The programmer and his woman

"Look, this is it." I pointed at the magnificent building and said to Xiaoxia, with a little excitement and anticipation on my face. "Let's go in and explore the secrets inside."

Following the bustling crowd, Xiaoxia and I stepped into the towering building. This building seemed to be a microcosm of a city, gathering businessmen and dreamers from all over the world.

Entering the building, the scene in front of you is dazzling. Rows and rows of stalls are closely arranged. In G City, these small shops are called stalls. Each stall is like a small world, full of colorful and various styles of clothes.

I looked around and suddenly realized that this was a clothing wholesale market. But unlike the wholesale markets I had seen before, the atmosphere here was more lively, with a constant stream of people coming to buy things. Everyone's face was filled with anticipation and joy, as if they could find the treasure in their hearts here.

What's more interesting is that I found that the wholesale rules here are different. You don't need to purchase a large amount of goods at one time to enjoy the wholesale price, but you can enjoy the same discount as long as you buy one piece of each clothing. This flexible purchasing method surprised me.

After walking around, we received many business cards from stall owners. These business cards not only had their contact information and store addresses printed on them, but most importantly, they also had download links for clothing pictures and detailed purchase prices.

The stall owners enthusiastically introduced the situation here to us. It turned out that this is an online wholesale market specially built for online sellers. Sellers can easily get goods here, and they can enjoy preferential prices without having to purchase in large quantities. In this way, they can use more funds for other aspects, such as marketing promotion.

Hearing this, I suddenly realized that this is a business with low cost and high return. We tried to open an online store a few years ago, but the problems of supply and pictures have not been solved well. Now this place provides us with a perfect solution, which makes us very excited.

After we got back, we couldn't wait to open the computer and browse the URL on the business card. I was surprised to find that these pictures were the most common pictures of products I had seen on the Internet. This time we actually found the source of women's clothing.

Xiaoxia and I smiled at each other, our hearts full of expectation and confidence. We knew that this might be the starting point for us to realize our dreams.

This time we no longer hesitated. The previous idea of ​​making adult products has been thrown out of the back of our minds. Now we have found a more stable and profitable project. We will start from here and embark on our own entrepreneurial journey.

We first rented a house near the market. The difference was that we had never seen this kind of house before. The houses here were built in an irregular manner. One building after another was built very casually, and some buildings were almost adjacent to each other. People here call this kind of building a handshake building, and call this place a village in the city.

We have never seen such places in our cities. The term "urban village" should mean the rural areas within the city, and these lands should be the farmers' residential land.

Although the environment is not good, the price is cheap. You can rent a house here with the money you would spend on renting a partitioned room in City A. The only problem is that the sanitary environment is very bad. How should I put it? It’s okay if the building is a bit shabby, but here are the cockroaches that I fear the most, and the worst thing is that the cockroaches here are more than I could have imagined before.

The largest cockroaches I have ever seen here are as big as a small mouse, and they can all fly. If you walk on the street at night, you can see a group of black cockroaches hovering above your head under the street lights.

I remember when I was a kid, every household in the city was promoting the elimination of the four pests. In my impression, rats were basically gone in the 1990s. But here, in the dead of night, they would come out in groups, so many that you might kick one or step on one to death while walking.

Sleeping at night is even more terrible, cockroaches, rats and mosquitoes, they all come out at this time. I feel that the mosquitoes here are different from those in the north. The mosquitoes in the north will greet you before biting you, buzzing in your ear for a while before biting you, but I didn't find this phenomenon with the mosquitoes here. They usually bite directly and leave after biting, neat and tidy, never dragging their feet. What's even more strange is that I must have been bitten countless times at night, but in the morning I found that none of the bites on my body were gone. This may be related to the type of mosquitoes here. You can't see the black and white flower mosquitoes here, they are all large domestic yellowish mosquitoes.

But even so, I bought a mosquito net for protection soon, because there are no screens on the windows here, and every household here does not install screens. So I don’t have to worry about mosquitoes flying into the house every day, because the windows are wide open, and mosquitoes may have come in and out of the house many times.

We lived here. We didn’t know a lot when we first came here, so the leftovers were eaten by cockroaches in the first few days. The corn we bought from the market was also eaten by mice. After that, we had experience and never had leftovers at night. We also bought a large storage box and put all the food in it to prevent cockroaches from invading.

We tried hard to adapt to the environment here. The most delightful thing about this place is that it is always green all year round, without the bleak winter in the north. The trees on both sides of the road are not willows or poplars but fruit trees. When the fruits are ripe, you may even be hit by mangoes falling from the trees.

If you are curious, pick it up, peel it and take a bite. It feels great. This ripe mango that falls naturally is more delicious than the mango bought from the fruit store.

In this place, people seem to have transformed into shrewd and capable bosses, each running a variety of businesses. The atmosphere here is extremely lively, and everyone has a keen business mind and the ability to adapt flexibly. From fashionable clothing to exquisite and charming cosmetics to precise timepieces, there are a wide variety of goods.

These businessmen are good at capturing changes in market demand. They keep up with the times and have a keen insight into business opportunities. As long as they find that a certain product is profitable, they will plunge into it without hesitation.

