**Financial Services Association | New Consumer Daily, May 11 (Researcher Liang Youyun, Reporter Gao Mengyang) Today, going overseas is no longer a patent for major manufacturers. Domestic e-commerce platforms, large and small, and large, and many small and medium-sized enterprises have entered the overseas circuit, bringing e-commerce services related to AIGC into the field.

**Recently, the parent company of the e-commerce shopping guide website “What's Worth Buying” has successively disclosed key investment directions for 2024. Among them, empowering overseas with AI has become one of the company's investment priorities.

According to reports, in 2024, Worth Buying will promote the “worth buying” model of e-commerce shopping guides to go overseas through self-management and cooperation. Currently, the first destination worth buying is Thailand. The Thai version of “what is worth buying” is called “ZestBuy,” and it will adopt a self-operated operation model. According to reports, the app is being launched in major application markets one after another.

On April 12 this year, the import and export situation for the first quarter of 2024 was announced. According to preliminary estimates, China's cross-border e-commerce imports and exports amounted to 577.6 billion yuan, an increase of 9.6%, including 448 billion yuan in exports and 129.6 billion yuan in imports. How to improve service and operational efficiency and run faster while going out to sea has become the focus of everyone's attention.

Looking at it now, not only are there things worth buying, including Amazon, Meta, Ali International, Taobao, Tmall, JD, and Dunhuang, more and more e-commerce platforms are applying AI to e-commerce services, especially in the field of cross-border overseas travel.

Reporters at this year's Canton Fair discovered that more AI foreign trade and the application of new digital technology aroused the enthusiasm of overseas buyers: many exhibitors set up stabilizers and mobile phones, fiddled with computers, and simultaneously launched online exhibitions through cross-border live broadcasts and AI foreign trade tools.

“The intelligent generation of images and videos is one of the most frequently used functions by foreign trade merchants to distribute products.” Fang Zefu, general manager of Shenzhen Mecheng Technology Co., Ltd., told the Financial Federation that since this year, the proliferation of AI tools has further lowered the threshold for foreign trade entrepreneurship. Especially for an entrepreneurial team of 10-20 people, doubling the work efficiency of each employee means that the company's benefits have grown exponentially.

It's worth buying and going overseas, and relying on AI to find a new way out

According to the disclosure of the company Worth Buying, it has set up an R&D center in Chengdu to develop an overseas architecture, hoping to make flexible configurations in each country based on a unified underlying architecture. The company has also initially formed an overseas team to conduct research and planning for overseas markets, and has hired a professional overseas company architecture design team to determine the overall overseas business structure.

According to reports, the company is expected to use Thailand as a “model project”, then continue to export its e-commerce solutions through cooperation with local partners in other countries, and hand over the specific operation to local partners.

From the release of the news of going overseas to the official announcement of going overseas, it only took about half a year to set up a team and develop and adapt to overseas needs. However, at the press conference, Sui Guodong, founder and chairman of Worth Buying Technology, revealed, “Since 2013, anything worth buying this product has been recognized by many overseas e-commerce companies and brands, and many customers have invited us to test overseas.”

Although worth buying did not reveal the specific reason why they only started going overseas recently, compared to the booming development of the domestic e-commerce market and platforms, the penetration rate of overseas e-commerce a few years ago was still slightly insufficient. As the market share of several major platforms in the domestic e-commerce industry stabilizes and the growth rate gradually slows down, the increase in overseas consumer demand has become very impressive. The domestic e-commerce business model and overseas platform operations have also gradually stabilized, and platforms such as SHEIN, Tiktok, Shoppee, and TEMU have gained a foothold in many countries around the world.

A large number of e-commerce derivative needs were quickly discovered, including the need for shopping guides to search for high-quality products and recommend suitable products.

“Overseas markets, especially the e-commerce market in Southeast Asia, are developing rapidly, and there is an environment suitable for our existence; overseas e-commerce also recognizes effective marketing, and the product monetization rate is relatively high. Basically, e-commerce shopping guide commissions are 8-10%, and even the shopping guide commission ratio exceeds 10% for many categories.” In a recent earnings call, executives discussed the overseas revenue potential of the “worth buying” model.

However, the overseas business is still in its infancy, so it is worth focusing on hoping that the business will get on the right track next year. A senior management of the company worth buying said that the company currently has no clear requirements or specific predictions for the revenue and profit of the overseas business. “However, we hope to make good use of the e-commerce peak season in the second half of the year after the overseas business is officially open to users, and strive to achieve a positive operating side profit in the fourth quarter on the operating side of the fourth quarter, and lay a good foundation for next year.”

According to reports, in the early days of going overseas, the Thai version of “worth buying” still focused on making good product recommendations and shopping guides. “Priority selection starts with e-commerce product information flow. Later, we will increase social attributes, content attributes, and the proportion of AI analysis content. This requires a process.”

Currently, the AI e-commerce solution worth buying uses a big model self-development+introduction strategy.

According to reports, it is worth buying almost all the big model products that have been cooperated with or tested on the market. In addition to continuing model training, they are also actively introducing the strengths and abilities of other models. Take Kimi as an example. The company has already connected Kimi to some product detail pages in the consumer content community “What's Worth Buying”. It is worth buying in the future and will also use consumer community content from its own reserves to train models and connect with large external models.

