AI independent websites are propelling overseas brands into an "acceleration period".
If you are a Chinese seller operating as a "one-person team" and decide to launch a cross-border independent website, how long does it take from the initial idea to the official launch?
In 2025, the answer to this question is no longer three days but 30 minutes.
Through a highly intelligent platform, AI-powered website building for independent websites can be achieved. There is no need to spend time writing code or debugging plugins, and even basic modular learning can be skipped for the time being. In just a few dozen minutes, a website that supports multiple languages and currencies, with smooth payment and interaction experiences, can be quickly launched, and its page performance score can reach over 95.
This is not only a "blitzkrieg" for the cold start of global business but also a significant leap in the user experience that end-users can directly feel. Behind this lies a structural transformation in the cross-border independent website field: from being driven by traffic to being driven by efficiency.
The role of AI has been infinitely magnified. The focus of competition in platform capabilities is no longer the richness of the "feature list" but the construction of an operating system that can systematically meet complex operational requirements, deeply integrating the capabilities of AI with quantifiable efficiency standards.
While most players in the industry are still exploring single-point AI applications, Shoplazza has quickly initiated a comprehensive AI-driven systematic upgrade. Coinciding with this critical transformation node, Shoplazza recently held the 2025 Cross-border Independent Website Growth Summit. This event is not simply a showcase of business achievements or a display of technological strength; it is more like a powerful response to what the market needs.
Li Junfeng, the founder and CEO of Shoplazza, pointed out in his speech: Speed equals growth. Speed determines conversion rates, intelligence determines efficiency, and stability determines the growth ceiling.
Li Junfeng, the founder and CEO of Shoplazza
01
Why do independent websites need to be "faster"?
In the exploration of sustainable growth in the independent website field, we often overlook a common sense:
The compound interest effect of long-termism is sometimes too "grand narrative," and pursuing stability does not mean slowing down or only making technological layouts that reach the ceiling of intelligence.
Speed is always the ultimate focus of technological efficiency. Even a seemingly insignificant "speed" issue, such as a fraction of a second delay from the moment a user clicks to the completion of payment, can mean a loss of traffic and business opportunities.
Long before the explosion of large models, the demand for refined operations had already formed an obvious underlying logic: Speed equals growth.
In the "speed" system of cross-border independent websites, the primary dimension is the ultimate smoothness of the user experience.
As an important carrier of the experience economy, the value of independent websites is closely linked to user retention and conversion. In the intelligent era, which is "smarter" than the traditional page guidance and payment systems, labels such as fast, flexible, and seamless have become the hard standards for the "experience."
When it comes to speed, the most easily thought of is page performance, which depends on the technical foundation of the service provider. Through its self-developed global acceleration network and canary release mechanism, Shoplazza keeps the loading speed of its websites stable within 1.9 seconds, supports millions of album SKUs, and the payment page loads in less than 0.8 seconds. It also achieves a smooth settlement experience with instant opening, calculation, and display, significantly improving the user conversion rate.
The second dimension of "speed" lies in the efficiency of intelligent decision-making and the rate of system iteration.
In the traditional model, key aspects of independent websites such as product selection, pricing, and advertising placement mostly rely on manual experience, resulting in long decision-making cycles and high trial-and-error costs. Driven by AI, sellers can instantly detect data changes and form a dynamic closed-loop from identifying hotspots to intelligent advertising placement and effect tracking at the fastest speed, greatly improving the efficiency and accuracy of human resources.
Shoplazza has evolved from a tool platform to an intelligent operating system. AI runs through the entire process of independent website operation like blood. Data shows that the conversion rate of Shoplazza's AI search has increased by 30% year-on-year. With intelligent sorting and bundled recommendations, the ARPU has reached over $1.5, and the recommendation framework has also brought obvious conversions.
This also marks that independent website platforms have bid farewell to the random stacking of scattered AI tools, and a battle of "high-dimensional speed" driven by systematic intelligence in business processes is approaching.
The third dimension of "speed" is also reflected in the efficiency of global market layout and ecological collaboration.
In the increasingly competitive cross-border track, the ability to quickly and accurately reach the global core markets directly determines the "slope" of the new growth curve. After integrating the ecological capabilities of AI, Shoplazza has effectively simplified the previously cumbersome and complex globalization process. Through in-depth collaboration with hundreds of ecological partners such as TikTok for Business, Google, Meta, PayPal, Stripe, and Cainiao, it has built an "end-to-end" channel for the global market.
