DHgate new header

Today DHgate.com changed its header. There were five tabs above the search box on the right side including “All Categories”, “Factory Zone”, “What’s New” and “My DHgate”; and now they are moved to the left below the search box with “All Categories” becomes the first tab. Also, the search box is bigger than before. Besides that, DHgate.com also adds Facebook and Twitter entrance on the home page and became the first website in this field did this. These changes improved DHgate.com’s user experience and adding more social feel to this trading marketplace.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Even this project aims to build authoritative profile of people, it also works for company profiles.  If you are new to China wholesale shopping business, and trying to research the websites, you can simply put the website’s name, like “DHgate” or “Lightinthebox“, into the Personas Box, and it will automatically generate you a cool profile report. Trust me, it is REALLY REALLY cool!

Just like DHgate.com or Tradetang.com, TooTooMart.com is another B2B online trading platform from China.  TooTooMart.com is running as a new web venture for Ninetowns Internet Technology Group Company Limited (NASDAQ:NINE), which holds a group of websites including a Chinese B2C Food site and a Chinese B2B forum site.

As of the web template design, TooTooMart.com is very similar to Lighinthebox.com.  The drop down manu of “All Department” at the top left corner which is originally from Amazon.com, truly adds value to users’ shopping experience.

TooTooMart.com offers some good selections on cell phones, women’s shoes, musical instrument, make ups and mp3 players.  One thing standing out on TooTooMart.com is its daily deal offer.  Everyday, there will be one product on TooTooMart.com which offers great discount, ranging some where from 70% up to 90% off regular price.

The search volume for “international trade” actually keeps on declining over the years.  Is that against the globalization trend or is it just a sign of traditional large interanational trade transactions are declining?

Along with “international trade”, “wholesale” search volumes also keeps on declining over the years.

Here comes the interesting thing, as “wholesale” is declining, “China wholesale” search volumes actually increase steadly over hte past 5 years.  Does this mean people who used to search for “wholeasle” now have a clearer idea of getting information about wholesale products just from China?

Let’s make the keyword more accurate, “wholeale from China” is just the keyword showing poeple who are interested in getting wholesale products from China, and we can see it increases significantly in the past two years.

Instead of using “China wholesale”, the keyword which is usually related with business buyers (B2B), we pick another phrase, “buy from China” which can represent both the business buyers (B2B) and consumers (B2C). From the Google Trends chart, we can see obvious increase in the search volume since 2005.

Based on these charts from Google Trends, can we make the following conclusions?

1. China is becoming more and more important in the wholesale industry, and global buyers want to purchase wholesale products from China.

2. International trade used to only played by big buyers and manufacturers, and their weight in the global trading is declining. Many small international buyers start to join the game.

3. Global trading/shopping is nolonger limited to business to business (B2B), it is possible that consumers are starting to hunting for bargains globally.

To celebrate Bastille Day, France’s National Day, Lighitnthebox.com offers 50% discount on speedy expedited shipping fees and 40%  discount on standard shipping fees for 100s of selected wholesale electronics products. This promotion lasts until July 17.

During this promotion, MP3 and media players, cell phones and security systems are among the best selling products.

DHgate.com currently carries a Limited Time Offer program for wholesale products from home & garden, auto parts and toys categories.  The program lasts until August 4th, and the buyers will receive the goods in less than 30 days after payment.  These pre-sale products will only be shipped to USA, Canada and Australia by ocean freight.  Since the shipping cost has been significantly decreased through ocean shipping, these wholesale products truly has high resale profit margin.

All of the promotional wholesale products are “Made in China”, including LED grow lights, faucets, sinks, pet supplies, wheel rims, road bicycles, saddle seats, RC planes, plane models, clay sets, and toys etc.

The best part of this DHgate promotional program is its Guranteed Return Policy which allows the buyers have up to three calendar days to return products for a replacement or full refund for free.  North American buyers only need to ship the original package to a designated location in Oakland and  a Sydney location for Australian buyers.

Quji Guo, Chinese name 郭去疾，was born in Chengdu, China.  He was one of the first group of students from his elementary school who became interested in computers.  Since then, coding became one of his favorite hobbies.  Currently, Mr. Guo is the CEO and chairman of Lightinthebox.com, and he had good performances from previous studying and working experiences.

Mr. Guo finished his master degree in University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, and got his MBA from Stanford University.  He then worked in Microsoft and Amazon before joining Chinese Google as Li Kaifu’s special assistant in 2005. Serving as the CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) in Chinese Google, Mr. Guo contributed to many key Chinese Google products, including Chinese Google’s Music Search, Kingsoft Software, Google Pinyin, Google Local, etc.   In 2006, Mr. Guo founded Lightinthebox.com with the slogan: “One World, One Price”.

