The second e-commerce junior is more greedy than Ali executives

Spiral Labs

2024-05-15 19:48Posted on the official account of Beijing Spiral Laboratory

The second e-commerce junior is more greedy than Ali executives

Author丨Iron Hand

Editor丨Nuts

Cover source丨Unsplash

There was a widely circulated joke in the e-commerce circle, when Ali e-commerce was at its peak, half of the bars in Hangzhou were supported by Ali Xiaoer.

Although in the official propaganda caliber, the role of Ali Xiaoer is just a brick in the Taotian e-commerce empire, and he often has to play a hard-working pawn during the big promotion activities. But in the community, the rumors that Ali Xiaoer can earn a Cullinan a year and spend tens of thousands of dollars for a meal have never stopped.

Recently, the news that "an employee of an e-commerce platform in Hangzhou accepted bribes of more than 9,200 yuan" has once again refreshed many people's cognition.

According to a CCTV report, Wang is an operator of an e-commerce platform in Hangzhou, mainly responsible for the approval business of the official flagship store of furniture on this e-commerce platform, and he quickly turned the approval power into a business of hundreds of millions of yuan in just one year, during which he and many people jointly accepted bribes of more than 130 million yuan, of which the amount of bribes he received was more than 92 million yuan, and gradually formed a gray and black industrial chain of reselling furniture official flagship store indicators.

Hangzhou e-commerce platform, the official flagship store settled, and jointly accepted bribes of more than 130 million yuan, many key factors were superimposed, and the enterprises involved pointed directly at Alibaba.

Although it is not uncommon for executives of large enterprises to seek personal interests through their own work convenience, it is not uncommon in the Internet industry to have hundreds of millions of yuan in black income a year as an ordinary operation in a basic position.

The younger two can be more greedy than the executives

What is the concept of accepting bribes of 92 million yuan a year, if you compare it internally, none of the Ali executive corruption cases that have been publicly reported before have reached such a "height".

In 2016, Kong Qi, vice president of Alibaba Pictures and general manager of Taopiaopiao, was taken away by the police for corruption and bribery, and the amount of bribes was estimated to be tens of millions of yuan; In 2018, Yang Weidong, the former president of Youku Video under Ali Entertainment, accepted bribes of more than 8.55 million yuan and was sentenced to 7 years in prison; In 2020, Shi Miao, the former vice president of Cainiao, was detained by the police for accepting millions of yuan in bribes.

In the e-commerce system, Yan Limin, the former general manager of Taobao Juhuasuan, was sentenced to 7 years in prison in 2012 for accepting bribes, according to the verdict, Yan Limin accepted two cars purchased by customers for his care during his work, with a total value of more than 538,000 yuan.

The maximum bribe of executives is not more than 10 million, and the operation of businesses in basic positions can collect hundreds of millions of dollars in a year, such a bizarre sense of contrast can't help but make people more curious, how much power Ali has in the second-hand hand.

Spiral Lab noticed that in 2018, the People's Court of Yuhang District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province had tried a bribery case of Tmall Qianxiaoer, according to public reports at the time, this Xiaoer named Tianli used to be a merchant operator of Tmall assembly computer category, and from 2016 to 2017, he repeatedly accepted merchant benefits and took advantage of his position to take care of merchants, with a total of more than 420,000 yuan of illegal gains.

Now that seven or eight years have passed, judging from the details of the illegal operation, the position authority of Ali's junior seconders does not seem to have improved much, but the price of the benefit fee has risen rapidly.

According to CCTV's report, the main authority of the arrested operator Wang is to help merchants pass the review of the platform and enter the e-commerce platform, and it is only in the furniture category.

In one year, a total of more than 400 merchants have successfully entered the platform under Wang's illegal approval, and the overall amount involved is as high as 130 million yuan, according to this ratio, the average store has to "tribute" about 325,000 yuan to Wang.

It is worth noting that after the Tmall Xiaoer Tianli bribery case was discovered, Alibaba closed 7 stores involved in the case in accordance with the "improper profit-making clause" in Article 69 of the "Tmall Rules", including some top-ranked star stores.

And now there are more than 400 stores in the furniture category that have entered in violation of regulations, and if Ali wants to continue to implement the iron-fisted policy, it may be a seismic change for the entire furniture category.

Bugs and absences

There is a widely circulated line in the TV series "In the Name of the People": "Absolute power leads to absolute corruption".

