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Hello everyone, I’m Xiao Y, a small seller fighting in the red ocean of Amazon. I sell mobile phone cases on Amazon. I graduated from college a little over a year ago and just turned 24, but now I’m very confused.
I decided to work for Amazon when I was a junior in college. Many of my seniors graduated from school and did this, and their stories have always been circulated among us, the students in the ivory tower.
Plus I have resource advantages, my relative's factory is a mobile phone case factory, which can customize many different styles and has been doing business in China. He also plans to do Amazon, so he asked me to run it, so I found a company to intern first.
This company is engaged in the distribution of goods and follow-up sales. The person who led me was mainly engaged in follow-up sales. The software used for follow-up sales and automatic price adjustment, so his main job was to pay attention to whether there were any complaints. If there is a next step, if the other party's attitude is not too tough, continue to follow, if the other party has a brand or trademark proof, withdraw. So it also shows that it is not possible to chase and sell without being tough. The job of follow-selling is actually quite leisurely, so the person who led me would also post on forums or hang out in some social groups, and of course he would take me along with him. This is the only thing I am grateful to him for. The only basic operations I learned were how to adjust prices and how to find products to copy sell on Amazon. At that time, I was naive and thought it would be easy for me to do it. I quit my job when I graduated. My relative gave me an office and registered an Amazon account, and then I started working on my own. At the beginning, I was really stupid and didn’t even know how to write a listing. I could only hang out in forums, WeChat public accounts, and QQ groups every day to ask questions. I also met a few operation veterans, and gradually got the hang of it through unremitting theoretical understanding and practical operation. Of course, there is nothing much to sell mobile phone cases, it's just the style, material, and compatible models. The key is whether your pictures are attractive enough. After getting used to it, the sales volume is also OK. After all, my factory has advantages, and it's not bad to be able to lower the price. I don't have any big ambitions, I feel satisfied if I can get 30 orders a day. But to put it bluntly, the threshold for this thing is too low and it is too easy to attract copycat sales. Sometimes there are as many as 8 copycat sales in one night. As someone who has done copy-selling before and has no ruthless tactics, I naturally know how arrogant they are. During the peak season last year, I was trying to copy-sell almost every day, and in the end I was exhausted. I also thought about killing those who copied my products, but this is not a long-term solution. If one group leaves, another group will come. Secondly, if they dare to copy your products, it means they are not afraid of you. Why waste money and effort and possibly cause trouble? So I thought about it for a long time and read many foreign blogs. I decided to make my own designs and patterns so that others can't imitate them. I discussed it with my relative, and he agreed that we could try it out in small batches. I found the patterns on a website, and when I saw that the number of likes was high, I tried to send it to the model maker in the factory to let him see if it was easy to operate. I made a small batch first, and if the sales were good, I would mass produce it. At the same time, I contacted the designer to buy the copyright of the pattern. Through this method, we found three or five exclusive licensed styles, and hired a photography team to take a set of very beautiful pictures. The copyright of the pictures belongs to us. If someone wants to copy the product and find it on Alibaba? Sorry, we don't have that style. Want to order it? The threshold is high, and I guess they won't be that stupid. Of course, my relative won't be stupid enough to sell it exclusively on Alibaba. At worst, I can ask the designer to complain to Amazon about those who copy the product or sell the same product. Business is slowly picking up, and I am delighted that my mentality has changed a lot in this year. I went from being full of ambition to being confused. I was very focused on Amazon before, probably because I put all my interests and life into it. Every day I was full of energy, thinking about how to advertise, how to find channels to send tests, what patterns to shoot... But now I am more and more Buddhist. Anyway, the number of orders is there every day, fifty, seventy or hundreds, and the ads are open every day. Sometimes I spend more, sometimes less. Now I just feel exhausted. I used to go to my relatives' offices to sit, but now I just move my computer to my home and stay there every day. I think it may be because I am the only one working for Amazon in the entire factory. Although the office is not big, it is the only one for me and no one communicates with me. My relatives don’t understand Amazon either, but they witnessed my growth step by step and thought I was still very reliable and not just playing around. I can only solve problems by myself, from choosing styles to designing pictures, writing listings, advertising to off-site evaluation and order-boosting. I can only share my happiness by myself, as my relatives don’t understand anything that is not related to the number of orders. Often after I explain it to them two or three times, they suddenly feel lonely and gradually don’t like to share anymore. Friends I used to get along well with are now working and are rarely available except during holidays or breaks. Even when they do have free time, they have their own lives. So I gradually developed the habit of sitting in front of the computer alone, thinking alone, and being ecstatic alone. Sometimes I feel that I should find new products, or increase the order volume, and want to make a breakthrough, but I don’t know how to do it. Sometimes I feel like I should find a partner to be with, maybe I won’t be so lonely. Sometimes I feel like I should go out more often, but I’m tied to my account and I’m always worried about it when I go far away. Many friends envy my freedom, but I am alone when I am distressed, and alone when I am happy. I have to explain a lot to others, but it’s hard to tell the difference between the two fields, and I don’t want to continue halfway through. It seems that I can do everything and keep growing, but in fact I am getting more and more lonely and decadent. Someone on the forum said that the way to make a person useless is very simple, just give him a computer and an Internet cable. I personally agree with this. E N D |
