This white paper provides a detailed introduction to the entire process of cross-border e-commerce independent websites, from website building to advertising placement and optimization. It offers comprehensive operational guidelines and practical advice for cross-border e-commerce practitioners, helping to improve the effectiveness of independent site operations.
1. Website Building
- Shopify Website Building System: Suitable for platform sellers transitioning to independent sites and traditional manufacturing enterprises creating overseas brands. Advantages include a vast selection of themes, digital marketing interfaces, rich plugins, low entry barriers, security and stability, efficiency, and channel compatibility. Registering an account provides a 14-day free trial, with various monthly rental packages available. There is no commission, but credit card transaction fees and payment handling fees apply. You can select templates for permanent use in the official template store without purchasing a server.
- Driving Traffic via Facebook: Bind Shopify with your Facebook page and pixel, upload product catalogs to create dynamic ads.
- Payment Methods
- PayPal: Suitable for receiving payments for products priced from tens to hundreds of US dollars, B2B small sample orders, B2C retail, and non-counterfeit products. Shopify automatically creates a PayPal business account, and the email used for activation must match the one used to register Shopify.
- Credit Card: Pay attention to the 180-day chargeback period, complaints and chargebacks affecting platform reputation, banks charging deposits, and maintaining transaction security. There are embedded and redirect integration methods; embedded integration requires sellers to have PCI certification. Third-party credit card acquiring channels such as LianLian Pay and PingPongPay offer different preferential policies.
2. Account Opening
- Asset Creation and Account Opening Process
- Create a Facebook personal account, ensure information is authentic, and enable security verification.
- Create a Business Manager (BM) platform for one-stop management of ad accounts, pages, and related staff.
- Create a public page/business to represent your brand, services, and business. It can be used for publishing ads, managing support, Facebook Messenger, and Stories, etc.
- To apply for an account, you need to provide a mainland business license, website (up to two, within the business license's scope and belonging to the same category), Facebook business page, company address in Chinese and English, contact person information, website URL, and backend screenshots of third-party platforms. The official agent will review the information.
3. Advertising Placement
- Determining Market and Audience
- Use Facebook's official Insights and Audience Analysis tools to identify target markets and audience characteristics, such as user interests, demographic distribution, activity frequency, etc., for precise targeting.
- Ad Creation Process
- Log in to the ad management tool, select an ad campaign, create an ad set, including choosing optimization goals, defining the audience (country/region, age, gender, language, interest segmentation, etc.), selecting placements (automatic placement recommended), setting budget and schedule.
- Create ads, choose the ad publishing identity (Facebook page or Instagram account), format (carousel, single image or video, collection, etc.), complete materials, copywriting, and URL links, and set call-to-action buttons.
4. Ad Data Interpretation and Optimization
- Data Interpretation
- Ad hierarchy involves ad popularity, audience and ad relevance, billing methods (CPM, CTR, etc.), conversion effectiveness (website add-to-cart/purchase, etc.), performance numbers and costs, add-to-cart rate and conversion rate, etc., which can reflect ad effectiveness and website optimization points.
- Optimization Strategies
- Audience Optimization: Summarize target audience characteristics, exclude platforms not targeting the audience and those with poor performance, avoid omissions (test similar audience ratios, extend remarketing windows, expand interest keywords) and avoid overlap (test audience overlap) when creating and testing audiences.
- Budget, Bidding, and Event Optimization: Choose appropriate bidding strategies (accelerated delivery during major promotions, etc.), specify audience value, ensure the bid cap is high enough; improve the "budget/bid ratio," use campaign budget optimization, test creatives at the ad level, optimize upper-level conversion events for niche or high-value products, and increase the number of conversion events.
- Ad Copy Optimization: Clearly convey information and calls to action, customize for different audiences, keep it simple and recognizable, mention price, use a single call to action, ensure text and visuals match, add time frames, and use appropriate tone and style.
- Creative Production Tips: Show the brand early, consider muted playback effects in design, place highlights at the beginning, balance information and duration (dynamic feed ads no longer than 15 seconds, Stories ads no longer than 10 seconds), design layouts for the platform, try more innovations, and use creative assistance tools (such as Facebook Ads Library, Ads Spy, Facebook Inspiration, Mobile - studio).