After achieving "AI transformation," Shoplazza's annual API call volume exceeds 10 billion times, and over 80% of its functions support combined innovation. In addition, regarding the most basic language issue when entering a new market, Shoplazza's multi-model intelligent translation system has also made the translation process faster: it supports 109 languages, and the translation speed can reach 0.8 seconds for every 100 product items.
Being "one step ahead" in technology gives Shoplazza a unique integration ability, integrating the originally scattered capabilities of traffic, payment, and supply chain into standardized product modules. Against this background, the proposition of "speed equals growth" has been deepened.
Pursuing speed does not encourage short-term traffic explosions but emphasizes the use of intelligent technologies to quickly capture fleeting business opportunities and time windows and transform this agility into sustainable long-term growth capabilities.
At this summit, Shoplazza clearly listed "speed" and "stability" as the core pillars of growth, facing the reality of the slowdown in global traffic dividends. However, it has chosen a more proactive and practical technological and experiential solution to reawaken the industry's desire for "ultimate speed."
Independent websites are no longer just traffic recipients but new growth hubs.
02
Where are the new "dividends" of AI-powered independent websites?
The certainty of growth comes from performance, intelligence, and stability.
If "speed equals growth" represents the growth ceiling in the new cycle, then a positive signal is that AI, as a systematic capability, can reconstruct the starting point of the business logic, allowing the core competitiveness of e-commerce platforms to return to the underlying technology.
Therefore, while "charging forward" in terms of speed and performance, the reconstruction of business scenarios by intelligence is also the key landing point for the value of independent websites. Especially in this year, known as the "Year of Intelligent Agents," Shoplazza's hundreds of thousands of merchants are presenting a rare "front-line" perspective on how to make AI a quantifiable and perceptible growth engine in independent website operation.
In the cross-border independent website field, homogeneous competition and the difficulty of repeat purchases are like two mountains weighing down on small and medium-sized merchants. The capabilities of AI are expected to provide a way out for merchants through precise scenario-based applications. Several cases presented by Shoplazza at this summit clearly demonstrate how AI can help small and medium-sized merchants achieve "overtaking on curves" in global competition.
A fast-fashion seller from Guangzhou found that the path to branding was not easy during the transformation from platform e-commerce to an independent website: severe homogenization, difficulty in repeat purchases, and high customer acquisition costs, which are also the classic "three challenges" in the clothing industry.
Relying on systematic AI practice in the Shoplazza ecosystem, they improved conversion rates by optimizing website loading speed and page design, and tried AI-powered product selection and intelligent generation of advertising materials, breaking the deadlock of homogenization and minimizing trial-and-error costs. In Shoplazza's system, multi-website management and data tracking tools also helped them improve operational efficiency.
In terms of website building, the Page Builder tool provided by Shoplazza breaks the traditional card-stacking logic of website building by introducing AI technology. With an adaptive modular architecture, it allows for the freedom of "embedding cards within cards," making the what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing and optimization faster.
In the operational dimension, Shoplazza has also self-developed an AI-driven membership operation and push system, Loyalty & Push, which supports automated hierarchical management, points rules, level mechanisms, and multi-channel reach, helping sellers improve the repeat purchase rate.
It is worth mentioning that platform e-commerce and independent websites are now moving towards ecological collaboration to help sellers build their brands across multiple channels. For example, TikTok for Business launched a new generation of marketing tools for independent websites for the first time at this summit and carried out in-depth collaboration with Shoplazza.
Different from the fast-fashion track rooted in cross-border e-commerce, sellers in fields such as auto parts are not very familiar with the rules of online operation. An auto parts startup team of only three to five people transformed into an independent website in 2019 due to offline inventory and capital pressure. They achieved a cold start from scratch using Shoplazza's low-threshold platform system and then optimized their efficiency with AI tools in the AI era, achieving high efficiency with a small team.
Now, this auto parts team has gained some experience in global competition and shared many "pitfall avoidance guides" at this event, such as the selection of SaaS platforms, the establishment of payment systems, and team configuration. They specifically pointed out that Shoplazza not only has a fast website building and operation speed but also its Chinese service team and local ecological resources have greatly reduced the threshold for entrepreneurship.
