In order to generate economic growth and empowerment in our communities, brothas and sistas must establish global trade channels and accommodate a global consumer base. The biggest e-commerce news to come out this year our American media is just too scared to talk about is AliPay offering brothas and sistas to accept payments from AliPay 300 million customers. In this article we are going to discuss with yall brothas and sistas how we can start marketing and selling goods and service to this 300 million market from our operations.
Backgrounder on AliPay and ePass
You can learn more about AliPay services at http://global.alipay.com/product/overview.htm. As you see, there are several difference type of services and let’s briefly cover them.
Cross-Border Web Site Payment. This is where you have a checkout process embedded on your web site to sell goods and services. Keep in mind there are restrictions on what to sell to the Chinese market and all you have to do is screw up one time to be cut off permanently.
Cross-Border Mobile Payment. This is also where Chinese citizens can make mobile payments using a QR shopping wall or doing buy online, pickup in store or purchase on site using AliPay on their mobile phone. There are a lot of possibilities here but we may want to look at setting up retailing showrooms and media to accommodate the Chinese market.
Express Login. This is similar to Facebook and Twitter login oAuth for web sites. What this can be good for is web services that does things like photo processing or health monitoring or play online games.
Auto Debit Service. This is your subscription service and can be for digital subscriptions to an online service or used as a tangible subscription service for selling items on a monthly basis.
From what I read and understand, it appear you have to pay a one-time fee of $1,000USD which I know may be steep but there are strategies around the $1,000 such as operate a web site that can handle multiple merchants. Also, it look like the checks can go to various banks around the world which is not an issue if the bank is here in the United States and Bank of China is in New York. So you got the option whether to move your money to another country to play some Forex games or bring it here to America, doesn’t matter as you still got to report all of that to the IRS anyway.
Another AliPay offering is called ePass that create a whole supply chain to get Western products to the China market and there is extremely great information you can find at http://global.alipay.com/epass/index.htm and I recommend strongly you download the PDF file from the URL (image above is from the PDF) to learn about the Chinese market. For example 11/11 is Singles Day in China and more money is spent on that holiday than what the USA spends on Black Friday.
What Brothas and Sistas Can Sell to the China Marketplace
Source: http://www.internetretailer.com/commentary/2014/07/31/what-do-chinese-online-consumers-want-buy-us
Looking at the chart above from recent research, it appears Chinese want baby care, beauty and fashion more than anything from the American market. What you don’t see and this is important for brothas and sistas to understand is the Chinese are not interested in consuming crap like Shonda Rhimes or Tyler Perry crap, not interested in negative anti-women drug dealing rappers, ghetto tattoos, scandalous drama relationship books, butt model magazines, and overpriced $100 bottle liquor and weed paraphernalia. So that means a lot of brothas and sistas need to start thinking outside the current black consumption framework to figure out what to sell and market to the 300 million AliPay users out there.
Do you notice something about the list above that talks about baby products, beauty products like cosmetic and fashion products like hats and apparel? Do you notice all of that stuff can be done using QR code shopping posters? Also, do you realize these products can be offered as a subscription service? Like sending out a nice cosmetic beauty jar homemade with natural ingredients each month? Or a cool logo hat that can be sent out each month?
Setting Up the Web Site
Brothas and sistas should realize and I think the PDF document in the link above explain it best – build simple order Chinese-language sites and learn to use translation web sites to help you translate simple text like “place order” and stuff like that. So spend some time learning how to keep things simple with small sentences and small paragraphs and commands to translate and focus on pictures. Another important thing is to check out Chinese web sites and lock at colors and fonts. The fastest way is to just look at photos of urban Chinese cities and look at the advertisements and the font and colors they use. That’s how you figure out your customer and how they think and what colors they like such as red and gold as a favorite.
