"Boss, to be blunt, these three major e-commerce platforms are difficult to cooperate with! I’m afraid we can’t continue with them!" Hao Jianguo reported to Huang He.
This was his honest opinion. He had been working on this matter for the past half month and had completed the task very seriously, but it just wasn't working out. Especially with the last three companies, after the entire team’s professional judgment, they unanimously agreed that these three were almost impossible to conquer. Therefore, Hao Jianguo had no choice but to report to Huang He.
Hao Jianguo wasn't worried that this would expose him. After all, if one person could complete every task, it would be too perfect and seem fake.
"If this won't work? Do you have any new ideas?" Huang He didn't say much and instead asked.
"Yes, boss. I think the best way is for us to create a large e-commerce website and then use our Western Wild Horse Wallet to seize the market!" Hao Jianguo said.
"Didn't I say that this plan is too difficult, and the competitors are too strong? It's easy to fail!" Huang He said unhappily.
"Boss, actually, I haven't just been negotiating all these days. I've also been understanding the entire industry, and then I discovered that the entire e-commerce industry in the United States is just a bluff! Take the three major e-commerce platforms for example. They are all superficial. As long as we push forward easily, we might be able to defeat all three!" Hao Jianguo suddenly said.
This surprised Huang He, so he asked Hao Jianguo to continue.
"Boss, in the past half month, I've actually seen through the old bottoms of these three stores. The most vulnerable is Walmart, because the thinking of this platform is still stuck in the offline era. Their online website is just a tool to assist their offline purchases."
"Although their website has over 10,000 types of products, these products are almost all common products found in supermarkets. And items that cannot be bought in supermarkets also cannot be found on Walmart's e-commerce website. However, according to our statistics, the items users need to buy online are often those that are inconvenient to buy in supermarkets. Otherwise, with the logistics speed of e-commerce platforms, they often have to wait for more than ten or twenty days to receive their online purchases. It's better to just go to the supermarket to buy them, which is more relaxed and simpler!"
"Therefore, I believe that Walmart as a whole is a vulnerable target, not worth mentioning. They rely on their physical stores. Although this will stabilize their online website, it also severely restricts the possibility of further development of the website, and it's not worth mentioning."
"Then there's eBay. Although eBay is currently the largest e-commerce website, and eBay's reach extends all over the world, with branches in dozens of countries, it looks overwhelmingly difficult to defeat."
"But eBay focuses too much on its origin as a flea market!" Hao Jianguo sneered and said, "Everyone has seen the inspirational stories of eBay's beginnings, and everyone knows how Jeff turned a small second-hand auction forum into the world's largest e-commerce website in just one year. This is Jeff's most legendary story, but it is also his biggest failure in development."
"As the saying goes, what makes you rise can also make you fall. eBay's rise was due to its auction business, which means it is destined to fail because of its auction and flea market business."
"The reason why the auction business was able to help eBay double its growth back then was because second-hand item auctions and flea markets were a completely blank blue ocean!"
"The online shopping environment at that time was actually very bad. The experience of shopping online was not comparable to shopping in offline physical stores. Therefore, many brand new products had no market at that time. Only by selling items that could not be bought normally in the market, or were extremely difficult to obtain, could e-commerce websites rise."
"eBay found this item, which is second-hand goods. After all, people who sell second-hand goods are unlikely to set up stalls themselves to hawk them. They can usually only try their luck at some local flea markets. But the problem is that local flea markets can at most reach tens of thousands of people, which leads to many second-hand goods not finding interested buyers, so these second-hand goods can only be stuck in their hands."
"But with the emergence of eBay, they perfectly solved this pain point. They only needed to put the product information online, and buyers all over the world could see these high-quality and inexpensive, or unique second-hand goods through the network, thereby completely opening up their website's sales channels and market."
"This is exactly why eBay was able to rise, but it is also why eBay is heading for collapse, because the volume of the second-hand flea market is fixed. This market is far inferior to the online shopping market for new goods. As e-commerce continues to develop in the future, the flea market will become a very small market, not worth mentioning."
