ShangHai, China -- (SBWire) -- 04/18/2010 -- Through out the 2008-2009 global financial crises period, the overall B2B foreign trade suffered seriously across the world, while China took the most hit as it is the largest exporting nation in the world. In the circumstance of this financial crises and fierce market competition, B2B companies in China had to reduce its regular annual membership fee to attract more customers and visitors.
We had conducted professional researches on several popular B2B marketplaces on the Internet such as Alibaba.com, GlobalSources.com, ec21.com, TradeKey.com, TradeKool.com and made-in-china.com etc and we were impressed by this interesting and unique B2B marketplace provider, BusyTrade.com’s evolution from competitive B2B industry. ( http://www.BusyTrade.com )
Since November 2008, Alibaba, one of the major online B2B Marketplace providers, reduced its annual charging fee. Fyesor instance, for the Chinese suppliers, annual fee was lowered from 50000 RMB to 19800 RMB. While for the Alibaba’s Chinese Trust Pass members, the annual fee was lowered to 1688 RMB from 2800 RMB. According to some B2B experts’ forecast, Alibaba’s pricing reduction indicated that its sales strategy had been seriously questioned by the market thus it lost significantly market shares from SMEs.
According to the market response, there’s no doubt that many companies had lost their confidence in Alibaba’s annual membership model, as a result the effect proved that the Alibaba’s membership renewal rate had been decreasing over the years. The 1688 plan of Alibaba for Online Wholesale Market was introduced on 8th, March and it’s 40% lower compared with those less expensive ones in mainland China. After the above reductions in membership fee, Alibaba triggered a new round pricing reduction storm in mainland B2B.
Annual fee paying model is the most commonly used among B2B marketplace providers, however, the drawbacks of annual fee model are highly correlated to the numbers of the trade leads that a marketplace can bring to its paid members. For many companies in China, expensive annual fees set by Alibaba and other leading B2B providers becoming an obstacle for them to use e-commerce.
When annual fee model exposed drawbacks, pay-per-click model from search engine emerged. Search engine marketing greatly reduce the entry barriers for SMEs to promote on Internet, however, as more and more advertisers compete for few hot keywords, the price per click for hot keywords is becoming unbearable for SMEs. Pay-per-click marketing couldn’t save much cost for its consumers as its target audience is way too wide to be focus on certain group. As a result of its by product, click fraud is becoming one of the major problems that search engines are facing.
Is there a solution that can address the problems SME faces both on B2B and search engine marketing?
BusytTrade provides a unique model to address the problem. BusyTrade ( http://www.BusyTrade.com ) is one of the leading global B2B provider based in Hong Kong, China, BusyTrade marketplace serves over 3 million SMEs around the world and is one of the most famous B2B marketplace in the world.
BusyTrade’s ( http://www.BusyTrade.com ) marketing approach combines the B2B marketplace with pay-as-you-go long-tailed SaaS model. The most significant innovation on BusyTrade’s B2B model is the BusyDollars system, which is a micro payment system facilitating the ordering of plug-ins, web tools and value added services on BusyTrade. On the other hand, by integrating various web tools and valued added services provided by BusyTrade and its affiliate business partners, BusyTrade can always provide SMEs with most up-to-dated technology and services at the lowest cost. Charging no annual fees or membership fees, BusyTrade’s account is free to signup and free to use certain basic functions, however, if the members want to access to more value added services, they will required to pay. Like Apple provides apps on Apple store and Facebook provides plug-ins to its members, BusyTrade provides all kinds of business related tools and services to SMEs at the most easily accessible manner. All of the tools/services are accessible by ordering online instantly through BusyDollars.
In conclusion, we are happy to see Busytrade;s ‘Pay As You Go’ model work out to be a mainstream model for many B2B marketplaces in the future. High pricing membership fees and click fraud will no longer bother SMEs as they are marketing their products/services on Internet. We sincerely hope that BusyTrade’s ( http://www.BusyTrade.com ) model will be accepted by more and more SMEs.
Researched by http://www.B2Branking.com
Technical Terms
B2B: business to business
SME/SMB: Small and medium enterprises/business
Search Engine marketing: Promote products/services on search engine
B2B marketing: Promote products/services on B2B marketplace
B2B Online Marketing Make Easy, Pay-as-you-go With Busytrade!