Part 1: The Dilemma of Platform Dependency—Farming on Rented Land
Good day, colleagues, and friends from the global trade frontlines: Hello, everyone. We are gathered here today to directly confront a shared practical challenge and to explore a path forward together. Let's start with the most pressing question: Why do so many of us in foreign trade work harder and harder, yet find it increasingly difficult to earn good money? The root of the problem likely lies in the very "soil" we have relied on for years—the familiar, heavily invested-in B2B platforms.
First, let's calmly assess the real gains and losses for all parties in the platform model.
The platforms are undoubtedly the biggest winners. They have built massive "digital marketplaces" and firmly control the rules and keys to these spaces. By attracting a huge number of businesses to set up shop, they create powerful network effects—buyers come because there are many sellers, and sellers stay because there are many buyers. Once this effect is established, it builds an extremely high barrier to entry. Platforms control all the data generated by transactions, knowing who is buying, what they are buying, and at what price. They continuously optimize rules and algorithms based on this data, aiming to make the entire marketplace operate more efficiently while maximizing their own revenue. This income is steady and substantial: annual fees, transaction commissions, and most importantly, competitive advertising revenue. This is a highly successful business model, but its success is, to some extent, built upon certain "sacrifices" made by the merchants.
So, what do we, as merchants, lose?
First, we lose initiative. We are like "tenants" in this digital marketplace, paying rent—including annual fees and ad spend—for a stall. But the location of that stall, its display rules, even whether it gets seen, are largely not up to us. They are determined by the platform's algorithms and bidding rankings.
This directly leads to the second loss: profit. To get a good spot and visibility, we must constantly invest in advertising and participate in bidding. Customer acquisition costs spiral upward year after year, from a few yuan per click a few years ago to tens or even hundreds of yuan for popular keywords today. Even more challenging is that our stall is right next to hundreds, even thousands, of competitors selling similar or identical products. Competition is infinitely magnified, often devolving into brutal price wars that slowly squeeze and drain our profit margins.
The most critical loss is the third: customer and brand equity. When we receive an inquiry or even complete a transaction through a platform, does that customer truly belong to us? Their contact details, specific needs, and communication records mostly remain within the platform's system. It's difficult for us to establish a direct, deep, and sustainable connection with them. More importantly, in the eyes of buyers, we are often just "a supplier on the platform," a drop in the vast ocean of "Made in China," with very weak brand recognition. The traffic we attract at great cost is like water flowing through a pipe—it passes our stall but cannot be retained to form our own pond. Once we stop paying, the flow immediately redirects elsewhere.
This reveals a core truth we must recognize today: In the platform model, what we purchase as "traffic" is essentially a "leased resource," not an "owned asset." We pay to rent a momentary slice of attention from the platform's massive traffic pool, directed toward our stall for that instant. It is one-off and consumable. You spend one hundred yuan today to get one inquiry; tomorrow you need to spend another one hundred yuan, or even more, to get the next one. This process has no compounding effect and cannot generate returns over time. Your business remains built on continuously paid "rent," like building a tower on sand—the foundation is unstable.
Thus, our core pain points become crystal clear:
First, there is the anxiety of runaway costs. Advertising spend feels like a bottomless pit, yet results are increasingly unpredictable and hard to measure. Profits are severely eroded by rising marketing costs.
Second, there is the struggle of stalled growth. We are stuck in the quagmire of homogeneous competition, where besides lowering prices, there seem to be few other options. Business volume might exist, but profit margins are precarious.
Third, there is a deep-seated sense of insecurity. Your store ranking, even the survival of your entire store, depends on the platform's rules. An inadvertent rule change, an algorithm update, can cause your exposure to plummet off a cliff. You are left in the dark about the reasons and powerless to change it. This feeling of being "at the mercy of others" is the deepest unease in the hearts of many seasoned foreign trade professionals.
Fourth, and most long-term, is the confusion of lacking a brand. After five or ten years in business, with customers coming and going, have you truly built your own brand recognition in overseas markets? Do you have a group of customers who recognize, trust, and are willing to consistently follow you? If the answer is no, then our business remains forever at the level of "trade," unable to achieve a genuine leap in value.
Therefore, the dilemma of platform dependency is far more than a technical issue of "whether it works well or not." It is a structural, fundamental strategic problem. It concerns the cost structure of your business, your source of profit, your ability to withstand risk, and your long-term brand value. Recognizing this is the first step in seeking a breakthrough and building digital assets that truly belong to us.
Part 2: The Shift in Core Thinking—From "Traffic Mindset" to "Asset Mindset"
We have just analyzed the dilemma of platform dependency. Its root cause lies in the fact that we have long been fighting on the wrong battlefield, chasing the wrong kind of resource. That resource is traffic. Now, it is time to fundamentally shift our thinking—from a "traffic mindset" to an "asset mindset."
Digital assets and traffic leasing are worlds apart.