Your China-targeted AliPay web site should be very simple and straight forward. Page one is the product list, page two is the single product, page three is the checkout which direct them to AliPay to make a payment, then you have a return page for confirmation of order or a cancellation of order. You send email receipt and that is your whole setup and don’t make it more complex than what I described as you are dealing with cats on the other side of the world. Just keep it simple and remember to have mobile HTML5 pages and you can easily do this with WrapBootStrap templates.
What Brothas and Sistas Can Offer
Everybody around you brothas and sistas is going to make you think American black folks don’t have shit to offer the Chinese market and will try their best to have yall believing that crap. Even your own black media will try to convince yall that you don’t have much to offer and try to argue it is “difficult” without explaining the so-called difficulty to enter the Chinese market. The reason why is because these affirmative action set-aside chasing characters spent all these years selling out our people to boot-lick bigots for scraps. Now today, these same characters still got brown stains and crusty white residue on their nose and lips and shocked you cats with an opportunity to target a 300 million customer base. So don’t let other self-hate black media and other weak cats discourage you because you will be surprise how good of an opportunity you got making that money selling to the China market.
Here are the things you brothas and sistas can offer right now:
Digital Mobile Bling. Sell custom ringtones jingles that can be downloaded and part of a subscription plan. Sell wallpaper and other theme packs for mobile phones. Selling them for $1 with a market of 300 million, focus on cultural and mainstream stuff with your twist. Don’t forget about Singles Day also.
Physical Mobile Bling. In Asia, you should notice they have “key charms” that they put on their mobile phones like trinkets you would put on your custom bracelet. Also look at American-made leather tablet cases, mobile phone holders and even a cute mobile phone baby cradle and stuff like that. You get the idea. Again, make sure the focus stay on mainstream and not try to niche too narrow to get as much as that 300 million customer base available.
Information / Instructional Video. Show things like playing pickup basketball in New York and show how to do dribble and other b-ball skills. Show how to dance or mix music and throw a party. Make a video showing the sistas in China how to take a good black man away from these unappreciative black women. Remember that a lot of urban lifestyle things you brothas and sistas already doing, cats in China are working to learn and perfect right now and you got a market of 300 million to sell information and instructions too.
Cosmetic Products. I’m not an expert on this but from my girl and other Asian girls I dated, they love natural smells of fruits and vegetables more than the bold stuff like the strong perfume lines. So it probably a way to make stuff out of cucumber or whatever yall sistas be doing and stuff and use Western ingredients not found in China and leverage that as a selling point.
Non-Perishable Food. You can setup a small food processing plant in your own hood to do everything from powdered milk to powdered sauce base and dry ice greens and stuff like that with seasoning they like (not what you like) to ship over there from America. Remember that they want American goods they like, not what you like as an American.
Scenario Case Studies
One way to help brothas and sistas understand the paradigm shift and major opportunity AliPay and ePass gives brothas and sistas is to do some motherland African storytelling. You cannot just give our people facts – black people love some anecdotal storytelling were cats be making up stuff as they go along – that’s why all these cats be knowing the words to Slick Rick Children Story and can tell you all about how that little kid screamed “why you hit me?” and stuff so let’s give some scenario case studies for brothas and sistas to consider creating services for the China market.
Shelia and Shannetta. Both Shelia and Shannetta created together as a side hustle a home-grown natural concoction for a hand softening cream. Shelia went out and aggressively got customers from the local church and all of the co-workers and knew she squeezed Shannetta out. So Shelia and Shannetta was at work at the call center and Shelia bragged with a silly smile on her face that she did $3,000 in sales from everybody around her. Shannetta responded that she setup an AliPay monthly subscription service to send a sample pack to women and China and she only got 3% of the market so far. Shelia gave Shannetta and bigger sillier smile saying “oh 3%? Maybe you can do better..” and Shannetta told Shelia that 3% of 300 million customers is 9 million customers paying her $20 months and she making $180 million a month and will have $2.1 billion in sales within a year. Shelia face went pale as Shannetta returned that silly ass smile Shelia was giving her earlier….
