Multinational Group Buying: American Post 80 Couples In China

Jonathon Jenkins, 29, and her 24 year old wife want to change the fate of China's foreign trade.

The "post-80s" couple who only stayed at the number and the most basic vocabulary level of Chinese language, got less than half a year in Hangzhou, and got about three million dollars.

Their "sharp weapon" is a foreign trade group buying website called OrderWithMe, and CEO Jiang Wen Shen calls it "online foreign trade 2".

If you meet a young boy wearing a cap and a shoulder bag in high school in Yiwu, Zhejiang, and discussing the details of the product to the dry mouth in the factory, there is a wife and assistant who looks like Anngelina Jolie.

He set up the office of foreign trade group purchase website in Hangzhou, and the purchase was mainly to Yiwu and other places.

OrderWithMe has been on the line for four months, and has been hanging out more than 500 kinds of products, including fashion ornaments and furniture decoration, with a paction volume of US $125 thousand.

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The threshold for small commodity export orders in Chinese factories is usually between 50 and 100, and small retailers in Europe and the United States often fail to meet this standard.

The OrderWithMe mode is to pack small orders into a large order to achieve.

The traditional foreign trade process involves at least 6 main bodies: factories, exporters, importers, wholesalers, retailers and consumers.

The price of a medium and high-end ladies handbag from the factory of Cai Yizhen, Fujian Province, is about 60 yuan, less than 10 dollars.

When it comes to the US retail market, the price varies from 40 to 70 dollars in different regions. In the past, Tess Rodriguez, an American small retailer, bought from American wholesalers about 18 to 22 dollars, while OrderWithMe offered a group purchase price of 12 dollars.

Although OrderWithMe is also earning the difference between group buying price and product ex factory price, this range is obviously much smaller.

Although the order is not large, but because of the short process and high efficiency, Evenson has become a lucky star in some small factories in China.

For example, for Cai Yizhen, who encountered the cold winter, two thousand or three thousand pieces of orders by Jiang Wen - Shen and a total of about one hundred thousand yuan were also counted as firewood.

"The orders on the Brazil side were very good, which is 80% less than before this year, and orders in other places are halved."

Cai Yizhen told the Southern Weekend reporter that she had bitten her teeth and laid off more than thirty people. Compared with 100 of the heyday, she has lost 1/3 of her weight.

On the first day of OrderWithMe trial business, Evenson and his wife went to Las Vegas to attend the trade fair. After that, they accumulated about 20 Chinese factories, fifty or sixty American small customers, and three or four two grade wholesalers in the United States.

More than a month ago, TechCrunch Disrupt, the most famous business venture in the industry, entered Beijing for the first time. OrderWithMe gained the favor of investors and won the "entrepreneurial arena" champion in one fell swoop.

Since then, Jiang Wen Shen has received endless e-mail from all over the world every day.

Most of them are small retailers from the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia. Their demand is grotesque -- "anything that is made of real bamboo fiber", "imitation antique French furniture", "quality LV, WAL-MART handbag".

They also have Chinese factory owners who want to be suppliers, as well as businessmen from Dubai, Kenya or Brazil, who want to open a branch of OrderWithMe in the area.

The idea of being pushed out

A year ago, Evenson was cornered.

His software company has spent about one million dollars, and spent more than a year researching and developing a game simulation game software that teaches Chinese children to learn English. It was told by the Chinese government that it is not allowed to sell directly to Chinese schools.

That night, Jiang Wen son stayed up all night.

He decided to go back to business.

The business plan was written in one breath, a full 30 pages.

In 2006, third years after his graduation, Evenson taught English in Shanghai. When he did not teach, he went around the surrounding cities.

"When I arrived in Yiwu, I found that there were all kinds of fashion jewelry here."

He saw business opportunities, quit his job in Shanghai, and opened a jewelry store in the United States.

In the next three years, the more than 20 year old American boy came to China to purchase in less than two months.

Although the price is cheap, but because it is foreign trade orders, like earrings accessories, he has to enter at least 10 dozen (120 pieces).

As a result, even though he opened two branches later, the storehouse was still very large, and the ornaments had to be updated frequently, and he fell into a vicious circle.

As a result, Jiang Wen Shen, who claims to be an ambitious businessman, went bankrupt.

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The way to avoid bankruptcy is not not. One of them is to buy goods from the big American jewelry dealers, but in this way, although it is saved, the price is very high and the profit is very low.

Jiang Wensen, who is very familiar with China, is unwilling to choose this path.

After the failure of his first venture, one of the questions he pondered was: can small retailers join together?