For a grassroots operation employee, the black income of up to hundreds of millions of yuan is obviously the product of its own absolute power.

Judging from the details of the case, just by mastering the merchant's entry authority, it can openly carry out power rent-seeking, and it was only discovered after operating more than 400 stores in violation of regulations, which actually reflects a problem from the side, that is, there are still loopholes in the review mechanism of the e-commerce platform itself.

It is understood that the reason why the business operation of this bribe of 92 million yuan was found out came from an anonymous report letter within the same company, and if there was no such report letter, his business might have continued.

In other words, in the one year of the auditor's illegal operation, the merchants who entered the platform in the form of "payment" were still safe and sound, although the way they settled in was not compliant, but it did not seem to affect the normal operation of the e-commerce platform.

And this phenomenon obviously makes the violators more confident, anyway, after settling in, there is no negative impact, so they can be more unscrupulous to collect money, and regard the audit rules as nothing.

In addition, it is also worth noting that the reason why the business of illegal audit can be so big is inseparable from the matchmaking of a group of intermediaries, and this Wang has developed 8 intermediaries to serve as brokers, and there are brokers under the brokers, and many of them are insiders in the furniture industry.

This deformed business ecology actually reflects that practitioners in the entire industry are no longer surprised by this image, otherwise there would not be more than 400 merchants obediently paying money to open stores.

And if you dig deeper, who started this atmosphere of paying money to do things?

As early as 2015, Ali had notified 26 Taobao stores of the penalty decision to permanently close stores, Ali said that these Taobao stores violated the principle of good faith management, sought improper benefits through "unspoken rules", tried every means to give gifts to related people, gave cash or other benefits, and attempted to bribe Xiao Er.

Although the shop involved was permanently closed, but for those who "collect money to do things", Ali seems to have not paid attention to a few typical, for many years about Ali's small two incomes rumors have been floating on the Internet, but due to the lack of official reports, whether it is the merchants or the employees themselves, it is difficult to find out the authority of the small second-hand, whether it is really all exposed to the sun.

Ali Xiaoer is not alone

Frankly speaking, if Internet companies, especially platform-based companies, over-decentralize access to work, it is indeed easy to become a breeding ground for corruption, even if this power is only in the hands of grassroots employees.

Ma Huateng once said in Tencent's internal speech that many of Tencent's businesses cannot be done, not because of the problem of managers, nor because of the business direction, but because the corruption loopholes are too big and the business has been hollowed out.

According to the "2022 Internet Anti-Corruption and Anti-Fraud Report" released by Southern Metropolis Daily, operations are one of the four common positions in corruption and fraud cases in the Internet industry, and the other three are business development, procurement and sales.

From the perspective of work attributes, most of the possible corrupt behaviors of the latter three are embezzlement, and once the operation cannot keep the bottom line, most of them obtain illegal benefits through power rent-seeking.

Taking Douyin Group as an example, according to the 2023 anti-fraud notice officially released by Douyin, last year, Douyin Group investigated and dealt with a total of 177 cases of fraud violations, of which 136 people were dismissed for violating the red line of integrity, and 23 people were transferred to the judicial authorities for suspected violations and crimes.

Among these cases transferred to justice, more than 70% of the cases involved employees taking advantage of their positions to provide improper assistance to external customers or businesses and accept favors.

In addition to Douyin, Internet companies such as Tencent, Meituan, and Kuaishou have also been exposed to similar corruption incidents on many occasions.

Even some live broadcast e-commerce companies that have just emerged in the past two years have begun to show this bad atmosphere.

In November last year, a criminal verdict published on the official website of the Shanghai High People's Court showed that Zhou, the investment promotion commissioner of Li Jiaqi's beautiful wrist company, used his position to help a company provide help such as product selection and delivery, live broadcast scheduling, etc., and collected "benefit fees" for a total of 1.09 million yuan many times.

How to solve this problem, in addition to intensifying anti-corruption efforts internally, the multiple divisions of access work, so that the power of a single person is no longer the decisive factor, may be able to solve the chaos of "collecting money and doing things" of large Internet companies to a certain extent.

Especially for Alibaba, in the past, when the company was developing rapidly, the impact of these problems may be masked by the growth of GMV, and now Ali is in an important stage of reform, and vested interests in certain positions are bound to make way for reform.

In the Internet industry, which is already in a downward environment, an ordinary e-commerce platform operates 92 million a year, can you expect other employees in the same position to sit still?

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