Two friends from Yiwu, Zhejiang, who have long been deeply engaged in the small commodity trade, arrived in Urumqi the day before yesterday. Their visit aimed to conduct an on-site inspection of the offline channel layout in Xinjiang and surrounding Central Asian markets, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent cross-border wholesale cooperation between both parties relying on the WorldHub e-commerce platform. As a practitioner focusing on Central Asian market development, I accompanied the two merchants throughout the entire process, spending a whole day conducting in-depth visits to two core commercial landmarks in Urumqi——the International Grand Bazaar and Hualing Rag Market. Through face-to-face communications and negotiations with offline merchants, we systematically investigated the current status of local commodity sales, quality control standards, and market cooperation potential, building a key communication bridge for the WorldHub platform to connect Yiwu’s supply chain with Central Asian offline retail terminals.
In the morning, we first went to Urumqi International Grand Bazaar. As the largest and most representative comprehensive international trade market in Xinjiang, it is not only the core of integration of local culture and commerce but also an important commodity distribution center radiating Central Asia, West Asia, and even Europe. It gathers thousands of offline stores, covering various commodities such as household goods, textiles and fabrics, and characteristic handicrafts, among which there are many wholesale stores targeting Central Asian merchants, which is highly consistent with the global wholesale positioning of the WorldHub platform. During the visit, we randomly selected more than 10 stores mainly engaged in daily necessities and household cleaning products, and conducted in-depth face-to-face communications with store owners and purchasing managers. We focused on inquiring about the monthly sales volume of the stores——it was learned that the monthly wholesale volume of stores focusing on exports to Central Asia generally ranges from 500 to 2,000 pieces. Among them, rigid-demand categories such as rags and cleaning cloths have maintained a leading sales volume due to their adaptability to Central Asian family and catering scenarios. At the same time, we also learned in detail about commodity quality standards. Local merchants generally pay attention to cost-effectiveness and require commodities to meet national basic quality inspection standards. Some stores focusing on the mid-to-high-end market will additionally introduce environmentally friendly materials (such as cotton and linen, degradable fibers) to meet the quality needs of the Central Asian middle class. In addition, we also communicated with merchants on core cooperation issues such as sourcing channels, wholesale prices, and logistics timeliness, and found that most offline stores still rely on traditional supply chains, with problems such as single sourcing and large price fluctuations. This also highlights the cooperative value of the WorldHub platform in connecting Yiwu’s high-quality supply chain and integrating offline channels.
In the afternoon, we went to Urumqi Hualing Rag Market——a highly influential professional wholesale market for cleaning products in the northwest region. It gathers hundreds of offline wholesalers and manufacturers of rags and household cleaning products. Its products not only cover the local Xinjiang market but also are exported to Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan through border trade, making it a core site for inspecting offline channels of cleaning products in Central Asia. In the market, we focused on connecting with 5 large-scale offline wholesalers, and accurately grasped market dynamics by on-site inspection of samples, reviewing sales ledgers, and face-to-face negotiations with managers. In terms of sales volume, during the peak season (March to October every year), the monthly wholesale volume of rags of leading wholesalers can exceed 5,000 pieces. Among them, solid-color pure cotton rags and microfiber cleaning cloths are most popular among Central Asian merchants, mainly sold to offline supermarkets and wholesale markets in cities such as Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. In terms of quality control, all merchants in the market are required to provide product quality inspection reports, and some merchants have also established a three-stage quality inspection process (pre-production, in-production, and post-production) to ensure that commodities meet the import standards of Central Asian countries. At the same time, in response to the dry climate in Central Asia, some merchants have also optimized the water absorption and durability of rags to improve product adaptability.
This full-day visit and inspection with friends from Yiwu not only allowed Yiwu merchants to intuitively understand the sales scale, quality standards, and cooperation potential of Urumqi’s offline market but also enabled us to accurately capture the core needs of Central Asian offline retail channels——they not only need cost-effective rigid-demand commodities that meet basic quality standards but also urgently require diversified and high-quality supply chain support. Through face-to-face communications, we have initially reached cooperation intentions with 3 offline stores, planning to connect high-quality sources from Yiwu through the WorldHub platform to make up for the supply chain shortcomings of local merchants. At the same time, we have also collected specific demand parameters for cleaning products such as rags in the Central Asian market, providing first-hand data for optimizing the commodity selection of the WorldHub platform and improving the adaptability between the platform and Central Asian offline channels in the future. Going forward, we will continue to deepen cooperation with Yiwu’s supply chain and Urumqi’s offline merchants, relying on the WorldHub platform to open up the cross-border wholesale link of “Yiwu supply sources – Urumqi transit – Central Asian retail”, helping more high-quality commodities enter the Central Asian market efficiently and promoting the quality and efficiency improvement of cross-border trade cooperation.
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