One Sydney Chinese bought a dragon boat at Tmall and behind it was a 270,000CNY arbitrage opportunity.

The Dragon Boat Festival is coming. Eating dumplings and dragon boat racing are the most familiar folk customs in China.

With convenient online shopping, even if you are traveling overseas, buying Chinese zongzi (rice dumplings) online through Tmall and other domestic e-commerce platforms is nothing new.

However, the recent Dragon Boat Festival online shopping of a Chinese in Sydney is a bit unusual. She did not buy zongzi but bought a 14-meter-long dragon boat on Tmall.

Wang Jiaojiao is one of the few Chinese people at Sydney Dragon Boat Club. She is a staff member of the Health Department of NSW.

Many local Australians like the dragon boat very much. The love of foreigners for the dragon boat once shocked Wang Jiaojiao.

But it is not surprising that rowing is a very popular sport in foreign countries. Universities such as Oxford and Cambridge have a tradition of rowing for over 100 years, and the rowing is still an Olympic game.

Although there are many differences between the dragon boat and the rowing boat, the similarity is high and therefore it is easily accepted by foreigners.

Of course, they just treat the dragon boat racing as an ordinary sport and do not necessarily understand the culture behind it.

For Wang, she rows dragon boats with a dozen of teammates of the dragon boat clubs in the blackwattle bay every week.

After two hours of training, they had a breakfast together, which did not delay the work and arrangement of the day. Therefore, dragon boating has become a fashionable social way in Australia. During this process, Wang will also tell the new teammates about the Chinese culture behind the Dragon Boat and Chinese Dragon Boat Festival.

For this year's Dragon Boat Festival season, they need to buy a new dragon boat. Then they searched it on internet and to their surpise the magic Tmall really has it for sale.

What most surprised Wang was that the price of 30,000 yuan was only 1/10 of the price of the previous boat that the club purchased in Germany, so she immediately placed an order.

It is the Peisheng shipyard in Hangzhou Thousand Island Lake which received this dragon boat order. Zhu Wuxin who worked for 18 years at Peisheng Shipyard never thought that one day his dragon boat can be sold directly to Australia through e-commerce platform such as Tmall/Taobao.

The extraordinary order of Wang also shocked the customs of China and Australia. Few individuals purchased such large items online.

For this landmark personal cross-border online shopping order, Ningbo Beilun Customs attached great importance and expressed its full support and assistance in customs clearance.

Just 15 days later, the dragon boat arrived in Sydney Harbour and Wang's foreign teammates were shocked.

If you bought it from the German manufacturer, it will not only be 10 times more expensive, but also take three to four months to deliver.

Everyone is satisfied with the performance of the new dragon boat. Coach Chris Alexandrou said:

“The performance of this dragon boat is better than all what we had previously rowed. Everyone can feel it, the speed is faster, the turn is also very flexible. See the color of it? Shining in the sun, which let us stand out in all the teams.”

The prices and logistics speed of Chinese e-commerce not only opened the eyes of foreigners, but also opened up new opportunities for cross-border e-commerce entrepreneurs.

For goods like the 14-meter-long dragon boat, there have been few foreign individual buyers before, but such orders will increase in the future.

Better performance, one-tenth of the price, makes this type of product particularly competitive, and perhaps a group of cross-border e-commerce companies that specialize in such certain large-size goods may be born.

There may also be a group of professional sales companies. Take Dragon Boats as an example. German companies are asking for 300,000CNY while China's 30,000CNY has better performance and faster delivery.

Why did many Australian clubs buy German dragon boats in the past ?Because many Chinese factories did not advertise overseas enough and many people did not know how to buy it.

The dragon boat is so big. If the logistics cannot keep up, delivery is also a problem.

Even now, not all Australian dragon boat clubs know that dragon boats on Tmall are cheaper.

Suppose someone uses short-term window of such an information asymmetry to do SEO on the Internet, and advertise in various social media, make accurate marketing campaigns, and even immediately book airplane tickets to fly to Australia to sell dragon boats.

Even if it is sold at 300,000CNY like the German company, it may sell well with faster delivery speed and better performance. There is 270,000CNY (40,000USD) profit margin for each sale, which is almost one year's salary for a lot of people.

Of course, with Tmall's propaganda, such a large profit cannot be sustained, information asymmetry will rapidly shrink, and more people will directly contact the manufacturers to purchase online.

However, with the development of e-commerce and logistics, there will inevitably be more opportunities for cross-border retailing of such large items.

In addition to the dragon boat, think about all too big to deliver goods, some of them may be a good opportunity for cross-border e-commerce retails.

In fact, it was heard long time ago that some people were exporting small domestic machinery abroad and earning tens of millions a year.

There is nothing new under the sun. Now it is only in the era of e-commerce that these businesses are redone with new platforms, new technologies, new marketing, and new logistics.

If you want to buy large items such as furniture from Tmall/Taobao/JD, please don't hesitate to contact us.