The Internet Age: Learning Foreign Trade from Scratch

Mr. Xia used to be a technician in a blister equipment company. In 2007, he founded his own company selling blister equipment with his wife. The first export order he received was kind of a legend, resulting in his strategy for the following decade of concentrating on export orders while supplemented by domestic orders. In 2007, Mr. Xia resigned from his original company and started his own business. Since the website of his old owner’s was optimized with my help, he also asked me to build a website and have it optimized soon after the company was founded.Due to the financial constraints at the beginning, he only wanted to spend a few thousand yuan on network marketing, and didn’t take search engine advertising into account. By the end of 2009, the website had got a nice natural ranking and had received several inquiries from the Internet. One day he received a phone call from a man claiming to be an interpreter. His employer, a boss of a Czech company wanted to order two blister machines in China and would like to have a face-to-face business talk in a few days. Mr. Xia was busy at that time. He answered some technical questions and didn’t pay attention to it afterwards. It was probably the professionalism of Mr. Xia for answering these questions that made the interpreter choose him among multiple suppliers. After half a month, the interpreter called again and told him that he and his Czech boss had arrived in Shanghai and would like to see the equipment and negotiate business.

Mr. Xia was not confident then. He had just started the business and hadn’t even registered a company. At that time, he conducted business in the name of the Shanghai branch of a large blister machine manufacturer in Shenzhen. If the customer saw his simple office, he must turned away immediately. So he told the customer that the factory was in Shenzhen while in Shanghai there was only an office. They’d better look at the equipment and have a business talk in Shenzhen. Hearing this, the interpreter and the Czech boss decided to fly to Shenzhen directly. At the same time, Mr. Xia got in touch with Mr. Peng, the owner of the Shenzhen-based factory and told him what was going on, hoping that he could get a good price. The factory in Shenzhen was one of the largest in China. Plus, Mr. Peng was very skillful at negotiating (I said so because I also purchased the equipment from Mr. Peng when I was still the director of a blister packaging factory in 2004). So the negotiation with the Czech boss went very smoothly. In the end, two units were sold for more than 700,000 yuan. You know what, the same equipment was sold to my previous factory in 2004 at the price of only 150,000 yuan. Mr. Xia earned more than 300,000 yuan from this single order, which was the first bucket of his business.

Luck has played a big part in this export order. First, because of the involvement of the interpreter, Mr. Xia gets to receive inquiries from foreign customers with the Chinese website; secondly, also because of the interpreter, communication is no longer a problem, and there’s no difference from domestic trade; thirdly, unlike the domestic trade, once the foreign customer has chosen a supplier, he would rarely make changes. If domestic buyers went all the way from Europe to Shanghai, and were then asked to go to Shenzhen, they would have already changed suppliers.

After taking the taste of the export order, Mr. Xia naturally turned his head to overseas business. The odds of success were too low if there was only a Chinese website. They must enter the overseas market with every effort. Then there came the problem. Mr. and Mrs. Xia were not highly educated and hardly knew any foreign languages. Frankly, they were afraid of conducting business with foreigners with the Internet. So initially, they chose to get export orders using domestic resources. In addition to the Chinese website, Mr. Xia also asked his friends he knew in the upstream and downstream industries of blister packaging over the ten years to introduce foreign orders for him. Since the increase of China’s labor cost in 2010, some labor-intensive factories moved to Southeast Asia, driving the rapid development of the supporting blister packaging industry in the regions. As a result, the suppliers of raw materials and models used in blister packaging also relocated their factories to these areas. Among them was one of the friends of Mr. Xia’s, who introduced a lot of orders for blister packaging equipment. Every company owner who has been in the foreign trade knows that a significant channel to quickly obtain information on export orders is to buy customs data. With the help of customs export information, you will have an clear knowledge of which foreign companies need to purchase blister packing equipment. At that time, they were affordable to hire a graduate in English to sell equipment via email to customers acquired from the customs data.

