The big seller is laying off thousands of employees! Millions of bad debts are wasted

Recently, there have been rumors in the industry that a big seller, one of the Shenzhen Bantian Five Tigers, is laying off employees crazily, from 6,000 to 7,000 employees at its peak to 2,000 employees! More than half of the employees have been laid off!

This seller was one of the first sellers in the industry to set up eBay distribution. It also relied on the early eBay to start its business and gradually developed to all major platforms. Amazon is one of the main revenue platforms. It is said that this seller has tens of thousands of Amazon store accounts, and its annual sales peaked at more than 16 billion yuan.

Now, not only are they facing large-scale layoffs, but they are also unable to stop the layoffs even after 2,000 people have been laid off. According to insiders, after this round of Primeday, they will continue to lay off about 1,000 people. Although the distribution of goods has shown a downward trend in the past two years, one is that the platform sku richness is extremely saturated, and it is difficult to produce a hit product without differentiated distribution of goods. The second is that the later stage of distribution of goods requires a large amount of inventory purchases. Many distribution companies are capital-intensive models, and all the money is bet on the goods. These two important defects have caused many sellers to turn to high-quality products, and even distribution of goods requires a fine distribution.

These drawbacks only make it difficult for sellers of bulk goods, but the last straw that broke the camel's back was the wave of store closures in the middle of last year, because bulk goods sellers have a higher demand for accounts, and the asset-heavy model also makes the cash flow of bulk goods companies generally worrying. This wave of store closures in the middle of the year was a major blow to the bulk goods model. If there were no store closures, this cross-border seller, one of the Sakata Five Tigers, would definitely be able to survive for a while. Under the asset-heavy model, once the store closures and cash flow are cut off, it's over.

How much losses big retailers will suffer due to store closures can be seen from the financial reports released recently by several big retailers.

The bad debts announced by this big seller on the Amazon platform reached 85.33 million yuan. There is no doubt that this part of the bad debts must be due to a wave of store closures last year, which resulted in the freezing of store funds and inventory, which has not been unblocked to this day and can only be treated as bad debts. It is worth noting that the big seller also has large bad debts on the Walmart platform. As a popular e-commerce platform in recent times, Walmart has attracted a large number of Amazon sellers to transform. Walmart’s store opening conditions are relatively strict. Internal channels require sellers to have stores such as Amazon and have annual sales of hundreds of thousands. Because this threshold screens out many small and medium-sized sellers, there are fewer audits and sensitive points after successfully opening a store, and it doesn’t matter if you just brush direct reviews. In this case, the bad debts of this big seller on the Walmart platform are rather strange.

After consulting some Walmart insiders, I learned the actual situation. It is easy to get orders in Walmart, especially for sellers who can’t make it in Amazon and switch to Walmart. In most cases, they can get dozens or even hundreds of orders overnight by batching many products, but the problems that follow are much more troublesome. Walmart has very strict requirements on the timeliness of orders. If there are many orders but many logistics can’t keep up with the timeliness, the store is likely to be officially closed. This is probably one of the reasons why the popular products have bad debts in Walmart.