Online marketplaces have been an absolute godsend for ex-porters in India and abroad. The new-age exporter no longer has to travel long hours in a cramped plane to meet prospective buyers and showcase his products. Nor does he have to spend precious dollars buying exhibition space in expensive trade fairs and carrying tonnes of samples and marketing collaterals, in the hope that business will materialise from the few genuinely interested buyers who turn up at the booth.
Online marketplaces have created the perfect virtual space where exporters can showcase their products and communicate with prospective buyers at a fraction of the cost that exporters would spend when the Internet had not become so all pervasive. And today there is no exporter worth his salt, and we lay a strong emphasis on the ‘no’ here, who does not have an online presence in one or more online marketplaces.
Exporters, big and small, have made a bee-line for online marketplaces, both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). Take for instance, the big Indian brand Amul making its debut on the Amazon Global Selling Platform in November 2016. With the Global Selling programme, Amul and many other Indian exporters can now sell their products in nine countries, which include US, UK, Japan,France and Canada – it’s a total consumer base of 300 million, which includes a huge Indian diaspora that is nostalgic for all that is Indian. At present, the programme lists 25 million products from 18,000 sellers in India. These exporters include famous retail brands such as Fab India, Biba, Himalaya, Organic India and Liberty Shoes among others. And this is just the tip of the iceberg as this is just one of many B2C platforms.
The real opportunity for exporters however lie in the B2B international marketplaces. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, as we all know, has played a pivotal role in promoting exports from Chinese SMEs, with great success. And the B2B marketplaces of today have evolved to not only listing and showcasing of products but to full-service platforms. Today, these B2B platforms provide services from credit rating and due diligence of buyers to facilitating export inspection and export credit financing to receivables recovery services, all under the same umbrella. There really is no conceivable reason why an exporter will not avail the services of an international marketplace.
This story is from the July 2017 edition of The Dollar Business.
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This story is from the July 2017 edition of The Dollar Business.
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