Chapter 65: Fox Tao's First Double Eleven — Tens of Millions in Daily Sales! (3)

Chen Yansen was only willing to spend his time on girls and making money.

What bullshit class team-building — he had zero interest. Wouldn't it be nicer to ask Meng Jie out to Pearl Lake and steal a few kisses?

In fact, that was exactly what he thought, and exactly what he did. The hazy, heady feeling of being eighteen or nineteen had him completely hooked.

After eating and drinking his fill, he hummed a little tune, strolled back to room 0418, and slept straight through till dawn. For an ordinary college student, the weekend is a fine thing — but for Chen Yansen, work was the norm.

Morning meeting, requirements review meeting, campaign operations meeting — the whole morning was spent in meetings without a thing accomplished.

Fortunately, Fox Tao today may be small as a sparrow, but it has all its organs intact. Under his forceful push, the site's daily active users and order volume were climbing steadily, just a hair's breadth away from the target he'd set at the start.

With nothing better to do, he wandered the web at random, checking Fox Tao's user feedback along the way.

"Whatever you do, don't use Fox Tao. For the sake of an iPhone 4, some bastard — I don't even know who — was handing out eggs at our village entrance, dragging eighty-year-old grandpas into registering."

"Handing out eggs, that's a good move! I'm off to try it at my apartment complex gate!"

"Did anyone actually get a phone for 0 yuan?"

"My uncle's niece got a microwave for 0 yuan by bargain-hacking, but yeah, you really do have to pull in a ton of new users!"

"Anyone know who the boss of Fox Tao is? That guy's got no conscience — I curse him to have a son with no asshole."

Chen Yansen gave a slight nod, closed the tab, let out a long breath, and thought to himself: Rave reviews — I really am a business genius.

Once the billion-yuan subsidy red-packet text messages went live, he'd probably harvest even more glowing reviews. Still, a good product had to accept users' criticism and suggestions in order to improve.

Thinking of this, he called Wang Zihao over and told him to keep an eye on product reviews online — and whenever he spotted a good one, report it.

"Brother Sen, only you could pull this off!" Wang Zihao gave a thumbs-up, won over by his shamelessness.

"Great minds don't sweat the small stuff. A man's sense of morality is usually inversely proportional to his wealth — get it?"

Chen Yansen said dismissively. In his previous life, he'd wised up too late and suffered two or three years of hardship; otherwise he'd have been on top of the world long ago.

"Got it, Brother Sen, I'll get on it right away." Wang Zihao, caught between laughter and tears, nodded in agreement.

"Oh, and find time to ask Teacher Liu for guidance — pick up some finance know-how." Chen Yansen called him back and made a point of adding.

I'm the one in charge of ad placement — what's the use of learning finance?

Wang Zihao's face was full of doubt, but seeing Chen Yansen's serious expression, he didn't argue, just gave a grunt of acknowledgment.

Chen Yansen opened the data dashboard and focused. Yesterday's new-customer increment was 193,000, but the first-order conversion rate was only 7.1%. The vast majority were still coming for the 0-yuan deals — plenty of room to grow.

The weekly retention rate was only 41.3%. Put simply, of the 1,000,000-plus new customers pulled in last week, only 400,000 logged in again the next week; the week after that, just 160,000; by month's end, barely over 60,000.

That was the fatal flaw of guide e-commerce—it generated neither traffic nor products, merely acting as a pure e-commerce middleman. The moment ad spending stopped, you simply sat and waited to die.

But Chen Yansen didn't care about any of that. In 2010, customer acquisition costs were low, and with his utterly shameless marketing tactics, he could rake in profits hand over fist before the guide e-commerce model collapsed.

By then, he'd start fresh—whether it was food delivery or short videos, he'd have plenty of confidence and capital.

At three in the afternoon, the SMS interface deployment was complete.

Zhuang Rui and the test team combed through the billion-yuan subsidy red-packet logic and backend code once more, and only after confirming there were no issues did they let Hu Yun import the user data and send out the marketing texts in batches.

