Close-up of people who help foreigners shop in Taobao.

On the first floor of an old house in Jing 'an District, Shanghai, more than 50 foreign girls exchanged clothes, bags and ornaments excitedly while drinking Sangria fruit wine. They are taking part in an offline "spring exchange" activity.

This four-story old villa currently belongs to a 40-person entrepreneurial team. They handle about 5,000 trading orders on Taobao and Tmall every day, almost from foreigners living in China.

However, these people are not Alibaba employees. They all belong to a startup company called Baopals.

Baopals's "treasure" is Taobao's "treasure", and "pals" means "buddy" in Chinese; As the name implies, Baopals means "Taobao's buddy". Baopals is an online shopping guide platform designed to help foreigners in China shop in English on Taobao and Tmall. Through it, merchants on Taobao and Tmall can also locate "foreigners" in China more accurately.

Shopping online on e-commerce platforms such as Taobao is really a common thing for China people today. However, if you are a foreigner who doesn't understand Chinese, things are not that simple.

"Life in China is great, but it can also be very difficult, because everything is designed around China people," Jay Saulnier, an American, admitted to interface fashion.

There are natural language barriers for foreigners to shop on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Tmall, and there is no special English e-commerce platform in China market. Many foreigners in China don't know much about the overseas version of Taobao. Even Amazon China (Amazon.cn), once the closest to the English-speaking world, only interspersed some English words in Chinese-based web pages, and talking is better than nothing.

The e-commerce environment in China has now entered an era of full competition, and the winner-takes-all situation has basically been laid. Amazon China just announced the closure of its e-commerce business in China in April this year, which marked that the e-commerce giant, which was invincible in the global market, lost a battle in China.

Over the years, with the strong development and fierce competition of China local e-commerce companies such as Taobao, Tmall, JD.COM and Pinduoduo, the e-commerce business of Amazon China has been losing ground. After missing several important time nodes of e-commerce development in China (such as the trend of platformization), Amazon China lost the patience of its partners, gradually lost its consumers in China, and finally lost its living space in the e-commerce market.

Embarrassed, Amazon's e-commerce business in China can't keep consumers in China, nor can it keep Amazon's overseas users. Robert, an Englishman who once lived in China, said, "I never use Amazon China to buy things, nor do most of my foreign friends in China."

In their eyes, Amazon China serves China consumers, which is different from Amazon's global website. "Even if we choose English on Amazon China, you will still see many Chinese paragraphs on the page." Jay Thornill, who lives in Shanghai and is from California, said, "For a long time, there was no online shopping platform for foreigners in China."

So foreigners can't buy online in China?

Before the founding of Baopals, like most foreigners who don't know Chinese, the three founders would ask their friends in China to pay first and then return the money to their friends when they had to shop. However, after realizing this blank market and the pain point of consumption, Jay persuaded Charles Erickson and Tyler McNew, also from the United States, to set up Baopals in March of 20 16.

In the early days, the operation mode of Baopals was to grab information on Taobao and Tmall platforms and then translate it into English. Baopals also provides customers with a call center to help them speed up transactions and logistics. A service charge of 5% will be charged for every product purchased by customers.

In addition, the website will charge users a fixed fee of 2 yuan to 8 yuan according to the different unit prices. For goods with a unit price lower than that of 30 yuan, each item is charged to 2 yuan, 30-60 yuan to 4 yuan, 60-90 yuan to 6 yuan, and 90 yuan to 8 yuan.

Today, Bao pars's team has 15 foreign employees and 25 China employees. From the first small apartment, Baopals also moved his office to this old villa that combines Chinese and Western styles. Prior to this, the Baopals team worked briefly in an office building. "But we soon felt that the environment was not in harmony with our team atmosphere, and we preferred an office environment that was more like home."

The cumulative sales of Baopals20 18 is 70 million yuan, which is about six times that of three years ago. In the fourth year, Baopals currently registered 45,000 users, accumulated 600,000 orders and sold 2.6 million products.

In other words, each registered user buys an average of 59 items. The user activity of Baopals is quite high.

"Baopalswap" is an offline "changing clothes" activity held by Baoyou for foreign women regularly. Female consumers are the most active consumer groups on this platform at present.

In fact, Bao pars's male users (49.5%) and female users (50.5%) account for almost half, but their consumption behaviors are completely different. Female users stay on the Baopals platform for far longer than male users. They spend more time searching and browsing products, and have higher participation and activity on the platform.

Now, women's wear has become the largest department in Baopals. Compared with the second-ranked "electronic and office" products, the number of female products exceeds nearly one-third.

