sell products in China, including Gucci, American Apparel Inc. and The Children’s Place Retail Stores Inc., the company says.
The average ticket price for a Xiu.com client is $90 and its sites have 300,000 to 400,000 unique visitors per day. The vendor takes a service fee of about 20% on all clients’ sales, it says. Xiu.com’s sales were $150 million in 2012 and it expects to grow by 20% this year, it says.
Gmarket is a unit of eBay Inc., No. 7 in the 2013 Asia 500.
Karmaloop is No. 118 in the 2013 Top 500 Guide; Blue Nile, No. 74; American Apparel, No. 284 and The Children’s Place, No. 112.
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