Well…. It’s Wednesday …a work day. And what have I got planned?
I’m going to listen to Star Wars- Master of Disguise (A Jedi quest book 4).
And why is that do you think?
Because the 2 projects that I’m meant to do for my actual job description….(although I feel that many things fall into my job description at the moment)… has been put on pause.
I’m meant to look after both Singapore & Australia… and in the future New Zealand, but yep its been put on pause because we’re waiting for the directors to set up a time to go an see the potential service providers.
We’ve done all the cost analysis and know what each provider can give, as well as the reputation of each, but we’ve been put on pause.
So I’ve been ‘lent’ to another project for the moment.
800du.com its like a website that we run that basically does some of the promotions for a shop through their affiliate program. We do some advertising and honest reviews in Chinese for an American e-commerce store and when they click the link that goes through us, the customer get the discount and we get a kick-back.
The word kick-back sounds like corruption to be honest, but its perfectly normally because essentially we’re helping them promote stuff, so this is money they don’t have to spend on promoting stuff themselves. Most kick-backs are only 5% or so, and then you give a 3% discount to the customer which means that you’re getting 2%, which although doesn’t sound like much, ….this is China, and you’ve got 1000’s of people buying stuff everyday, and when the average buy value is 75 USD, you end up getting 1.6 USD on each sale, something like this.
And of course when a lot of our staff working on this are doing menial jobs, for instance photoshop etc. (I know photoshop is a great skill in Australia, but it’s a dime a dozen here), or article writing.
Most of the articles created are done Chinese style. It’s strange to know that different cultures write in different styles, but modern Chinese writing writes with many .gif pictures dispersed within the article.
Let me find you an example
View it with google translate and you’ll be fine, but take a look at the use of moving images throughout the text. I think because people either have short attention spans or because the writer wants to emphasise the point.
Oh apparently its just to match the content.
Anyway, so my job was to help the 800du team to increase their user base.
My idea on this was to get foreigners involved.
Now this is surprising to most of the Chinese team, because of 1 important reason. The American team thought it was great…. But only because they don’t know the regulations in China regarding foreigners.
Basically from September 2014-October 2015 foreigners and Chinese were allowed to buy things through the ‘e-commerce chancel’ for importing overseas products. They would just have to upload their passport before their goods were to come to China.
A bit of background info: there are 4 ‘channels’ for import into China. 1. Postal, 2. Commercial, 3. Express (DHL, UPS, TNT, Fedex and all of this… they can import books and stuff) & 4. E-commerce.
Essentially everything that’s e-commerce based is meant to go through this.
And then October 2015 the government announced that foreigners could no longer buy things and bring it through the e-commerce channel, because….hahah….(the Ch. Gov. loves irony by the way) they don’t have enough experience in foreigners buying things from overseas, that they need to test some more.
Well….what about the whole 1 year previously? I think that’s a pretty good test no? Well it seems they make the rules and the rules is no.
But so now apparently foreigners can’t buy stuff through the e-commerce channel. ….which would mean that there’s no point translating things on the website or making the site ready for foreigners.
But… if the site is friendly enough to foriegners, and that they can learn how to say products names or something through it…then they can contact their Chinese friends and then they can buy stuff through our site. Which means by getting 1 foreigner signing up..we also get 1 chinese friend for which the foreigner needs to use his/ her friends’ ID card to actually purchase the stuff.
Oh and the other plan is to write some specialized articles to entice people to our website.
So far my idea for that is an article on the American / international special discount days for shopping, and then a lady I will be working with wants to do an article for ‘Children’s Day’ although.
But in the meantime as I’m doing research for these articles… I’ll be listening to this Star Wars audio book.
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