Chapter 10 The foundation of one’s life

Chapter 10 The foundation of one’s life

Chapter 10 The foundation of one’s life
Although Bai Qiwen couldn't keep up with Xu Shenxue's thinking for a while, the world is big and the boss who pays the salary is the most important. If his boss wants to play this way, then let him play this way.

Anyway, it doesn’t cost much to set up a store on an e-commerce platform, and you don’t even need to hire someone to do any design. You can just outsource it to a studio that specializes in online stores.

Registering a new brand is even easier and doesn’t cost any money.

Online sales focus on young, fashionable, and cost-effective mobile phone models. This is also simple. WeCool Electronics has a large number of mature and available mobile phone design solutions. When the time comes, pick out a few young and fashionable ones, make some minor changes to the appearance, change the color, and then go directly into mass production without even changing the mold.

As for performance and stuff like that… what can you expect from a 400-500 dollar device? It just works.

With limited and controllable costs, Bai Qiwen couldn't find a reason to persuade him, so he said directly: "Mr. Xu's idea has opened my eyes. Building an Internet brand mobile phone based on the basic concept of young people's first mobile phone has never been involved in this concept by any manufacturer before. Although there are certain unknowns, my intuition tells me that this can work!"

“As for the cost, if the action is not too big, it is also within the controllable range, and the overall risk is relatively small!”

Xu Shenxue nodded slightly: "However, online sales are not the same as direct wholesale to channels. We face a variety of customer groups, so the return rate must be well controlled."

"As for the return rate, in addition to factors such as consumer preference and impulse orders, the most important factor is quality. Therefore, the quality of our Internet brand mobile phones must be strictly controlled to ensure that the proportion of returns due to quality is reduced to the lowest possible level!"

Bai Qiwen is not worried about this: "Although our mobile phones are mainly low-end, the quality is still relatively stable."

If you talk about workmanship and materials, they are definitely just average. You get what you pay for. You can't expect too much from a phone that costs only four or five hundred yuan!

But will it work?
Of course it is possible!
Although Weiku Electronics produces low-end feature phones of unknown brands, it is at least a big brand among unknown brands, and its OEM business is also very prosperous. Putting other things aside, the product quality is still very solid and there will be no problem at all in normal use for two or three years.

Without this skill, it would be impossible to achieve the scale of annual production and sales of 500,000 mobile phones.

Ordinary consumers may not understand, but those channel dealers and some OEM manufacturers in Huaqiangnan are all experts in the industry with sharp eyes. If your products are not good enough, they will not cooperate with you on a large scale!
Moreover, this traditional manufacturing industry, which uses a large-scale wholesale channel model, is more concerned with reputation within the industry. If a large-scale quality accident occurs, causing damage to the interests of channel dealers and OEMs, the entire Huaqiangnan mobile phone circle will know about it overnight, and then the channel dealers and OEMs who seriously distribute unknown-brand mobile phones will no longer come to you.

Those who come to you at this time are all channel dealers doing shady business. What they want is a rubbish phone like yours, but they will only give you the price of a rubbish phone... If this is the case, you might as well just close down.

It would be impossible for a mobile phone manufacturer that produces 500,000 mobile phones a year to conceal the fact that it makes counterfeit and shoddy mobile phones. Moreover, the impact would be too bad, and it wouldn't take long for the patrol police to come and arrest the manufacturer.

Therefore, although the low-end mobile phones of Wecoo Electronics have poor performance, they are definitely not cutting corners. The quality is not excellent, but there will be basically no problems in normal use for two to three years.

This is the foundation of their existence!
Bai Qiwen acted quickly. After Xu Shenxue gave him the task of entering the online platform, he selected three people from the marketing department that day to form a temporary e-commerce team to coordinate and be responsible for the e-commerce business.

The organizational structure of Weiku Electronics Co., Ltd. is relatively simple, and it adopts the vertical management model commonly used by many small and medium-sized private enterprises...