Traffic leasing, as we said earlier, is like renting water on someone else's land. Water is fluid; it flows to you today and may be gone tomorrow. You must keep paying for the water to keep flowing. Once you stop paying, your field dries up. All your investment is consumed in the act of "leasing" itself, leaving behind nothing that can accumulate or be passed on.
Digital assets are completely different. It is like digging a deep well on your own land, carving out irrigation channels, even building a complete water circulation system. Your initial investment might go toward buying the land and laying the well foundation—a phase where you might not see immediate water flow. But once built, the water produced by this well is entirely yours. You don't pay someone else for every bucket. More importantly, your asset appreciates over time—the well can be dug deeper, yielding more water; the channel network can expand, increasing irrigation efficiency. All your early investments solidify into an entity that can generate continuous returns and whose own value grows. This is the core of an asset: it possesses the qualities of accumulation, exclusivity, and compounding returns. Traffic brings one-off transactions, while assets bring continuous returns and brand premium.
So, what is the most important carrier of this digital asset for a foreign trade enterprise? It is your brand-owned independent website. Please understand an independent website as your enterprise's "digital territory" in the online world. Sovereignty over this territory belongs entirely to you. On this land, you have complete autonomy: you set the rules, design the style, lead the content, and control the data. It is no longer a stall in a crowded marketplace that can be relocated at any moment, but a "permanent embassy" designed by you, embodying your brand spirit and professional strength.
The strategic value of this digital territory goes far beyond being just a corporate website.
First, it is the ultimate repository for brand perception. Every visitor here experiences your unique brand story, professional image, and values. They no longer see you through the platform's filter but engage with you directly.
Second, it is a self-owned reservoir for customer relationships and data. Every visitor's behavioral path, dwell time, and content interests settle as your private data. You can use this data to truly understand customers and build direct, deep, sustainable connections with them.
Finally, it serves as the command center for global operations. You can flexibly adjust the content and strategy on your territory based on different markets and different customer segments, conducting refined operations and testing, without having to consider any platform's preferences. Owning this territory means you regain the initiative and control over your business.
However, merely staking out a piece of digital territory is not enough to automatically turn it into a high-yield asset. In the past, building and operating an independent website came with high technical barriers and labor costs—content creation, multilingual adaptation, customer interaction, data analysis; each required a sizable professional team. This is precisely why many foreign trade enterprises hesitated. But today, the situation has completely changed. The key technology to transform this digital territory from "barren land" to "fertile soil" has matured: that is Artificial Intelligence (AI).
AI is becoming the most powerful tool for building and enhancing our digital assets. It is no longer a distant concept but a concrete "accelerator" and "amplifier" applicable to every stage.
In the asset-building phase, AI drastically lowers core barriers. In the past, writing professional English descriptions and technical documentation for a product might have required a seasoned copywriter. Now, AI can generate accurate, fluent, and culturally appropriate copy in multiple versions, based on an understanding of the product's core selling points and industry terminology. In the past, creating website versions in a dozen languages was a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly project. Now, AI-powered multilingual engines not only provide high-quality translation but also perform "cultural adaptation," ensuring your content is appropriate and effective across different markets. AI can even dynamically adjust the focus of displayed website content based on a visitor's origin or industry tags, making every customer feel the site is tailored for them. All this makes building a high-standard, professional independent website unprecedentedly efficient and economical.
In the asset-enhancement phase, AI acts as a "super administrator" and "intelligent analyst." It can be the tireless "chief customer representative," engaging in intelligent conversations with global visitors 24/7, performing initial qualification, answering FAQs, even guiding customers through needs clarification, and seamlessly handing off the most valuable leads to human sales. More importantly, it is the "data alchemist" working in the background, transforming raw behavioral data—clicks, page views, dwell time—into clear customer profiles, demand predictions, and decision-journey analyses. You can know which content is most engaging, which product combinations are frequently viewed, at which step customers drop off. These insights allow you to precisely optimize every detail on your territory, continuously improving the conversion experience and customer satisfaction.
When the independent website—this "digital territory"—combines with AI—this "intelligent construction and operation system"—a wonderful chemical reaction occurs. The independent site provides the data soil and application scenarios for AI to function, while AI transforms the independent site from a static display window into a dynamic, growing, intelligently interactive, and continuously learning organic entity. Your digital asset is no longer a "project" requiring constant, forced investment but an "ecosystem" with the capacity for self-optimization and self-expansion. It starts working for you automatically, accumulating continuously, and in the process, constantly increasing its own value.
Therefore, the shift in core thinking is about moving from leasing resources externally to building assets internally. Use the independent website to lay the sovereign foundation, and use AI to infuse it with an intelligent soul. This is not merely a switch of tools or channels; it is an upgrade of the entire foreign trade business logic—from chasing momentary splashes of traffic to cultivating your own evergreen digital forest.
(To ensure the completeness and fluency of the content, the speech will continue in the following sections to elaborate in detail on the construction blueprint, practical results, and future outlook.)