Demystifying the evaluation of black products: teaching hands-on, sweeping orders all the way to overseas.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “billion state power” (ID: iebrun), Author: Xiao Han, Editor: HE Yang Dacheng.
“This is a very exciting dream, although it is a bit scary; I often blame myself, but I am full of ecstasy.”
” During the Spring Festival, Amazon has checked too strictly.” Dong Yang in front of the computer said that since he has been a cross-border e-commerce company for 12 years, he has not known it is the Nth time. Received a “warning letter” from the platform.
“How important is the praise in the comment area to me as a small business. This is a battle, but I am not the mouse…” Dong Yang defended. What makes him truly fearful is that the current situation is different. No matter how the negotiation is done, those “swiping orders” service providers refuse to take orders.
From the Spring Festival to the end of February, the “warning letter of ordering” has intensified.
Under the fierce platform rectification policy, Amazon, eBay and other platforms have launched the most rigorous rectification action, referring to “cross-border illegal production.”
Amazon’s attitude is very resolute, “When you see it, you close the store!”
In China, the investigation and punishment of “swiping orders” is becoming more and more severe. At the end of 2020, thousands of beauty shops in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen were closed almost overnight. Smuggling criminal gangs used cross-border e-commerce platforms to “swipe orders” to smuggle cosmetics and other goods into the country, with a case value of more than 600 million yuan.
Does this case mean that the next nightmare of cross-border transactions should be “woke up”?
Swipe order with “real person evaluation” vest
Facebook groups have become the hardest hit area
Multiple groups compete for customers
Facebook has become one of the customer-acquisition positions of the order-swiping organization. They combined with various purposes to establish a Facebook group.
In the nearly 100 Amazon-related Facebook groups surveyed by Ebang Dynamics, behind the bursts of screens, various marketing tricks emerge one after another. In the seemingly enthusiastic atmosphere, words such as “real person evaluation” and “local buyer” can be seen everywhere.
The bloggers who posted these posts are all engaged in the “evaluation” business; some claim to be individuals, while others say, “We have a team.”
In the days when business is good, it often happens that multiple gangs scramble for customers under the same post. Is this a bit evil?
However, these swipes seem to have long been used to.
For Lee, the “shopping agent”, he has been in this business for the fourth year.
In the beginning, he was only a part-time job, but as the era of fake order-checking passed, the “real person evaluation” type of order-checking business earned more and more, and he switched from part-time job To be full-time.
The service of “real person evaluation” is charged based on “orders”. The price is generally divided into three levels: exemption, rating, and text retention, and the cost ranges from 15 yuan to 100 yuan Yuan Renminbi varies.
Lee said, “Some intermediaries also provide video evaluation, Q&A and other services, but we don’t want to do this, it’s too much trouble.”
Look at another example. Alex went to study in the United States in 2018 and soon joined the “scratch” army.
Looking back on the days when he was a “professional buyer”, he still missed a bit-in that not very spacious cabin, many small things were obtained by swiping orders .
“Although some things are really useless, they are obtained for free after all. Generally, I will send a screenshot of the order to the merchant after completing the order, and the merchant will transfer the money to me immediately after verification; the goods will also be shipped normally, and the received goods belong to me. “Alex said.
Most people start buying orders through acquaintances.
Xiao Xiang, an international student, told Yibang Dynamics about his experience of checking orders on Amazon: “The sister of a classmate who asked me to help check orders, she taught me to search for mobile phones on Amazon. Bracket, find the goods in that store through normal browsing, click in and stay for a while, and finally place an order and pay.”
After communicating with some intermediaries, Ebond Power learned that women’s clothing, children’s clothing, footwear, and even screws, etc., all have different degrees of ordering.
In some groups on Facebook, there are people who post directly to find buyers for product evaluation. The categories involved are 3C, small appliances, clothing, pet supplies, etc. Most of the posts will include product pictures, and clearly require buyers to be overseas local users, and some will clearly mark the price to indicate the amount of rebate.
High imitation of user search and browsing behavior
Every time it takes 10 minutes to swipe an order
Amazon reviews 10,000 reviews every day
What happened to the “assessment” that was once in a frenzy?
According to the billing intermediary, the merchant only needs to download at the intermediaryOnce, the intermediary will arrange buyers to purchase the merchant’s merchandise and make evaluations according to the merchant’s requirements. Once confirmed, the merchant needs to pay a certain “commission” to the intermediary, and the intermediary will give the buyer a part of the “rebate”.
There are also many ways to “rebate” the order. Some intermediaries require merchants to return the money directly to the buyer’s PayPal account after confirming the order; there are also intermediaries that require merchants to send the money back to the buyer’s PayPal account. All are handed over to the intermediary, and then the intermediary rebates the buyer. Since the rebate amount will not be lower than the price of the product, that is to say, in the “real person evaluation” transaction, the buyer can get at least one product for free.
This is a naked confrontation game. As Amazon pays more and more attention to “swiping orders”, buyers have also formed a set of anti-discovery processes.
As required, they will first search for product category names on Amazon.com, browse the search results for 3-5 minutes, and imitate the behavior of real buyers “shop around”; Click on the product in the target store, browse the product page for 3-5 minutes, make everything look like a real buyer who wants to shop, and then place the order.
In order to prevent the proliferation of false reviews, Amazon reviews reviews every week and provides review details to social media companies such as Facebook in order to prevent these bad sellers from abusing the platform to brush orders. According to reports, in 2020, Amazon will review nearly 10,000 product listings every day.
Not only is Amazon strictly investigating the issue of “swiping orders”, it is also concerned by government departments in many countries.
In July 2020, “Mysterious Seeds from China” became a hot topic in foreign media for a while.