There were rumors that Lightinthebox.com got 6 million USD Venture Capital funding in 2008, and one of the VC was from the New Oriental English Inc.’s co-founder, Xu Xiaoping 徐小平。

Mr. Guo believed that there is currently a market demand in the Exporting B2C field.  Exporting B2C business model is a combination of wholesale and retail.  Lightinthebox.com has its own inventory and delivery service.  It mainly targets the US market, with recent openings in France.  Lightinthebox.com has over 100 employees in Beijing and Shenzhen.

Diane Wang, Chinese name 王树彤, is the founding CEO of DHgate.com, the leading fast trading marketplace serving global buyers from 230 countries.  As one of the few beautiful female CEOs in the IT industry and the founder of such a fast growing company, Diane draws a lot of attention from the industry.

Diane Wang was born in Beijing in 1968.  She has been serving in Microsoft and Cisco for many years before starting Joyo.com in 1999.  She was the CEO of Joyo.com from 1999 to 2002.  Joyo.com grew into one of the biggest B2C website in China and later on got acquired by Amazon.com.

Diane started DHgate.com in the end of 2004, and the website went alive in 2005. Its first year sales was less than 1million USD, and by 2008, annual transaction on DHgate.com already surpassed 200 million USD with the prediction to break 300 million this year.

“Made in China” concept has already generated some big companies, among them Alibaba is the most famous one.  Back in 2007, when Alibaba first filed IPO, it had a market value as high as 28billion USD.  Diane Wang didn’t want to create another Alibaba, but the 2nd generation of B2B website.  The first generation of B2B websites offer product listings and rely on merchants’ membership fees, and Diane wants to take one step further. Besides product listing, DHgate.com also offers escrow, transaction and delivery.  Also DHgate.com’s main revenue is from transaction commissions, merchants can list products on DHgate for free.  Unlike Alibaba aiming for mid to big clients, DHgate.com targets smaller buyers as a fast trading marketplace.  It is the first website entered this field, and later on followed by TradeTang.com and Beltal.com, etc.

Recently, Diane started her own blog at TheGateWayBlog.  Her blog updated at least twice a week, and  provides practical tips on running, growing and evolving micro and small businesses.  I recommend it to all entrepreneurs interested in wholesale ecommerce.

Beltal.com is another B2B China wholesale online marketplace we found.  Unlike its Beijing based competitors, Beltal actually locates in Shanghai, China.  Like DHgate.com and TradeTang.com, Beltal.com is another wholesale site offering one-stop trade services to international buyers who are interested in purchasing directly from China.

Escrow service is essential for international fast trading marketplace, and Beltal.com has its own escrow service that the buyer retains the payment until Beltal receive his satisfaction confirmation. Also, sellers are Beltal.com can be rated and left feedbacks by their buyers after the transactions, so it makes easier for other buyers to recognize good sellers from bad ones.  These two services became the standardized services for sites sharing the same business model.

Beltal.com newly roll out a Price Matching Policy which worth a notice.

If you discovered a lower advertised price offered by any of our competitors (Trading platform) on the same available brand and model from same location, let us know and we’ll contact all available sellers to match that price on the spot.

There are also conditions applied to Beltal’s Price Matching Policy.  Item prices lower than 50USD don’t apply to this policy.  Any applicable shipping or handling fees will be included when calculating the price difference, and Beltal’s Price Matching Policy doens’t apply to any free offers, promotional offers, limited-quantity items, items for sale November 28th & 29th, refurbished items, clearance items, mail-in offers, financing, bundle offers or pricing errors. Overall speaking, if you have enough time, it’s not bad to try this program. On the Beltal’s product detail page, there is a link below “Email to a Friend”, called “Price match guarantee”. You can click it, and fill out a form, telling Beltal where you find a cheaper price, and they would get back to you soon.  So far, I haven’t tried this service yet, so if anyone has used it already, you are more than welcome to share your experience with our readers.

TradeTang.com was founded in 2008 and it is another business-to-business (B2B) marketplace offering one-stop trade services to both international buyers and Chinese domestic sellers.  Although TradeTang is very similiar to DHgate.com, and also locates in Beijing, China, it is actually an independant company.

Unlike Lightinthebox, TradeTang acts like a platform.  Buyers are not buying off TradeTang, but the sellers doing business on TradeTang.  Similiar to DHgate’s Escrow Service, TradeTang’s service is free of charge for all online transactions. The buyer only pays the supplier when s/he receives the ordered items and being happy with the quality.  Escrow service is a must for international trading marketplace.

As of today, I do see one function that TradeTang has over DHgate, which is its GROUP BUY program.  Based on the theory of “buying more and enjoying lower price”, TradeTang offers many popular products at competitive prices. The campaign lasts for 20 days, and buyers can join groups to bulk buy directly from the factories and manufacturers in China.