General

The State Administration of Market Supervision recently announced four national standards for cross-border e-commerce, including the Management Specifications for Comprehensive Cross border E-commerce Service Business of Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises and the Evaluation of Cross border E-commerce Transaction Service Quality. Experts believe that the release of four new national standards in the cross-border e-commerce field will provide more standardized support for the cross-border e-commerce field to go abroad and go global, and Chinese enterprises will be more "resourceful" in "buying the world and selling the world".

Expand new space for foreign trade

Overseas fresh fruits and vegetables are served on Chinese families' tables. Beauty products, medical and health products, and mother and baby products are widely loved by Chinese consumers. China's smart phones and smart home appliances are sold abroad... The increasingly mature "buy the world and sell the world" business model not only stimulates the vitality of domestic and foreign markets, but also expands new space for the growth of the international trade industry.

In recent years, China's cross-border e-commerce industry has entered a stage of rapid development and has become the core driving force for China's foreign trade growth. According to customs statistics, the import and export scale of China's cross-border e-commerce international trade has increased nearly 10 times in the past five years. The proportion of cross-border e-commerce in foreign trade will increase from less than 1% in 2015 to 4.9% in 2021. In 2021, the import and export scale of China's cross-border e-commerce will reach 1.92 trillion yuan, up 18.6% year on year.

Industry insiders believe that the cross-border e-commerce industry presents significant characteristics. From the perspective of commodities, more than 90% of cross-border e-commerce goods are consumer goods. From the perspective of business entities, cross-border e-commerce has significantly reduced the threshold of specialization in international trade. Small, medium and micro enterprises have become new trade operators, with private enterprises accounting for more than 90%. From the perspective of channels, cross-border e-commerce has gradually developed independent websites, social networking sites, search engine marketing and other new channels relying mainly on third-party platforms. In terms of nodes, as an important overseas node of cross-border e-commerce, overseas warehouses have become a new type of foreign trade infrastructure. At present, the number of overseas warehouses in China has exceeded 2000, covering an area of more than 16 million square meters, and more market entities have participated in the construction of overseas warehouses.

The new features of cross-border e-commerce also bring new challenges to the normative development of cross-border e-commerce. Sun Zhaoyang, director of the High tech Standardization Institute of the Chinese Academy of Standardization, said that small and medium-sized enterprises are faced with high foreign trade compliance costs, lack of information exchange and other problems when participating in international trade. As a comprehensive foreign trade service, cross-border e-commerce services urgently need to improve service quality and efficiency. At the same time, affected by many factors such as cross country, cross region and cross culture, the multilingual naming of trade commodity names has ambiguity, unclear description of commodity attributes, missing key indicators and other problems, which affect the trading efficiency and quality. In order to meet these needs and challenges, relevant national standards for cross-border e-commerce have been continuously introduced to provide support and guarantee for the development of cross-border e-commerce.

Promote standardized development

How to describe the same smartphone production technology in Spanish and Arabic? How to retrieve the information of a certain ceramic product in different language environments? What are the specific requirements for the services provided by the cross-border e-commerce integrated service platform? What are the principles, indicators and methods for evaluating the service quality of cross-border e-commerce platforms? The four recently published national standards for cross-border e-commerce provide clear "reference answers" to these questions.

"The four national standards for cross-border e-commerce released this time play an important role in improving the overall development level of cross-border e-commerce." Sun Zhaoyang believes that, first, it can effectively guide comprehensive foreign trade service enterprises and their cooperative service providers, carry out the operation and management of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive services for small, medium-sized and micro enterprises, improve the quality of comprehensive foreign trade services, reduce transaction risks, and promote the healthy development of the comprehensive foreign trade service industry. The second is to ensure the consistency and accuracy of relevant product classification, naming and information description in various cultural backgrounds and language environments by standardizing the classification, naming and product information description of multilingual cross-border e-commerce transactions in seven major language environments, including Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Korean, Arabic and Russian, so as to improve the transaction quality of cross-border e-commerce and reduce transaction costs. Third, closely focusing on the problems such as imperfect credit system, weak awareness of intellectual property rights, cross-border transaction fraud and rights protection in the development of cross-border e-commerce transaction services, the quality evaluation of cross-border e-commerce transaction services was carried out to promote the construction and excellence of cross-border e-commerce transaction services through evaluation, which is helpful for promoting the construction of cross-border e-commerce transaction service credit system and improving the service quality of cross-border e-commerce platform operators and operators within the platform, Protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers at home and abroad, create an honest and standardized cross-border e-commerce trading environment, and provide necessary institutional guarantees and communication channels for the healthy interaction and development of cross-border e-commerce.

Hong Yong, associate researcher of the E-commerce Research Institute of the Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce, said: "The introduction of the four new standards will help to form a unified standard in the field of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive services, improve the level of cross-border e-commerce services, provide a template for cross-border e-commerce product information description, promote cross-border e-commerce product compliance, constrain cross-border e-commerce enterprise behavior, and achieve high-quality sustainable development in the field of cross-border e-commerce."

Improve the competitiveness of the industry

In recent years, the State Council has successively set up 132 cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones in 6 batches, covering 30 provinces, autonomous regions and cities. Multi departments have explored and formed the institutional framework of the cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zone with the "six systems and two platforms" as the core, and tried first in terms of technical standards, business processes, regulatory models and information construction in various links such as transaction, payment, logistics, customs clearance, tax refund and foreign exchange settlement. In April 2021, five national standards, including Guidelines for the Exchange of Quality Evaluation Results of Cross border E-Commerce Products and Specifications for the Description of Cross border E-Commerce Export Commodity Information, were published. The four new national standards added "instructions" for the development of cross-border e-commerce norms.

It is reported that after the release of the four new standards, application, implementation, verification and improvement will be carried out according to the scope and applicable objects of the standards. First of all, we will formulate relevant standards implementation rules for different standards implementation entities, and cooperate with cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones, cross-border e-commerce parks, cross-border e-commerce platforms or cross-border e-commerce enterprises to carry out the pilot work of standards. According to the pilot results, constantly improve and modify the content of the standard, and further promote the application and implementation of the standard.

Hong Yong believes that from the policy point of view, we should support cross-border e-commerce platform enterprises to become bigger and stronger, and cultivate competitive cross-border e-commerce integrated service enterprises. Encourage competent cross-border e-commerce enterprises to build overseas warehouses by self construction or leasing, and improve the competitiveness of cross-border e-commerce international trade exports. In addition, banking institutions, cross-border e-commerce platforms and market procurement and trade networking information platforms strengthened the verification of trade authenticity and improved the efficiency of cross-border e-commerce RMB settlement through the system direct connection mode. We should optimize the services of cross-border e-commerce parks, accelerate the construction of comprehensive service platforms, logistics sorting lines, bonded warehouses and other infrastructure services, and improve the operation and maintenance level and operation efficiency of cross-border e-commerce public service platforms. In terms of logistics, we can rely on the advantages of water, land and air comprehensive logistics, seize the policy opportunities of free trade zones, comprehensive bonded zones, comprehensive pilot zones, and accelerate the construction of integrated supply chain systems to provide efficient services for the development of cross-border e-commerce.