Ultima Consulting believes that all those eBay and AliExpress affairs are only useful to three categories of sellers:
- individuals, for one-time sale of things they do not need;
- rare pearls, beginner entrepreneurs of the garage type, who have developed a product of their own but lack resources for organizing normal sales channels.
Such Comrades have rather a short phase of working via ‘sales floors’; they either soon go out of business (>80%) or go one level higher if their product is successful.
- outright Mickey Mouse companies that have neither goods, nor brand, nor even a website of their own.
These sell quite standard crap (five hundred tiny shops all selling the same socks from the same factory) and wage price wars (for lack of other competitive advantages) to drop one another’s margins to zero or negative values.
All such businesses’ life consists in teetering on the brink of starvation. Or falling beyond.
The fuss of Mickey Mouse companies constantly being born and dying produces sort of economic "vacuum boiling".
For more or less decent companies, the whole fuss around eBay and AliExpress is just a needless pain in the ass.
A note by Ultima Consulting.
To the above-mentioned ‘Mickey Mouse companies’, working through ‘sales floors’ brings nothing but a pain in the ass, too.
Moreover, such companies’ whole life, neither long nor happy, is an embodiment of this pain.
Still, due to their bosses’ lack of vision, such glorious ‘companies’ are left with just a couple of options:
- either immediate death (without ‘sales floors’, they are quite helpless in the open market),
- or that very half-starved half-existence supported by (futile) hopes of ‘things getting right’.
Little do the poor creatures know that sales via trade floors benefit only the floors themselves. These earn a world of money exactly on the margin that they extort, as their fees, from the sellers who can sell nothing on their own.
This also applies to our Russian Orthodox Yandex.Market. At least as regards the scheme of charging a percentage from the sales.
Remember the Gold Fever of California? The only ones to make money on Californian gold were the shops that sold gold prospecting gear. And the prospectors’ own balanced result was deeply negative.
In short: a clever trader retains his margin and uses it to develop a Walmart, and a stupid one gives it away to a mister who develops an Alibaba Group with it.
Still, fashion is fashion (‘vanitas vanitatum’, as Old Ecclesiast put it), so many Comrades take an active interest in working with the ‘sales floors’.
In the context of Ultimate IEM solutions, the issue boils down to the task of correct integration with the floors’ software – uploading the goods mix, descriptions, inventory, downloading goods items, etc.
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Integration with eBay As Exemplified by 123.ru.
Made using the API provided by eBay for sellers of goods/services.
The whole thing works automatically in the background.
Orders downloaded from eBay appear in Ultima as delivery orders and are then processed in the standard fashion like all deliveries.
The goods mix, descriptions with photos, and inventory are promptly synchronized with the central Ultima database without any [usually cack-handed] human interference.
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Integration with AliExpress As Exemplified by PartsDirect.ru
Technically, very similar.
Practically, as Chinese businessmen are all smart and intelligent, AliExpress requires the seller to have a Chinese address.
A Goods Page.
119441 is the goods item’s code in Ultimate IEM, printed on its sticker in big type for ease of visual identification at the warehouse.
The Form for Editing the Same Good Item’s Properties in the Interface of the Ultimate IEM Desktop Client:
Fashion is profitless.
But our customer’s wish is a law for us.