As we head into Q4, marketers around the globe are once again dusting off their crystal balls in an attempt to predict what lies ahead in this post-pandemic shopping season.
Amid rumblings of challenging economic times, identifying creative growth strategies will be critical to many advertisers’ success this Q4. In addition to the normal holiday playbook, marketers would be wise to search far and wide for untapped shoppers to target…may we recommend the overseas shopper?
The cross-border shopping phenomenon in China has continued to build momentum over the past several years, giving retailers more reason than ever to set their sights overseas to find new business. In January, eMarketer predicted that the number of cross-border shoppers in China will rise to nearly 260 million by the end of 2022. Further bolstering the opportunity, China’s annual Singles’ Day event has been crowned the world’s biggest shopping event of the year. Last year the holiday raked in an estimated $139 billion in sales, easily dwarfing the US’s Black Friday weekend sales yet again.
CJ’s global network offers a way to get a piece of this action by leveraging affiliate partners focused on Chinese shoppers. Read on for our top tips and publisher recommendations for growing your global presence.
Partner with These Influential Affiliates in China
Expanding your program into another market can be daunting—especially if you’re not sure where or how to get started. To help jump-start your global growth, we’ve rounded up a curated list of top-performing publishers in China. These publishers have a proven track record and have consistently shown their ability to drive growth for their advertisers.
- 55Haitao (3791870) - Based in China, 55Haitao is a large loyalty site focused on cross-border shopping. In addition to offering cashback and promoting great offers, 55Haitao has a large and active user forum, as well as a large content team. They offer advice and recommendations for their users on how to best use freight forwarding/drop shipping services, so advertisers don’t need to have international shipping to integrate with them.
- Dealmoon (1899918) - Dealmoon is the largest platform for connecting Chinese Americans with the world’s best brands. In addition to strong offers and robust content created by their team of editors, their audience of over 18M is highly engaged and motivated. They have been in the CJ network for 16 years and have shown the depth of their experience with Chinese shoppers and shopping holidays. Singles’ Day is a very large holiday for them, with advertisers who offer strong exclusives seeing a huge boost in performance.
- Duomai (4044600) - Based in Hangzhou, China, Duomai is the largest Chinese sub-affiliate network. They work with hundreds of high-quality affiliates in China covering many different promotional models. In addition to their network of affiliates, they also work with a large portfolio of influencers (called KOLs or Key Opinion Leaders) who promote brands on various Chinese social media platforms like Weibo, RED, and live streaming services.
- RebatesMe (4039057) - RebatesMe is a large cross-border loyalty site based in China. They offer very competitive cash-back rates and have seen success with the fashion, beauty, and exercise verticals. The majority of their traffic is from China although they do also have a significant portion of Chinese-American shoppers who use their site.
- Shopback (4345648) - Shopback is Asia’s largest loyalty shopping site, with over 15M total users and 12M app downloads. They have localized sites for nine different markets within Asia: Australia, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore. They continue to grow at an amazing clip, achieving near 5x growth in H1 2021 with continued growth expected during this Holiday season. Singles’ Day celebrations will be a part of their season-long Shopfest event that will be running in each of their nine markets.
- SMZDM.com (3434966) - SMZDM is China’s largest deal site, with over 30M page views per day, and 4.3M DAU on their app. Their name in Chinese means “What’s Worth Buying” in Chinese, and their shoppers look to them for the best offers on the Chinese web. They have a strong core of cross-border shoppers, with particular interest in electronics, health, and gaming verticals. Singles’ Day is their largest on-site event of the year by far, but for their cross-border shopping audience, Black Friday is still a big shopping day. Due to the sales volume they see from domestic audiences, placement fees are required for any bookings on-site during Q4.
Seek to Discover Up-and-Comers via CJ’s Recruit Partners Tool
We’re a big believer in the power of recruitment—consistently bringing in new publishers is vital for your program and the key to long-term, sustainable growth. While working with these recommended publishers in APAC is a great first step, it’s important to diversify your approach within a given region and work with various types of publishers across different verticals.
By using CJ’s Recruit Partners tool, you can continue to discover and bring in new publishers to your program through a targeted approach. Outside of searching for publishers by keywords and filtering by Property Models and Property Reach, you can also filter results by geographic area. Filter using Publisher Location and the Customer Conversion Area to find publishers that are based in the APAC region and/or have a minimum percentage of their total sales in a specific region. Ensure that you are using these filters to find new publishers that will help grow your global presence.
Start Your Promotions Well Before Singles’ Day
This year, Chinese ecommerce marketplace Alibaba announced that the Singles’ Day shopping event will start early, with presale items beginning as soon as October 24th. Retailers should take note and align their own Singles’ Day promotions to launch in late October in order to capitalize on the early boost in online shopping activity.
Looking for More? Check Out These APAC Region Publishers
APAC is a large region with no shortage of opportunity. Here’s a list of power publishers from Australia, Japan, and Korea.
Australia
- ZIPCO (CID 5750236) - Zip is a leading global BNPL (Buy Now, Pay later) publisher. Their 6.5M global customers can shop anywhere and everywhere from their shopping app.
- CashRewards (CID 3080986) - CashRewards is the largest loyalty publisher in Australia in sales volume. It also ranks in the top hundred websites in Australia and is growing.
Japan
- Interspace Japan (CID 4881807) - Interspace Japan is one of the largest affiliate service networks in Japan with over 500,000 sites.
- Rakuten Rebates (CID 5156138) - Rakuten Rebates is the largest cashback publisher in Japan with over 600 brands on their platform. Their number of users continue to grow, and they’ve seen +50% YOY growth rate since 2017.
Korea
- Mallree (CID 3978773) – Mallree is one of the largest cashback sites in Korea. Mallree is a reward sites for freight forwarding platform, MallTail. Mallree users are able to shop cross-border and arrange shipping via freight forwarding service, even if the advertiser doesn't ship directly to Korea.
- LinkPrice (CID 4467073) – Established in 2000, Linkprice is the oldest and the largest affiliate network in Korea with over 300K publishers.
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