Traffic is rented, trust is accumulated: the growth logic of cross-border e-commerce is being rewritten | Golden quotes from guests of Super Krypton Hall

Traffic is getting increasingly expensive while profits are getting thinner. Where is the next growth engine for cross-border e-commerce?

Over the past few years, the advertising logic of "trading traffic for sales volume" has gradually lost its effectiveness. Taking the Amazon platform as an example, the CPC of all categories has risen for consecutive years, the customer acquisition cost of some keywords keeps increasing, and a large number of sellers have fallen into the vicious circle of "the bigger the business grows, the thinner the profit gets". The extensive growth driven by traffic has come to an end. The underlying reason is that traffic is essentially "rented", and the effect disappears immediately once the advertising stops; while trust is "accumulated", which can continuously generate compound interest.

When brand trust changes from a bonus item to a key variable affecting conversion rate, the underlying logic of industry growth is shifting from "traffic dependence" to "trust compound interest".

A clear signal is that the proportion of independent websites in the cross-border e-commerce transaction volume of Chinese brands going global is continuously increasing, and the DTC model is becoming the choice of more and more top sellers — merchants no longer only pursue getting the first order faster, but pay more attention to user retention and repurchase, shifting from one-time traffic purchase to long-term operation of user assets.

On September 16, 2026, the second session of 36Kr "Deep Water Rules" · Global Expansion Series Super Kr Hall was held in Shanghai. Centering on the theme of "From 'Traffic Dependence' to 'Trust Compound Interest' — How Brand Trust Becomes the Ultimate Barrier of Cross-border E-commerce", three front-line practitioners, namely Zhang Yifei, Marketing Manager of Cross-border Business at Loctek, Yang Fei, Managing Partner of Ocean Stone, and Wang Xiao, Senior Product Expert of SME Applications at Alibaba Cloud, respectively deconstruct how to build, maintain and monetize trust from the perspectives of independent website operation, brand growth and AI foreign trade, digital identity and domain names.

This in-depth discussion on trust building and brand growth is worthy of attention from more global expansion practitioners, who can recognize its great commercial value. 

The following are the golden quotes shared by the guests at this event.