My destiny is in my own hands -- I relied on Amazon to achieve a comeback

The night before yesterday, I took advantage of the Chinese Valentine's Day to watch the recently acclaimed "Nezha: The Devil Child Comes into the World", and I loved the little Nezha in it.

Although he was teased by fate when he was born, and his chosen son was replaced by the evil man with a spirit pearl, becoming a little devil that everyone wanted to kill, he still faced his fate stubbornly, telling Ao Bing with a firm look in his eyes, "My fate is in my own hands, not in the hands of God", and then tried his best to protect the lives of all the villagers even if his body disappeared.

On the way back from the movie, I was filled with emotion. I seemed to see myself in Nezha, who once fell to the bottom but never gave up fighting. In my dictionary, not being able to decide one's origin is never an excuse for self-degradation.

1.

> > > Stubborn people always have something to insist on < < <

Since I was a child, my teacher said that I have a temper "as stubborn as a bull ", and I have gained a lot from this stubbornness. I carried this stubbornness with me from junior high school to university, and then went to study in Germany alone.

▲Photo taken in Munich, Germany in 2012

When I went to study in Germany alone, I was stunned when I went to a local supermarket to buy things for the first time. There were so many different products, which were completely different from the German language in the textbooks. There were even more than a dozen kinds of salt.

I wandered around until the last subway train was almost gone before I finished buying everything. Although there were 4 large bags of stuff, it took almost all my strength to carry them out of the supermarket , but in order to save the taxi fare, I still chose the subway station 1 kilometer away.

Apparently I was too confident in my physical strength. I couldn't walk any further after only halfway through. My legs felt like they were filled with lead and my hands were so tight from the handles of the plastic bag that they burned.

At this moment, a sudden inexplicable emotion came over me. I dropped the burden in my hands, squatted on the street in a foreign country and cried loudly.

Of course, I soon realized that crying was meaningless since I was alone in a foreign country without any friends or family. I had to rely on myself for everything.

Thinking of this, I resolutely picked up four large bags of daily necessities and continued moving forward, relying on my stubbornness to walk back to the apartment.

Looking back now, the biggest benefit of studying alone in Germany is that it taught me to be independent and to be strong enough not to give up in the face of adversity.

2.

> > > After returning to China after completing my studies, I first encountered cross-border business < < <

After returning to China, I faced the last stage of university - internship. At that time, I passed three rounds of screening including written test, HR interview and foreign HR oral interview and entered a large Amazon company in Tianjin.

This company is very large. There are 8 people in the German customer service department where I interviewed. We share a large office with English and other small language customer service staff. There are about 50 people in the entire customer service department , who are responsible for the pre-sales and after-sales processing of various Amazon and eBay accounts.

Opposite the customer service department is the product department, which is mainly responsible for product development and product launch, and has about 50 people. Downstairs are the finance department, technology department, general manager's office and other departments.

The entire company has a total of five floors and is located in an industrial park in Xiqing District, Tianjin. The company provides breakfast, lunch and dinner, and provides bus transportation to and from get off work. It also provides employee dormitories with two people in a room, and the employee benefits are abundant.

But the salary is not that much. I came here as a returnee from studying in Germany with an 8th-level German language certificate, but I could only get a salary of less than 3,000 yuan. Fortunately, there are many benefits, so graduates are scrambling to join this company.

I was very happy on my first day at work. The sound of keyboard tapping filled the customer service department made me feel as if I had walked into the white-collar life on TV. I couldn’t help but imagine myself looking elegant in high heels while holding a cup of coffee. Of course, reality told me that I was overthinking.

At the beginning, I was responsible for the relatively easy pre-sales customer service work. The team leader sent me a simple inquiry and asked me to write a reply to her. This team leader was my senior, and I know that I am very grateful to her now. She single-handedly led me to complete the transition from student to employee.

Because of my good language foundation, I was soon assigned to an independent salesforce account (a separate reply platform. At that time, the company's customer service and products had no access to the account, and the anti-association work was very effective). With this account, I began to reply to letters independently.

Afterwards, I accepted a more challenging after-sales customer service job and began to learn little by little how to guide customers to install and use the products to reduce the chances of customer returns.

