What many people can't guess is that this is a safe disguised as a book, where valuables are stored and placed in a bookshelf. It is difficult even for an extremely experienced “professional thief” to recognize. This creative safe is very popular with consumers overseas. It has more than 7,000 reviews on Amazon and a rating of 4.6!
This “hot” safe, which is both creative and practical, actually comes from a Chinese metal cabinet company, Jiangsu Shuaima Security Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Shuaima”). Today, we invited Ma Zhenyu, general manager of Shuai Ma, to talk about how he is leading the transformation of traditional foreign trade factories into cross-border e-commerce and simultaneously developing B-side and C-side businesses on Amazon, so that annual sales have surpassed 7 million US dollars in one fell swoop!

Shuaima, founded in 1997, was first a traditional factory in the metal door and window business, and has also tried to develop foreign trade through channels such as the “Canton Fair”. By 2013, Shuaima had become a metal cabinet foreign trade factory with an annual output value of over 100 million, with more than 200 employees. This year, the factory was handed over to Mr. Ma, who had been out and about for several years. This “second generation of the factory” officially began to “take over”.
When he first took over, young Mr. Ma was still a bit confused. “It just happened that domestic e-commerce was quite popular at the time, so I tried doing it for a while.” But at the end of the day, profit margins are limited because competition is too fierce. By chance, Mr. Ma learned about Amazon and discovered the same metal cabinet product. The price difference on domestic and foreign e-commerce websites can be about three times different, so he decided to try it out. Unexpectedly, in his first year at Amazon, Handsome Ma had a surprise “hit list” for Black Friday. “We reported a flash sale on Black Friday, and placed more than 1,000 orders on the same day. This is still a very rare occurrence in 2017. Abbottt, Premiere Creative’s creative director.
According to Mr. Ma, accurate selection of products and localized products are important reasons for “winning the first battle”, and being able to achieve these two points is inseparable from the company's rich experience in foreign trade and the advantages of its own factory.

How do you make metal look like “wood”?
While going out to sea, Shuai Ma discovered that metal boxes are different from sailing tracks such as electronic 3C — due to privacy considerations, foreign users are not interested in innovations such as fingerprint recognition or face recognition, and prefer traditional boxes that are unlocked with a password or key. As a result, they changed the focus of overseas product innovation to new materials.
Mr. Ma noticed that although the security doors at home are made of metal, the surface looks very similar to mahogany, which is very popular overseas. If this technology can be applied to safes, it should be very popular. As a result, he took the company's R&D personnel to study at a local security door factory in Zhejiang. After many tests, they successfully mastered the method of printing wood grain onto metal boxes, that is, wood grain heat transfer printing technology, which solved the problem of monotonous colors of metal boxes in the past, and obtained an exclusive patent. Now, Handsome Horse's wood-grain metal case has been selling steadily for a long time on Amazon.

In 2022, Shuaima, which successfully transformed from a traditional factory to cross-border e-commerce, grew sales at an annual rate of nearly 30% on Amazon, with annual sales exceeding 7 million US dollars; various products ranked in the top 10 categories, and ASIN won the title of Amazon's Choice!Many users gave Shuai Ma high praise in their reviews. For example, a college student said that when she went out, her change and accessories in her dorm room often went missing, and her locked drawer had been ripped open. When she saw Handsome Ma's advertisement on Amazon, she bought a safe with a dictionary cover, then hid it in a bookshelf, and never experienced a loss of items.

In addition to having product selection experience and factory advantage, if more overseas companies or consumers are willing to order Shuaima's products, operational skills such as product detail page (listing) optimization are also an essential part.

How did innovative coin boxes win Amazon's Choice?
If a traditional coin box contains coins, the coins can easily be dropped or moved during the process of carrying the cash box. After many optimizations and upgrades in the product department, Shuai Ma developed a coin box with a lid to avoid this problem. However, there were still few products with similar designs on the market at the time, which became the unique advantage of the Handy Horse Coin Box. Therefore, in the listing of this product, they combined images and text to emphasize this selling point 3 times in a row.
On the attached picture, Shuai Ma believes that coin boxes may be used for supermarket cashiers. Later, they noticed that fruit stalls or vegetable markets were the main usage scenarios, so they tried to create a similar scenario-based image. After Amazon A/B testing, the latter's data performance was clearly better.
Finally, under clever operation and promotion, Shuangma made more Amazon users know and recognized their innovative coin box, and eventually won the Amazon's Choice title in one fell swoop!

