2019-11-16 15:02
Reporter of this newspaper Yin Menghao
How does a bald man sell women's clothing?
No matter what others evaluate it, 38-year-old Zhang Peng believes that men have a promising future in selling women's clothing on live broadcasts, even though he is a bald man.
A few days ago, he took a photo of himself wearing black sunglasses and a woman's coat with his mobile phone, and uploaded it to Kuaishou. "Now, there are so many men dressed up as women. You want to make gimmicks." He took out his cell phone: "Look, he is more energetic than me!" On the screen, a slightly fat man wiped lipstick, wore stockings and a tight skirt, twisted his waist, pushed his hips, and looked back.
"There is no way, you have to live." Zhang Peng shrugged, "I couldn't accept it either, but now I think it's nothing."
live streaming sales is a new retail method that has rapidly emerged on e-commerce and short video platforms such as Taobao, , Douyin, , and Kuaishou in the past two years. With its advantages in small commodities and logistics, Jiangbei Xiazhu (hereinafter referred to as "Beixiazhu") village, 2 kilometers away from Yiwu International Trade City, has attracted more than 2,000 entrepreneurs like Zhang Peng, and is known as the "first village for live broadcasts in Internet celebrities".
The sign of "the first village of micro-business" remains at the entrance of Beixiazhu, although people here think that micro-business is out of date. Jun Yin Menghao photographed late at night, "Internet celebrity" An Ruoxi is live broadcasting to sell a pair of "hot" leggings. At Shangguan Jiehua's live broadcast base, a new anchor who has just entered the industry is selling shoes live, but the number of people in the live broadcast room is zero. Zhang Peng (left) and the girl Xiaoxiao formed a partner and rotated live broadcasts every night.
Just like the slogan written on the trash can in the village: Go to Beixiazhu and realize the dream of wealth. There are many myths of making wealth here: some people wear shorts and flip-flops when entering the village. In two years, the transportation tools have been upgraded from electric three-wheelers to BMW, Audi , and Bentley ; some people have made a net profit of more than 7 million a day because of creating a "hot product".
The first training institution Entrepreneurship Home, which launched the "grassroot hatching" sign in Beixiazhu, has counted all student information. The results show that almost all of the hundreds of students have rural household registrations, with academic qualifications ranging from junior and senior high school to technical schools.
"There are all over the world, except Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. To put it bluntly, they are all poor places." On a weekend night, Xu Chao, a partner of Entrepreneurship Home, told reporters tiredly after receiving a registration call, "You are the eighth one today." Before changing careers for training, this 32-year-old entrepreneurial mentor was also an anchor who "can do more than 100,000 yuan a day."
"I can't use Alipay WeChat, I can't type on my mobile phone, I can't speak Mandarin in my hometown, I owe hundreds of thousands of dollars at home to get rich overnight..." For those with poor qualifications or bad mentality, he will directly persuade them to withdraw, "You are not suitable for this business."
Like most outsiders, Zhang Peng Yexian contacted Entrepreneurship Home, skipped the basic class of 800 yuan and directly signed up for the practical class of 5,000 yuan.
His hometown is in Shanxi. He graduated from high school. His first job was to drive coal. Later, he went to an electronics factory in Suzhou for 8 years and became the workshop supervisor. In 2017, his mother suffered from cancer and he went home to take care of her. He returned to the factory a few months later and his position had been replaced. He resigned in Yiwu in anger.
At first, Zhang Peng was very hard-working. He got up at 8 o'clock in the morning to shoot jokes every day, broadcast one in the afternoon and evening, and went to bed at one or two in the morning. He accumulated fans to 20,000 yuan by selling New Year pictures, toys, etc., and earned more than 7,000 yuan a day.
"It was really fast at the beginning, and people with some traditional sales experience have started to do it." Xu Chao said. However, with the top anchors taking all and the 28-8 division expanding, every small anchor faces the problem of how to develop sustainably.
"I used to sell everything, but now it's not possible." Xu Chao feels that today, live streaming has long passed the stage of wild growth, and in the future, anchors can only have a way out if they are professional and accurate.
A month ago, Zhang Peng also turned his target to female consumers, broadcasting for several hours a night, but often there was no audience. He spent all the tens of thousands of dollars he earned last year, and he has been anxious about insomnia recently.
"Others earn tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a night, we can get a small share of the pie, and it's okay to earn hundreds or thousands." Zhang Peng, who was holding his dark circles, was unwilling to give up.
"How can you play live if you don't know how to broadcast it?"