In those days, Double Eleven lasted only a single day. Chen Yansen's billion-yuan subsidy red packets had a validity of fourteen full days — giving users plenty of time to think it over.

"【Fox Tao】 Your billion-yuan subsidy red packet has arrived! Dear user, congratulations on receiving your exclusive 100-yuan subsidy red packet — up to 80 yuan off! Click the link now to claim. To unsubscribe, reply t."

In an instant, Fox Tao users across the country mostly tapped the link. In an era when marketing texts and telecom fraud hadn't yet run rampant, most people still had a measure of trust in websites they knew.

Some discovered that the so-called billion-yuan subsidy and 100-yuan exclusive red packet were pure hype — what sat in their accounts were threshold-discount red packets that could only be activated after a purchase.

But another group delightedly noticed that buying home appliances and furniture could also activate the red packets, and their interest was immediately piqued.

Buy an electric kettle — with cashback plus the subsidy red packet, the discount instantly came to over ten yuan, roughly the equivalent of 20% off.

Buy a pair of sneakers — cashback and subsidy red packet together, and the discount instantly came to over forty yuan, nearly 10% off.

Buy a down jacket — with cashback and subsidy red packet, the discount instantly came to over a hundred yuan, roughly 15% off.

With the Double Eleven mega-sale imminent, some sharp-minded online shopping enthusiasts immediately spotted a business opportunity.

So in forums, Tieba, and QQ groups, a flood of kind souls offering to place orders on others' behalf popped up — not only refusing a service fee, but even offering a 2% discount. The clueless actually fell for it.

But the smart ones weren't few, and they quickly figured out how these proxy shoppers were profiting. Some silently copied the playbook, following closely to grab a share of the action; others simply exposed the proxy shoppers' money-making tricks in public.

It wasn't until the third day that Chen Yansen noticed something off in the data.

First, certain users had an extremely high daily order volume, and every purchase was a high-ticket item. Although the order info Mama Ali sent back was incomplete, he still had a vague sense that something was wrong.

Second, the number of new customers registering from the same IP address had increased.

"Brother Sen, I've figured it out! It's some e-commerce proxy shoppers pulling tricks—should we ban their accounts?" Wang Zihao suddenly shouted.

While monitoring user feedback online, he'd spotted people selling Fox Tao's subsidy red packets, which finally confirmed the source of the data anomaly.

"Why would we ban them?" Chen Yansen countered.

"But these people are all milking the campaign for freebies—it's too much," Zhang Wenbo frowned, indignant.

"Zhuang Rui, what do you think?" Chen Yansen offered no opinion of his own, turned to look at Zhuang Rui, and asked.

"First, we need to cap the number of registered users per IP—I suggest lowering the limit from five to three. Second, we need to limit the order volume from the same IP at any single store; Mama Ali may already flag this behavior as fake orders and penalize it. Finally, we should launch an old-bringing-new referral campaign—every new user invited automatically receives a set of thousand-yuan subsidy red packets."

Zhuang Rui pushed his glasses up, thought for a moment, and answered unhurriedly.

"Applause! Zhuang Rui, you've really improved fast!"

Chen Yansen led the applause, praising him without the slightest stint.

The e-commerce proxy shopper trade was still thriving over a decade later. Before smartphones and 4G networks became widespread, the first step to online shopping was owning a computer, the second was opening online banking, and only the third was registering an e-commerce platform account—those three steps alone stumped ninety percent of ordinary people.

Chen Yansen remembered clearly—the streets and alleys of Chunshen were filled with Taobao proxy shops, doing a roaring business.

Wang Zihao and the others fell silent.

They weren't stupid. The reason they hadn't thought of it just now was simply that they'd felt the company's interests were being harmed, and the urgent task was to cut off the source of the profit loss — overlooking the fact that in any business ecosystem, every seemingly insignificant link is a vital element of success.

In this Double Eleven, making a name for oneself in one battle was far more important than a few extra points of Mao Li.

