The distribution operation did not wait until the resumption of work, and the entire company was gone...

The root cause is the sluggish distribution of goods

We are a small company that mainly distributes products, with about 20 to 30 people. I first came into contact with Amazon in this company, so at the beginning I only knew how to distribute products. In the words of my master at the time, it was to let the market help us choose products.

However, we could clearly feel the difficulty of this approach last year. For products with the potential to generate sales, our subsequent approach was to place a large number of orders and conduct reviews to raise the rankings. Last year, the inspections were very severe. There was a period of time when reviews were dropped in large numbers, and new ones could not be kept for more than a few days. Even after placing a large number of review-free orders, the rankings did not move at all.

The store I was in charge of had only a few old products that could still hold on, and the potential products for the second half of the year were all half dead, and the situation of others was similar. At the end of the year, the company was also preparing to switch to a refined store, and selected several people including me to develop new products, but I didn't expect that the transition to a refined store would also become a fuse.

The building is about to collapse, the unusual atmosphere before the New Year

There were some unusual atmospheres before the New Year, and now I think that each one was a sign. First, the boss would get angry over trivial matters such as attendance. I remember clearly one time when there were a few pieces of waste paper next to the printer, so he held a two-hour meeting specifically to talk about not wasting.

Then the boss started to be absent from the company frequently. Every time he came to the company, he would hold various mobilization and encouragement meetings. In the meetings, he would emphasize some random issues, such as this employee did not take out his own trash, or that employee did not respond to his request on WeChat in a timely manner.

I thought it was because we all had to go home at the end of the year, and because the performance this year was not ideal, the boss was a little impatient. I also thought that the New Year holiday would allow everyone to relax their tense nerves and do a good job of transformation next year.

As a result, the epidemic broke out during the Chinese New Year holiday. This outbreak was really serious. People in my hometown started using buses and dirt piles to block the roads. It was definitely impossible to resume work on time. The boss also notified us to work remotely at home early, but did not specify how to calculate the salary during the period of remote work.

Didn't wait for the resumption of work, but ended up losing my job

Remote work is more complicated than expected. It is difficult to ensure that you can focus on the task at hand when working from home. The efficiency can be imagined, but what is more frustrating is that the boss seems to be afraid of this and can call us to five or six meetings a day. There is basically no useful content, just to keep us busy as if we will be lazy once the video is off.

Just recently, everyone has started to return to work, and our hometown has also lifted the lockdown. I thought I might need to go back to work at any time, so I returned to the city where I work from my hometown. However, we did not return to work normally, and we still worked remotely from home as required before.

Last week, the boss suddenly invited us to meetings less frequently, but he didn’t say when we would resume work. I began to sense something was wrong. I contacted some colleagues and learned that the initial results of the previous transformation to precision shopping were good. Before the New Year, the boss reserved a batch of goods for several products. However, due to the holiday and the impact of the epidemic, the company’s cash flow is now in danger.

As expected, I suddenly received a notice from the HR department in the past two days, saying that the company has ceased to exist and that our salary will be settled at the end of this month. At the same time, they told us that the days of delayed start of work will be counted as our unpaid annual leave. Now I am also trying to negotiate with several colleagues for the salary of remote work during these days.

At present, I have found my next employer, and I also have the idea of ​​working on my own for a while. However, I still want to write about this experience so that those who are still working in the operation field can learn from it, and also remind small entrepreneurial sellers of the importance of cash flow. Once it gets out of control, there will be no way back.