Amazon's Voice: The Years I Was Heartbroken by Big Sale Holidays

Factories try to transform, cross-border business becomes a new dawn

In the past two years, the phrase "family has a factory" has been often used to tease people with rich family backgrounds and good family conditions. However, those who really have a factory at home know that having a factory does not mean being rich, but more about living a life of hardship.

When I was little, I only knew that my parents often went to the factory. As I grew up, I knew that the factory was ours. During that time, I was a little proud and went out every day with my nose up.

Of course, people's minds always mature with age, and I gradually realized that in addition to the high-end assembly line automobile factories, there are also narrow, dirty, and fabric-smelling factories. The difference between them and small workshops lies in their scale.

Our factory is not so exaggerated, but the environment is acceptable. At the peak, there were several hundred people. Those were the years when foreign trade and cross-border business were doing well. The foreign trade bosses and buyers who came to negotiate business every day could set up several mahjong tables.

In the past two years, it has been obvious that the entire economic environment is moving backwards. My family and I have long been planning for this. After I graduated from university, I helped my family with e-commerce, intending to try self-production and self-sales to help the factory absorb some of its production capacity.

After trying out some domestic platforms for some time, I realized that the current domestic e-commerce market is quite scary. A factory like ours that is neither up nor down is in an awkward position. Our prices cannot compete with those of unscrupulous small workshops, and our quality cannot compare to that of big manufacturers in the industry.

Next I tried Amazon, and I didn’t expect that I would be doing this for more than two years.

Testing Amazon, first taste of success

At first, I tried to register and upload the product by myself, and then went to forums or Baidu to find answers according to the difficulties I encountered during the operation. Because English is my strong point and I have made many foreign friends, the title, keywords, description, etc. are basically not a problem.

Although the factory is owned by me, I am free to get the goods without any payment period, but I have no experience in stocking the goods myself, so I always feel very uncomfortable if the goods cannot be sold. So I still sold them by myself for a while, and only sent them through FBA when the order volume reached a bottleneck and stopped increasing.

After the FBA products entered the warehouse, I started looking for some foreign friends to help me post reviews. After all, I had worked on Taobao for a few months and knew a little about the importance of brushing orders.

After the first wave of fake orders, the number of orders began to increase gradually. Because the product costs are controlled by ourselves, the price is much higher than that in China, and we can make a lot of money with one order. With the initial results, I also started to put more styles on the platform.

Because the factory is faster than the average seller in grasping the style and trend, my new products can be put on the shelves one step ahead of others. During this period, I have reaped a lot of benefits.

The number of orders increased, and the bottleneck came faster. When the product reviews were difficult to increase (friends had used them all), the number of orders tended to stabilize. Although there was a small boom in the occasional event, it would return to normal after the event. I also began to seek advertising and off-site channels.

Seeking order growth, falling into the stocking pit

I probably didn’t have the skills to do it. I tried advertising and off-site promotions, but the results were not ideal. At the time, I thought that only promotions could significantly increase orders. As it was the end of the year, I might as well try Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday promotions.

I started to learn some things about the event. In addition to looking at people’s responses and forum posts from previous years, I also used software to pull sales and inventory data of competitors’ products for comparison.

Finally, I prepared several times the usual amount of goods and sent them to the FBA warehouse before the warehouse entry deadline. At the same time, I also reported the event LD in advance. At that time, I didn’t quite understand the difference between the schedule on the week and on Black Friday. When the LD schedule came out, I thought this morning was not bad, and I was delighted that the effect would exceed my expectations.

The final result was actually beyond my expectation, because I was not scheduled on Black Friday, but in the warm-up period, and the order volume was basically the same as usual. It took a long time to digest the large amount of goods sent. Although I did not have the pressure of the payment period, I knew very well that it was the factory that helped me to bear this pressure. After learning from the pain, I went to the forum for a long time and began to concentrate on understanding the pros and cons of scheduling and the prediction of stocking quantity.

After Black Friday, I started looking for reviews and promotions. The initial results were not very obvious, but the beginning of the year was indeed quite slow, and the entire industry was like this. Traffic began to pick up around April and May, and the preparations I made earlier also made product sales higher than before the New Year. At this time, I started preparing to participate in the mid-year Prime Day, but I didn't expect that fate would play a joke on me again this time.

Because sales in the first half of the year were better than last year, I participated in Primeday this time and carefully confirmed the schedule and time, etc. This time, as if to compensate for my loss last time, I was given a schedule for that afternoon.

The schedule was perfect and the stock was sufficient. I thought I could do something big this time. Unexpectedly, a bug appeared in the backend the day before Prime Day, and my LD event was inexplicably cancelled.

No matter how many times I called the flash sale team and seller support, or sent emails, the response I got was that it was indeed cancelled due to a bug, and they couldn't restore this LD event.

This time I had enough stock, and I didn’t ship again for a long time. I started advertising and selling off-site again, but the results were still not ideal. I finally sold the products after paying the long-term storage fee. These two experiences of participating in big sales left me with lingering fears, and I even didn’t participate in Black Friday that year.

Now I have learned a lot about advertising and off-site games, and I have also gained a lot of insights about Amazon. But I still think that the big promotion LD was cancelled by a bug is an unsolvable pit. If a seller with credit period has a large number of goods and the big promotion LD is cancelled, the consequences are really terrible. I hope everyone can prepare goods rationally and not be overwhelmed by the credit period.