Before becoming an adventurer's paradise, Beixia Zhu was an ordinary countryside in Yiwu.
Yiwu has many people and few land. People here used to only do small businesses such as changing chicken feathers and replenishing umbrellas. It was not until Yiwu developed a small commodity market in 1984 that a number of professional markets emerged. Beixiazhu also developed the New Year's painting calendar and cutting tool industry, but they all declined with the market fluctuations.
"I think about it now, I can only introduce logistics and get the right move." Village Party Secretary Huang Zhengxing said that Beixiazhu now has almost the lowest logistics cost in Yiwu and even the country.
In 2013, Yiwu set off an e-commerce boom. The cadres of the two committees of Beixiazhu Village went to Qingyan Liucun, known as the "first village of China's online store", and introduced 9 e-commerce merchants in the form of rent reduction and exemption, laying optical fibers, building schools, and organizing activities... Since then, more and more entrepreneurs have been involved.
In just a few years, Beixiazhu, whose population was originally less than 1,500, has now reached 15,000, which is 10 times the population of this village. There are 99 buildings in the village and 1,200 shops are rented out, and the rent has increased to an average of 50,000 yuan per square meter.
Two years ago, Beixiazhu also claimed to the public that "the first village for micro-businesses". Now there are two lines of words added to the village entrance signs - "the first village for live broadcasts in Internet celebrities" and "social e-commerce town".
"These statements are actually not accurate. Goods and supply chains are the foundation of our Beixiazhu." Village director Jin Jingxi admitted that many "Internet celebrities" came to Beixiazhu to purchase, but they were not in the village.
Every store in Beixiazhu is almost a small department store. You can buy Wenzhou shoes, Bozhou tea, and Guangzhou hand sanitizer in the same shop. The boss will confidently tell you: "The price anywhere is not as cheap as us."
From 3:00 to 5:00 pm is the most chaotic time in the village. In order to rush delivery, trucks, tricycles and cars fill the poor village roads. A express delivery practitioner said that the express delivery orders sent from Beixiazhu every day are calculated in tens of thousands.
However, there are difficulties behind prosperity.
"The people here are actually very pitiful. They all make money by making small profits and quick turnover." Hangzhou businessman Yu Hanbing sighed that most of the merchants in Beixiazhu have no factories, but earn the price difference as middlemen between the manufacturer and the sales end. Competition among merchants is fierce, and supply prices are suppressed very low.
"We usually only earn 5 cents to 1 yuan per item, at most 5 yuan." He pointed to a pair of pants on the table, and the purchase price was 30.5 yuan. He supplied a certain anchor for 31.5 yuan, and the anchor sold the price to 70 or 80 yuan.
merchants of course want to be anchors too. In fact, the live broadcast room is the standard or even core functional area of each store. For example, Wang Laiche, the owner of Haining fur, only rents half a store to save rent. He sets up more than a dozen mobile phones to sing for two hours every day, and can sell hundreds of them.
"You guys see it, it's true! Real skin! Scratch it casually! You can't break it! There's no problem! Free shipping for one!" The middle-aged man roared while stabbing the pants in his hand with a screwdriver. Several little assistants watched quietly from the side.
When asked if he would also broadcast live, one of the young people smiled and replied: "Yes, how can you play live if you don't know how to broadcast live?"
Almost everyone in the village broadcast live at the end of last year to the first half of this year. But in the second half of the year, enthusiasm has obviously subsided. "No fans, no matter how you shout in the live broadcast room, it's useless. In the end, you can only supply goods to internet celebrities!" said village director Jin Jingxi.
"I can't resist, I have to try to adapt"
"There is no way, this is the hottest sales channel now. When you can't resist, I have to try to adapt." Liu Qilong, a Henan businessman who supplies more than 60 anchors, used "love and hate" to describe his feelings for live streaming sales.
In the era when traffic is king, they must accept the new rules of the game: if you find an anchor with hundreds of thousands or millions of fans, you must first give the other party a few thousand to tens of thousands of yuan, and the other party will charge about 20% of the sales as a commission; if you find a top anchor with tens of millions of fans, in addition to the commission sharing, the first step must be to pay a "pit fee" of hundreds of thousands of yuan in queues. Only when the product is selected will the other party help you sell it for a few minutes.
has a more exciting gameplay - "Continuous Mail", which allows small anchors to spend money on "gifts" for big anchors and squeeze into the top three reward rankings, so that the other party will answer video calls and share fans to increase sales. This investment is often borne by merchants, and there is no upper limit, and it is common to spend hundreds of thousands of yuan.
