During Those Three Pandemic Years, How Did China's Cross-Border E-Commerce Small Sellers Survive — and Turn Their Businesses Around?

In early 2020, the day after the lockdown news broke, a small cross-border e-commerce seller in Shenzhen that made luggage found that the goods sitting in its warehouse could no longer be shipped out.

The goods were in China. The customers were abroad. Ships stopped, flights were cut, customs shut. The boss stared at the frozen order list in his backend and watched his hair fall out, by the handful.

I initially thought this was just another story of "hang in there and it'll pass."

But the more I looked into it, the more I realized things weren't that simple. Everyone was hanging on, yes — but some were merely white-knuckling it, while others, in the very act of holding on, somehow managed to grow a new skeleton for their companies.

What I want to talk to you about today is this very group: China's small and medium-sized cross-border e-commerce sellers. What did they go through during the pandemic years? What did they do? And how did they end up, almost by accident, catching up on the lesson of digitization?

All right, from the top.

What exactly is cross-border e-commerce?

It means you stay in China, sell your goods abroad, and skip the traditional offline process of export trading — you close orders directly through platforms and international logistics. China is the world's largest cross-border online shopping market, with more than 200 million cross-border buyers. As early as 2019, the global cross-border e-commerce market had already exceeded $780 billion.

That's a big pie. But the bigger the market, the more damage even a low-grade cold can do on the inside.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, three blows landed at once.

Blow number one: marketing.

Customers stopped spending and revenue started sliding. What to do? The first instinct was to cut costs. In nearly every interview, sellers slashed their marketing budgets first — ads off, campaigns paused, people standing by. But once the money dried up, so did the traffic, and getting anyone to even see you became a struggle.

What made it worse was a knife fight. The pandemic forced offline stores to shut their doors, and everyone piled online to fight over the same bowl of rice. Every seller was snatching from every other, competition ran far hotter than usual, and customers' tastes kept shifting day by day.

Blow number two: supply chain and logistics.

This one hurt the most. Factories went idle, suppliers closed their doors, and goods couldn't be shipped. Voyages stretched longer, customs wouldn't let things through, and costs climbed. One seller in the machinery business put it bluntly: when the government imposes restrictions, you simply can't ship — it's a completely different world from normal times.

And the damage cascaded. Broken supply meant empty shelves, empty shelves meant lost orders, and lost orders bruised customer relationships.

Blow number three: money.

The exchange rate moved every single day, eating into hard-earned profits. Customers kept dragging their feet on payments, receivables didn't come back, and cash flow reached a crisis point. Try borrowing from a bank? Banks instinctively pulled back, and small companies found it even harder to get a loan.

Three fronts, all under siege at the same time.

If you had been standing at that warehouse door back then, you'd probably have concluded: this business is done for.

But here's where it gets interesting.

Everyone took the hits, but how they responded made all the difference. Some couldn't take it. Others turned that pressure into an opportunity for transformation.

I ran a fairly sizable sample study. 104 small and medium-sized cross-border e-commerce companies in China: I talked to their founders, spent time in their factories observing, and then sent out questionnaires and collected them back. The data is right here — no fluff:

They survived on four moves.

Move one: ignite marketing. With offline stores gone, they moved the battlefield online. Livestream selling, paid advertising, bringing in influencers to build momentum, emailing to hold on to old customers. Notice something? Every one of these treats online channels as a lifeline.

Move two: split up the supply chain. No more putting all your eggs in one supplier's basket or one region's basket. Line up several suppliers, line up backup logistics partners, shift goods in from different countries. The pandemic taught them one thing: a single point of failure is a death sentence; redundancy is what keeps you alive.

Move three: handle money wisely. Squeeze expenses, renegotiate prices with suppliers, and watch the cash flow like a hawk. Can't get a bank loan? Then crowdfund, chase government subsidies, or go through P2P (peer-to-peer) lending. When the traditional door shuts, open a new window.

Move four: get on the digitization train. Adopt automation, adopt AI, adopt blockchain; build warehouse systems, automated packing, contactless delivery. These didn't just save the business — they also wiped out a pile of grunt work along the way.

But what truly made my eyes light up were the brand-new "ways of doing business" they were forced into.

I call them the "five livestreams."

Stream one: livestream marketing. On platforms like TikTok and Alibaba, they show off their products every day, and take people inside the factory so customers can see the goods through the screen. Why would anyone trust you enough to buy an expensive piece of equipment over the internet? Let them see that production line with their own eyes, and trust starts to grow. One number says it all: plenty of customers simply had a video call with a salesperson, then quietly placed the order.

Stream two: livestream selling. Live Q&A, live haggling, closing the deal on the spot. The biggest flaw of online shopping is that nagging uncertainty, and a livestream presses right down on it.

Stream three: livestream production. Watch it being made. When customers watch their own goods being built piece by piece, that feeling of being cared about is worth money.

Stream four: livestream shipping. When the goods are being loaded onto the truck, they open a video call so you can watch your shipment go into the container. Even if people can't cross borders, their goods still need to be seen.

Stream five: livestream after-sales. Customer bought something but can't figure out how to assemble it? Walk them through it on a remote video call. WhatsApp, WeChat, Zoom — whatever's handy.

Which of the five livestreams had the highest adoption rate? Selling, at 95%. Marketing came second, at 82%. Production 51%, shipping 58%, and after-sales 53%.

Chew on that for a moment — there's a brutal truth buried in it:

Traffic is grabbed; trust is livestreamed.

Having the goods isn't enough — people have to be able to see them, touch them, and believe in them. That's the lesson the pandemic taught small sellers for free.

I then ran another round of configurational analysis on the data — that is, testing which combinations of conditions actually pushed companies one way or the other — to see what really drove them toward digital transformation.

The conclusion was clear-cut. Two paths are prerequisites for digitization: first, digital marketing actually being used; second, technology making its way into the supply chain and logistics. Bring both on board, throw in contactless delivery, and you basically get there; do none of the above, and transformation is mostly empty talk.

In plain language: think digital transformation is just buying a system, installing it, and calling it a day? Not even close. It means taking "how do I find customers, how do I ship goods, how do I collect money" — all three of those — and rebuilding all of them as digital plays.

At this point, you might be asking: this was all back in the pandemic. It's 2026 now. Does any of it still matter?

I'd say it matters more than ever.

Looking back over these years, the pandemic was nothing more than an amplifier. It hit fast-forward on a trend that was late to arrive anyway. Going online, digitizing, building supply-chain resilience — these were never just pandemic-era survival tricks. They're the questions you should have answered ahead of any black swan exam.

Now, in 2026, looking back at that stress test, the lessons that actually stuck come down to three.

One: never stake your supply chain on a single leg, a single place, a single supplier. Redundancy isn't cheap, but when a black swan shows up, it's what buys you the chance to still be alive.

Two: treat "letting the customer see" as a product capability. Livestreaming, transparency, contactless — these aren't gimmicks; they're ways of lowering the trust barrier. Whoever makes "seeing" solid gets to eat a bigger slice of the market.

Three: when a trend arrives, don't be a spectator. Digitization is a course you can show up to late — and then you'd have to sit a make-up exam. Better to change on your own terms than to be forced to change.

I don't know when the next black swan will come. But I do know this: the companies whose founders were forced, back in 2020, to rebuild themselves bone by bone — those companies are no longer the same fragile frames they once were.

And to you, the reader: when that day actually comes, I hope you're not being pushed along — I hope you're already out in front.