The upper structure is the traditional board of directors and shareholders' meeting... Although Weiku Electronics Co., Ltd. nominally has several institutional shareholders, these investment companies are also controlled by Xu Shenxue, so he is actually the only shareholder.

Xu Shenxue himself serves as chairman and also serves as general manager.

There is currently no senior official at the level of deputy general manager under the general manager. Instead, many vertical management departments have been set up directly, such as the human resources department, administrative department, production department, R&D department, marketing department, purchasing department, etc.

The marketing department is also divided into several groups, including the OEM group, which is mainly responsible for OEM business; the brand group, which is responsible for the company's own "Weiku" brand business;
Then there is the comprehensive team, which is responsible for other business types besides the above two main businesses. For example, Weiku Electronics actually also supplies some mobile phone parts, mainly various types of mobile phone plastic parts. Their company also acquired a small injection molding factory in Baolong, Guanwai, mainly for its own mobile phone business, but its own mobile phone business has limited production capacity and cannot absorb the production capacity of this injection molding production line, so it also provides some mobile phone plastic parts business.

Now that a new e-commerce team has been set up, a few people have actually been drawn out from the comprehensive team to take up the helm.

After the e-commerce team was established, it quickly carried out market research and started preparatory work, such as contacting some online store studios to create online stores, contacting small graphic design studios with which it had a cooperative relationship to design packaging boxes for new products, making some promotional posters and online pictures, etc.

Then contact some online promotion resources in advance, such as administrators on forums, editors on portal websites, etc.

In addition, I also had several conversations with colleagues in the R&D department to explore how to create a first mobile phone specifically for young people, and required that this phone be injected with a young and fashionable design language.

However, this kind of thing cannot be finalized in a day or two, it requires a process. Bai Qiwen reported that they will be able to complete the preliminary preparations in about half a month. After colleagues in the R&D department have produced sample mobile phones, they will start promoting them online and put the products on sale.

A few days later, Xu Shenxue saw the e-commerce business preparation report submitted by Bai Qiwen. After reading it, he said, "Is the contact with Jingxi Mall not going smoothly?"

There are actually quite a few online sales channels. Although Taotao.com is the largest in scale and has the best sales, the e-commerce team has not forgotten other e-commerce platforms. Basically, they have opened stores on all e-commerce platforms.

But Jingxi Mall is different. It is not C2C at present, but an e-commerce platform in B2C model... It is called a platform, but it is not an online mall opened by Jingxi Company itself and then selling things on it. It adopts a self-operated model.

In other words, Jingxi itself is a large supermarket. Manufacturers sell their products through it, and it makes money from commission or the difference in price.

This is very different from a series of typical C2C platforms such as Taotao...

Despite this, the e-commerce team still tried to contact Jingxi Mall, but the results were not very good.

The other party did not actually refuse, but put forward more stringent conditions, including a long warranty and a high commission.

Bai Qiwen said: "The commission is actually acceptable. After all, the entry into the Dimao Mall that we are negotiating on Taotao.com also has traffic costs and commissions. The two are actually about the same when calculated."

"But what worries my colleagues in the e-commerce group is that they require a longer and stricter warranty, which will lead to a further increase in our costs."

"I have a general understanding of their warranty policy. Overall, the risk is relatively high for us manufacturers. Compared with offline channels, I am afraid the return rate will be many times higher!"
Xu Shenxue was naturally aware of the gap. They were now supplying goods to offline first-tier channel dealers. Although there was a quality guarantee, the actual return and exchange rate was very small.

After all, you bought a no-name brand mobile phone from a small street shop, and you still expect quality assurance?

Once I leave this door, the mobile phone store will no longer recognize the product... I also thought about coming back to return the product after a while, what a wishful thinking.

However, for online channels, returns and exchanges are basic. If you don’t even have a basic return and exchange policy for quality issues for a mobile phone costing several hundred dollars, no one will place an order.

(End of this chapter)