Original Ye Tan Ye Tan Finance
Text/Ye Tan ☞ Financial Woman | Poisonous tongue kindness
Blowing up shops accidentally injures consumers and merchants
Recently, a big event has happened in the e-commerce industry.
Pinduoduo has encountered organized and large-scale malicious orders in a short period of time.
Originally, the merchants operated well, and they were ready to prepare goods in the spring after the recovery of consumption and ship them with full power.
As a result, he suffered losses all of a sudden, and was also subjected to unprovoked abuse and bad reviews.
Judging from short videos and various media reports, the source of the bombing of the store is a certain group of people, who first purposefully incite and advocate on social media, and then gather a certain number of people to collectively go to the brand store to bomb many times, which is worse than offline smashing and robbery.
Organize a WeChat group for fried shops
What's more interesting is that according to the memories and descriptions of Pinduoduo Xiaoer, this group of unknown users is very professional and not very similar to ordinary consumers.
First of all, they will gather forces to place tens of thousands of orders within a few hours, and when the merchants are busy, they will deliberately urge the delivery, and specially write the place of receipt as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Tibet and other remote areas.
Once the goods are transferred to a logistics node, these buyers will immediately apply for a refund, trying to get the brand merchant out of money.
Even if they do receive the goods, they will still maliciously refund and take pictures to force bad reviews.
Although from the perspective of the entire e-commerce industry, fried shops are not a new behavior, but the above kind of fried shops for platforms and big brands are not common.
It can be speculated that this group of unidentified people wants to encourage a group of merchants to withdraw from the Pinduoduo platform, constantly interfering with normal operations, and making other small and medium-sized businesses afraid or even afraid.
Forcing merchants to quit Pinduoduo
Fortunately, as a platform, Pinduoduo took responsibility, opened the protection mechanism for the affected merchants for the first time, and sent a special team to dock, covering the losses of the merchants.
The protection mechanism will also be gradually improved after the bombing incident.
Starting from the source, design a mutually beneficial and win-win mechanism to protect consumers and allow businesses to earn money.
When the outside world interprets, it will focus on the policy of only refunds.
Refunds alone aren't new, and other marketplaces have similar policies when eligible.
The emergence of only refunds will largely force merchants to improve their user satisfaction rate, even if there are really users who deliberately refund, it is only a minority in the actual transaction, and the platform will not let these consumers keep wool.
What's more, refunds alone can't be a shield for blowing up shops.
Using this as an excuse to attack the flagship stores of well-known big brands is a low-level act of venting anger, and whether this group of people is a user or a merchant, they will be punished by law.
As early as 2011, in the early days of the development of China's e-commerce, there was an e-commerce giant who had a similar experience.
At that time, it was also small and medium-sized businesses on the platform, and the contradictions with the platform intensified and finally broke out publicly, and no one was the winner.
Industry insiders refer to the event as the October Siege.
Finally, on October 15, 2011, the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China personally intervened, hoping that the platform party would respond to the requirements of small and medium-sized merchants and solve the problem through legal negotiation.
As China's first generation of e-commerce giants, the platform later launched a series of incentive and support policies, evaluated merchants and divided them into levels, completed the largest user and merchant education, and helped purify the entire e-commerce industry.
At the time, an executive said:
For the long-term health of your business, you have to make a decision in the end. Many things are difficult to perfect, only how you try to make it more thorough.
Chinese first started using e-commerce for two purposes:
First, the range of choices is wider;
Second, the price is lower than offline.
If the user experience really conflicts with the interests of the business, the priority protection is still the consumer.
Of course, for malicious buyers, it is not completely impossible.
In February 2023, a people's court in Wuxi heard an e-commerce case.
The facts of the case show that in March 2022, Wang had an after-sales conflict with an online store in Pinduoduo, and in order to vent his anger, within three days in October, Wang placed an order for dozens of goods in the online store, including 1,209 bags of instant noodles, 781 packages of biscuits, 396 bottles of drinks and 94 cans of oatmeal, totaling 18,222.28 yuan.
Wang applied for a refund when the merchant was preparing to deliver the goods, which caused the merchant's credit score to plummet, so that he could not participate in the Double 11 promotion that year, and the merchant sued Wang to court, and finally Wang was judged to constitute infringement.
The interests of merchants, platforms and users can be balanced.
It is believed that after this incident, Pinduoduo will further optimize the technology, improve the experience, provide more convenience for merchants, and have more confidence to face transformation and upgrading.
In the new normal, friends survive
From the perspective of the history of China's e-commerce development, 1999 is a milestone.