Sammy Fitness vs Rocky Cross-fit. Sammy had a fitness studio in the hood where he promoted his own routine based on natural motions for several years. Recently Rocky who is old-school opened up a cross-fit gym across the street since it was the new fad and focused on stealing away all of Sammy customers and succeeded. Rocky was smirking having a full gym looking across the street seeing Sammy just enter his gym alone and working out by himself wondering when he going to shut it all down. One night, Rocky was closing up and saw Sammy closing up and ran across the street past his new Cadillac Escalade to talk to Sammy. Rocky asked why Sammy was working out by himself and Sammy can have a job at his cross-fit operation. Sammy told Rocky that he spends his time in the gym making functional fitness instructional videos to sell to the Chinese market and he only reached 6% of the market. Rocky laughed but realize he was rude then Sammy told him 6% of the market is 18 million customers and he sold these tapes for $40 earning his gym $720 million. Rocky went into sudden shock walking backward into the street before screaming “holy fuck!” as an entourage of Ferraris, Rolls Royces, chicks in Jeeps and a few Lamborghinis and a shiny bling gold-plated diamond-encrusted Astro Martin approached to personally pick Sammy up and get to rolling.
Little Timothy. It was career day at the middle school and Ms. Jones the teacher was trying engage the class with the guests who were there speaking about their career. One guy stated he was a marketing manager at a consumer product company and help create ad campaigns. Another lady said she was a network multi-level marketer selling coffee and showed everybody a picture of her standing with her arms folded next to a 2007 Mercedes S-class and some kid said “I saw you get off the bus!” and everybody in the classroom started laughing. But Little Timothy who have a stuttering problem stayed quiet with his head down. Ms. Jones the teacher wanted to get the class under control and ask a little sista student what she wanted to be when she grow and the little sista said she want to be a ballerina and someone said “she going to be a stripper!” and the classroom again burst in laughter. So Ms. Jones used her last card and called on Little Timothy to ask what he want to be knowing he has a stuttering problem. Little Timothy looked up and stuttered out “I..I…I…don’t want to be…..like any of you broke ass motherfuckers!” and stood up from his desk and pull out an item from his left pocket. “I…I..me..and…my mom hand make these miniature sneakers and I paint them…and I sell them over in China” and the kids got silent and said “wow!” turning away from the adult career folks. Little Timothy went on and said “me and my mom outsource a plant in Costa Rica building out these little kicks and I already have 10 million orders!” and then Little Timothy went into his right pocket and pulled out a fat wad of hundred dollar bills wrapped in a rubber band, shocking everybody he rolling with that kind of money. Little Timothy pulled the rubber band off the wad of hundreds, looked at his teacher Ms. Jones and stuttered as loud as he can “Buh..buh..beotch I’m rich!” and threw the wad of hundreds in the air making it rain all up in the classroom with all the kids scrambling to grab the money falling to the floor, especially the girl who said she wanted to be a ballerina.
So I hope the storytelling part inspired you African-Americans to realize now that you have access to 300 million new customers which is almost the whole population of the United States of America, you got some serious global opportunities for you to run and chase down and realize this ish is real and this is a gold rush right now. Even 3% of that 300 million base is nothing to sneeze at and you can bypass all these punk bigots and self-hating cats in our own community to open up new markets and generate revenue for you and yours to keep for your empire building.
Look into what you can offer and realize you can do the simplest thing like sell some fancy wallpaper for a mobile phone for cheap and realize if you just sell to 2 million cats, that makes you good and better than dealing with the American market. Let that money get wired to Caymen Islands and you go to the Caymen Island to cash out and get a vacation home for you and your kids to enjoy for the winter breaks and summer reunion. Don’t sit around keep reading these ignorant people who want you to just use ApplePay and hype that up – realize Alibaba is the biggest IPO ever, Chinese cats are buying up Brooklyn and Manhattan and AliPay has a 300 million strong consumer base while the biggest American card issuer don’t even come close at all. Recognize an opportunity and chase it down and I hope that is what brothas and sistas figure out here.