"If I were the CEO of eBay, I would immediately reduce the proportion of the flea market on the entire website and allocate all resources to developing the online shopping market for new goods. This is a wise choice, but eBay has always clung to its original flea market and failed to see the market situation, and has already gone down the wrong path!"
"Even more fatally, most eBay sellers are still individual sellers!"
"Because eBay entered the market by selling second-hand goods, and most of the people selling in the second-hand market are individual sellers, eBay cannot conduct detailed verification of sellers' identities, nor can it require sellers to provide funds as security deposits, because doing so would cause sellers to lose their willingness to sell goods online."
"But the direct result of this is that it is extremely difficult to verify the identity and safety of sellers, which leads to a disastrous buying experience. According to our data, over 3% of customer experiences on eBay are extremely poor. They will experience delayed shipping, damaged packaging, damage during transportation, receiving the wrong item, or outright fraud, among many other common problems in e-commerce!"
"These problems could have been solved by extremely strict control and exploitation of sellers, and by imposing stringent review and restrictive conditions on sellers to drive out scammers, while also reducing negative review rates!"
"Only professional merchants can afford such strict restrictions and have the profits to offset the costs generated by these strict rules. Individual sellers, on the other hand, cannot afford these restrictive costs. However, the essence of eBay's second-hand flea market dictates that they cannot impose strict restrictions on sellers, and thus cannot improve the shopping experience!"
"This is also why they have been gradually surpassed by Amazon in recent years, and may even be directly overtaken this year, because Amazon has fully implemented strict seller management systems, ensuring buyer interests through brutal treatment of sellers, thereby maintaining the platform's good reputation."
"And the next few years will be years of booming development for e-commerce. eBay has lost its competitive advantage and will eventually become a niche e-commerce platform, and even its demise is not impossible!"
"Therefore, I believe that eBay is also an opponent that can be easily defeated. There is no need for us to worry!" Hao Jianguo concluded.
"Hmm!" Huang He nodded after listening and said indifferently, "Then what about Amazon? What are the weaknesses of this company? Can it also be easily defeated by us?"
"This... Boss, I think Amazon is an unbeatable opponent from a business perspective!" Huang He was surprised that Hao Jianguo gave him such an answer.
"After my careful analysis, I found that Amazon is indeed a terrifying opponent. First of all, Amazon is now aggressively expanding into all-field businesses. Almost every month, more than 10 brand new product categories are launched on the website, and they are all well-known brands in their respective fields. This makes Amazon's product lines increasingly powerful. Currently, Amazon has over 320,000 different products, and it is almost impossible to find any shortcomings in its product categories!"
"Furthermore, Amazon's development path is also correct. Amazon has now introduced a user rating system, imitating our Jiangnan Mall, and seems to have copied our established rules and regulations entirely. As long as the user gives a negative review or requests a return/exchange, Amazon will agree to unconditional refunds for all products except for enterprise-type products."
"Although this will cause losses to many sellers and even lead to widespread criticism of Amazon from sellers, it has successfully created a good reputation for itself, and everyone on the internet praises Amazon!"
"At the same time, because of the widespread praise for Amazon on the internet, Amazon's annual online transaction volume has been growing exponentially. This also leads to a continuous surge in the number of sales sellers can make on Amazon. Therefore, the profits generated far exceed the losses caused by some malicious buyers, so many sellers can tolerate these bad conditions as long as there is money to be made!"
"Finally, there is Amazon's chairman, Bezos. He is the most difficult person to deal with. He is very sharp and very terrifying. When negotiating with him, I even felt like I was negotiating with you, boss. He is a perfect entrepreneur, and I am not as good as him."
"This opponent has no weaknesses, which means that almost all of Amazon has no weaknesses. We cannot defeat this opponent through normal means!" Hao Jianguo said.
"Oh, so you say this guy is unbeatable, yet you suggest the company enter the e-commerce market. This means there are abnormal ways to defeat Amazon, right!" Huang He asked curiously.
"That's right!" Hao Jianguo hesitated slightly, then said without hesitation, "Actually, Amazon has another weakness, a huge weakness, which is that it's just too cheap!"