In Liu Qilong's view, the relationship between suppliers and anchors is like the emperor and concubines of Qing palace dramas. "We are the 'flops'."
needs to emphasize that no matter how much the merchant invests, anchors do not guarantee sales. Most of the merchants are responsible for stocking, shipping and after-sales service.
Some powerful merchants decide to find a way out. Not long ago, Yu Hanbing posted a recruitment notice outside the store: recruiting two live broadcasters, requiring high school education or above, women aged 18-28, strong language communication skills, and a salary of 5,000+.
has another very important requirement, he did not explicitly write it - "Have a certain appearance." He believes that live broadcasters are not the same as ordinary salesmen.
He plans to recruit 50 people to try first, screen and train 25 people, and then focus on creating 1 to 3 people, aiming to "build a team of anchors representing the head of Beixiazhu." But as a supply chain expert, he is currently confused about how to "build", so he brought the Internet celebrity incubation team in Hangzhou to teach his employees.
"Internet celebrities are the best 'wild'. If you build a greenhouse to breed them, they will be all flowers in the warm room!" Some people are not optimistic about the traditional signing model.
alternative model is to open a live broadcast base - rent a warehouse or store, and recruit anchors to settle in. The cooperation method is also simple. The base price of each item is well marked. As for how much it costs to sell it to consumers, it depends on the anchor's own weighing.
"It means providing them with a platform, but they will not sign an agreement." Jiangxi shoe merchant Shangguan Jiehua believes that there will be more and more such platforms in Yiwu.
Not long ago, he rented a 5,000 square meter of venue 6 kilometers away from Beixiazhu, and was known to the public as "the largest live broadcast base in Yiwu." Considering that most of the anchors work at night, he sent people to work at the base 24 hours a day and also provided free pick-up and meals for the anchors.
"I often stay with these grassroots and want to solve their worries." Shangguan said, "Some of the novice anchors are funny. Can you just live in your place?" This made him laugh and began to consider whether to continue renting more empty houses.
This expensive investment made partner Chen Bing worried. He complained that the anchors attracted by the base were like nomads, sometimes there were a few, and sometimes a group came, most of them were just starting out.
"The anchor always says, I want to have a list of 200,000 yuan in seconds. Do you have any big products? I said, "You can talk about it in seconds!" He smiled bitterly.
However, Chen Bing also comforted himself: "We don't go on this road now, and there is no way to go."
"I'm afraid of coming and going quickly"
According to the idea of merchants starting their own business and cultivating anchors, the limited and expensive store in Beixia Zhu obviously cannot accommodate their ambitions.
Not only that, the village’s hardware facilities cannot keep up with the speed of industrial development. Although the village cadres are not stuck in the ground every day, they will speed up the construction of new stations, kindergartens, and parking lots... The most important task is to work from door to door, and advise villagers not to raise rents without authorization.
In March this year, a nearby street offered preferential investment conditions for merchants in Beixiazhu, which made many people want to change their address. Huang Zhengxing quickly reported to Zheng Yaming, secretary of the Party Working Committee of Futian Street, where the village belongs. Zheng personally held a symposium for leading merchants and promised not to increase rent within three years to stabilize the morale of the army.
"I still hope to last this business model. I am a little worried, afraid that it will come and go quickly." Zheng Yaming said.
Back then, Qingyan Liu was also a "Internet celebrity village" focused on building in Futian Street, with annual sales reaching 6 billion yuan at one time. Nowadays, all the big merchants have moved away and the village is deserted. No one hopes that Beixia Zhu will become the second Qingyan Liu.
On the night of October 28, Zheng Yaming held a symposium with the merchant again, and left until 10:30, and there was a question from beginning to end: "What do you want the government to do?"
Recently, he went to Beixiazhu every few days to conduct research. He heard that the "Internet celebrity live broadcast competition" organized by the village was shelved, and he promised to "will definitely do it."This post-80s secretary who has been in office for less than three years is open-minded about the Internet celebrity economy and believes that live streaming sales fully cater to the lifestyle of modern young people and is expected to lead the development direction of Yiwu's new retail.
"Of course there are mixed things in it, and the government needs to guide it correctly. I think such activities are effective and can allow some rising small anchors to expand their influence and bring real results."
is not just him, but many officials are curious about Zhu in Beixia. Every day in the village, you can meet the county magistrate, the director of the agriculture bureau, the director of the women's federation, or even the minister of commerce of a small country. Recently, leaders of the Development Research Center of the State Council and the State Post Bureau also named them to Beixiazhu.
