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Ms. Lin from Beijing has recently been hesitant about a bottle of face cream. The biological repair serum her friend brought back from Northern Europe significantly improved her skin condition, but she couldn’t make up her mind after searching all e-commerce platforms. “Language barriers, unreadable ingredients, indistinguishable reviews, fear of counterfeit代购, and overly expensive independent sites,” she shook her head with a smile. “I clearly want it, but I dare not buy it.”
At the same time, Claire, the Asia-Pacific director of a French niche skincare brand, is facing real challenges entering the Chinese market. Although her brand has laboratory-developed ingredients and EU organic certification and enjoys a good reputation in Europe and America, it is difficult to truly open the Chinese market. “We face three obstacles,” she admitted. “First, Chinese consumers are extremely professional about ingredients and efficacy, not satisfied with abstract brand stories, and require specific data and clinical reports; second, the local market has complex channels and diverse gameplay, and traditional European marketing strategies are ineffective here; most importantly, the cost of cross-border trial and error is high, and a failed promotion may damage the brand’s reputation.”
This is not just the dilemma of Ms. Lin and Claire. After ten years of exploration, the “trust and cognition” issue in cross-border consumption remains a common challenge for the industry. On the consumer side, information is vague, true and false are difficult to distinguish, and decision-making costs are high; on the brand side, cultural barriers, scene misplacement, and low communication efficiency—these are both long-standing pain points in the industry and precisely the key to next-generation platform competition: whoever can build a bridge across the gap for both buyers and sellers can define the next stop in the cross-border import consumption field.
Over the past year, Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase has led the market with a 70% operating growth rate, with the number of active brands exceeding 6,500. Behind this achievement is not relying on simple traffic dividends, but the platform’s first insight and response to an essential change: Chinese consumers’ demand for overseas good products is upgrading from “can buy” (transaction efficiency) to “understand to buy” and “buy with peace of mind” (cognitive efficiency and trust efficiency).
The construction of this new efficiency system is quietly pushing the cross-border import consumption industry to a new stage with more temperature and connection.
Sailors Have Arrived: They Are Reconstructing the Grammar of “Trust”
When the tide turns, someone always sets sail first.
In recent years, in the ecology of Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase, a batch of overseas brands has achieved breakthrough growth through systematic operation strategies. Looking closely at these brands honored at the Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase Annual Ceremony, it is not difficult to find four key dimensions that are progressive and together form their replicable growth methodology.
Content Construction: Redefining Content Scenarios as “Trust Bonds”
Some brands have redefined content scenarios as “trust bonds” and established a three-dimensional content matrix through immersive traceability, professional endorsements, and user stories. For example, a beauty brand went deep into the raw material producing areas in Morocco to shoot a traceability documentary, transforming the product research and development process into an engaging visual narrative; a health brand collaborated with experts from top three hospitals to create a series of popular science content, making professional knowledge easy to understand. This in-depth content strategy not only effectively solves the information asymmetry problem in cross-border consumption but also establishes a lasting emotional connection between the brand and consumers.
Traffic Operation: Achieving Efficient Conversion through “Short Video + Live Broadcast Collaboration” and “Explosive Product Leadership”
Some brands have demonstrated precise digital operation capabilities and achieved efficient conversion through the “short video + live broadcast collaboration” strategy and “explosive product leadership” model. We have seen that an imported mother-and-baby brand first used a matrix of influencer short videos to warm up the market during the peak promotion period, then concentrated traffic to the brand’s self-operated live broadcast room, and finally achieved a single GMV that exceeded 50 times the daily sales. At the same time, the explosive product strategy is valued by many top brands. They establish market cognition by creating star products, then drive the growth of the entire category through associated sales, forming a healthy product ecology.