In order to deal with the daily affairs of foreign trade, Mr. and Mrs. Xia made a division of duties. Mrs. Xia used her spare time to learn English and knowledge about foreign trade, while Mr. Xia was responsible for negotiations and technical aspects. After just one year, Mrs. Xia was able to handle both online communication and email writing in English, and could talk with foreigners in simple language.

At the beginning of the business, Mr. Xia had neither factories or teams. It was nothing more than a trading company with poorer strength compared with competitors. But the couple worked very hard. Because of the time difference between China and western countries, they often worked late to communicate with foreigners, which impressed many customers.

The success of another export order showed them another advantage they had: Integrity and goodness. One day in 2014, a Canadian customer asked to come to the office for a talk and told Mrs. Xia that he would take his son with him since no one was taking care of his son these days, and hoped that she wouldn’t mind. Mrs. Xia was also with her daughter while working. Considering that the two kids could play together, she decided to bring her daughter to the office. When she saw the foreigner’s son, she was a little surprised, because the boy looked like Chinese and seemed inferior in intelligence. Out of Chinese courtesy, Mrs. Xia picked him up and played with him for a while before leaving the two kids to play together. The business negotiation that afternoon went very well and the two kids had a great time, too. They have been in cooperation as of today. After becoming friends, the foreigner told Mrs. Xia the story of that boy. This child was not his biological son. He was adopted. When the foreigner traveled with his wife in Kaifeng, Henan Province in 2010, they saw an abandoned baby with an unusually big head (he had hydrocephalus). Since no one wanted him, the couple decided to adopt the baby. They saved him and arranged for him to attend a special school. Don’t think that it was just an impulsive move on their part. They often asked their children to do volunteer work every week. Although the abandoned baby was adopted by the foreigner, people still looked at him with disdain sometimes when seeing his silly expressions. But the foreigner saw the goodness inside Mrs. Xia. Mrs. Xia might hug the child as a gesture of goodwill out of politeness and business needs, but her 5-year-old daughter was truly innocent and loved to play with the little boy. It was the kindness of the family that made the foreigner decide to give the order to Mr. Xia who didn’t have much strength at that time. The order didn’t go smoothly. They came across many problems in the middle, and even made a loss in the first order. But touched by the foreigner’s kindness, Mr. and Mrs. Xia stuck through it. Later when the price of raw materials increased, they raised their sales price. Out of absolute trust in them, the foreigner didn’t haggle. He accepted the price and continued working with them until now.

After solving the language and talent problem, they began to conduct business on the Internet with great effort. First, they paid 28,000 yuan for overseas membership of Alibaba. Then, they started to place Google ads. Mrs. Xia was very studious, which was another advantage of hers. Alibaba provided a lot of training opportunities for all overseas members. With the help of the training, Mrs. Xia learned quickly. She was not only familiar with the promotion skills on Google and the foreign trade version of Alibaba, but capable of SNS marketing (use social medias for promotion). And because of her diligence, Mrs. Xia was the first among Alibaba students to use Facebook and Twitter for marketing and the first to get orders. So Alibaba instructors often asked her to share her experience during their lectures. When Facebook opened the commercial advertising business, they placed ads on it immediately. Mr. Xia now has a very clear strategic intent in network marketing, which is to dominate every possible overseas network marketing channel, so that customers will always find their information as long as they search for products related to blister packaging. As of today, the number of overseas business inquiries received every month by their company has reached 300, requiring multiple export sales representatives in charge.

The company has developed from a simple equipment trading company to an entity involved in multiple fields of the blister packaging industry. What’s more, they set up a blister packaging equipment factory and hold a stake in a blister product factory. And they agree with my notion of network marketing—the wider variety of products you offer, the higher the success rate of network marketing. They take orders for not only blister products, but also other plastic products such as plastic sheets and injection products. With time going by, the business scope is getting wider and wider.

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