Alibaba was founded in September of that year, and eBay China began to attack the city about a month ago, and when Dangdang.com became a hit, more than 300 e-commerce platforms were born in China by the end of 1999.
However, more than two decades have passed, and there are very few companies that have truly survived and lived well.
In particular, the e-commerce industry has become a red sea of fierce competition.
The three mountains in front of it are logistics, payment and experience.
Alipay was born first because banks were unwilling to process small and multiple transactions.
Because for banks, its costs far exceed benefits, in order to solve the most difficult payment trust problem in online shopping, Alipay has inadvertently become the largest third-party payment institution in the country.
With Alipay, users finally don't have to make offline transactions after placing orders online.
Then there's logistics warehousing.
After Taobao, JD.com invested billions of dollars to build its own logistics and distribution system, relying on word of mouth and service quality, forged a new road, achieved its own identity as a game-breaker, and created a new moat.
Time accelerated to 2015, when the industry thought that the overall situation of e-commerce had been decided, Pinduoduo relied on social fission, as well as sinking market users, supplemented by smartphone coverage, mobile payment infrastructure, logistics, warehousing and transportation that had been paved by predecessors, and blazed a new trail.
This is a path that the giants have been doing before, but they have not completely succeeded, and Pinduoduo has done it.
If the previous generation of platforms solved the problem of trust in the transaction process, then in the era of e-commerce that pursues experience and personalized shopping, what Pinduoduo wants to upgrade is the sense of trust after the transaction.
One hammer is not enough, if you want to be long-lasting, you must make the connection between merchants, platforms, and users closer.
This requires the establishment of a stable trust system.
Generally speaking, in a society, a stable trust system presupposes the existence of legal provisions, governance rules, social contracts, and commercial contracts, so that people-to-people interactions can be guaranteed.
On an e-commerce platform, if there are frequent store bombings, merchants and users hurt each other, which will only lead to the rapid collapse of the trust system.
The loss of trust of merchants and buyers will inevitably lead to evil people, lack of integrity, rampant counterfeiting, lack of awe, and finally everyone pays for malicious and evil deeds.
We must see the truth behind malice, find out the causes and solutions, prevent the spread of mediocrity, and stop further mutual harm in time.
Man is always the end and can never be a tool to achieve it.
When there are changemakers and pioneers in an industry, they will inevitably be questioned by their predecessors and repeatedly questioned.
Global electric vehicle giant Tesla, founder Musk achieved wealth freedom in his early years, but chose to invest all his wealth to build cars, and experienced at least three darkest moments of entrepreneurship.
Especially in 2018, Tesla's infighting, a large number of executives left, Musk was investigated by government departments, a large number of loyal users returned orders, and Musk was once emotionally out of control and crying when interviewed by the media.
He once said:
Starting a company is like gazing into the abyss while swallowing glass.
Pinduoduo has not been established for a short time, and China's e-commerce industry has been developing for many years, which does not mean that it can cross the river by feeling the stones.
On the contrary, the pits that the predecessors stepped on, Pinduoduo can not be avoided, after all, some things can only be experienced to find a way to break the situation in the new era.
The only good thing is that the human world is not completely the law of the jungle, or the law of the Black Forest.
In 1869, after the publication of the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin discovered that the values of the survival of the strong and the perishing of the weak had been deeply rooted in human nature and constantly consolidated.
So he wrote a sentence in the book:
As an alternative to natural selection, survival of the fittest is more accurate, and sometimes both are equally useful.
Fast forward to 2023, when a book called Survival of Friends is published, and the two authors further expand Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest.
They argue:
Without kindness, your cleverness will only make people intimidated and make people think of ways to stay away from you instead of cooperating with you. Without the cooperation of others, it is difficult for you, as a social animal, to survive.
Humans are friendly because this ancient strategy is very common in nature and has great power.
Between people, it can be as simple as approaching someone and wanting to interact socially, or as complex as reading someone's mind in order to work together to achieve a common goal.
Contacting, communicating, understanding and learning from each other allowed Homo sapiens to move behind most of its competitors and gradually move to the top of the food chain.
Similarly, in the current environment, more communication, understanding and cooperation between platforms, businesses, governments, and users is far superior to contradictions and conflicts.
As human beings, we are both kind and cruel, but we always show empathy, understanding, tolerance, cooperation and love.
Because we know in our hearts that we can evolve and survive.
(Disclaimer: This article is an objective analysis made by Ye Tan Finance based on public information, and does not constitute investment advice, please do not use this as an investment basis.) ）
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