Reporter | Zhou Fangying
Edit | Lou Shuqin
1
People who love online shopping, especially those who love to sell personal store clothes, must have encountered the trouble of "ultra-long pre-sale period".
On the social platform Little Red Book, the topic of #Hate Presale has garnered nearly 5.7 million views. Many netizens posted quite unpleasant online shopping experiences caused by pre-sales under the topic.
Source: Little Red Book
It can be seen that compared with the previously more common 3 to 7 days of pre-sale time, many online shop merchants now set the pre-sale time of pre-sale products as 15 days, and some even up to 45 days.
In addition, the pre-sale waiting period is also divided into whether it is a working day. This means that if it is calculated on a five-day workday, the actual wait time of the consumer after placing the order is longer.
Judging from the general feedback of consumers, the criticism of the long pre-sale time is that it weakens the convenience of online shopping - a long wait consumes the original desire to buy, or makes the purchased product directly become a seasonal product when it is received.
In addition, some consumers reported that after waiting for the pre-sale agreed delivery time, they asked the merchant when to ship but got a reply to the delay in delivery, and the reasons for the lack of goods were various, such as factory shipment delays, defective goods were recalled, and so on. There are also merchants who even take the operation of false shipments, so that the order shows that it has been shipped, but it is in a state of waiting for the shipment to be collected.
Most of the feedback from consumer complaints are online and have a certain number of fans of the Internet celebrity clothing stores, rather than the popular brand clothing that also lays out offline stores.
Since the volume is not as large as the scale of traditional brand clothing, the pre-sale model can help these small brands reduce costs and inventory pressure to a certain extent.
As suppliers of traditional brands, many apparel factories are mainly based on large-scale and large-scale production. The window period provided by the pre-sale allows these small-scale merchants to collect a part of the order first, and then concentrate on ordering to the factory for production, thereby reducing the economic and time cost of production.
This sales-to-order approach can also help merchants reduce the likelihood of spot inventory piling up. In addition, merchants can also judge which styles or elements have a better market response through the order situation during the pre-sale period, and accumulate experience for future new designs.
However, as Xiaohongshu netizens complained, the pre-sale model inevitably affected the consumer experience.
Some platforms have set up channels for consumer complaints for this purpose. However, many consumers will directly choose a direct refund option similar to "seven days without reason" when they can't bear to return the goods in advance in order to avoid trouble, so that the platform's penalty mechanism cannot effectively combat the existence of the ultra-long pre-sale period.
And when consumers really can't bear to receive the goods, early refunds, most of the time, the merchant has to bear the risk of high return rate. This means that merchants inevitably need to deal with the backlog of pre-sale inventory after the sale, and the model of selling fixed production is not established.
This is also why many merchants will write product descriptions such as "pre-sale products, no return and no exchange" on the introduction page of pre-sale products. However, such a description is not legally binding. Because according to the provisions of China's consumer rights protection regulations, consumers can still claim the right to return and exchange related goods when there is a quality problem.