Zheng Yaming admitted that as early as when Beixiazhu developed a micro-business, he still had a question mark in his heart. As Beixia Zhu became bigger and bigger, he changed his mind.
In October, the State Administration for Market Regulation stated that it would strictly control "Internet celebrity products". Zheng Yaming is not worried about this: "Most of the merchants in Beixiazhu are good, at least there is no problem in law."
The problem he is really worried about is that Beixiazhu lacks high-quality "Internet celebrities", and fundamentally lacks professional institutions that can build "Internet celebrities".
"Make money in a different way"
Beixiazhu is not without "Internet celebrity" incubation institutions, but they are gradually deviating from the original sense of "Internet celebrity" incubation.
, such as Entrepreneurship Home. Xu Chao said that he chose to do training to help people who need to get rid of poverty like him, but when he gradually realized that the people who asked him for advice later easily earned millions of dollars a year, he completely abandoned the business of selling goods.
They intend to change the service target and no longer target individuals, but connect with the sales department of the manufacturer - the latter can offer a price code that is obviously higher than that of grassroots.
Another large institution, located in the best location in the village and on the second floor of the vegetable market, has turned its commercial harvesting goal to remote rural areas that are eager to live stream and sell goods.
27-year-old He Yanping was originally engaged in the financial industry. Her philosophy is that when everyone tries every means to squeeze into an industry, they have to find a way to make money in another way.
"Now many people are queuing up to know the business model of Beixiazhu, so I will sell this technology." She plans to choose some entrepreneurial rural transportation systems to turn them into the second and third Beixiazhu.
Not long ago, a rural area in Hunan took the initiative to connect with the Red Broadcasting Club, and each person paid a tuition fee of 940 yuan. "Isn't it easier to charge tuition directly than helping others bring goods?" She felt that selling goods was not the purpose, but brand monetization was the only one.
Some people withdraw, and some people continue to enter.
On October 29, 27-year-old Northeastern guy Guo Libin walked into Zheng Yaming's office. He is the behind-the-scenes trader of An Ruoxi, the chairman of An Ruoxi Culture Media Co., Ltd. and "Internet celebrity" with more than 4.7 million fans.
Recently, they were invited to Beixiazhu to broadcast live several times, and they sold out almost every time, causing a sensation in the whole village. Zheng Yaming had watched it on the spot. He never watched the live broadcast, so he also placed an order that night and snatched a lipstick with free shipping nationwide for 5.27 yuan.
"You have a new order!" Guo Libin's phone kept sending a prompt sound - someone was buying their products.
He came to find Zheng Yaming to officially settle in Beixiazhu and obtain an ideal store and eye-catching advertising space. "I also hope to drive the entrepreneurs of Beixiazhu to build Beixiazhu into the first village of a true 'Internet celebrity'!" said Guo Libin.
Zheng Yaming is planning to set up a public incubation platform in the village. "How about asking your team to build it?" he asked Guo Libin. When Guo heard this, he immediately agreed.
"You have a new order!" Guo Libin's phone kept ringing.
That night, he wanted to start a live broadcast and needed to go back to the village to prepare. Zheng smiled and said goodbye: "Then welcome your team to come quickly, we will provide you with good service!"
live broadcast starts at 9 o'clock in the evening. As soon as the broadcast started, thousands of people instantly poured into the live broadcast room, gradually exceeding tens of thousands.
only had an accident in the middle: in order to connect with a big anchor, Guo Libin spent 250,000 yuan, but someone fetched more than one million yuan, and Guo only grabbed the third place in the ranking, which led to An Ruoxi waiting until 12:30 to join the microphone.
"Black fans" laughed at them at the bottom of the screen for "I didn't win!" An Ruoxi felt embarrassed and complained to Guo: "Either don't play the ranking or win!" But she quickly held back, regained her sweet smile, and looked at the phone: "Get in the car first and give you a second wave!"
"You have a new order!" "You have a new order!" The backstage kept jumping, and three after-sales personnel stared at the computer and typing on the keyboard without saying a word.
At 2 a.m., there are still more than 2,000 viewers online. The supplier smoked a few cigarettes, but couldn't hold on and was so sleepy that he lay down on the side. But An Ruoxi was slow: "Babys, there are the last 100 orders left, each person is limited to one order!"
"You have a new order! You have a new order! You have a new order..." The sound in the speaker was tireless, echoing over the rare quiet Beixiazhu.
(Chen Bing is a pseudonym in the article)
Editor: Han Wenwen
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-