Interviewing Top Chinese E-commerce Executives.
Mike’s Blog 134
Going deeper into the China side of cross border e-commerce export. Spent a ton of time this past week interviewing top Amazon FBA sellers in China and service providers. What is crazy to me is the rest of the world has no idea who they are – they are like a faceless group of sellers on the internet.
I am excited to put faces to those faceless names. Wendy did amazing work lining up these interviews and we drove out to a few districts in Shenzhen to do the groups of interviews on Tuesday and Wednesday – with Thursday going up to Guangzhou to interview more the supplier and factory side.
While I have been doing podcasts and video blogs for years now, this was a whole new ballgame. We had our professional video crew come with us to record and it was true lights, camera, action! I interviewed in English (really gotta up my game in learning Chinese) and some of the interviews were answered in English while others were answered in Chinese. We will take all this amazing and one of a kind content and open it up for the world to watch and learn.
We are also doing this as a lead up to the first ever dual language Cross Border E-commerce seller event bringing top Chinese and English Amazon sellers and the ecosystem together. We believe this is the future of ecommerce, bridging the international world and the Chinese world of e-commerce players and to get rid of this “us vs them” thinking.
Being in China now for 10 years, quite a few of these industry players I have known from before. We had worked hard to do events and attend more events over the years (I’ve been networking in the Chinese e-commerce industry since 2008 when my team invited me along) and now it is time to show this network to the world.
It is insane to me that this factory area with broken down buildings and piles of garbage in the alley is home to multi-millionaire Amazon FBA sellers. But that is just what it is all about, don’t worry about the outside, keep your own interior clean and build up a team and a machine.
Stay on track – follow the market – we see the trends of Chinese sellers continuing to expand globally. Trying to stay ahead of the curve, we are going to be the first English blog and business to feature them in the international community. I’ll be the “token white guy” to be your guide and show you the interviews with these massively successful Chinese sellers who are unknown to the Western world.
Let’s see where this takes us. I am preparing to get some angry emails and comments from people who may say our displaying of these sellers is not helpful. But to me, they are here in this world and unknown – so putting a face to it and making it clear to everyone around the world that this industry exists will open up new perspectives and drop some of these barriers and stereotypes.