2024 E-Commerce Events: Industry Insights

Industry growth and internal competition are going hand in hand, platform competition is intensifying, AI is widely used... The situation in the e-commerce industry is constantly changing, and new opportunities and challenges are emerging at the same time. Practitioners still need to keep their footing and sum up their experience. Some industry trends and signals can also be seen from some important events.

Ⅰ. Inventory of important events

1. eBay and Alipay cooperate

In 2024, eBay partnered with Antom, a subsidiary of Ant Group, to make Alipay one of eBay's payment options, allowing Chinese buyers to check out on eBay directly using Alipay.

Using a familiar payment tool not only greatly improves convenience, but also increases trust. As a payment platform with more than 1 billion users, Alipay can obviously help eBay and its sellers reach a very large consumer group and bring more sales opportunities.

2. The threshold for entering TikTok’s US store is lowered

TikTok has attracted a large number of active users with its unique ecosystem and algorithm, and TikTok shop has also attracted a considerable number of sellers to settle in. In the second half of 2024, the threshold for entering TikTok stores in the United States will be lowered, attracting more sellers to join again.

No third-party e-commerce experience is required, the review process is simplified, the entry modes are diversified, local stores and stores can be selected, and semi-hosted and fully-hosted modes are available... It provides e-commerce sellers with more flexible space to play, and also prepares for the development of emerging markets.

3. Sell products with traffic and content

As consumers are somewhat tired of traditional advertising, the content on social media that is rich in form, outstanding in content, highly authentic and has a low sense of distance, to some extent, makes it easier for consumers to generate buying urges. The rise of content e-commerce can be said to be an inevitable trend.

Many leading brands have invested in content marketing early on: professional content teams, high-quality product photos and videos, and account matrix layout on mainstream social media platforms at home and abroad, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. TikTok and TikTok shop have brought low-threshold content e-commerce opportunities to many small and medium-sized sellers and even individual sellers.

In social media marketing, in order to effectively manage multiple accounts and prevent account association, many marketers will use proxies, such as IPFoxy, to provide accounts with pure IP and a secure network environment, so as to achieve stable, efficient and long-term operations.

4. AI technology is widely used

In addition to launching AI functions for generating and improving listings, Amazon launched the AI assistant Amelia in September 2024, which can provide assistance to sellers based on their specific circumstances; eBay launched and continuously improved AI tools related to store operations, such as AI-powered bulk listing tool for batch listings, AI-generated item descriptions for intelligent generation of product descriptions, etc.

In addition to the e-commerce platforms where stores operate, social media platforms involved in overseas marketing have also launched AI tools. Pinterest launched Performance+ suite to help optimize advertising strategies; Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and other mainstream social media, launched AI Studio, Gen AI and integrated Meta AI Tools.

5. Temu's rapid growth: 90% of Amazon's user base

As of August 2024, Temu's global user base has reached 91% of Amazon's, and it is expected to surpass Amazon, which has been established for 30 years, within the year. In addition, Temu has nearly 700 million visits per month, of which only a quarter are from the United States. In contrast, Amazon has 2.7 billion visits, almost all of which are from American users. Obviously, Temu's growth and expansion speed is amazing. This is also affecting the situation of the e-commerce industry and the strategies of enterprises, causing the industry and model to involute, such as the Amazon Haul mentioned below.

6. Amazon launches low-price mall

In June 2024, Amazon announced that it would launch a low-price mall. Finally, on November 12, Amazon Haul was launched on the mobile terminal to enter the low-price market. The low-price mall stores and the main site stores share the same backend and manage the stores in a site-switching mode. Sellers have the right to select products, set prices and participate in activities, but cannot decide on advertising activities independently, and products do not support follow-up sales; the same SKU cannot be used on the main site and the low-price product store at the same time; for different product types, the maximum product price of the low-price product store is limited... Although sellers are invited to join in the early stage, many people speculate that the threshold of the low-price mall will become lower and lower in the future.

Ⅱ. Last words

It is not easy to adapt to industry trends. E-commerce practitioners need to sum up experience, leverage resources reasonably, and constantly explore new directions.