Ecosystem Collaboration: Integrating into Platform Rhythms and Responding to New Functions
Some brands are deeply integrated into the platform rhythm, cleverly combining brand events with platform nodes, and quickly responding to new function iterations. A high-end skincare brand deeply bound its new product launch with the 618 promotion, achieving a sales record of breaking 10 million on the first day with the help of platform traffic resources. These brands also always maintain sensitivity to new platform functions, from search optimization to mall operation, and can seize opportunities at the first time to ensure leading positions in ecological evolution.
Product Innovation: Achieving Differentiated Breakthroughs with Ingredient Technology
Some brands take ingredient technology as their core competitiveness and achieve differentiated breakthroughs by defining new tracks. We have seen that an oral beauty brand targets cellular anti-aging needs and achieves a 300% annual growth with its exclusive collagen formula; a German brand focuses on joint care and establishes a professional cognitive barrier through patented technology. These brands are good at transforming scientific research advantages into market language and building a solid professional image through white papers, expert endorsements, and other content.
From content construction to traffic operation, from ecosystem collaboration to product innovation, these four dimensions support each other and together form a systematic growth path for overseas brands in the Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase ecology. This multi-dimensional strategic layout not only helps top brands achieve short-term growth but also lays a solid foundation for their long-term development.
Of course, it’s not just the brands themselves that are boldly “sailing.” Professional influencers have also become an important bridge connecting overseas good products with domestic consumers. Looking at the list of award-winning influencers of Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase, you will feel the unique creativity and amazing conversion power of content creators: traceability influencers go deep into production bases, show the whole process of products from raw materials to finished products through on-site live broadcasts, and establish quality impressions in a visual way; popular science influencers integrate professional information into life scenarios, making complex knowledge easy to understand through experimental comparisons and principle explanations; life-oriented influencers and vertical category influencers naturally present product value in real scenarios through exhibition coverage, daily vlogs, and other forms.
In the Douyin content ecology, these different forms of content complement each other and ultimately form a stable trust relationship between brands and consumers. These methodologies all point to a core: the value of high-quality influencers is far more than “traffic leverage” for a single exposure, but also their ability to continuously output professional and credible content and their determination to build long-term cooperative relationships with brands. Truly efficient brand-influencer cooperation is based on in-depth collaboration with content as the link and long-term value as the goal.
At the same time, supply chain partners are also strengthening the terminal experience by improving fulfillment services. More and more cross-border supply chain enterprises have been “praised” by the official. They voluntarily launch standardized service commitments such as “express delivery” and “worry-free return,” transforming abstract trust into specific fulfillment guarantees.
These seemingly independent explorations are actually co-writing a new business language. Brands, influencers, and supply chain partners—they are no longer isolated individuals but form an organic trust ecosystem. In this ecosystem, every party is working in their own way towards the same goal: to break down the word “trust” into executable, accumulable, and perceivable specific actions.
They are no longer just “selling goods,” but jointly weaving a three-dimensional “trust network” for consumers. And this collaborative model and value consensus沉淀 from practice is exactly the new grammar being formed in Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase.
The Base Pool Is Expanding: Why Douyin E-commerce? Why Now?
In 2024, China’s e-commerce market continued to lead the world. According to official statistics, the annual online retail sales exceeded 15 trillion yuan, of which cross-border import consumption remained robust, with the scale steadily maintaining at 500 billion yuan.
In this wave, the number of users of Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase continues to climb, sales grow rapidly, with year-on-year growth of over 100% in payment transactions in multiple categories, and the overall GMV has achieved three consecutive years of leading growth; in the past 365 days, it has the highest growth rate among all cross-border platforms.
From macro growth to the emergence of positive cases at the micro level, the question arises: why can Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase do this?
We can explore this issue from two dimensions. The first is the “time” dimension. If we sort out the development context of the cross-border import consumption industry, we can see three clear stages of evolution, and each stage is actually a story of how “trust” is established.
The initial stage of cross-border import consumption can be called the “buyer era.” The essence of this stage is “trusting people.” Users’ trust is placed on individual buyers,代购, or KOLs. In other words, you trust him before you dare to buy the goods he brings. The advantage of this relationship is that it is human and warm, but the ceiling is obvious: the scale cannot be expanded, the supply is unstable, and there is a lack of norms. It终究 cannot escape the “small circle business.”
