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Chinese Are Eating The World

Everyone knows it. You may have already read other variants of this article. A different angle through a different lens. May be in terms of One Belt One Road initiative. But I’m only interested in how they are doing that in tech, and most specifically in the e-commerce industry.

When we first got into dropshipping, there were nearly no Chinese in the industry. They were mostly just suppliers of the goods. Dropshipping in essence began with AliExpress. Chinese would just host products there and fulfil on behalf of other dropshippers.

In the following year, Chinese learnt that they are being duped. For every $5 they get in gross sales, the dropshipper gets $20 in gross sales. The first change we saw happen was the prices went up at least 100% on AliExpress. They needed an equal share in the dropshipping business.

By following year, many new dropshipping stores popped up that have now become some of the largest in the world. Chinese didn’t just want to fulfil orders, they mastered the business end to end. From advertising and sales to fulfilment. They replaced most dropshippers.

A similar trend can be seen on Amazon FBA as well where most new and top sellers are based out of China.

I Learnt Something From Chinese, And I’ve Never Been To China

During our dropshipping business, we engaged with many Chinese vendors while trying to source our products. During the early phase, we simply placed orders on AliExpress directly for our customers. That seemed to become impossible once we started selling at scale, and so we decided to engage a few vendors for long-term order fulfillment.

My co-founder started engaging them on WeChat to discuss details of manufacturing, pricing, quality etc. After signing up a few vendors, we started the fulfillment process.

During one of the video calls with our vendor who was packing orders to ship at the time of call, I saw something that left me in complete disbelief. I saw that her 4 year old daughter was also packing orders in the background in her house, while the vendor attended our call.

At that point I realized how the Chinese are eating the world and that’s because of sheer hard work and no other reason. If you have a problem with the Chinese doing that, you need to work harder than them. And if you can’t, then you need to stop complaining.