Huang He sat down in his chair, feeling a bit tired after seeing off Dai Tiejun, who left with a confused expression.
"Am I developing too fast?" Huang He murmured, looking out at the world enveloped in darkness.
Whether it was QQ or the e-commerce mall, these things had already appeared in 2003.
However, the newly born e-commerce mall at that time certainly did not have the high configuration of the current Jiangnan Group. Not only did it have a complete charging system, but it also immediately achieved a terrifying national daily order volume of 120,000 items from the start.
It's important to remember that Taobao in the other world did not set its first daily order record exceeding 100,000 until 2006.
More importantly, at that time, Taobao did not have a mature express delivery system like Jiangnan Express, which was akin to what would exist more than ten years later.
Historically, all of this had to evolve step by step as Taobao's order volume increased and the demand for express delivery grew, leading express delivery companies to evolve to this level.
Then, Boss Huang single-handedly propelled his own express delivery company to the level it would reach after 2010.
This statement wasn't wrong, and the benefits were immense. However, being a step ahead made one a genius, while being two steps ahead made one a madman. A company like this express delivery service consumed a vast amount of capital. Currently, Huang He was basically relying on Jiangnan Group's financial support to keep this decade-ahead madman, Jiangnan Express, operational.
But it wasn't right for Jiangnan Group to keep subsidizing it indefinitely. Jiangnan Express needed to become profitable as soon as possible, and the best way to achieve this was to accelerate the arrival of the e-commerce era of the future.
"It seems I need to be even more aggressive!" Huang He muttered to himself.
This time, Jiangnan Group's online shopping launch also had many aggressive aspects.
For example, customers could directly top up cash into their accounts.
Secondly, each account was highly private and could completely evade real-name verification. If one chose to purchase prepaid top-up cards at internet cafes or phone cards from telecommunication companies, the step of binding an ID card could even be omitted.
Finally, and most importantly, the accounts had severe security vulnerabilities. Once an account's username and password were stolen, all the charged cash in the account could potentially be pilfered.
These aggressive practices would be unthinkable in the future. Frankly speaking, they placed consumers' money in great danger. Such things would never pass policy in later years.
With the development of the future, various protective policies would be comprehensively implemented, making it almost impossible for online shopping to avoid real-name verification. Furthermore, attempting to steal funds from Alipay or WeChat, other than through fraudulent means where victims voluntarily transferred money, would be nearly impossible through technical means.
However, in the wild era of e-commerce in 2003, anything was possible. Jiangnan Group's rapid and aggressive development meant that it would inevitably face repercussions from these issues in the future, a fact Huang He was well aware of.
But since he had already become aggressive, he might as well be even more so. After all, no one in the world understood e-commerce better than Boss Huang. Before the aggressive world retaliated, he could perfectly resolve all issues by transforming himself into a perfect gentleman.
The next day, Huang He called an old friend. "Old Wang, how are things on your end? I'm counting on you!"
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On April 18, 2003, the first sales climax of Jiangnan Group concluded under the watchful eyes of many industry insiders. Although Jiangnan Group itself appeared remarkably calm and made no grand announcements, it left its domestic competitors utterly stunned.
While Taobao was not yet born, China's e-commerce industry was far from stagnant. On the contrary, it already had quite a few players.
The earliest entrant was a website called 8848. No, not the 8848 titanium phone, but the 8848 e-commerce network. It was also the first to offer cash-on-delivery services in fifty cities nationwide. At a time when online payment methods were cumbersome and people lacked trust in online shopping security, cash-on-delivery successfully opened the first blue sky for China's e-commerce.
What was most impressive about 8848 was that the company actually went public in 2000.
Of course, it was impossible to go public directly under the name 8848. However, the Chinese stock market has always had a knack for "resurrection through borrowed corpses." Thus, in 2000, through a collaboration with a company called Zongyi Stock, 8848 completed its resurrection. Zongyi Stock, originally a penny stock with a market value of only tens of millions, saw its stock price surge ninefold and its market value increase sevenfold within a year. The chairman of Zongyi Stock even directly became one of China's top 50 richest, far wealthier than Huang He at that time.