But in fact, according to the original plan, the founding team of Baopals did not intend to focus on the sales of women's products. Charlie, who was involved in content and marketing from the beginning, said, "We know nothing about women's wear" because the three founders are all men. "We only write what we know, such as the surrounding areas related to Game of Thrones, alcoholic products and electronic products."

Therefore, when Baopals hired the first employee, the content produced by the platform changed rapidly. Because this employee number one is a girl.

"Women will buy a lot of clothes and shoes, which seems to be a fixed stereotype, but it is true," said the Baopals team.

Content specifically aimed at female consumers has become imperative and crucial for the development of Blancpain. 2065438+2008 10, different from the main blog, the independently operated content blog "Baopals Style" was officially launched. At present, the blog is updated once a week, and the content can be read in official website and WeChat official accounts.

Ginger, the content director of "Baopals Fashion", told Interface Fashion that they would capture the search trend data of female users on Baopals, and combine the seasonal trends of women's wear, shoes, handbags, beauty cosmetics and other products on foreign social media to write seasonal wear suggestions for female users mainly aged 25-34 on the platform, and recommend quality products on Taobao and Tmall.

"Baopals Fashion" has launched a series of topics: "Fashion of the Week". This series mainly summarizes and recommends women's wear, handbags and shoes sold for the first time on the platform of Baopals in the past week.

The content team will also launch three independent feature articles on the same day to recommend suitable products for different topics. For example, "nine essential skin care products for pregnant women" and "3 steps to rejuvenate your skin" and so on.

Baopals aims to solve the pain points of foreigners shopping on the e-commerce platform in China. In terms of content, the team is also actively recommending products that are most suitable for foreigners.

"Baopals Fashion" once wrote a recommendation article on "Beijing Old Cloth Shoes" to foreign girls, because Jiang found out in the background that foreign girls seemed to like Beijing Old Cloth Shoes very much. "They must think that the old cloth shoes in Beijing are both comfortable and fashionable."

For another example, in view of the huge demand for oversized women's wear on the platform, in April this year, Baopals launched the "oversized women's wear department", and content blogs related to oversized women's wear are also very popular. "Many foreigners in China find it difficult to find suitable clothes because most clothes are too small for them."

"We searched hundreds of clothes styles on Taobao and finally found tens of thousands of oversized goods," said the content team of Baopals, from oversized shirts, shorts and T-shirts to oversized ladies' sweatpants and sportswear to oversized ladies' underwear, swimsuits and swimming trunks.

Like all e-commerce, Baopals has its own product promotion system. The scoring system designed by Baopals has an interval of 0-5. Different from Taobao, Baopals removes the complicated evaluation criteria such as diamonds and crowns, but reduces all the products with a rating of 4.5 on Taobao to 2.5, and then scores them according to comprehensive factors such as quality, express delivery and service.

In addition, if the sales volume of a product is less than 90 pieces, the system will automatically mark it as red.

In other words, as long as a product has a trusted seller's label, the score is greater than or equal to 4.5, and it is not marked in red, consumers can buy it with confidence.

From this perspective, the model of Baopals depends largely on the business ecology built by Alibaba, which Jay and Charlie do not deny, but strictly speaking, Taobao and Tmall are also their competitors.

According to the fashion of a young man in Taobao, at present, foreigners have been shopping and commenting on Taobao. "As a new user growth point, this is a very good potential market," said a second child. "With more and more foreigners in China, they will gradually do as the Romans do, and Taobao and Tmall will become their way of life."

Baopals understands that in order to retain target users, it is necessary to establish a community system that conforms to foreigners' language, culture and aesthetics, build trust with users through content and socialization, and cultivate loyalty.

In addition to operating two content projects, "Baopals Fashion" and Baopals main blog, the Baopals team also introduced the "Discovery" section on the platform. The three sub-columns of "community", "activity" and "collection" under this section have realized the functions of users recommending products to each other, joining interest groups and publicizing product reviews.

"These functions are user-driven," Charlie said. "We will give some rewards to users who recommend good products."

At present, Bao pars's main income depends on collecting commissions from users; Sometimes, some Taobao and Tmall sellers will automatically pay a certain commission to Bao pars after they fail to complete an order transaction. Jay stressed that in order to control the content and platform tonality of Baopals, the team has never taken the initiative to talk about cooperation with Taobao merchants, and currently does not consider advertising marketing.

"The biggest problem in 2 1 century is not that there is no choice, but that there are too many choices," Baopals' team stressed. "It is the community and users who decide what products to buy, not the active promotion of the merchants."

However, not all foreigners who can't speak Chinese choose to use Baopals.

Jason from Ireland is one of them. He told the interface that the online translation software was enough to help him complete the shopping on Taobao. "I stayed in China for a year. When I talked to Taobao customer service, no one suspected that I was a foreigner."