After completing the listing and successfully selling the product, Shuai Ma also discovered another unexpected challenge — the problem of returning the password lock box. Users usually set their own password after purchasing, but it won't be reset when returning the item. However, when Amazon checks the appearance of the returned item, it will assume that the returned box is sellable. After another customer bought it back, they found that the initial password entered was invalid and the box could not be used.
Aware of this issue, the team added a paragraph to the product description. If the buyer finds the lock unusable after receiving the item, please contact them via Amazon. Shuai Ma will send him another accessory to restore the lock to its original state.

As a traditional foreign trade factory in the past, although Shuaima was able to reach more C-side users on Amazon, the experience the company has accumulated over the years is actually mainly B-side. “Our main sales now still come from commercial procurement orders.” Therefore, in his second year at Amazon, Shuai Ma decided to use Amazon Enterprise Purchase, so when expanding the ToC business, he was also able to maximize the company's B-side advantages and drive rapid overall sales growth. Currently, Shuaima's B-side sales account for 13% of overall sales, reaching nearly one million US dollars, and is expected to increase further.

Meet the demand for 1 customization and repurchase of 100+ commercial purchases
For example, when it comes to corporate purchases, Shuai Ma has received a special commercial demand: customers want to customize 600 to 700 mailboxes similar to Tiffany blue, and this color is rarely used on metal boxes. After communication, Shuaima offered the customer a 25% discount. After successfully completing the order, the customer also repurchased more than 100 times and became their loyal users.

Looking back on the B-side's “booming” experience, Mr. Ma summarized the four major benefits of the company's purchase for Shuai Ma:

1 Efficiently build a ToB brand
In Amazon corporate purchases, Shuaima can show B-side customers information such as company introduction, after-sales service, and corporate qualifications that they are particularly concerned about, thereby building the trust of enterprise customers in the Shuaima brand. In the future, they will also purchase and upload factory images to fully demonstrate Shuaima's manufacturing capabilities and further enhance the trust of enterprise customers.

2 “Self-service ordering”, easier operation
Through traditional forms of foreign trade, Shuaima generally takes several months to complete a B-side order, and it also often needs to respond to the needs of overseas corporate customers across time differences. For corporate purchases, Shuaima can use an inquiry quoter (CQE) to create exclusive price links for B-side customers, and large orders can also enjoy commission discounts. If customers need to make a purchase, they can place an order on their own, and there is no need to worry about other users “picking up”, saving time and effort.

3 Companies buy exclusive tools, and sales soar
Shuaima deeply uses the corporate price and quantity discount (BPQD) function, and the setting rate is as high as 90%. Now, more than 25% of their customers have purchased more than 50 products at a time, and around 40 ASINs in the store have received impressive B-side orders. The unit price for B-side customers is as high as 33 US dollars, which is 63% higher than the C-end.
This year, Shuai Ma received an inquiry from a Puerto Rican customer on the company's purchase. He needed to buy 2,500 medical kits. The order amount was nearly 90,000 US dollars, and the commission could be saved more than 6,500 US dollars. Despite not being able to close the deal in the end due to timeliness issues, “this gave us more hope, and the possibility of getting big orders from the company is constantly increasing. Abbottt, Premiere Creative’s creative director.

4 B-side C-side, shared growth
Since Shuaima saves operating costs such as advertising on the B-side, although the unit price of the product ordered by commercial procurement is lower than on the C-side, from the perspective of profit margin, this is a “win-win” for Shuaima and the buyer. Moreover, large orders placed through corporate purchases can also directly increase C-side traffic and conversion rates, and drive simultaneous increases in bilateral sales.

On Amazon, Shuai Ma successfully won the B-side and C-side bilateral traffic in one fell swoop, achieving rapid growth with excellent product and operational capabilities. In the future, they also plan to develop more product line layouts, enter more Amazon sites, and begin overseas offline sales. It is estimated that sales on Amazon will reach 100 million yuan next year.
On Amazon, metal boxes such as cashiers and medicine boxes launched by Shuai Ma fall into the school supplies category. This is also one of the nine key categories Amazon companies buy. Today, we brought you the “Official Selection Guide for Businesses Buying School Supplies” to help sellers and friends select products accurately, and the B-side can also easily “pop the order”!