Increasing export volume thanks to cross-border e-commerce

It is necessary to support enterprises to build the capacity to participate in cross-border e-commerce. Photo: ST

According to experts, cross-border e-commerce in Vietnam continues to develop into an important distribution channel, especially by helping businesses increase their export capacity and find partners.

Le Duc Huy, General Director of Dak Lak 2/9 Import-Export Company Limited (Simexco), said that the business is exporting coffee to more than 70 markets worldwide. Since the first month of 2023, orders have grown by 20% over the previous year. Therefore, he expects the profit growth plan of 15% compared to 2022 in 2023 to be within reach.

Achieving the above results, according to Mr Le Duc Huy, along with ensuring product quality, businesses have actively digitally transformed and promoted activities on cross-border e-commerce. As a result, since 2021, Simexco has increased sales and transactions on powerful e-commerce platforms worldwide, such as Amazon, Alibaba, etc., helping to improve profit margins and spreading the business's coffee brand. Mr Huy also revealed that the company currently has a store on Amazon for the US market with many orders.

Similarly, a representative of Ngoc Thanh Son Tea Co., Ltd. said that for small and medium enterprises, especially newly established enterprises, thanks to cross-border e-commerce, their products have known more, achieve more efficient than spending hundreds of millions of dong to attend fairs and trade promotion programs abroad.

In addition, according to businesses, cross-border e-commerce is an effective sales channel and a place to help businesses find partners. At the same time, we can directly learn about market needs, update information about the market, and help them find new partners. Updating customer information and feedback, thereby drawing experience and overcoming limitations to improve designs and the quality of goods and services.

In particular, businesses using e-commerce not only receive support from the management agency but also from international e-commerce platforms themselves.

For example, Amazon Global Selling is a program to help businesses develop their businesses, especially when exporting and doing business on Amazon. Amazon Global Selling supports Vietnamese businesses in capturing market information, thereby improving the quality of human resources and gradually building brands for Vietnamese goods in the world market.

With Alibaba - one of the leading platforms for global business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce, this platform has the necessary features for sellers, such as requesting an online quote, Online trade fairs… help businesses easily approach and understand the needs of buyers. Moreover, this company also offers several incentives and services specifically for the Vietnamese market.

According to Amazon's report, Vietnam's cross-border (B2C) retail sales are estimated to grow by over 20% annually, reaching VND 75.4 trillion (equivalent to USD 3.3 billion) in 2021. As a result, it is expected that Vietnam's B2C will reach 256.1 trillion VND (11.1 billion USD) by 2026.

The above issues show that cross-border e-commerce is growing and is considered an effective way for businesses to penetrate and expand export markets, especially in the context of international trade facing many risks from pandemics to geopolitical tensions. However, according to a representative of the Trade Promotion Agency (Ministry of Industry and Trade), to make effective use of cross-border e-commerce, businesses need to solve the disadvantages of product supply capacity.

Therefore, according to businesses, this needs financial, technological and policy support. For example, in finance, in addition to credit capital with preferential interest rates, some banks also provide payment solutions specifically for cross-border e-commerce in particular and import-export businesses in general. But in terms of policy, e-commerce transactions in Vietnam mainly lean towards the domestic market because there are no separate regulations on e-commerce applications in import and export activities, causing many difficulties for businesses as well as state management agencies in managing e-commerce.