Chapter 110 - 102: Crazy Group Buy, Line-Cutting Fee
On the way back that evening, Wang Zihao suddenly said, "I just saw Zhou Yuwen."
"Who?"
Chen Yansen paused, the name sounding familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.
"Teacher Liu’s ex-fiancé," Wang Zihao explained.
"So what if you saw him?" Chen Yansen shifted in his seat, leaning back comfortably and speaking nonchalantly.
"What if he tells Teacher Liu that he saw me at the Star of the Milky Way?" Wang Zihao asked, worried sick.
"Weren’t you having a great time just a minute ago?"
Chen Yansen scoffed and retorted.
"I regret it now. A place like the Star of the Milky Way isn’t suitable for a pure, innocent young man like me." Wang Zihao’s face was filled with remorse.
Chen Yansen rolled his eyes and ignored Wang Zihao.
’Nothing a few more trips to a KTV club can’t cure.’
Twenty minutes later, the car stopped in front of the teachers’ apartment building. Chen Yansen got out and took the car keys from Wang Zihao. "See you tomorrow."
"Sigh, I wish I could be as cool as Brother Sen," Wang Zihao muttered to himself, watching Chen Yansen’s retreating back.
「The next morning.」
Chen Yansen walked into Room 206. He had barely been seated for two minutes when Zhao Maolin came in with good news: the online marketplace partnership was looking promising.
The telecom company had purchased a batch of phones last year and now had some leftover inventory. The brands and models were all mixed, with an estimated value of over eight million yuan.
This batch of phones had originally sold well. But after the New Year, Huawei, Mountain Star, Coolpad, and Motorola had all launched new spring models. These new phones far surpassed last year’s models in terms of screen, OS, memory, and camera.
As a result, these old phones became dead stock.
The head office had originally planned to bundle the phones under a thousand yuan with a "top up your phone credit" promotion. For those over a thousand yuan, they would be paired with 59 or 79 yuan monthly plans and practically given away.
Now that Zhao Maolin had volunteered to take on the task, headquarters didn’t hesitate, directly handing over this pile of daily-depreciating inventory for him to handle.
"We had originally agreed on a price of 60% of the retail value, but some bastard played a trick, and now it’s 70%. Are you confident? If not, I’ll just reject the offer."
Zhao Maolin asked tentatively.
For example, the Huawei C8600, a custom telecom model, had a retail price of 1,499 yuan. It had been on the market for a year. Selling it at 70% of retail would mean a price of 1,050 yuan. Even if Chen Yansen gave back his entire commission, that’s what the price would have to be.
To be honest, with a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen, 320x480 resolution, 256MB of RAM, and 512MB of storage, it really wasn’t a good value for the money.
"Brother Zhao, do you have a product list?"
Chen Yansen didn’t make a decision on the spot, wanting to understand the full picture first.
At the same time, he couldn’t be sure if this was some kind of trick from Zhao Maolin.
"I do. I’ll have Wenwen send it to your email. You can look at it when you’re free. For today, let’s go over the contract first."
Zhao Maolin replied nonchalantly. Right now, he was only concerned with integrating the phone credit top-up portal.
"Alright, I’ll set up a group chat later," Chen Yansen readily agreed.
Ten minutes later, he opened the email from Gu Wenwen. It was a dense list of over 60 different products, all old models from 2009 and 2010, with inventory ranging from a dozen to five or six hundred units each.
Chen Yansen calculated based on the Super Rebates commission payout and found that the final price for the customer wasn’t much of a discount—at most thirty to fifty yuan cheaper than offline specialty phone stores.
But the list prices at those offline phone stores were already inflated to begin with.
Chen Yansen mulled it over for a moment, then called Zhao Maolin and told him straight up that it couldn’t be done.
FoxTao’s users weren’t stupid. A phone with a market value of only 1,100 yuan was being listed at 1,499 yuan, yet the final price after rebates wasn’t much lower. This would easily antagonize users and destroy their trust in Super Rebates.
The loss would outweigh the gain!
"It’s fine if you don’t do it. Saves us from letting those idiots take advantage. We clearly could have gotten another 10% off, but they just had to stir up trouble."
After hearing this, Zhao Maolin breathed a sigh of relief and cursed with a laugh.
Chen Yansen smiled but didn’t say much. After hanging up, he passed the telecom company’s proposal to the Key Account Business Development Department.
After the New Year, FoxTao held a campus job fair, scooping up many outstanding talents from various departments before the spring recruitment season officially began. Through external recruitment channels, they also added five new members to the Key Account Business Development Department.
Most of these new hires had been working in the industry for seven or eight, or even ten-plus years. They were all seasoned veterans with extensive brand and platform connections.
In such an environment, Song Yuncheng grew rapidly. Every day, besides being busy pushing for B2C platforms to join FoxTao, she could also find time to discuss marketing plans with brand partners.
In the afternoon, Song Yuncheng returned to her desk after a call and excitedly reported to Chen Yansen, "President Chen, the Chery deal is settled! We’re signing the contract this week. It’s a four million yuan advertising fee, plus a 15% commission."
"Is there an ROI requirement?"