Some American consumers discussed on social media that they received an anonymous package from China that contained mysterious “seeds” without shopping. This incident caused some residents to panic and aroused the attention of the USDA. The Ministry of Agriculture even issued a warning to remind residents not to plant and beware of the invasion of harmful alien species.
When public opinion thought it was just an isolated incident, the same situation was found in Britain, Japan, Canada, France, Australia and other places.
Users receive gifts inexplicably
Amazon recommends that users, if they receive an unordered package, first check with relatives and friends or contact customer service to confirm whether this is a gift for themselves. If not, you can provide shipping labels to customer service, and Amazon will investigate the logistics and take actions against bad actors who violate Amazon’s policies, including suspension or cancellation of sales privileges, withholding payments and other penalties.
Is the original sin a platform rule?
Amazon is playing a leaderboard game
It will be enough to survive for a while by making two hits.
Amazon’s regulation of cheating is roughly the same as Taobao’s practice.
A few years ago, Taobao has been docking with various express company systems to prevent cheating on tracking numbers, and it has also set up its own inspection system, which is almost always accurate.
“Amazon is also investigating cheating in express delivery, so in recent years it has extended the FBA order to avoid express tracking number inquiries.” Some people in the industry said that it cannot be eradicated and there are policies. There are countermeasures, but now the cost of brushing orders is getting higher and higher.
“There is no way. The cost is high and you have to brush it more or less, otherwise the sellers below the waist will have no chance.” A clothing seller pointed out that the sales of the shop The speed of ranking improvement can be 10 times faster than that of a normal sales store.
Because of this, there are not a few sellers who think they “have to pay for orders”.
A number of sellers from apparel, 3C, home furnishing and other categories all told Ebond Power that they had or knew that their peers had swiped orders and reviews. “Amazon is playing a leaderboard game, there is no sales at all if you don’t swipe orders.” One of the sellers pointed out.
The seller explained that the phenomenon of product homogeneity is too serious. Among thousands of similar products, how can you let usersBuy yours? Only the products ranked at the top of the listing have the opportunity.
This is not only the need to place PPC ads (that is, pay-per-click ads), but also a certain amount of sales and user praise in order to get higher weight.
According to a report from e-commerce data company Marketplace Pulse, in 2020 alone, the Amazon platform added 1.3 million new sellers, and 4.5 million new sellers have joined Amazon since the beginning of 2017 platform. Millions of businesses have gathered on the Amazon platform, making competition in the same category more fierce. Consumers may search for a certain keyword on Amazon, and dozens of pages of products may appear.
“Products that are not on the top of the ranking list or have low user reviews have no chance of being seen by consumers, let alone transaction orders.” Another Amazon 3C seller also mentioned To.
For many small and medium-sized sellers, it’s more “cost-effective” and more cost-effective than investing a lot of money and energy to slowly polish, and using the method of swiping orders to quickly advance the products to the top of the rankings. Practical.
“If you are lucky, it will be enough to make two’explosives’ for a while.” The seller admitted frankly.
Can drinking poison quench thirst?
Small and medium sellers become cannon fodder?
Can independent stations be the antidote?
It’s not a long-term solution to increase your rankings periodically by swiping orders. Everyone knows the truth, but this “addiction” is not easy to quit.
“I will buy it every other time. If you don’t do it, the sales will go down, and the goods will be hoarded. But if you buy too much, it is easy to be found by Amazon. I risk closing the store. Very scared.” said the seller.
“Amazon’s ordering is easy to be closed, and there is nowhere to appeal, but it is still unavoidable. This store has been closed and there are other stores, many sellers haveThere are many accounts. “A cross-border e-commerce agent operating service provider pointed out that on the one hand, these cheating sellers are indeed to be blamed, but on the other hand, they also have their own helplessness.
“Amazon is a strong model for constant strength, which is more beneficial to sellers with strong operations. If it occupies more than 25% of a certain category, there will be traffic even if it is not in operation.” He pointed out, A large number of small and medium-sized sellers ended up being reduced to cannon fodder, and they can live a day.
Another industry insider also pointed out that Amazon is a “all-goods store” model, which weakens the brand relatively and emphasizes products and cost-effectiveness, which will inevitably make it easier to generate homogeneous competition .
“More and more sellers are attracted in, and more and more products are sold here. The platform uses a certain algorithm to select from the massive SKUs that are more in line with consumer expectations , This is understandable. But from another point of view, the cruelest point of the twenty-eight rule is that 80% of sellers exist only to bring out the success of the other 20%, and this 80% is still constantly changing to allow the platform to flow into ‘Living water’.” The industry insider said.
To be sure, Taobao’s order-swiping problem has existed for many years and still cannot be eliminated, and Amazon is the same.
E-commerce platform is essentially a traffic distribution company. They buy traffic everywhere and then distribute the traffic to sellers on the platform.
But the traffic will never be enough to divide, this is the platform’s bidding advertising model (whoever bids higher, whoever can occupy better resources), and sellers for For more exposure opportunities, we have to embark on a price war.
When these sellers cannot make money through standardized operations and cannot invest more money to burn advertisements, what will they do? The answer is self-evident.
Although practitioners believe that “swiping orders” is not the original sin of sellers, what it reveals is the seller’s loss and even despair in the platform e-commerce ecosystem.
“I want to be an independent brand, not a salesman”—this is something that many cross-border e-commerce practitioners dream of but are difficult to achieve. They are eager to lift the ceiling of growth and be more dominant in their dialogue with the platform.
Perhaps, this is also represented by SHEINIndependent stations can bring more imagination to the majority of cross-border e-commerce sellers.