In recent years, the scale of China’s cross-border e-commerce import and export has continued to grow rapidly, becoming a new bright spot in the development of foreign trade.

In recent years, the scale of China’s cross-border e-commerce import and export has continued to grow rapidly, becoming a new bright spot in the development of foreign trade.

Domestic consumers purchase overseas goods through cross-border e-commerce platform, which constitutes cross-border e-commerce retail import behavior. According to statistics, in 2020, China’s cross-border e-commerce retail import scale has exceeded 100 billion yuan. Recently, data show that in the first quarter of this year, China’s cross-border e-commerce import and export reached 419.5 billion yuan, up 46.5% year on year. Among them, exports reached 280.8 billion yuan, an increase of 69.3%; Imports reached 138.7 billion yuan, an increase of 15.1%. At present, there are more than 600000 cross-border e-commerce related enterprises in China. So far, more than 42000 cross-border e-commerce related enterprises have been added in China this year.

Experts said that in recent years, cross-border e-commerce has maintained a double-digit growth rate, which has made a significant contribution to China’s foreign trade development. Especially in 2020, China’s foreign trade will realize a V-shaped reversal under severe challenges, which has something to do with the development of cross-border e-commerce. Cross border e-commerce, with its unique advantages of breaking through time and space constraints, low cost and high efficiency, has become an important choice for enterprises to carry out international trade and a pacesetter for foreign trade innovation and development, playing a positive role for foreign trade enterprises in coping with the impact of the epidemic.

The development of new formats cannot do without the strong support of relevant policies. Since 2016, China has explored the transitional policy arrangement of “temporary supervision according to personal belongings” for cross-border e-commerce retail imports. Since then, the transitional period has been extended twice to the end of 2017 and 2018. In November 2018, the relevant policies were promulgated, which made it clear that the pilot projects were carried out in 37 cities, including Beijing, to supervise the import commodities of cross-border e-commerce retail according to personal use, and not to implement the requirements of first import license approval, registration or filing, thus ensuring the continuous and stable supervision arrangement after the transition period. In 2020, the pilot will be further expanded to 86 cities and the whole island of Hainan.

Driven by the pilot, China’s cross-border e-commerce retail imports grew rapidly. Since the pilot of cross-border e-commerce retail import was carried out in November 2018, various departments and local governments have actively explored and continuously improved the policy system to standardize in development and develop in standardization. At the same time, the risk prevention and control and supervision system is gradually improving, and the supervision is powerful and effective during and after the event, which has the conditions for replication and promotion in a wider range.

Experts said that in the future, as long as the cities where the relevant regions are located meet the requirements of customs supervision, they can carry out online shopping bonded import business, which facilitates enterprises to flexibly adjust the business layout according to the development needs, facilitates consumers to purchase cross-border goods more conveniently, and is conducive to giving play to the decisive role of the market in the allocation of resources. At the same time, efforts should be made to strengthen the supervision during and after the event.