3-star South Korean supplier predicts 3x business growth using Alibaba.com

Lee Jun Seok is the CEO of Woorim Company, a manufacturer and exporter of cosmetics in South Korea. When the business first started in 2018, sales were mainly online and domestic, as there was already large demand coming from the local market.

Interest in Alibaba.com began with a book about the platform. The system structure and pricing have changed since it was published, but Seok judged that the essential qualities of Alibaba.com – which is a place where manufacturers can promote their skills and find buyers – have not changed. The emergence of e-commerce due to the coronavirus outbreak in January 2020 prompted Woorim Company to join Alibaba.com in December 2020.

Were there any difficulties in selling on Alibaba.com? How did you overcome it?

During the first eight months of selling on Alibaba.com, we received inquiries but they didn’t lead to actual transactions and I wondered if we should give up.

We preserved and continued to respond quickly to all buyers. We were able to collect frequently asked questions through these responses which were added to the product page, including product and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) information that buyers considered important. Interestingly, buyer interest increased. It was still not as much exposure as we expected, and that’s when we decided to make good use of the Keyword Advertising Tool on the platform.

The advanced setting in Keyword Advertising allowed us to set up different keywords depending on the buyer inflow amount. With this knowledge, the number of exposures grew from 700 to 100,000 with hundreds of clicks in January this year. Thanks to this exposure effect, the number of inquiries for each posting also increased.

Do you have a strategy for achieving success on Alibaba.com?

Through many trials and errors, we learned the most important factor in closing a deal is the inquiry response time. The faster you respond, the more reliable the buyers perceive you to be. Therefore, we manage our average response time to not exceed 4 hours by replying on both mobile and PC. In addition to Alibaba.com messaging functions, we use third-party messengers that buyers commonly use to maintain continuous contact.

After a steady year of operating on Alibaba.com in this way, our product exposure, conversion rate, and buyer inquiries have improved considerably. We’ve maintained our account status on Alibaba.com as a 3-star supplier and currently have buyers from the United States, Canada, Russia, Europe, and Southeast Asia. We set this year’s sales target to be triple that of last year’s and we are already expected to achieve this target by July.

The characteristic of e-commerce operations seems to be that the more you improve steadily in a way that fits the platform algorithm, the better the results.

Why choose Alibaba.com?

Alibaba.com gives us access to insights on global product and industry trends and allowed us to follow these trends to adapt and develop our own products.

If your goal is to expand your business overseas, this is one of the very few places where you can meet worldwide buyers at a time when business trips are difficult due to the coronavirus. From my prior experience using other platforms, I think Alibaba.com is a platform you can trust to meet your marketing and business needs.