Footwear B2C E-Commerce, Want To Say Love You Is Not Easy.

Some people say,

I can't earn anything at all.

This does not seem to be absurd. As the overall business status and environment of electronic commerce become more and more exposed, embarrassment and bottlenecks are gradually appearing in front of people.

Under this condition, the prospect of footwear B2C industry is also hard to say.

Gross profit margin is still a headache for all families.

Generally speaking, the gross profit margin of online sports brands is around 20%, and the 20% of them also bear the cost of logistics, warehousing, labor costs and so on. Footwear B2C can not earn any money at all.

On the one hand, since the beginning of this year, B2C has been in danger in terms of supply, stock and gross profit in various vertical fields of footwear.

They are all looking for new profit points. With the rising cost, the scale of the industry will become more and more profitable.

At present, the average gross profit margin of the industry is less than 10%. It is possible to raise the index to 25%-30% if the profit is to be realized.

So, what leads to the poor gross margin of footwear B2C market? Logistics bottleneck has to be one of the big problems.

Some people believe that the footwear B2C industry is in the "blood selling operation".

Among them, the return of goods is an important reason for the high cost of such enterprises.

Since the mainstream third party express business mainly comes from Taobao's platform enterprises, the third party express companies will greatly affect the distribution service of footwear B2C enterprises when they launch large sales promotion services in the busy season, such as festivals or Taobao.

As we all know, the online shopping habit of domestic consumers is cultivated by Taobao, so in their minds, it is reasonable to buy things online.

This will undoubtedly make the domestic footwear B2C website, which is trying to provide high standard of service, face enormous profit pressure from the beginning.

But even so, websites are still showing the attitude of some overseas websites, such as "unable to reach the goal", and all websites offer no reason to refund.

Due to cost considerations, the website did not voluntarily inform consumers of this provision.

This kind of performance is a compromise between the domestic B2C website and the reality. It is trying to find a way out between the swing of "low price" and "high standard service".

But unlike other products, footwear B2C users do not frequently purchase the same type of shoes.

This means that footwear B2C needs continuous access to new users.

Now, the cost of acquiring new users is rising.

Only by increasing the richness of the goods will the old customers become sticky.

In addition to the logistics of footwear B2C enterprise profits, the other big problem facing the website is inventory management.

PEAK CEO Xu Zhihua said publicly that "this year is a year of inventory clearance".

"Zero inventory" is more like a "beautiful thing" to an enterprise, but in reality, it is very difficult to achieve zero inventory.

This is mainly due to the recent large number of websites cut off the big discrepancy in marketing investment, making the pressure on access to traffic greatly increased. Although the footwear B2C platform can help solve the pressure of part of stock funds by means of real warehouse consignment mode, this series of actions has greatly reduced the order.

In addition, similar to other e-commerce websites, the footwear B2C website also needs to be purchased from different sources and has multiple inventory points throughout the country, but this has brought great difficulties to management.

The backlog of inventory directly brings business risks to businesses, and shortages make customers complain.

Many buyers will encounter shortages when shopping online. Sometimes they may even be out of stock and show goods at the front desk.

For websites, more brands and more styles mean more inventory backlog and quality.

Due to the serious inventory in the upstream of the industry chain, each brand has to borrow money from the online channel at a low price. At the same time, for the sake of quick clearance, the brand sometimes even has a price per day, which forces the footwear B2C to lower the price for shipment.

But with low price and low discount, it will inevitably lead to marketing of footwear brand image.

Especially in this year's footwear B2C industry, not only the pressure on inventory of sports shoes brands that occupy the leading position of sales is great, but the famous brands will release a lot of low-priced goods, so that the whole market will have an excess of low price goods and lower the gross profit of the industry. With the continuous increase of logistics and manpower costs, many footwear B2C will be faced with dual pressures from capital and goods.

On the whole, footwear belongs to consumables, and every Chinese average buys 2-3 pairs of shoes every year. So, how big is the market size of China's footwear B2C? The total retail size of China's footwear market is 400 billion yuan. At present, online sales account for only 400 billion of the total market scale. If China's online sales can reach the level of the United States and Japan and South Korea in 5 years, online sales will account for 10% of the total retail sales, and then there will be a market of 40 billion yuan. The sales of Zappos, known as "Amazon for sale of shoes", account for 30% of the total sales of online footwear in the United States. By analogy, a company with an annual sales of 12 billion yuan (400 x 30%) in China is entirely possible.

After a brutal competition, the footwear B2C are considering the essence of returning to business rather than simply investing in scale growth.