Under the impact of the epidemic in 2020, cross-border e-commerce has shown explosive growth and has become an important driving force for my country's export trade. The strong overseas market demand has stimulated the performance scale of many domestic companies to expand exponentially. Such a hot trend has also led to the illusory dream of "getting rich overnight", attracting countless people to compete to grab the dividends.
However, as the dividends faded, the false illusion of "getting rich overnight" was gradually punctured by reality. Problems such as platform operation risks, policy supervision, and internal competition among peers emerged nakedly. Many sellers blindly followed the trend and entered the market, but lacked sufficient operational and stability capabilities. Some Taobao and Pinyin sellers rigidly adopted traditional operating logic and were eventually eliminated by the industry. Since the beginning of this year, sellers’ operating costs and pressures have been increasing day by day. From entering the market with confidence to leaving in despair, the dream of “getting rich overnight” seems to have been transferred to the shipping industry. Breaking the 60,000 USD mark, scalpers drive up Matsun’s freight rates! Entering 2021, the hot situation in the red ocean of cross-border e-commerce has cooled down. Policy fluctuations, account blocking, and price wars are undoubtedly important driving forces. However, tracing back to the source, the most fundamental reason that forced many sellers into trouble is the sharp decline in profits. Among them, the high transportation costs are a major pain point for sellers.
In mid-September, shipping giants such as CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd announced that they would temporarily freeze prices. Shortly thereafter, freight rates on many lines plummeted due to the power restriction order. ▲ The picture comes from CMA CGM Sellers who have been suffering from logistics costs for a long time thought that the container shipping market had finally ushered in spring, but after a brief decline, the ocean freight quickly rebounded and even broke through the previous peak level. It is reported that the current Matson freight rate has exceeded the 30 yuan/kg mark, soaring to 35 yuan/kg. ▲ The picture comes from the Internet Due to the strong demand for shipments during the peak season and the current logistics situation of insufficient supply, the rising freight rates seem difficult to reverse. However, in addition to this, sellers have revealed that scalpers are also driving up prices, which is also a major cause of the rapid rise in freight rates. According to sellers’ feedback, the price of Matson’s containers was as high as 60,000 USD this week. However, with such high freight rates, the delivery time is not satisfactory. According to sellers’ actual measurement, Matson’s overtime ship needs more than one month to sign for the goods. ▲ The picture comes from the seller communication group It costs a high price to use Matsushita Shipping, but the delivery time is almost the same as that of ordinary ships. For this reason, sellers call for a joint boycott of scalpers, reasonably arrange the delivery ratio, and lower the Matsushita price. The epidemic not only stimulated the rapid development of cross-border e-commerce, but also indirectly promoted the shipping industry, which is closely related to it. Before the epidemic, Matson's freight rate was about US$1,500 per cabinet. With the serious imbalance between supply and demand during the epidemic, it has soared nearly 40 times so far. Under this huge profit, the performance of major shipping companies in the first half of the year has doubled several times to dozens of times, which truly proves what it means to "get rich overnight." The continuous rise in transportation costs is, on the one hand, the inevitable result of the supply and demand environment caused by capacity reduction and container shortage. On the other hand, it is also inseparable from the freight forwarders who raise prices wildly and make huge profits. In contrast to the current situation of surging profits in the shipping industry, sellers are facing the difficulties of their profits being eroded and even their losses increasing. After working alone for two years and losing 1 million, how can I get rid of my Amazon addiction? A seller shared his magical and realistic journey on Amazon: he lost more than 1 million in two years working alone, but even so he felt an addictive pleasure of self-abuse and could not stop being a philanthropist. ▲ The picture comes from Zhiwubuyan It is learned that the seller started to contact Amazon in mid-2015, and initially distributed goods in a sweatshop in Bantian Wuhuli. A few months later, he transferred to a boutique company to do operations. After several years of hard work, he achieved some success and accumulated a lot of connections and resources. So at the end of 2019, he raised 2 million yuan in funds and left to work alone. When I started working alone, I happened to catch up with the epidemic, but the impact was not too great. Throughout the 20 years, I was basically in the stage of nurturing links and making small profits. However, in January this year, the wind direction of several categories suddenly changed. My peers started a price war and seized the market at the cost of huge losses. The seller originally thought that his product was a private model after all, so he still had a certain bargaining power. However, soon, the newly introduced public or semi-private model products quickly seized the market share with their price advantage, and the seller's top 10 core links were squeezed to the bottom 50, so he had no choice but to cut prices to catch up. During this period, we also experienced competitors using various despicable means to attack store links. Although we successfully recovered after several twists and turns, we also suffered considerable losses. After nearly a year of brutal price war, the overall loss was more than 1 million. The seller said that even though he knew he was losing money every day, he felt an addictive pleasure when seeing orders coming in one by one, and even joked that doing charity on Amazon had become a hobby and belief. In fact, despite the current turbulent industry situation, there is a growing call to abandon Amazon and invest in other fields, switch to independent sites and other third-party platforms, but many sellers still have concerns. Some sellers have invested a lot of money on Amazon, spending a lot of effort and energy, and it is not easy to change careers, which is restricted by many factors such as capital transfer and resource connection. Therefore, even if you find out that the dream of getting rich overnight is just a bubble after entering the industry, it is difficult to get out easily. As the popular joke said before: Amazon is like a besieged city, people outside the city want to get in, and people inside the city want to get out. What do you want to say about this? Feel free to leave a message in the comment area~
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