Jason believes that you can't experience the fun of pure Chinese e-commerce without shopping directly on Taobao. "What's the difference between shopping on a pure English website and living in the West?"

And this kind of consciousness is easily generated with the growth of living time in China. This proves to some extent that Baopals also has the problem of user retention and transformation. With the old customers gone, such a precise positioning platform needs to think about how to break through the ceiling of user growth.

Some consumers in China are now attracted by the simplicity and grassroots temperament of Baopals. Some of these users want to shop in English, or they like the "indecent, careless and funny" blog content of Baopals, or they prefer the simple and easy-to-understand recommendation system on Baopals.

In addition, the commission charged by Baopals is not high, and these China users will also enjoy the American culture displayed by Baopals and choose to shop on Taobao through Baopals.

This integration is due to the further globalization of China.

At present, 35% of Baopals users come from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, 19% from Beijing, 15% from the Pearl River Delta, 3% from Chengdu and 27% from other parts of the country. This is basically consistent with the distribution of foreign resident population in China.

According to the 20 1 1 census data of the National Bureau of Statistics, the top three countries in terms of the number of foreigners in China are South Korea, the United States and Japan. At the same time, their places of residence are mainly distributed in Guangdong, Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu and Fujian.

20 15 China annual report on international migration (20 15) shows that in 20 13, the number of foreign permanent residents in China reached 848,500, with an annual growth rate of 3.9%. If this growth rate is maintained, the number of foreigners in China will exceed 980,000,438+07 in 2065, 654,38+00,200 in 2065 and 438+00,670 in 2009. However, this figure may still be a conservative estimate. If foreigners who live and work illegally are included, the number of foreign permanent residents in China should be more.

Baopals serves foreigners in China and has gained recognition in this vertical market. More importantly, Baopals proved the success of this idea and model with annual profit data.

But the founder of Baopals is not satisfied with this. They understand that compared with the huge global market abroad, the market of foreigners in China is very small, and these users are not the most stable users for Bao pars.

Outsiders can easily complete electronic transaction payment in Bao pars through Alipay, WeChat and UnionPay, and also enjoy a mature and convenient express logistics system. However, once they leave China, they will not be able to enjoy these conveniences. Therefore, "it is difficult for foreigners in China to become our permanent users. After they leave, they can't use Baopals, "Charlie said frankly.

In order to gain more foreign users, Baopals also wants to "go out" now.

On foreign social media such as Facebook, foreigners send private letters to Baopals every day, asking if they can accept international orders. "We haven't done any marketing and promotion work, but when they learn from news or other channels, they will come to us," Charlie told Interface Fashion. There are many people from Africa who consult.

The primary goal of Baopals this year is to create an international version of Baopals. The three founders revealed, "Let foreigners all over the world buy things on Taobao through Baopals; Let Baopals cover the global market and let more foreigners know and trust' Made in China'. "

In order to achieve this goal, the team must solve two difficulties: cross-border transactions and international logistics.

Kirsty Booth, the user of Baopals, is British. She said, "I hope they can provide information about international logistics, but I know it's difficult."

At present, after users buy goods from Taobao and Tmall merchants through Bao pars, the merchants are still responsible for the logistics of the goods, and Bao pars plays the role of communication and coordination in the middle. But this approach obviously doesn't work in the face of complex international logistics.

Baopals' current plan is to take a warehouse in China to centrally process and inspect all the goods of international orders sent by Taobao merchants, and after passing the inspection, Baopals will send them abroad. However, before that, they should make efforts to make platform technology and warehouse management system serve and process orders effectively.

Jay also revealed that in the current planning, Baopals International Edition will allow overseas users to shop on Alibaba's overseas e-commerce platform. By then, overseas consumers will be able to get express goods delivered from Alibaba's overseas warehouses.

In terms of cross-border transactions, at present, users of Bao pars can settle in US dollars through PayPal. PayPal is one of the most common online payment trading platforms in the world. "We are still trying to introduce Visa and MasterCard settlement and bank transfer payment methods."

Jay also revealed that considering the high transaction cost of Paypal and credit cards, the team also considered using Bitcoin for transactions.

Overseas market expansion plan is just around the corner. Jay and Charlie said that there is no need or plan to seek financing at present. "Financing may accelerate the expansion of overseas markets", but we don't really need money, because the model of Baopals is successful at present, and it is self-financing and "(the capital flow of the whole company) is very healthy". However, both founders admit that they are more interested in the participation of partners, if the other party can bring substantial suggestions and help to the company's technical and other development.

"We hope to be closer to Alibaba's ecological chain. We can help them build better brand trust and loyalty among western consumers. " Charlie said.

(At the request of the respondents, the second child in the article is anonymous)