Double 11 in the eyes of small businesses: Anxiety with nowhere to go | apk live thailand bebas, anaconda wild slot, kurokawa akane

It’s Double Eleven again. Unconsciously, this shopping carnival evolved from Singles' Day has passed its tenth year.

This year, each e-commerce platform once again broke the sales record of previous years, and the leading platforms basically achieved a growth of more than 20%. Among them, Tmall’s total transaction volume on Double 11 was 213.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26.93%; JD.com achieved a cumulative order value of 159.8 billion yuan during the Double 11 Global Goods Festival (November 1 to 11), a year-on-year increase of 25.73%.

Behind the rising sales data, some people believe that the platform, merchants and consumers have achieved a win-win situation for all three parties. The huge transaction volume brings huge revenue and profits to the e-commerce platform; merchants gain several times the daily traffic and recover cash flow, and at the same time dispose of unsalable goods and clean up inventory; consumers can purchase their favorite products at more favorable prices.

However, an industry analyst pointed out that in fact, only e-commerce platforms are the real "winners." For merchants, regardless of whether they participate in the Double Eleven event, regardless of how the store is operating, whether it is profitable or losing, they must pay a fee to the e-commerce platform based on the store's turnover. For consumers, not all commodity prices are more favorable. Under the operation of rising first and then falling, the prices of some commodities during Double Eleven are even higher than usual.

As a business owner who has participated in the Double 11 event for three consecutive years, Lin Yin (pseudonym) does not deny the above point of view. "The Double 11 sales every year are the moments when I feel the most anxious," Lin Yin said.

“At first I was anxious about whether to participate in Double 11. After I made up my mind to participate, I started to worry about how to arrange advertising, what styles to sell, how to make inventory and pricing, etc., and even hesitated about whether to arrange brush orders. In short, from the beginning to the end of the event, the whole process was full of anxiety.”

Losing money and making a profit, preserving survival or capturing traffic?

As early as the eve of Double Eleven in 2015, the famous financial writer Wu Xiaobo once wrote bluntly in an article that more and more merchants were passively involved in the "Double Eleven" promotion, which was tasteless and costly, and they were afraid of offending the platform or being taken advantage of by their opponents. "Almost 99% of the participating companies only made sales and users, but all were negative in terms of profit. When the effectiveness of users is greatly reduced, such a marketing campaign becomes a sad zero-sum game."

This statement caused a lot of controversy at the time. We have no way of verifying whether only 1% of merchants can make a profit during the Double 11 event. However, judging from Lin Yin’s experience in participating in the Double 11 event, it is indeed not that simple for small merchants like him to make profits during the big promotion period.

It is reported that Lin Yin runs an online lighting store on an e-commerce platform, and usually sells about 150 units per month. Calculated based on the average product price of 450 yuan, eachMonthly sales are approximately 67,500 yuan. "A small store of my size can usually provide basic food and clothing, and even struggles to survive during the off-season. We love and hate Double 11. When I was not eligible to participate, I didn't feel much about it. It was none of my business anyway; but later on when I became eligible, I felt particularly anxious."

On the one hand, there are people who have the mentality of becoming rich and are living a stable life cautiously; on the other hand, there are people who are lucky and spend a lot of time, resources and energy on the Double 11 wave in the hope of "getting rich overnight." Faced with these two choices, Lin Yin was always wavering at first.

In his opinion, if you do not participate in the Double 11 event, your store ranking will soon be squeezed out by other merchants. It is difficult to guarantee the original search ranking, and this wave of traffic dividends will be wasted. But if you participate, you will need to solve a series of problems. In addition to special considerations such as stocking, pricing, logistics and other matters, you will even face the dilemma of whether to swipe orders or not.

"The most important thing is that even if a small store like mine participates, it will be difficult to balance profits." Lin Yin said, "If I do it well, I can earn some traffic, maintain the store ranking, and if I am very lucky, I can make a small profit. But based on my experience in the past two years, if I don't do it well, it can easily become a loss-making business, and the most serious consequence is to close the store directly after the event."

