Publisher Spotlight: BorderX Lab

Another great publisher has joined the Rakuten Marketing’s affiliate network! We welcome BorderX Lab to the network and hope others in the network can find out more about the brand with this quick Q&A session.

Q: Tell us a little about BorderX Lab.
A: The company is BorderX Lab (SID: 3257296) and the app is called Beyond (pronounced Bee-eh-yang in Chinese). We’re designed to be a cross-border mobile marketplace for global Chinese consumers. Our goal is to bring the same consumer lifestyle that someone in New York or London has to Greater China, but also to Chinese people across the globe. We have customers in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore US, and Canada.

Q: How has BorderX Lab grown as a company?
A: Our platform has been growing quickly since our humble beginnings four years ago. Our logistics and technology provide a much better customer experience. We have made some great strides in promoting our merchant partners and grown our content team, so we are now producing over 60 articles daily to help sell products (up from 10/day 3 years ago). We are now quickly closing in on 10 million global downloads and are in the top 5 publishers for a good portion of our Rakuten Marketing partners.

Q: What type of advertiser partner would be a smart fit for your company?
A: We have five big categories: shoes/streetwear, beauty, fashion, Mom&baby and health/nutrition. We’re looking for merchants that are well-established that can accommodate $5-$100 million in annual sales. But our content discovery model also lets us build and promote up-and-coming brands. If we feel a brand has the potential to do $50k monthly, we’ll usually bring them aboard.

Q: In your opinion, what has driven your success in our network?
A: Our high-quality content is really the key. We post 60 articles each day on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin (a big video platform in China). Last year, we had about 100 million unique Chinese speakers around the world viewing at least one content piece. There’s this great halo effect where many people read the product reviews and articles we post, generating numerous new customers.

In the affiliate world we’re a bit of a rare animal, a content publisher that can drive big volume.

Q: Tell us a fun fact about BorderX Lab.
A: Our team is just as passionate about the products we sell as the customers who shop with us. Many of our beauty merchants send us samples for product seeding and reviews and when a box arrives, we act like kids on Christmas!

Our sneaker/streetwear group owns huge collections of sneakers and love to show off their latest kicks.

Our fashion team loves to show off their new Burberry scarves and Minkoff bags. We are an interesting product testing lab. I usually know if our content and operations team like a product, it’s going to do well on our app.

Q: What new vertical categories are you now offering?
A: Mom&Baby and Health&Nutrition are new categories for us this year. We’re producing a lot of content and layering in the use of personalization, so every user sees the products and the product categories they want to see.

Q: Describe BorderX Lab in one word.
A: Discovery.

Q: Why did you choose Rakuten Marketing Affiliate Network?
A: Rakuten Marketing has a great combination of large merchants and powerful technology. Because of these opportunities, they’ve been a fantastic partner over the past 3 and a half years.

Merchants convert Chinese speaking customers 5X better when they work with our model vs. driving them directly to their English site. We require a bit of whitelisting, but it’s well worth it. Our logistics, localization, payment and content do a great job removing the friction from cross-border transactions. Our content helps businesses with a mature Chinese outreach get a new batch of first-time customers, helping them test new products without inventory risk.

If you are interested in partnering with BorderX Lab, search for SID 3257296 in the Advertiser Dashboard.