eBay China Growth Continues With Yuanshi Motors Club, Greater China Auto Parts Industry Summit Forum
eBay continues tapping into China's vast auto parts manufacturing base for cross border growth, launching the "Automotive Global, Win on eBay - eBay Greater China Auto Parts Industry and Ecosystem Summit Forum" in Changzhou and Shenzhen and establishing the Yuanshi Motors Club to provide support for auto parts sellers in the region.
According to PingWest (translated by Google):
"Moving the World, Winning on eBay" is an industry event tailored by eBay for Chinese auto parts sellers. This summer, it will be held in Changzhou and Shenzhen. Changzhou is a well-known auto parts industry center in the country, with thousands of auto parts manufacturing companies; while Shenzhen is a highly developed innovation highland for cross-border e-commerce, with cross-border e-commerce exports exceeding 100 billion."
The forum event presentations analyzed the latest trends in the global auto parts market, shared valuable experiences in cross-border success, and provided business planning suggestions and practical strategies for participating sellers with eBay handing out "Supreme Honor", "Excellence Achievement", "Innovation and Start-up" and "Newcomer" awards to leading auto parts sellers.
General Manager of eBay International Cross-border Trade Division in China, Lin Wenkui introduced the Yuahshi Motors Club program as the next step in eBay's commitment to enhance the competitiveness of Chinese auto parts sellers:
"Auto parts and motorcycle parts are one of the most advantageous categories on eBay. The overseas market for auto parts is a long one, full of opportunities and challenges. eBay will continue to support Chinese cross-border e-commerce companies to seize opportunities in the global auto parts market."
"The Yuanshi Motors Club is our commitment and strong support to China's leading auto parts sellers. It will greatly enhance the competitiveness of Chinese auto parts sellers in the global market and help them achieve business growth!"
The Yuanshi Motors Club reportedly provides the following perks to members:
- customized overseas market analysis
- compliance policy interpretation
- traffic support
- product selection guidance and other full-scale support for leading auto parts sellers who join the club
This kind of market analysis, product selection guidance, and compliance support would be hugely valuable to all sellers and many in the US would no doubt love to have access to this data as well - but historically eBay typically only practices this kind of data sharing with China and other Asia Pacific region merchants that import into the US.
US sellers raised concerns about unfair competition in 2014 when then president of eBay Marketplaces (later CEO) Devin Wenig went all in on selling eBay users' search data to Chinese manufacturers to help ramp up "vintage" reproductions to compete with popular authentic items on the platform.
Adrienne LaFrance
"We send [manufacturers] data about what people are looking for on eBay and they respond and turn it around incredibly quickly," president of eBay Marketplaces Devin Wenig told me. "We have a really big China export business to Europe and the United States. And they respond very, very quickly to consumer taste, whatever it might be. It's really remarkable to see how quickly the manufacturing base adapts to the demand signals they get."
In other words, that red wool-blend Cross Colours hat on eBay might not be the relic from 1989 it appears to be, but instead a newly manufactured replica. (It is, of course, against eBay's policy to sell counterfeit items.) Yes, there's a huge and thriving "new vintage" manufacturing sector built around—and tailored to— your online searches.
More recently, current CEO Jamie Iannone has publicly downplayed investor and media questions about increasing competition from Temu and Shein while quietly increasing China sales to over $1 Billion in 2023 with continued growth so far in 2024 - most of which is cross border trade importing into the United States.
Liz Morton
2023 year end report:
Q1 2024:
Q2 2024:
The pressure is clearly on as Temu has overtaken eBay to become the 2nd most-visited ecommerce website, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas of Marketplace Pulse.
Temu overtook eBay to become the 2nd most-visited e-commerce website in the world (source: SimilarWeb) pic.twitter.com/oAzI2AaDtt
— Juozas Kaziukėnas (@juokaz) August 13, 2024
Iannone addressed the Temu and Shein elephants in the room at a recent JP Morgan investor conference, downplaying the impact of Chinese competition by citing eBay's strong "organic" traffic and shift away from historical dependence on lower-priced inventory from overseas.
It really hasn't impacted our business to see some of the Chinese competitors come in for a couple of reasons. One is, eBay has a - the vast, vast majority of our traffic is organic. So we don't have as much as other people with paid traffic. So when another big paid player comes into the market, it just impacts us less.
Secondarily, for those who have been following the story for a while, we moved away from kind of the low ASP overseas inventory a while ago to really focus on our core of where we're strong. And so you can look at what we're doing in focus categories, our focus on non-new in season. It has been a differentiated strategy that's worked out well for us.
While it's not clear what the average price point is today, initiatives like they Greater China Auto Parts Industry and Ecosystem Summit Forum and Yuanshi Motors Club and the Western China International Fair for Investment and Trade in Chongqing Municipality where eBay had a sizeable presence earlier this year show that eBay continues to see China as a vitally important piece of their GMV and revenue growth strategies.
After disappointingly revising guidance down in Q2 earnings report, ramping up more cross border trade from China may be Iannone's only hope of eking out the meager 0%-2% GMV growth eBay has forecasted for Q4.