According to Lin Yin, when he participated in the Double 11 event for the first time in 2016, he had too many stocks, which eventually led to serious inventory backlog and tight cash flow. In order to ship goods as soon as possible, his store still maintained a large discount after the event, and ended up losing money.

"I was pretty good that time. I lost tens of thousands of yuan to learn a lesson, and at least I kept the store. A friend of mine was relatively unlucky. His profit was much lower than usual, but he didn't quote the price well, so he had to close the store to stop the loss."

However, even if there is the risk of losing money or even closing the store, Lin Yin still chooses to participate in the next Double 11 like moths flying to the flame. When asked what the considerations were, Lin Yin smiled helplessly, "There is no way. You have to take a long-term view in doing business. In order to increase traffic and expand the scale of the store, you have to bite the bullet and participate even at a loss."

Buying orders has become a common trend, should you take the risk?

"Participate even if you lose money", this is the choice Lin Yin made after weighing the pros and cons. But what follows is whether you should take the risk when fraud is common during e-commerce sales.

According to Lin Yin, when he first opened the store, friends taught him various "secrets", including the so-called method of quickly improving the level of the store, that is, brushing orders.

“At that time, the platform had a very ambiguous attitude towards merchants cheating on orders. On the surface, it was prohibited but in fact it was tacitly allowed. It almost turned a blind eye. In order to save costs, I personally went to the battle and asked all my relatives and friends around me for more than 20 (e-commerce platform) account numbers and passwords. I used different accounts to place orders in my store every day. After the scale expanded, I found a customer service person. In addition to doing the transactions myself, I also asked her to place some orders outside.”

However, as the false prosperity brought about by fraudulent orders ultimately harms the interests of consumers, relevant departments are increasingly cracking down on the phenomenon of fraudulent orders, and the E-Commerce Law that will be implemented in 2019 explicitly prohibits this phenomenon.The e-commerce platform has no choice but to hold high the banner of cracking down on fraudulent orders.

This change is nothing short of adding insult to injury for Lin Yin. "In the past, it was low-cost and sneaky, and you would get defrauded of a little money at most, but it was not illegal. Now the cost of one order is more than 30 yuan. The higher the cost, the greater the risk of being cheated. And when I think that it is illegal, I don't dare to take the risk. But seeing that other merchants in the same park are still committing crimes against the trend, entrusting them to specialized order fraud agencies to do the volume, and are still alive and well, I feel very tortured."

Lin Yin said that as far as he knows, some stores usually only have one or two hundred orders a month, but during Double 11, they can place hundreds of orders every day, and one day's sales are equivalent to a month's sales.

As early as three years ago, Wu Xiaobo clearly pointed out that the "Double Eleven" sales record has lost its true reference value, and the record itself has even become a result that can be set - much like the general mobilization model used by cities in various places to create Guinness records. Even the rankings of various categories can be manipulated and operated, and have almost no practical significance as a reference.

Three years have passed, and the signs of fraud are still the same, even more diverse and more subtle.

A recent report titled "E-commerce Order Shopping: "600,000 Sellers Are on Standby Every Day"" stated that some merchants use sales and positive reviews before "Double Eleven" to increase the attention and sales of their products during "Double Eleven". In the order-fake industry chain, some platforms claim to have “600,000 brushers,” and stores also require “brushers” to fulfill requirements such as shopping around, making fake chats, and collecting treasures, simulating real transactions to evade platform supervision.

When talking about the sales expectations for participating in the Double 11 event this year, Lin Yin said, "This time I have more experience, and the arrangements for stocking and pricing are better. I also spent money on the through train this year, and the sales situation is expected to be better than last year. But I dare not swipe orders, and I suffer losses in terms of traffic and rankings. Now

While the promotion is still going on, it’s hard to say whether it’s a profit or a loss. ”

"Anyway, it's hard to make money during Double Eleven, and people are exhausted. Those who can't get up or down just have to endure it. We'll decide whether to participate next year based on the situation." Lin Yin finally added.

[Source: Blue Whale TMT Network Author: Liu Minjuan ]