With fame, he could later smoothly negotiate annual framework deals with the major B2C platforms — securing favorable terms on cashback ratios, settlement cycles, and promotion policies, even down to the CPA cashback for new customers. Without a name, he probably couldn't even get past their front door.

"Clap clap clap—!"

Upstairs on the second floor, applause thundered. Everyone looked at Zhuang Rui, praised by the boss, their eyes full of envy.

"Keep working! Once Double Eleven is over, I'll increase everyone's November bonus based on the gross margin. I hope that number is as high as possible — give it your all!"

Chen Yansen waved his hand, signaling everyone to return to their workstations.

Over the next few days, the ad placement team's budget kept growing.

On Double Eleven itself, the ad spend on just the major long-video sites and the three big portal sites alone reached 600,000 yuan — fully six times the usual amount.

Of course, the number of new customers gained was also considerable. Combined with the new-customer growth brought by the 0-yuan bargain event, the single-day new-user registrations broke through the 300,000 mark for the first time.

Chen Yansen led the operations team and the design team in fighting continuously for three days, and finally, on the eve of Double Eleven, they launched the Fox Tao Double Eleven special edition on the site's homepage.

The homepage added thirteen hot-sale event pages for mainstream categories, and hand-picked over 2,000 core products from top-tier brands, displayed to users in the form of brand groups.

The overall tone of the entire site was instantly elevated!

On the screens in Room 206, the site's order volume and sales for the day scrolled in real time.

At 15:47 in the afternoon, orders broke through 200,000!

At 17:29 in the afternoon, single-day sales broke through 10 million!

Hearing the commotion, Tang Qingshan rushed to the startup park at 20:00 that evening. By then, the sales on the screen had already reached 12.03 million!

"Chen Yansen, the data isn't wrong, is it?" Tang Qingshan asked, face full of surprise, hardly daring to believe it.

Just a week ago, Fox Tao's single-day sales were only 200,000!

In just a few short days, the numbers had multiplied dozens of times over?

"Principal, the order data Mama Ali sent back has a 15-minute lag. The actual sales will only be higher. The data team will recalibrate tomorrow based on the orders in Mama Ali's backend."

Chen Yansen's answer left no room for doubt.

Special e-commerce events like Double Eleven only come around a few times a year — he didn't want to explain any further.

After all, the more successful Fox Tao was, the more comfortable his days at Xucheng Academy would be!

And the connections and resources a university principal possessed were beyond ordinary imagination — this was also the main reason he had chosen to start his business within the university.

"Teacher Cao, give the logistics department a heads-up and have the faculty cafeteria prepare fifty servings of late-night snacks and send them to the startup park." Tang Qingshan nodded in satisfaction and instructed Cao Dahua.

"Got it, I'll step out and make a call to arrange it." Cao Dahua nodded hurriedly in reply. Before heading downstairs, he couldn't help but take a long look at Chen Yansen — this kid really knows how to make waves.

Here he was already lying in bed at home, and he still got dragged out!

If it happens too often, the body will have problems!

……

……

Hangcheng, Mama Ali's headquarters was ablaze with lights.

"Daniel, GMV has broken 900 million — just one step from 1 billion. With four hours left, we can definitely hit President Ma's target."

A subordinate walked into Zhang Yong's office, face flushed with excitement, and reported loudly.

"Why is the sales generated by the Mama Ali Alliance 5.1% higher than its usual share? Have you traced the source of the data?"

Zhang Yong stared fixedly at the data and analyzed calmly.

"It's a comparison shopping site called Fox Tao. From just after midnight, it funneled 200,000 visits into Taobao's main site. We just had the data department tally it up — their cumulative sales today are 12 million."

The subordinate answered truthfully.

Fox Tao?

A comparison shopping e-commerce site with single-day sales reaching the tens of millions?

This piece of news caught Zhang Yong somewhat off guard.

He even felt the idea of meeting the other party stirring in his heart.

Double Eleven was the e-commerce holiday gimmick he himself had come up with — the higher the other side's sales, the more advantageous it was for him.

(End of this chapter)