Facing the complexity of multi-country operations, they realized that "leaving complexity to the system and leaving growth to oneself" is not just a slogan. The modular products, intelligent capabilities, and ecological openness of independent website platforms have become their "ballast stone" in the diversified traffic landscape.
It can be seen that Shoplazza's platform-level intelligent capabilities are transforming platform-level technologies that were previously only accessible to large enterprises into agile capabilities that small and medium-sized merchants can "use out of the box."
A consensus in the current independent website industry is that AI capabilities are the new growth dividend. Whether AI can be deeply integrated into the entire process of independent website operation like an operating system directly determines the growth ceiling of merchants.
For technology service providers, only by serving merchants around the three dimensions of "faster performance, smarter operation, and a more stable and reliable platform" can independent websites truly become the "operating system" for global business.
03
Ecological infrastructure makes AI more stable
Different from many industry events that chase hotspots and talk about trends in a vague way, Shoplazza at this summit always focused on the implementation path of technology and clear growth trends. For example, at the roundtable forum, the technical team directly communicated with operational operators, and the front-line experience sharing of merchants ran through the entire agenda. The topics also addressed multiple vertical and cutting-edge pain points such as intelligent payment, B2B transformation, social media operation, and profit margins in emerging markets.
This also shows that the cross-border industry needs to make good use of AI but can no longer blindly follow the trend and shout empty slogans about AI. To make every model and algorithm find a value anchor point in business scenarios, it requires both technology manufacturers to accumulate technology and polish products and sellers to embrace the ecosystem and actively reconstruct scenarios.
Take the payment scenario as an example. Many people regard it as a "technical connection" tool, but in fact, it directly determines the user conversion rate, the efficiency of merchant payment collection, and the compliance of funds, and it is also the "last mile" of growth. However, in the construction of the payment system, most merchants have not established their own systematic strategies and have not thought about how to choose service providers or how to use aggregated payment and local payment to improve in-site transactions. At this event, participants could better understand the logic of the payment scenario.
Another example is the current trend of B2B foreign trade merchants transforming into independent websites. In order to get rid of their dependence on platform e-commerce and explore a broader DTC track, many B2B merchants are almost "fighting a desperate battle" and want to turn losses into profits in a shorter time. However, there are more "pitfalls" in the cold start than expected. Even if they are proficient in using technology, most merchants still operate independent websites with a platform mindset. The reconstruction of products and websites, advertising and content strategies, and the key paths for customer asset precipitation all need to be learned and explored through case sharing and ecological exchanges.
Therefore, the evolution direction of technology is only one aspect and not a panacea. Independent website sellers also need to face two key propositions:
First, how to better position and quantify themselves;
Second, how to ensure that emerging technologies such as AI can drive their growth continuously and stably.
In any industry, to truly make good use of technology, one cannot only understand technology. In the context of globalization, what makes AI move from "technologically available" to "value trustworthy" is not the technical foundation but the ecological infrastructure.
Today's independent websites are evolving into an ecological hub connecting global business resources. Shoplazza can attract more than 500 ecological partners and form in-depth collaboration in multiple aspects such as traffic, payment, and logistics because the ecological effect makes up for the scenario-based challenges that technology alone cannot solve.
How can AI-driven growth be more stable? Merchants' anxiety about "instability" essentially stems from the fear that technology will become a tool for chasing short-term traffic explosions. However, in a professional and collaborative global ecosystem, the risks caused by single markets, single platforms, and single product technologies are dispersed, and more reusable scenario solutions are precipitated instead.
This summit brought together dozens of global leading cross-border industry manufacturers such as TikTok for Business, Stripe, Cainiao, and Amazon Web Services. The lineup itself is the best proof of ecological infrastructure: Shoplazza is building a collaborative network with professional division of labor and complementary capabilities. For example, by entrusting payment to Stripe, logistics to Cainiao, and traffic operation to TikTok for Business, merchants can free themselves from complex systems.
This is also the core value of the independent website model: entrust professionalism to the ecosystem, complexity to the platform, and growth to oneself.
On this new path pursuing long-term efficiency, both speed and vision are indispensable.