Of course, by 2003, with the departure of 8848's founder, the website had declined. However, a starved camel is still larger than a horse, and its basic value remained.
Currently, the largest e-commerce website in the country was EachNet, founded just a month after 8848. This network, which began by selling books, almost perfectly replicated the development curve of Amazon in the United States. In 2001, it received investment from Sina, and in 2002, it received 30 million yuan in investment from eBay, then the leading e-commerce company in the United States.
There were rumors that eBay was still considering a full acquisition of EachNet.
Then there was Dangdang, which also started by selling books. Although it didn't yet compare to the two elder brothers mentioned above, its entire team was still full of vitality.
And then there was Alibaba. Many might think Alibaba is Taobao, but that's not quite true. Taobao was still undergoing its final gestation in a villa in West Lake. The entity actually operating online at this time was Alibaba.
This was a platform dedicated to facilitating online transactions between businesses. Because the volume of business-to-business transactions was relatively large, and because businesses were large enterprises with high costs for falsifying information or defaulting, they were indeed the best early participants in online e-commerce platforms.
Therefore, the Alibaba website was currently fully focused on business-to-business transactions and had not yet ventured into business-to-consumer transactions. This task was actually not handled by Alibaba but by Taobao, located by West Lake.
Regardless, the e-commerce websites in China had developed a somewhat tense atmosphere.
While everyone was contemplating how to attack their rivals, identify their weaknesses, and snatch more market share from them, a behemoth suddenly and unreasonably emerged.
In November 2002, Jiangnan Mall first appeared online, but these e-commerce companies paid it little attention.
After all, in their view, Jiangnan Mall was merely an internal trading platform for Jiangnan Blind Box players. Although it offered online shopping and express delivery services, it was ultimately an internal transaction among their own people, so no one took it seriously.
It wasn't until today, when Jiangnan Mall calmly announced in a small line of text on its official website that its 10 million blind boxes had all sold out in ten days.
But that wasn't the most terrifying part. What was terrifying was that Jiangnan Mall had managed to complete over 120,000 transactions daily for ten days, while ensuring that express delivery could be completed within 72 hours, with couriers delivering directly to all buyers' hands. This was an extremely frightening feat.
What made all companies even more apprehensive was that in this article, Jiangnan Group announced that a total of 1.87 million active accounts had participated in this transaction within ten days.
While everyone knew that there was a lot of inflated data among these 1.87 million active accounts, with many accounts being repeatedly registered to purchase more blind boxes, even if these 1.87 million accounts were halved, and then further reduced, there would still be 900,000 active accounts. Moreover, these 900,000 active accounts had completed the entire online shopping process, from top-up to sale to receiving the goods.
This meant there were 900,000 users who had acquired online shopping habits.
It's crucial to realize that at this moment, the biggest predicament faced by all e-commerce websites was not a lack of money or technology, but a lack of users with online shopping habits.
Take EachNet, which had the largest user base, for example. It had been operating for over three years, and the total number of accounts that had engaged in online shopping during these three years was only slightly over 500,000.
Unless one combined all the users from 8848, EachNet, and Dangdang, the astonishing number of 900,000 accounts could not be surpassed.
This meant that Jiangnan Group had captured 50% of the market share upon its arrival.
And this was just the beginning. Because Jiangnan Mall was backed by QQ, which had already surpassed 80 million registered accounts, Jiangnan Blind Box, with over 9 million total customers, and the current Facebook website, which controlled all social traffic. If these entities continued to supply users to Jiangnan Mall, the other e-commerce websites could only envision one scene.
It was like a golden cudgel stirring up chaos throughout the heavenly palace.
As these websites pondered how to deal with the sudden emergence of Jiangnan Mall, on April 9th, Jiangnan Mall announced that to provide customers with a more comprehensive shopping experience, they would be launching over five hundred individual or corporate shops across more than thirty different categories, including clothing, home goods, luggage, maternal and infant products, toys, sports, beauty, digital products, enterprise supplies, appliances, snacks, tea and wine, kitchenware, cleaning supplies, automotive, home textiles, books, audio equipment, stationery, pharmaceuticals, health products, accessories, watches, eyewear, jewelry, daily necessities, fast-moving consumer goods, and more.