Here, success or failure does not depend on birth or background, but on personal efforts and wisdom. As long as you have a hard-working spirit and a smart mind, you don't have to worry about not being able to stand out in this business world and make huge profits.

We have been running our online store business with great care. At first, when we first put our products on the shelves, several days passed without receiving a single order. However, as time went by, the situation gradually improved and we began to receive some orders. Although the number was small, it made us very happy.

In fact, e-commerce had not yet fully emerged and developed at that time, and express delivery was not as convenient as it is now. Every time we sold a product, we would personally take a car to the market to pick it up and pack the clothes and ship them out at the market.

It is worth mentioning that the express delivery fee was quite expensive at that time. Even the cheapest one in the same province cost between 6 and 8 yuan. If the destination was remote, it would cost more than 10 yuan or even more. Moreover, free shipping was not common at that time, so the high postage was usually borne by the buyer.

After completing the delivery task, we would stroll around the market for a while. Since it was our first time in this place, we felt like we had discovered a treasure when we saw the clothes on sale at a price of five or ten yuan. We were so excited that we couldn't help but buy many pieces at once.

Later I learned that the real clearance items here are sold by weight, not by piece. For example, the thin summer clothes we bought for five or ten yuan may not even cost one yuan per pound.

In the following time, we continued to go around various shopping malls, collecting business cards from different stalls, planning to go back and put their products on the shelves.

At the beginning, the products we put on the shelves were basically disorganized, and we didn’t know what type of products we wanted to do. After putting more products on the shelves, we discovered a problem: the price competition for mass products is quite fierce. If we blindly lower prices to increase sales, it is obviously not suitable for the two of us to do this. Instead, some niche products have more advantages.

After our research, we finally decided to go with the style of celebrity women's clothing. After selecting the store style, we found that there are quite a lot of manufacturers of this style. Among them, we also found a brand that specializes in providing clothing for the club service industry. His business route is different from that of merchants in the market. It is a bit like franchising, and it only provides price protection and agency purchase prices to sellers.

For clothes that cost dozens of yuan, the suggested price is hundreds of yuan, and the profit can reach one or two hundred yuan. It is also very cheap to join them. You just need to report the name and address of the store you operate to them. When you get the goods, you can enjoy the agency price by reporting the store name. Their staff will also conduct price inspections on the franchisees' stores every day, and if any store is found selling below the suggested price, its agency qualification will be revoked.

What we need to do is to serve the shoppers well and promote their brands. At that time, KTV, nightclubs and clubs were popular in the city, and there was a trend of opening more and more. The owners of these places also needed to order large quantities of such clothing after opening the store, but there was no brand specializing in this industry clothing. Their appearance just filled this gap. These customers ordered large quantities, always dozens of pieces, and the profit of one order could sometimes reach thousands of yuan, and the return rate was basically zero.

This gave us great prospects. Through our contact with this type of clothing, we turned our attention to merchants in the market that make similar clothing. Compared with this brand, the quality is not much worse, but their prices are cheaper. So we took down the popular products that were not selling well before and put more products of this type on the shelves. Unexpectedly, after a while, a dress became popular on the platform. Because the style of this dress was too avant-garde, the stall only provided a few pictures of European and American models. Most of them were sold overseas before. Unexpectedly, with the changes in the public's aesthetics and openness, this dress became a best-seller in China.

Since the number of available pictures was so small, we had to use some buyer show photos as product display pictures. We never thought that this operation would produce unexpectedly good results.

However, the pictures used at that time were still very different from the exquisite model pictures on the Internet today. After all, they were just taken by customers with their mobile phones, and the pixels were naturally not very high, and could not be compared with professional cameras at all.

With the emergence of several popular products in the store, business suddenly became extremely popular, and the sales of other styles of goods also increased. The number of orders increased from a few pieces a day at the beginning to more than ten pieces, dozens of pieces, and finally even to several large packages of goods. After a whole year of unremitting efforts, we finally ushered in the harvest season.

Although I did make a lot of money, this job was really tiring! Every morning after getting up, the first thing I did was to check which orders had been sold. Then, I had to sort out all the orders and go to the market to pick up the goods. Sometimes there were so many types of goods that it would take me the entire morning just to sort out the orders, and I might even be so busy that I didn't even have time to eat lunch.

However, I later had an idea and made full use of my spare time to develop my professional skills and wrote a small program specifically for picking up goods. Through this program, all the goods that need to be picked up can be downloaded directly to the mobile phone and automatically classified and organized. In this way, when I go to the market to pick up goods, I can get them all at once. I no longer have to worry about missing a certain piece of clothing, nor do I have to run back and forth between markets and waste precious time. With the help of this software, our store can always rank high in the delivery time of the entire network.

As more and more goods needed to be picked up, it often took until the market closed at night to get all the goods. There was no time to eat after returning home. As soon as we sat down at the door, we had to start packing and shipping the goods. It took almost midnight to pack all the goods. The couriers here basically sleep in the morning and get up to work at noon. It is very normal for them to collect our parcels at night at two or three o'clock in the morning.

After everything was done, I realized that I hadn't eaten all day. I went out at two or three in the morning. Most of the small restaurants in the village were still open. There were many people who were busy as late as us. It was very lively outside at this time, and there were many people. This was something we could never have imagined before coming here.