Chen Yansen looked up and asked casually.
In 2011, for them to dare to advertise on a shopping guide website was a rather bold strategy.
Even though FoxTao performed well in categories like home improvement, large appliances, and digital products, with an average customer transaction value close to 1,000 yuan, the gap was still obvious compared to a car that cost tens of thousands.
"It’s not mandatory in the contract, but their expected ROI is 1.5. The final ROI ratio will affect future cooperation," Song Yuncheng explained slowly.
"Get Zhuang Rui and Wang Yunxia from the events team to draft a proposal. Also, you need to think through the entire process for the user—order tracking, vehicle pickup, and after-sales service. Understand?" Chen Yansen instructed.
"Okay, I understand." Seeing him nod, Song Yuncheng did as she was told and got up to find the product and event planning staff.
Although she lacked confidence in the campaign, they had taken the client’s money, so she had to come up with a viable plan.
Chen Yansen looked around the second floor. He had rented all 16 office spaces, and the total number of employees had surpassed 160. Customer service and business development were still the largest departments.
As the number of partner merchants increased, Xu Dan recruited seven more female editors from the School of Communication and Culture. Just like before, with the exception of Li Bin, the editing team was composed entirely of women.
At this stage of development, the responsibilities of each team at FoxTao were clearly defined.
The Business Development team primarily worked with merchants from platforms like the Taobao ecosystem, Jingdong, Sunning, and Gome, serving sellers through formats like Brand Group Buys, Category Days, and special events for major brands.
The Key Account Business Development Department was responsible for bringing in B2C platforms, implementing marketing plans for major brands, and negotiating partnerships for special categories.
The Editing team was responsible for liaising with merchants, checking commission rate settings, and updating front-end titles and main images.
Li Bin was in charge of price comparisons and managing the user experience.
The Category Operations team was responsible for reviewing merchant application forms and increasing the variety of products and categories on Super Rebates.
In addition, there were the Technology, Events, Design, Administration, Product, Legal, and Finance departments.
Each department performed its duties, ensuring the project’s high-speed operation.
Over 100 Brand Group Buys went live every day. Although the traffic was more dispersed, the output didn’t decrease. This was because the website’s daily active users had increased by 50% compared to the previous year, and user stickiness and repeat purchase frequency were also steadily improving.
「Three days later,」 Lashou’s first Brand Group Buy on FoxTao went live. The strategy was a complete copy of the Gaopeng Network’s model.
Evidently, Lashou Network, which had just secured 50 million US dollars last year, was being much more extravagant.
For a few select products, the commission rates were around 40-50%. Within 30 minutes of going live, they had already generated one million yuan in sales.
The total sales for the day reached 14 million yuan!
A company like Chery spending a fortune on a shopping guide website might not make much of a splash, but the group-buy business was a natural fit for it.
The user bases of both had a very high overlap: they were all netizens who loved to hunt for bargains.
When others in the industry learned that Lashou had sold 14 million yuan in a single day on FoxTao, they immediately halted their spending on television and outdoor advertising.
Compared to a tangible, measurable CPS advertising model like FoxTao’s, those commercial placements where even impressions were hard to track were a complete waste of time and money.
At the end of the three-day event, Lashou Network’s total sales reached 31 million yuan, which was almost equivalent to half a month’s revenue. It also brought nearly 100,000 new customers to their site.
Chen Yansen also made a hefty profit. Just from the new customer acquisition fees, Lashou had to pay him four million yuan, and that wasn’t even counting the gross profit from the Brand Group Buy.
Just as Lashou Network’s event ended, QQ Group’s took its place.
This made Wang Xin, who had been hesitating about whether to increase investment in shopping guide channels, regret his indecision endlessly. He practically slapped his thigh in frustration.
Tens of millions in revenue had already shaken up the market share in the group-buy industry.
Gaopeng Network and Lashou Network had successively joined FoxTao’s marketplace rebate module, making it a habit for group-buy users to click through from FoxTao before placing an order.
After all, by spending an extra 30 seconds, they could save another 3-5 yuan on a 100-yuan restaurant group-buy deal, which was a great bargain.
Meituan, 24quan, and WoWo Group, who had yet to join, were getting extremely anxious. In order to get in ahead of the others, some even tried to force "line-cutting fees" on the business development staff, offering fifty or a hundred thousand yuan at a time.
Chen Yansen quickly stepped in and strictly forbade the business development staff from accepting any "line-cutting fees" from the group-buy platforms. He declared that anyone caught would be reported to the police immediately, which finally suppressed the restless recruiters.
’These bastards are really willing to throw their money around,’ Chen Yansen cursed internally.
He couldn’t help but recall his previous life. Just a few years after entering the industry, in order to cooperate with a top livestreaming salesperson, he had been forced to slip a business development agent 100,000 yuan just to get a chance to cut in line and have his samples looked at.
That’s right, just to look at the samples!
Want to get scheduled for the livestream directly? Sorry, you had to cough up more money!
Having had a similar experience, Chen Yansen naturally knew how to put a stop to this kind of chaos.
After he took action, the situation quickly returned to normal, and the major group-buy platforms all settled down considerably.