Spend 6.6 million to fight a price war! From dropping out of junior high school to top category, this post-95 e-commerce boss has something to do!

I came out of school at the age of 16. At that time, I was naughty and had something to do, and the school wanted me anymore.

At such a young age, I can’t do anything in society. I can only go to the factory to be a quality inspection. When I was 18 years old, I read the books of the construction engineer myself. At the age of 19, I got a second-level construction engineer. Then I went to the construction site and worked as a construction worker for more than half a year. I was lucky and became a project manager for subcontracting.

After spending more than two years at the construction site, the overall performance is still good. His annual income has reached more than 100,000 yuan in his early 20s, and he bought his first car in his life by himself.

In September 2016, I opened a Taobao store part-time job and looked for products on Alibaba. I also had to work during the day and worked as a customer service to do Taobao at night. I only slept for two or three hours. Even if I earn 3 yuan per order, I could make a call for half an hour. I think no matter how much I sell, as long as the transaction is completed, I will always have the chance to sell more. With this idea, I made 50,000-100,000 in two months.

Seeing that the income was good, I quit my work on the construction site and went to work on Taobao full time. At that time, I met two friends in the construction team, who were 20 years older than me. Each of the three of them took out more than 100,000 yuan to set up a company. I mainly managed it. They held the business shareholding and embarked on the road of entrepreneurship in a daze.

1. Buy a store and spend 9.1 million on price war

At the end of 2016, I started my business and didn’t expect how much money I could make or how much turnover I could make, because I didn’t know anything. There was basically no sales in 2017 and 2018. At the end of 2018, I knew how to look at the data so that my performance improved.

In fact, it was because of two price wars and lost 6.6 million yuan to experience. Because competitors are my best role models, I took some of my competitors' playing styles and underlying logic and started doing it.

I don’t want to fight a price war either, it’s all about adapting to the survival of the platform. The automotive supplies industry is all standard products, and basically dominated by sales ranking. Whoever has a higher sales volume and who has a higher cost performance will be able to sell.

So we have a lot of price wars, and we can do it for every single loss of 10-20 yuan.

In 2018, I fought a price war and lost about 1.6 million in three months. In 2020, I fought another price war and lost more than 5 million in three months.

In 2018, our company had a lot of inventory and only had one main product. This product could be sold for millions in a month, accounting for 60%-70% of the total performance, and other products accounted for 20%-30%.

If we stopped at that time, we might face the inability to sell millions of goods, which would also lead to the in vain of many of the efforts we had made before. There was no way, so we could only fight a price war.

I think as long as you are still alive, it doesn’t matter if you lose money , because you can survive as long as you have a ranking. At that time, I had the mentality of thinking about who could survive whom and fought a price war with the other party. We changed from the gross profit of the first order to about 10 yuan, to 5 yuan, and then to 0. The price will be adjusted 5-6 times a day, and the last order will lose at least 15-20 yuan.

This price lasted for about 2-3 months. At that time, the promotion was paid every day, with orders of more than 1,000 yuan a day, and a loss of 30,000 to 40,000 yuan a day. Gradually, both parties could not stand it. By September, the price gradually began to rise, which was a little better.

2. Learn from one mistake and gain wisdom

It was also from that time that I realized a problem, that is, we must not rely solely on one product, and we must not only have one store.

So from the end of 2018 to the beginning of 2019, I used all the money I earned to buy stores. At that time, a Tmall store was about 500,000 yuan. In three months, I bought 4-5 stores , and then I started to expand the category.

So far, the company's product subcategories have reached dozens of types, several subcategories have also reached the top three, and some subcategories have reached the first place. Together with the three platforms of Tmall, JD.com and Pinduoduo, we have more than a dozen stores.

Now anyone is not afraid of price wars with me, and I will definitely not lose as much as before. Now I can compete for a product for three months to ensure a guaranteed capital. Our strategy is to not light up in the east or the west , because there are many products and other platforms also have profits.

The company now has dozens of operations. I have a basic profit requirement for each operation. 80% of the stores are profitable, but some stores have high profits and some stores have low profits.

3. Partners betrayal and become competitors

I have been starting a business for six years now. What has had a great impact on me was that when I first started my business, I hired a friend to go with me. He did not invest in shares or invest money at that time. After working with me for about two years, he went out to start a business by himself.

When he left, he told me that he was going out to do art photography. I gave him some money, which was equivalent to supporting him to start a business and giving him pictures of our company. It took 3-4 months to realize that he was exactly the same product as me and the price was lower than mine.

I have been self-regulating for a long time, and I think my goals and personal abilities are definitely higher than him, so what should I do? I can only show my strength to prove that he was wrong to leave. This is true. After he left in 2018, our company doubled and I also made the team make more money.

Today I meet the team members leaving. I first wish you a blessing because everyone has their own ambitions. If the other party is not satisfied and his own abilities are not enough, I will still keep it. If I leave because of betrayal, in order not to affect the people who stay and work with the company, I will take practical actions to let the people who stay and get more.

I think this is the most effective. The people in the team have made money. Many people who have worked for two or three years have bought houses in Suzhou, and the cars they buy in Shanghai are also 300,000 to 400,000 yuan. This also makes me feel very accomplished.

4. Life cannot overcome small obstacles, and big obstacles cannot overcome even more

In fact, I have been lucky in the past few years of starting a business, and most of the time I can get rid of danger.

The luckiest thing is the Shanghai epidemic. Before the lockdown, we completed the relocation of two or three cloud factories, so we did not have the problem of not being able to ship goods in the first half of the epidemic.

The impact of this epidemic on us is that one is that office efficiency is inefficient, the other is that team building cannot be built, and the other is that products cannot be newly added. Everyone is blocked at home, and they cannot do it when looking at samples, shooting, or the above pictures. During the epidemic, sales in a month were at least 5-10 million. In the first half of the year, we basically had no new products, which led to a decline in overall performance.

In fact, the company was in a loss at that time, so I could only grit my teeth and tell everyone that it was okay. Even if we were working 1-2 hours a day, we would pay a normal salary, which was a lot of money. We would give all the commissions we should give, so that everyone could guarantee the minimum food, clothing, housing and transportation.

After the epidemic, at least we are still alive and the company can operate normally now, I think that's OK. To be honest, e-commerce companies like ours are really lucky in Shanghai. I don’t want to make any profit this year, I just want the team to run normally and can continue to move forward steadily.

If I can’t overcome this small hurdle and I still have decades of life in the future, how should I face it? The difficulties that follow may not be smaller than this difficulty. Even small difficulties cannot be solved, so it is even more impossible for me to solve the major difficulties later. I have always been holding this mentality and have been here all the way to this day.

Before last year, I had to rely on myself to explore. The competitors were my teachers. I had basically never gone out to study. I was about to reach the age of thirty. With the stability of my career as possible, I had to improve my cognition. I set a new goal for myself, investing 500,000-1 million to study every year and moving towards the goals I set in my life.