In the first quarter of 2024, worth buying achieved operating income of 296 million yuan, an increase of 16.85% over the previous year; net loss attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 22.711 million yuan, compared with a loss of 687 million yuan in the same period last year.

In response, senior management of the company explained during the performance meeting that the first quarter was a low season for e-commerce consumption, compounding the company's investment in public welfare projects and increased investment in AI research and development, which affected the company's short-term performance.

However, judging from the 2023 financial report data, it is worth buying, but there is still a situation where revenue does not increase profit. The company achieved revenue of 1,452 billion yuan, an increase of 18.17% year on year; realized net profit to mother was 74.7753 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 11.92%. This is also the second year in a row that the company experienced a decline in net profit.

Behind the decline in net profit are rising platform marketing and promotion costs, rising service costs, increased employment costs due to compounding business expansion, low gross margin of new businesses, and R&D expenses that must continue to be invested. If they want to transform into an AI e-commerce company and gain a foothold in the AI field, it is worth buying and still has a long way to go.

AI is being widely implemented in e-commerce, and it is already a “big boss”

In fact, at present, in e-commerce platforms, especially in the field of cross-border overseas travel, the use of AIGC technology in merchants and sellers is more common, and it mainly focuses on various aspects such as product display, marketing, user experience improvement, and content innovation.

Shenzhen Mecheng Technology Co., Ltd., where Fang Zefu is located, was once one of the earliest closed beta merchants for AI business assistants on Ali International.

In the closed beta phase, Weicheng Technology mainly tested the intelligent delivery of a computer case. In the “Intelligent Title Optimization” section, the company's operators originally covered some parameters and marketing terms in the title, and the AI “business assistant” helped add information related to lighting and color.

“We later discovered that when overseas buyers are searching for computer cases recently, they have indeed begun to pay attention to colors without lights or cases. By adding these keywords, we can be found more accurately by customers. We are likely to refer to these keywords as we expand new products and develop our supply chain in the future. This is a shortcut to developing new products in the future.” Fang Zefu said that using AI tools, you can quickly and accurately find long-tail words that segment people.

Fei Fan, general manager of Zhongxing Group, which switched from domestic trade to foreign trade in 2014, is also optimistic about the prospects of AI applications in the field of cross-border overseas travel.

During the interview, Fei Fan told the Financial Federation reporter that their biggest headache in foreign trade is dealing with overseas customers because their demand for AI tools favors intelligent reception.

“People always think that the foreign trade threshold is very high, but I always think that the foreign trade threshold can be very low. Most of our operations don't understand English; they usually use some AI tools. ” According to Fei Fan, the team originally spent a lot of time editing video material, but now they only need to shoot the original video material for 1 minute in the sample room. The AI tool will automatically generate a 15-20 second video, and can also automatically generate a piece of text, greatly reducing the cost of video generation.

“We used to be able to produce 20 videos a day, but now we can increase it to more than 200, ten times more efficient! All of the selling points refined are quite professional in foreign trade.” Fei Fan believes that compared to 9 years ago, now with AI help, it is much easier to transfer domestic trade to foreign trade.

Currently, with the exception of Ali, many players have increased their investment.

In July 2023, EasyDianxia released the first self-developed AIGC digital marketing creation platform, KreadoAI. It has now fully entered the commercialization stage, covering 203 countries around the world, with over 1 million registered users and more than 1 million monthly user visits. According to official reports, the tool has been approved by users from Brazil, China, the US, India, Europe and the US. The average monthly payment rate is growing by more than 20%, and the average monthly renewal rate is growing by more than 50%.

Not long ago, based on foreign trade data accumulated over 20 years, Dunhuang Network Group released the first large-scale model “Flying Sky” in the vertical field of cross-border e-commerce developed. It hopes to target different cross-border e-commerce transaction scenarios and effectively help merchants improve transaction yield.

Meta also launched Meta Advantage, an intelligent advertising product portfolio composed of 12 products, in August of last year. Sora, the big Wensheng video model released by OpenAI at the beginning of this year, also made cross-border merchants really feel the convenience of AI tools.

In the cross-border payment scenario, PingPong applied AI technology to actual business scenarios, developed a digital payment service system suitable for small-amount and high-frequency transactions in an increasingly fragmented global trade network, and built its own AI risk control model.

It can be said that with the application of AI in the field of foreign trade, the threshold for Chinese merchants to start overseas business is gradually lowered, which can further improve order conversion, and more importantly, reduce costs at the marketing level. This is also the reason why AI can quickly be implemented in the field of foreign trade and overseas travel.

Although at this stage, AI tools cannot be iterated based on operational results, AI models will also have problems such as data discrimination and opaque algorithms, causing certain risks and problems for merchants to make decisions. However, the industry is still optimistic about the future of AI being implemented in overseas scenarios.

“AI technology+quality supply chain services will change the pattern of going overseas in the next ten years.” Li Chun, co-CEO of Dunhuang Network Group, also emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence in improving the efficiency of going overseas.