From Taobao intern to the father of Pinduoduo

Chapter 76: Big deal!

In a herd of thousands of cattle.

At 6 PM on January 10th, the administrator posted a message: "New products are officially launched at the Three Little Bees flagship store! Promotional videos are now available. Please click the link below to purchase, and click here to watch the promotional video."

Inside the university dormitory, Zeng Wen was browsing Taobao, looking for a store to order World of Warcraft power leveling services.

At that moment, he saw the Qianniu message box flashing, and when he clicked on it, he saw this message from the administrator.

"A promotional video? They're just selling bread, why would they make a promotional video for it?"

Zeng Wen clicked on the link with doubt, and the page redirected to Tudou.com, where the video started playing automatically.

After watching the video, Zeng Wen was deeply impressed: This shop owner is really good at doing business.

He never imagined that selling bread could be marketed this way. This is clearly a low-budget video, yet it's better made than many other videos.

"If all gay porn was this good, I'd be willing to watch more of it."

He clicked on the product link and his eyes fell on the main product image. The bread in the main image was exactly the same as the bread Xiao Yang made in the video, only much smaller.

At this moment, Zeng Wen had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he felt guilty for taking advantage of the store's great deals last time, and on the other hand, he felt a sense of accomplishment that he could buy the same bread as in the video with just a few taps on his phone.

He knew in his heart that as long as the new bread tasted good, he would most likely become a loyal fan of the store in the future.

He immediately placed an order for a box, secretly resolving: as long as it tastes good, he will come back to buy it often in the future.

Just then, with a click, someone pushed the door open and entered. My roommate, looking exhausted, climbed onto the bed and muttered, "I'm so tired."

Zeng Wen asked, "What's wrong? Why are you so busy today?" This roommate was the one he had recommended to work part-time as a packer at Brother Li's (Li Zhi) shop.

My roommate replied, "Li Ge isn't too busy, but I've been temporarily assigned to help with packing at a shop called Three Little Bees. That shop is insanely busy, they're overflowing with orders today! I heard they made a porn video that's gone viral on Tudou.com, it's all over the internet, and they probably had over a thousand orders today alone. Ugh, I'm so busy I barely have time to breathe, but the pay is good, I made 80 yuan today."

"Three little bees?" Zeng Wen's heart skipped a beat. Wasn't this the shop he had just placed an order with? "There's even a promotional video? Holy crap, what a coincidence!" He quickly waved, "Dude, come over here and take a look, isn't this the shop?"

Zeng Wen reopened the webpage he had just closed. His roommate struggled to climb out of bed and came over to take a look. He nodded and said, "Yes, that's the one. The trademark is exactly the same."

"Holy crap!" Zeng Wen slapped his thigh. "What a coincidence! I just bought bread from this store. By the way, how's their bread?"

My roommate scratched his head: "How would I know? I'm just in charge of packing; I can't exactly steal the customers' food, can I?"

Zeng Wen thought about it and agreed, then suddenly remembered something else: "By the way, this store's promotional video said they would donate to an orphanage, is that true?"

My roommate waved his hand: "Never mind whether it's true or not, just show me that promotional video. I've been busy all day and haven't had a chance to watch it, I haven't even had time to eat."

Zeng Wen opened Tudou.com and watched Xiao Yang's cooking video again with her roommate.

After watching it, my roommate couldn't help but exclaim, "This video is so well made! Thinking about it, the bread I just packed was the same bread from this video. It's quite amazing."

But I honestly don't know if they actually donated anything to the orphanage. I'll be helping out there for the next few days, and I'll try to find out for you then.

……

Inside the Three Little Bees company, dozens of packing workers, like ants carrying food, continuously load the packed packages onto delivery trucks.

Meanwhile, the office area was filled with the clatter of keyboards as eight pre-sales customer service representatives were busy answering various customer inquiries. Even the boss, Mr. Gu, had to step in to help.

He secretly rejoiced that he had listened to Lin Mu's advice and divided the customer service team into business lines, clearly separating pre-sales and after-sales.

Don't be fooled by the seemingly simple division of labor. It might appear that after-sales customer service can be easily handled by transferring staff to support pre-sales when things get busy, but having learned from past mistakes, Boss Gu knows the ins and outs.

Previously, customer service staff were responsible for both pre-sales consultation and after-sales reassurance. When things weren't busy, it was fine, but when orders surged, it was easy to make mistakes, such as sending the same package to the same customer four or five times.

Now that Lin Mu suggested splitting things up, each person can focus on just one thing, and single-threaded processing is less prone to errors.

After working tirelessly for most of the night, it wasn't until three or four in the morning that Boss Gu finally had a moment to relax. Looking at his employees, who were slumped over from exhaustion, he said, "Brothers, you've worked hard today! I'll treat you all to a big meal and a foot bath later, and today's wages will be paid at 1.5 times the normal rate."

The employees were too exhausted to celebrate, and just gave a faint "that's more like it" look. Some even asked if the cost of the foot bath could be converted into wages. Let's leave those small details aside for now.

Boss Gu walked up to the operations desk, stared at the back-end inventory data, and looked on in surprise.

We sold over a thousand orders today!

It's worth noting that the promotional video had only been released for 24 hours, yet it had already accumulated 100,000 views on Tudou.com. Those 100,000 views translated into over 1,000 orders, a conversion rate of approximately 100:1.

At this rate, the number of views is expected to exceed 100 million within a week, and reaching 200 million views within a month is not a problem.

This only represents the number of views on Tudou.com. When you include the videos that are reposted and copied by others, the total number of views across the entire network is even more difficult to estimate.

However, a new problem has arisen: insufficient production capacity, a serious shortage! According to this calculation, a production capacity of about 4 to 5 cases per month is needed to meet market demand, while he currently only has 15000 cases in stock.

Although we have communicated with the contract manufacturer, they can only produce a maximum of 15000 boxes per month, leaving a shortfall of 2 boxes.

Mr. Gu was extremely anxious. His employees could rest, but he couldn't. He had to busy himself looking for new production capacity in Hangzhou to make up for the shortfall of 2 boxes.

This is no easy task: soft white-crust bread is a new product on the market, and for contract manufacturers to produce it, they must modify their existing production lines. Convincing contract manufacturers to modify their production lines involves a whole host of issues.

How can he prove that this is a long-term order and not a short-term cooperation? How can he ensure that product quality will not decline significantly? Who should bear the cost of modifying the production line? And there's the negotiation of payment terms... Countless problems await his solutions.

In addition, delivery is another area for improvement. With such a large volume of shipments, it's entirely possible to renegotiate with the delivery companies and further reduce delivery costs.

And on Tmall, his store is currently very popular, so he can take this opportunity to apply for additional support resources.

Mr. Gu knew that Tmall needed a classic merchant case study, which was his bargaining chip. In addition, he had promised Lin Mu that he would donate to an orphanage and film a behind-the-scenes video.

With one thing after another piling up, Boss Gu wished he could split himself in two, experiencing both pain and joy.

……

P.S.: Requesting monthly votes.