In the long run, the development of “small and beautiful” e-commerce sellers has great bottlenecks. The first is the bottleneck of the platform. The overall operation of the seller is subject to the rules and policies of the platform. The platform will not allow a seller to become particularly large, because if a seller becomes particularly large, the platform will have no say and the platform will suppress you. The second is that the traffic within the platform is limited. As more and more sellers enter the platform, they will compete with you for traffic. Your traffic costs will become higher and higher. The third is that among all platforms, each platform will have its own bottleneck. Amazon accounts for only 20% of US e-commerce. When its traffic has a bottleneck, your bottleneck has also arrived.
Now we see that many sellers may earn 10 or 20 million yuan a year, which is no problem for them to buy a house and they are financially free. When the company makes you financially free, what else do you pursue? How can you continue to make the company bigger and stronger, or make it have sustainable development? This involves what I think is more important
The first point is that you don’t know what will happen in the future. You lack a strategic layout. It is impossible for small sellers to communicate with the big guys who set the rules on the platform, nor is it possible to go to the United States and the United Kingdom every day to understand the trends of products and what customers are like.
The second point is that as a small seller, there is no organization or platform to rely on. All development is done alone. You are in a weak position in the entire business process. No matter how much you do, you can only achieve a turnover of 30 to 40 million on the platform at most. You are in a relatively weak position both to the platform and to other competitors.
The third point is that your entire operation cannot be standardized, finances cannot be standardized, and systems are not standardized, so you do not have the ability to enter the capital market. Whether your company can develop sustainably in the future is also a very big problem. These are some of my views on the future development prospects of “small and beautiful” companies.