After-sales service is a very difficult job. If it is not handled well, it will lead to bad reviews. I once made such a mistake, and the usually gentle team leader scolded me.

At that time, my stubbornness came back, I clenched my fists tightly and thought to myself, it's just customer service, I don't believe I can't do it well. With this stubbornness, I worked hard in the training and work in the next six months, and I wore out three notebooks.

These efforts have brought my customer service level to the peak. As long as I provide after-sales service, there will not be a single negative review, and I will not lose any complaint from customers, no matter how unreasonable they are.

But this also gave me a glimpse of the future. I realized that even if I move forward here, I can only be a more professional customer service. So after completing the internship, Frank and I discussed coming to Suzhou, a city that I fell in love with at first sight because of tourism.

3.

> > > The first step in transformation operations < < <

Because we were short of money, our first stop in Suzhou was an undecorated bare house with concrete walls all around and only some simple furniture.

I still remember the first night I spent here. Frank was afraid that I couldn’t stand the heat in the south, so he went out to buy a cool mat to put on the bed.

Sure enough, I didn't sleep well that night. The hot weather in Suzhou in July almost drove me crazy . There was no air conditioning or fan, and my back was soaked with sweat. When I tossed and turned, I found that I was pierced by a thorn from the mat. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Later, Frank rented a warehouse, and we moved in and slept on the floor, finally enjoying air conditioning. At that time, I was still very stubborn, thinking in my heart that I must work hard to have a home in this city.

At that time, I didn’t know what I would do in the future. I just thought that I had worked as an Amazon customer service representative in a large company, and my account health was very good. So I screened Amazon companies online and sent my resume to any company that offered good salary and benefits.

When I saw a company I really wanted to work for, I would do everything I could to find information about the company online and call the person in charge to schedule an interview. Now I think about it, I don’t know who gave me the courage, but I guess the person in charge was also shocked by my recklessness and actually scheduled an interview with me.

Finally, I chose Hua Wu Que, which is still a well-known foreign trade company in Suzhou, and became one of the earliest employees of Hua Wu Que. I really liked the office environment at that time, in a villa with a small bridge and flowing water. After I joined the company, I found that the decoration inside was too simple.

I didn't even have my own desk. I shared a long table with the person in charge, Lao Tian. Lao Tian initially let me upload the products myself. Later, he found that the sales of the products I uploaded were quite good, so Lao Tian opened a German account for me and asked me to be responsible for it.

As a result, this account created my first hit product. I don’t know if it was because of my understanding of Germany, my ability to express myself after working in customer service for a long time, or because I was lucky enough to encounter a concert in Austria, but a simple dress I uploaded sold for 3,000 euros in the first month after uploading it. During those two days, Lao Tian looked at me with a gleam in his eye, and quickly taught me how to write soft articles for SEO promotion. He also gave me other products and a separate Etsy account. Thanks to these things, my salary also rose to around 6k.

3.

> > >Hungry for more, I go higher and higher < < <

Due to good performance, my life improved a lot and I moved to a single apartment in Shilu. At that time, I spent whatever I earned. Frank and I were both foodies. We ate hot pot and Sichuan cuisine every night, and we spent thousands of dollars on food every month.

At that time, the income was not enough for me, and this company could not satisfy my desire for Amazon, so I decided to quit and switch to another platform. After deducting the rent and the money we spent on food, I only had a little over 100 yuan left . But we were stubborn and not afraid, and felt that we could shine wherever we went.

At that time, a top Taobao company happened to hire me to build a team for them . The product I was familiar with was wedding dresses. They had e-commerce experience but no foreign trade experience, so they needed me to start with recruitment.

At that time, I was young and reckless. I thought that I only had 100 yuan, and if I lost, I could just start over. So I accepted the invitation from this Taobao store.

I didn't expect to run into a problem right at the beginning - I didn't know how to open an account. Because my previous accounts were all ready-made, I was completely confused when I had to open one this time. I looked through various forums, but there was very little information, unlike the Amazon information that is now everywhere.

