Shopee & Amazon Export: CS and Logistics Reality

Exporting overseas and entering foreign markets through Shopee and Amazon.

It’s a hook you hear a lot. These are posts you see and hear even more often these days. K-brand exports through Shopee, which covers Southeast Asian markets, and Amazon, the gateway to the dream market of the U.S.

Just listening to the pitch, it feels like you could achieve in an instant the overseas expansion that big companies struggle to achieve over months or years. At the same time, you’re probably worried. Is this… really possible?

E-commerce exporting sounds like a jackpot

Expanding overseas through e-commerce platforms like Shopee or Amazon presumably means exporting products B2C or D2C by using e-commerce traffic, rather than through traditional B2B trade.

Excellent!

Because of how e-commerce works, there’s no need to build a separate website or company profile, and skipping the distribution chain widens your margins. Overseas market entry achieved the moment a sale happens!

Isn’t that a jackpot?

Think about traditional overseas expansion: just finding the right partner takes at least six months even if you move fast, and sometimes several years.

But there’s a tiny problem

But there’s a small problem here. A very small one.

How are you going to handle CS? Oh, and how are you going to handle logistics?

Not long ago, a salesperson approached me without realizing I was a trader. He said he could get me onto U.S. Amazon and Southeast Asian Shopee right away. Naturally, he left those two things out completely. Even when I hinted at it, he didn’t catch on.

Companies claiming you can enter overseas markets and achieve exports in a short time through Shopee or Amazon often leave these two things out.

• Without solid CS, your brand can easily collapse before you even properly enter the market, let alone grow.
• Without solving logistics, building a profit structure is close to impossible. In the worst case, just when your product really starts selling, logistics problems can stop you from supplying it at all.

And yet they say nothing about it? It must mean CS and logistics are not their problem, and they don’t care.

The real barrier is non-tariff barriers, not tariffs

The whole world has been in an uproar over Trump’s tariffs for more than a year, but in trade the bigger problem is generally not tariffs but non-tariff barriers.

Not only visible, institutional non-tariff barriers, but also non-tariff barriers that are hard even to identify, are the biggest obstacles to entering overseas markets.

In other words, getting over these barriers is the core of exporting. Simply putting your product on the market may bring a small success in the short term, but in the long term what matters is building a proper, stable distribution structure. In that sense, a short-term all-in bet on e-commerce is a very risky idea.

Will a domestic e-commerce formula work overseas?

In Korea, as Coupang and Naver Smart Store took off, it became easier for individuals and sole proprietors to enter the market, and much easier to succeed.

But since you’ve had some results with e-commerce at home, you can succeed overseas with a similar strategy?

That’s a very complacent idea.

Depending on how you succeeded and what strategy you used, the same strategy might work overseas, but most will inevitably fail. Marketing is a concept that contains humanistic elements, and where the human and cultural environment is different, you have to approach it differently. The market gap created by these cultural factors is far wider than you think.

Easy success is poison

Easy success always turns into poison. Moving in hope of easy success is volunteering to drink poison.

There’s something I always say. Exporting is nothing more than B2B sales carried out across two borders.

You’re doing B2B sales, and you’ll trust a company that promises to make you successful without even checking your product, your price, or your market?

Good luck.

Related: SME export cost · Why attend trade fairs