Subsequently, with the entry of well-known e-commerce enterprises into China, cross-border import consumption entered the “shelf era.” In this stage, the trust logic changed to “trusting the platform.” It is worth affirming that it greatly enriched product selection; but looking at the details, the experience is standardized and cold, which seems to be a “regression.” Consumers are faced with massive SKUs and complex parameters, doubts about authenticity have not been completely eliminated, and platform trust is not solid.
Now, we are entering a new stage, which can be called the “mind era.” The background of the “mind era” is the great enrichment of content carriers, the great expansion of interaction methods, and the great optimization of platform norms. Here, the foundation of trust becomes “trusting consensus.” Consumption no longer depends on a certain person or a certain platform logo, but comes from the three-dimensional cognition woven by live broadcasts, short videos, and user reviews. What you believe in is not a word from someone, but your own judgment formed after seeing it with your own eyes and verifying it from multiple parties—this is the perceptible reality of current cross-border consumption.
The second is the “resource” dimension. Entering the “mind era,” consumers need an ecological field that can simultaneously carry content interaction and transaction conversion, and Douyin E-commerce just has multiple genes related to “trust”:
Through a strong content field experience, brands can intuitively display factory assembly lines, invite experts to interpret ingredients, and users share real experiences. Abstract brand concepts are transformed into perceptible stories in links—”grass planting” is trustworthy. Then, real-time interaction in the live broadcast room and questions and answers in the comment area allow brands to connect directly with users and make direct commitments—”transaction” is trustworthy. Finally, for users who do not make a deal immediately or want to come back, the brand can reach them again through the shelf field to fill the gaps, ensuring that users from “heartbeat” to “action” will not be lost during jumps, and also allowing users’ consumption habits to be continuously consolidated in the platform—”efficiency” is trustworthy.
In other words, the real breakthrough of Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase lies in transforming the core link of “trust building” from a deliberate and independent marketing action into a part of the user’s natural experience. Trust is no longer just a prelude to transactions, but an inevitable result of high-quality content, smooth interaction, and reliable fulfillment. This means that the core of competition in cross-border import consumption has elevated from “transaction efficiency” to “trust efficiency.” And Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase provides the industry with the key infrastructure to achieve this elevation by seamlessly integrating the content field and the shelf field.
Starting from Double 11, Refresh the “Trust Efficiency” in the Cross-Border Import Consumption Field
From the current visible trends, new and different growth paths are emerging in the ecology of Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase: for example, content-oriented merchants break through trust barriers with professional endorsements and in-depth content; scene-penetrating influencers break the distance of virtual transactions through scenario-based content such as traceability live broadcasts; extreme fulfillment supply chains turn service experience into the core competitiveness of enterprises…
These paths are in completely different ecological niches, but they all point to the same key—trust. Perhaps trust is the key to reshaping the competition rules of cross-border import consumption.
The just-concluded “2025 Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase Double 11 Cross-Border Merchant-Influencer Conference” provided a concentrated display stage for these new business samples. The conference awarded a number of merchants, influencers, and institutions, and the award list not only focuses on sales figures but also focuses on the depth and sustainability of user dialogue.
It is worth mentioning that this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival Double 11, Douyin E-commerce Global Purchase has unprecedentedly extended the battle line to two months. Behind this strategy is respect for the law of brand development—user trust needs time to沉淀, and user cognition needs a cycle to develop. The platform hopes to help brands tell stories systematically through a more relaxed rhythm and also assist consumers in completing the complete decision-making process from perception to trust.
Peter Drucker said: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” In the cross-border field, the core of creating the future lies in making the establishment of trust more efficient and systematic. In the 2025 Double 11, we may witness: when content can be systematically沉淀 and transactions are truly based on understanding, Double 11 is no longer just a promotion node, but an important test field for building new infrastructure for cross-border consumption. (Reporter: Wang Lei)