But this was not a big problem. I finally registered an account and started recruiting. The boss didn't know English, but he was generous and asked me to recruit people to form a team from the beginning. I recruited two fresh graduates and started my challenge in a two-story apartment.

At that time, Amazon and Etsy were operating together, and Etsy developed faster, achieving a monthly sales of 200,000 in less than three months. Unfortunately, the good times did not last long. Just as we were preparing to make a big splash, Etsy launched a large-scale ban on Chinese stores, including ours.

I informed my boss of the situation over the phone and he calmly told me not to worry and to think of a solution first. I still had an Amazon account, so I could set up the Amazon account while thinking of a solution.

So I started to focus all my energy on Amazon. My daily work was to browse forums, summarize, take notes, and then apply them to my account to test one by one to find out what methods were useful for sales. When I encountered a problem I didn't know how to solve, I relied on my stubbornness to work hard, constantly looking for answers and deductions, and never gave up until I solved it . In this way, I mastered the knowledge of uploading, advertising, etc. bit by bit. It was with this energy that I was able to get 70 to 80 orders a day on my German account.

However, as the performance increased, I found that I had less and less time to study operations. There were a lot of emails for customized wedding dresses, unlike most categories which had hundreds of orders a day but only a few emails. Therefore, most of my time was spent replying to emails.

I suggested to my boss that we hire a customer service representative and expand the same products to different websites. I was very grateful to my boss for his kindness and for entrusting a little girl like me with such an important task. He generously arranged what I asked for. I am also the type of person who repays a drop of kindness with a spring, so I put the product on the shelves at a very high price, hoping that he could make money as soon as possible.

At that time, we could have 80 orders a day, with sales of about 8,000 euros, and the profit was decent. So we moved to an office building and started recruiting on a large scale, with German, English, Spanish and French being deployed at the same time. It was also at that time that I met Vivian, the woman who has been with me ever since then.

The expansion went very smoothly. Now I think I really have the ability to make others trust me at the first meeting. I also recruited a Spanish master's degree returnee who was very capable and had 60 to 70 orders a day not long after joining the company. But she was a Virgo with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Once again, she encountered a four-star review. She actually wrote to the customer to ask if it could be changed to five stars, and then the customer angrily changed it to three stars.

Of course, this was just a small episode. After the expansion, the company became better and better with everyone's joint efforts. The team size increased to 12 people, and the monthly sales exceeded one million. I also went from an Amazon operation to the head of the cross-border business department, and I got a monthly salary of 25,000 yuan, basically living a life without worries about food and clothing.

Unfortunately, life always plays tricks on you. Suddenly one day, Amazon closed our store without any warning . The official explanation was that the company's main body was inconsistent. Later, I found out that when declaring the main body, I missed a shareholder with a shareholding of more than 20%. This information was not shown on the business license, so I ignored it when registering the account.

I appealed again and again, and called customer service in different countries, but unfortunately, my account was not restored. Our team was also facing a state of no income, and after a month, there was no sign of recovery in the store.

So a few of us core members went to the boss and told him that we couldn't wait any longer. Of course, we also knew that the company was not doing well, so we didn't want the last month's salary. If we encountered any problems, we could come to us.

I had to start over again, but this time I was lucky that my experience in successfully building an Amazon team at my previous company unexpectedly made me famous among the bosses. After I left this time, many companies offered me olive branches, including the then cross-border giants LightInTheBox and Talang. The head of Talang in Beijing even flew to Suzhou to have coffee with me.

However, because of this detailed conversation in the cafe, I once again felt the powerlessness of a big company. The sense of accomplishment that I wanted, "if I work hard I can reach the sky," is something they could not give me.

At this time, another relatively small company in Suzhou also approached me. The boss of this company was very courageous, self-made, young and promising, and very sincere in talking to me. He called me three or four times a week to invite me to join . After careful consideration, I decided to work with him to expand this company.

My Amazon story has just taken off. Due to space constraints, we will see you next week for the rest of the story . Sellers who want to get to know me can scan the QR code below to chat with me privately.

PS. If you want to join the seller discussion group, you can also private message me to let me add you to the group

Click to like and share your experience▼