Black Friday bug caused hundreds of thousands of losses, and freight forwarders were "humble" to collect goods during the off-peak season

Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday have both ended. During this promotion, overall online retail sales hit a new high again, with Shopify achieving sales of $3.36 billion, up 17% year-on-year; Walmart became the most searched shopping website on Black Friday, with American consumers searching for Black Friday discounted products on the platform more than 1 billion times; Amazon also said that consumers purchased hundreds of millions of items, with sales hitting a new high.

Looking back on this round of promotion, it can be said that there were joys, sorrows, laughter and tears. In addition to the battle for orders, there were also various unexpected changes.

During the Black Friday event on Amazon US that kicked off last week, many sellers reported serious delays in advertising. Due to the huge deviation between advertising data and real-time advertising expenditure and return rate, sellers made mistakes in judgment and continued to increase advertising budgets, resulting in losses of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It is reported that many sellers found that when tracking Amazon advertising data, the ACOS, which was usually off the charts during big promotions, was unusually low, and the advertising expenditure displayed was only half of the actual expenditure. In other words, the advertising expenditure shown on the background report was several thousand dollars, but in fact tens of thousands of dollars may have been spent.

This also caused many sellers to be misled by wrong data and continuously increase advertising investment to improve sales ranking, which eventually led to excessive spending. Some sellers also missed the key sales period due to insufficient spending.

The system failure also affected Amazon's advertising business, including sponsored products and sponsored display ads, which account for 80% to 90% of Amazon sellers' advertising budgets. Soon after, Amazon responded to the incident to sellers and advertisers, saying that the bug had been resolved. However, the two sides have not yet reached a consensus on the issue of loss compensation.

For sellers, advertising is particularly important in order to improve sales rankings and occupy high-quality traffic positions. The sudden bugs in the advertising system are also not conducive to the advancement of Black Friday operations to a certain extent. Not only that, advertising costs have become increasingly expensive in recent years. According to Marketplace Pulse data, the average cost per click has increased by more than 40% compared to 2020.

However, despite the doubling of costs, the biggest feeling of sellers during the promotion period is that the advertising investment is not proportional to the return. As market competition becomes increasingly fierce, the traffic space is becoming more crowded. After the top sellers take up the majority of the traffic, many bottom sellers are in a dilemma of too many people and too little porridge. Therefore, it is common that after a lot of advertising, ACOS soars, but the order effect is not very significant.

As cross-border e-commerce enters the second half, traffic competition has become the most important issue, and a variety of traffic diversion methods have been developed. More and more sellers are expanding their off-site traffic diversion methods such as social media publicity and influencer marketing on the basis of on-site promotion. The big promotion campaign is not only a competition for products, but also a battle for traffic.

During the peak season, logistics is also a key factor. However, this year, the once-hot container shipping market has gradually cooled down, and the money-making power of the former maritime cornucopia has dropped sharply. What sellers are happy to see is that the high shipping costs have also recovered to a certain extent.

The boom in cross-border e-commerce in the past two years has also pushed the shipping industry to the forefront, with freight demand and freight rates soaring. However, as the cross-border industry returns to rationality and the hidden danger of overcapacity buried during the peak period, the demand for container shipping has dropped sharply since the second half of the year, and even now it is the traditional peak season, it is still difficult to hide the downward trend.

Relevant data show that due to slowing consumer demand and overstocking, global container throughput fell by 8.6% in September, the month with the strongest demand for shipping in previous years, reaching the lowest level since February. Looking at the domestic situation, the volume of shipping containers sent from China to all ports around the world has further declined, down 22% year-on-year on Wednesday.

The grand scene of long queues of containers at major ports and sellers' difficulty in getting a cabin last year seems to have disappeared. Instead, there are piles of empty containers piled up on the docks of South China ports such as Guangzhou Port and Yantian Port, with no one interested in buying them.

The shrinking demand for shipping has also brought about a chain reaction of falling freight rates. Data shows that the Shanghai Container Freight Index has recently dropped to $1,443.29, about one-third of the level at the beginning of June. The average freight rate for a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Los Angeles has dropped from $11,197 at the end of January to $2,262 in the first week of November, the lowest level in two years.

The attitude of freight forwarders has also changed 180 degrees. The ocean freight rate, which was close to 50 yuan per kilogram last year, has now fallen below 20 yuan, with the quotation as low as 2.5 yuan. Some freight forwarders even said: "We are trying to get cargo at a dog-licking price."

However, in reality, after the National Day week in October, the domestic shipping container departure volume recovered, but with weak foreign demand and Guangzhou's epidemic prevention and control, the export container volume fell again.

Although it is the peak season, the severe epidemic situation in many places has not only affected the normal operation of sellers, but also disrupted the rhythm of stocking. Guangzhou, as the core position of the domestic cross-border supply chain, has recently experienced multiple rounds of epidemics, causing many sellers to be unable to ship goods in time due to the blockade of suppliers and obstruction of logistics.

However, just yesterday, Guangzhou Haizhu, Panyu, Tianhe and other districts announced the lifting of temporary control areas and scientifically and accurately demarcated risk areas. With the further optimization of epidemic prevention and control measures, cross-border logistics problems will also be solved.

Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday left quietly without a cloud, and the ups and downs of 2022 are coming to an end. Cross-border merchants have witnessed the historic moment of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the decline of demand under the sluggish macro-economy, and personally experienced the fever and cooling of the container shipping market, the ups and downs of sales performance, and the transformation and change of the industry.

Now standing at the crossroads between 2022 and 2023, have all sellers achieved the goals set at the beginning of the year?