When it comes to the difficulties of small businesses, Evenson gets excited and doubled his voice.

His likes and dislikes carry a deep brand of his family. He never saw his father from the day he was born, and his mother grew up by running an air conditioning plant to pull two sons.

"If I'm working for a big factory, I'm just helping CEO. If I'm a small business, I'm supporting my family.

Because small businesses are mostly related to families, big businesses are more concerned about money itself.

Evenson told the Southern Weekend reporter.

That's why he later founded OrderWithMe.

Jiang feels that what he is doing is "particularly meaningful". From the perspective of procurement, he believes that it is also helping Chinese small factory owners to open up overseas markets and build their own brands.

"There are so many factories in China. The products they produce are nameless or surnamed, or better. They are called Zhang's" Gao's "or" Wang's ".

"They need to give the product some personality - just like you have a child and hope that he has his own personality," he said.

Don't put Alibaba in your eyes.

Jiang Wen sons set up OrderWithMe in Hangzhou for a long time.

He intended to register a foreign trade company in the Binjiang high tech Zone to deal with all the legal documents and export tax rebates for export.

But the district government's reply is: sorry, you can apply, but we will not approve it.

The district government is very frank: the government has limited cash and does not want to export tax rebates up to 13%-17% for foreign trade companies.

Finally, the type of company registered in Binjiang District changed to a business consulting company. It took three or four months before and after the export, and the export link took three or four days to process by the branch which was registered in Hongkong.

"We spent a lot of time and finally made a big circle," said Gaoyang, director of factory relations. "You know that it only took 24 hours for Jiang Wen son to register in his home town in Texas, and he could finish it online."

Although he often works in Hangzhou, Jiang doesn't think of the Alibaba, a global business giant known as "let the world have no difficulty in doing business", first because his Alibaba experience tour is not pleasant.

"If you type" handbag "on the Alibaba website, you may come up with 300 thousand kinds of results.

The middle links are gone, but the American self-employed people still don't know what to do next - they don't know who to call, and whether they are trustworthy.

Although Alibaba has launched a small wholesale platform - Aliexpress, but there is still massive information and difficult to detect the real dilemma.

"If a Chinese factory says," I give you 1000 yuan, you put my product on OrderWithMe, "said Jiang Wen Shen." I will say, "no, I choose the goods because it is of good quality, not because someone else has paid the promotion fee."

Jiang Wen Shen adopted this pattern related to his character.

He hates to complicate simple things and hate black box operations.

He used "dirty" to describe the foreign trade industry. "Because there are so many deceit, even those who I think can be called friends may deceive me for interests."

OrderWithMe is exactly "pnational single group buying mode".

The products or services introduced on the general consumer group buying websites must be delivered even if only one person orders.

The OrderWithMe is displayed first, then the list is finished. Finally, whether the total purchase quantity meets the minimum requirement of the manufacturer.

If the minimum purchase volume is not reached after 7 days, the purchase of the commodity group fails.

"In fact, if everyone buys three or four pieces, then the order of up to twenty people is almost enough."

Deng Chao, who lives in Shanghai for four years, is the technical director of the team. "Our overseas customer base is growing."

Now part of Jiang's team is actively looking for foreign retail customers, and the other part is selecting thousands of Chinese products to meet the needs of foreign markets, then looking for the right manufacturers and confirming the order quantity, order completion time, and whether the products meet the environmental standards of lead-free, nickel free and cadmium free export.

Jiang's favorite design is to mix the elements of the social network, so that the American self-employed people decide what to buy or not to buy. You can vote in order to decide which of the hundreds of items selected on the website can enter the group purchase sequence. You can also say which color you prefer, or you want to replace some parts.

Even if you want to order something over the group purchase period, you can turn it out from the historical record and vote to decide whether it can re-enter the group purchase sequence.

A few days ago, Evenson closed the OrderWithMe beta website, leaving a countdown card pointing to the January 10, 2012 OrderWithMe new website "officially opened".

Jiang Vinson and his team plan to launch three original brands with different age groups. Each brand will launch 30 group buying products every week.

Jiang said that what he has done has not been done yet. In fact, many entrepreneurs in China now have a shorter B2C process in the deep ploughing of foreign trade, such as Guo's CEO (LightInTheBox) (Lanting Pavilion) and Feng Jianfeng's CEO's DinoDirect.

"Things on LightInTheBox and DinoDirect are still expensive, after all, they are the form of retail."

Jiang Wen son said.

He sometimes indulge in his own dream of electronic commerce, giving people the impression of being young and frivolous.