Want to sell Cross-Border eCommerce to China?
Then you’ll first need to figure out the best Cross-Border eCommerce platform to sell your product on.
And in this post, we’re going to show you how to set up your very own Cross-Border eCommerce store on TMall one of the most popular Cross-Border platforms in China.
Some of you may have heard of Taobao, which technically is how Jack Ma grow his Alibaba empire. And while you can sell Cross-Border on Taobao, it harbors a poor reputation for fake products. To counterbalance this situation, Alibaba Group adopted a multiple-brand strategy, that is how TMall, previously call Taobao Mall, was created.
Unlike Taobao where anyone can just set up an account and literally start selling your products or services in just minutes, getting up and running on TMall is much harder.
For one in order to start a TMall shop or TMall Global shop, you must be the owner of the brand or an authorized reseller of the brand. The application process to get started on TMall is also quite complicated.
I know all of this mean sound discouraging but trust me, once you get accepted by TMall, you’ll attract higher quality customers. So below are the 5 steps you have to go through if you decide to set up a store in TMall or TMall Global shop.
Step #1: Understand the 4 Store Types
There are 4 types of TMall Store each with has its own unique purpose, so before we talk about how to start your TMall application process, you should know what store type will be best suited for your brand
Brand Flagship Store: Just as it sounds the Brand Flagship Store is designed for private brands or the exclusively authorized sellers provided by the brand to sell on TMall.
Franchise Store: Unlike the Brand Flagship Store, Franchise Store can be an authorized seller that was allowed by the brand. They do not need to be exclusively authorized.
Exclusive Store: An Exclusive TMall Store is a store that carries multiple brands but they must all be in the same category. For example: if you’re are selling Women’s apparel on your Exclusive TMall, you cannot be selling infant or baby products as well.
Shopping Place-Type Flagship Store: The trademark owners of offline chain supermarkets, shopping places or online b2C websites, or the entities of which the trademark owners directly provide exclusive authorization will be marketed in the stores opened on Tmall.
Different TMall Store types will have different application requirement which will be discussed in more details below
Step #2: Submitting Your Application
In order to set up a TMall shop, you must submit a brand application for approval. However, you must understand that there is a difference between TMall Global and the National TMall.
With the National TMall only brands that are registered in China will be accepted, so if you want your brand to be set up on the National TMall then you must first have registered your brand in China. The other will the only way to get your brand on TMall would be to apply to be approved for TMall.hk (TMall Hong Kong) or TMall Global.
The Application Process
To begin your TMall application process first you should check on this page.
On this page, you select your industry from the left column and then set your store type. Choose whether your brand is imported or not, then the required documents to be accepted will be listed below. Remember that all the documents need your corporate seal on them and if you cannot provide one of the documents you’ll not be approved.
Next, you’ll need to provide information to set up the store, such as the store type, brand name, product category, etc. In addition, you should provide additional brand information as well as more enterprise information, including certificates, whether your revenue is no less than 1 million and so on.
Finally, you’ll need to come up with a great name for your store and the application will be completed. The whole processes above will take up approximately 2 hours of your time.
TMall’s Hot List
If your brand is on the TMall Hot List then you’re in luck, because your application process will be very easy. The TMall Host List is a list of varieties of hot or famous brands that presently don’t exist on TMall. These brands are given special priority status as they are in high demand by the market. See if you’re brand is on the TMall’s Hot List here.
Step #3 Wait for Your Evaluation
Once you’ve submitted your application, now all you can do is wait for TMall to evaluation it and pray. But here is a general guideline on how TMall will evaluate your brand.
- Brand Targeting: your brand image and style, who your target audiences are, your price point.
- Brand Operating Capability: brand launching time, do you have any offline operation such as a physical store. Your annual trade volume, export volume, operation on other platforms such as Taobao or JD.
- Brand Feature: Does your brand have original designs, what are the features of your product, do you have, features or services.
- Enterprise Credibility: factory, awards, operation plan and other featured information.
- Whether you submit real information
- Whether your brand can scale
- Whether you have the valid authorization
- Whether you meet China’s administrative and regulatory requirement in terms of production process, operation scope, and integral product safety qualification.
TMall’s evaluation process will generally take 3-6 days to finish.
Step #4: Completing Store Information
Once you have successfully passed the evaluation process, you can now activate your account and do the following:
- Set a password for your TMall account
- Bind a mobile phone number and an email to your account for security
- Complete the real name authentication in an Alipay account that does not bind any Taobao account before.
- Sign a service agreement
- Learn TMall’s rule
- Fully enter all your store information
This whole step will roughly take you about 1 day to complete.
Step #5 Setting Up and Designing Your Store
If you made it this far then your TMall store is almost ready to sell your products. But before you launch your TMall store for the general public, Tmall will require you to release a certain number of products on your store first. For different industries the minimum items number is different. You can look up the number here for your industry.
After that, you can go to the dashboard to learn more about how to release your products and the regulation of product releases.
Finally, take the time to make your store beautiful and your brand shine. Here is a page of many links for decoration training lessons.
What’s Next
Most brand imagines of sales pouring in once they have successfully launched their TMall shop, and in some rare cases, this could actually happen. In reality, however, this is far from the truth. For most brands, you’ll have to market your TMall store and brand, in order to really see some results.
TMall provides some great tools for you to market your store on their platform, and many of these tools are similar to that of Amazon.com. It even has its own TMall university that educates shop owner on how to perform better on TMall. We’re not going to cover marketing and advertising on TMall here, as it is an entire topic that deserves another post of its own.
Comments (1)
Greetings, I am a Mexican entrepreneur and I would like to know everything I need to open a virtual store in Tmall Global (the steps, requirements and documentation).