Starting from the Internet celebrity e-commerce industry chain: the profit is as high as 50%, earning 200 million a day

01

A woolen coat that costs 350 yuan sells for 700 yuan

Internet celebrity e-commerce, it is a unique e-commerce model in the form of recommending and selling products, with Internet celebrities as the core, content platforms and e-commerce platforms as carriers, and product recommendations and sales.

Because of the high stickiness of fans and high user loyalty, Internet celebrity e-commerce has been growing rapidly since its outbreak in 2016.

From Zhang Dayi's Taobao store to Li Jiaqi's loud call for "buy, buy, buy", to Li Ziqi's snail noodles, which sold millions of copies, the impact of online celebrity e-commerce on people's lives has become more and more extensive.

According to statistics, the scale of the Internet celebrity e-commerce market will reach 300 billion in 2020.

How profitable are Internet celebrity shops? It’s no problem to have a transaction volume of 200 million on Double Eleven, and it can earn 400 to 500 million a year.

However, it is difficult to live up to the reputation.

Online celebrity shops cannot escape these characteristics.

One is profiteering.

It should be no secret that the huge profits of online celebrity shops. Open any online celebrity store, and you will find that a sweater that looks worth 100 yuan can sell for 239 yuan; an ordinary short-sleeved T-shirt can be sold for 109 yuan.

The scary thing is that you know that online celebrity stores can make money, but you don’t know that it can make money so much—the profit can reach more than 50%.

A factory supplying online celebrity stores provided a data: a woolen coat that costs 350 yuan can be sold at 700 yuan in online celebrity stores. The factory itself only earns fifty or sixty yuan.

Why do online celebrity shops sell an ordinary woolen coat so expensive? This is because the packaging costs it spends on Internet celebrities and the marketing costs it spends on Internet channels must be counted in it.

The second is the cottage.

Pattern making in the clothing industry is already a tacit secret.

Big names, original designer brands...as long as they are good-looking, Internet celebrities can directly copy them, and kindly said on Weibo: "This is a private server I saw when I was shopping, and I specially asked someone to edit it. Give fans a favor."

Large online celebrity stores will also build their own factories to make patterns in person, and small online celebrity stores will be more direct. They will go to wholesale markets such as Hangzhou Sijiqing to get goods.

Those piles of clothing have been transformed into brand clothing with keywords such as retro, Hong Kong style, French style, and gentleness in the online celebrity shop, which is as fascinating as hanging in a window.

Of course, profiteering and imitation are only the superficial features of Internet celebrity shops, and the ecology behind Internet celebrity e-commerce is the most suffocating.

02

Internet celebrities eat meat, others drink soup

Internet celebrity e-commerce can be said to be "Internet celebrities eat meat, others drink soup" Such an ecology.

The job of an Internet celebrity is like this: sit comfortably in the office, spend ten minutes choosing the styles brought by the supplier, and then go to Paris to take a few photos looking up at the sky, and you can earn tens of millions a year.

As for operations, customer service, warehouse management, and photography, they are all in charge of the MCN organization behind her. Internet celebrities themselves only need to put on good-looking clothes, have a good time, and create an exquisite and eye-catching life for fans.

However, the people and things in the supply chain behind Internet celebrities are not so simple.

When online celebrity stores earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year, the factory owners behind the online celebrity stores can only earn three to four hundred thousand yuan a year, and this is still in the case of a large supply of goods.

Three to four hundred thousand is the size of a small factory. It is no exaggeration to say that a senior programmer can earn so much money in a year.

Moreover, while earning high profits, online celebrity shops also pass on the risk to the factory. If there is a return order, it is not the online celebrity store itself that needs to bear the loss, but the factory owner.

The owner of a certain factory revealed that he supplied more than 5,000 lace dresses to an online celebrity store, but 1,700 of them were finally returned. The loss in this, the factory needs to sell 8000-9000 pieces of clothes to earn back.

Compared with the bitter factory owner, the situation of employees may be worse.

The garment workers on the assembly line have to work fourteen to five hours a day, from 8 am to 11 pm, basically all year round.

The factory adopts a piecework system, and the income for making a piece of clothing is only 15 yuan.

The more you do, the more you earn, so workers tend to seize all their time to work, gobble up their meals, and run to the toilet. Because the clothes are full of cotton wool, their mouths are often full of cotton wool after a day of work.

The plate sewing workers in the factory often have to work overtime until 11:30 or even 12:00, and their feet are swollen when they go home at night. They only have one day off on the 1st of a month.

The workers responsible for packing and express delivery trotted all the way, dragging dozens of kilograms of goods. Life gave them no chance to stop and rest.

Even the workers looking after the weaving machines seem to be leisurely enough, but they still need to work in two shifts, following the machines continuously...

Compared with glamorous Internet celebrities, they work harder and busier, but earn less money.

03

You actually paid for the internet celebrity’s air ticket to Paris

The deformed ecology behind the online celebrity shop actually reflects two points:

First, Internet celebrity marketing investment is too much, which destroys the normal distribution of benefits, and squeezes the labor force of the upstream industrial chain in a disguised form, causing the entire industrial chain ecology to become deformed.

Think about it carefully, how much of the money we spend on Internet celebrity shops is spent on the clothes themselves, and how much is spent on Internet celebrities?

It is very possible that the money for air tickets to Paris, the money for buying Hermes bags, and the money for staying in five-star hotels are all paid by us consumers for them.

That's right, the strong personal appeal of Internet celebrities is indeed a good advantage, but is it possible that this advantage has caused many consumers to lose their eyes and pay far more than the clothes themselves?

And when the marketing investment of the product itself increases, in order to make a profit, the merchant can only extremely reduce the upstream production cost, resulting in meager profits of the factory.

What is even more frightening is that when the clothes consumers buy are generally in a state where marketing is greater than quality, it will affect the supply and demand of the entire clothing market, thus hindering the normal development of the entire industry.

second, The trend of consumerism brought by Internet celebrity shops has left those serious clothing business owners with only two options: either join them to increase marketing, or stay in a corner where no one knows.

Internet celebrity stores have brought about a misunderstanding: only if the storefront "decoration" is good enough, the models are beautiful enough, and the product pictures are exquisite enough, this store is worthy of consumers' orders.

This has led to the fact that today's online stores have no way out - if you don't spend money on marketing and promotion, no matter how good your products are, no one will care.

I followed an e-commerce seller on Zhihu. In terms of industry knowledge and professionalism, he is really no worse than other sellers.

Just show him a picture of lace fabric, and he can analyze whether the density of the fabric is high or low, and whether the material is combed cotton or milk silk. Craftsmanship, cost... He can also come up with it.

It's just that because he doesn't know how to operate a store, his online store has only tens of thousands of fans so far.

The seller sighed: "Shops selling imitation brands can be very popular. As a clothing practitioner, I have unlimited fabric resources, high-quality fabric quality, and low purchase cost. The clothes I make are of perfect quality, excellent price, and styles can also be popular Agreed, but just can’t sell.”

The smell of wine is also afraid of deep alleys, the reality is so cruel.

Of course, we cannot deny the economic value and significance of the times brought by the online celebrity store itself. It's just that there are too many flashy online celebrity shops, which even blind the original face of an industry.

It is worth noting that a bubble is always just a bubble, just like a flash of fireworks, it will eventually pass away. When the tide goes out, you'll know who's been swimming naked.