Workplace reviews and discussion: 敦樸企業股份有限公司

To be honest, the relatively free environment and spacious office.

Unfortunately, everything else was a drawback. For the past one to two months, I had been applying for e-commerce operations positions. During my interview, photography and video were mentioned, but not extensively, since my photography, videography, and image-editing skills are not particularly strong. As an e-commerce operations specialist, listing and delisting products, shipping, advertising analysis, and operations are the main priorities of e-commerce. During the second interview, they also hoped that I could integrate the e-commerce operations. Although I felt it would be difficult, it should not have been a major issue if there had been a relevant contact person.

When I first joined, I already felt that something was unusual because the very large office was extremely spacious. During the interview, they said the company had products listed for sale on Amazon, Shopee, and JD.com. However, the company's products generally had poor reviews. When I opened the relevant backends, I even found a large number of serious customer complaints alleging that the products leaked and caught fire violently after purchase. In addition, the owner asked me as soon as I joined to write a three-month work plan and PDCA. It was genuinely difficult for me to provide that immediately upon starting.

Later, my supervisor asked me to provide product keywords. At the time, I naturally assumed this would not be a major problem: I could simply extract backend data and use it as the basis for optimization and refinement. However, the company had stopped all advertising activities after March or April. Aside from inferring keywords from competitors, I could only provide a new keyword report based on the performance of advertising keywords from six months earlier.

Because the owner had no understanding of e-commerce whatsoever, and the supervisor had a sales background, I carried out advertising activities, product tracking, and so on based on what I could do personally. However, because the company had long lacked proper e-commerce management, many products that had been discontinued several years earlier were still sitting on the shelves. Some inventory had been in storage for more than two years, and the brand store lacked proper construction, design, and products. Many products had ratings that were too low and needed to be relisted. However, because the company's division of responsibilities and handovers were unclear, it was difficult to obtain product codes. The lack of graphic and design personnel also made it genuinely difficult to relist the products.

After completing the basic remediation of the e-commerce operations, the owner expected me to launch new platforms on other sites for sales. However, the company's credit-card information was disorganized, making the task difficult to accomplish. After the FBM listings were completed, the warehouse could not provide packing slips for shipping (Amazon UK), and also had only a vague understanding of the products' length, width, and height. In addition, the packaging descriptions did not match the actual measurements, and there was a considerable difference between the weights before and after packaging. At that point, I did not even know whether the official website could be trusted. In fact, the PDI sheet, official website, and e-commerce backends were completely inconsistent. The PDI sheet was manually updated daily by a contact in mainland China, so its reliability could not be clearly determined.

In addition, the HR employee who also handled finance seriously lacked an understanding of advertising. All advertising budgets had to be divided into separate installments, like slicing a sausage, with each installment requested separately. As a result, many ads with excellent ACOS performance died in the process. This method seriously disrupted ad operations and made it difficult to analyze and review different advertising behaviors. It also often forced products with fundamentally different selling points into a single budget package. This frequently wasted large amounts of clicks and exposure, which was extremely regrettable. To make matters worse, unlike at ordinary companies where HR and finance provide paper forms to facilitate procedures, or where digitization allows them to help track processes, this person simply opened the electronic approval system and told you to do it yourself, even though it should have been their job. Their attitude when providing instructions was also unfriendly.

In addition, because the owner acted without careful consideration, while I was employed I took over an explanation concerning products that were difficult to relist because they had received one- and two-star reviews, in the hope of helping. The owner directly canceled the outsourced operations contract, even though the company's Google keyword backend had been created by the outsourced operator and no one at the company knew what was in the backend...

Aside from the frustrations of ordinary work, there were also many meaningless meetings that often lasted several hours. Meetings with the mainland China contact and the owner often lacked meaning and conclusions from an e-commerce perspective. At the same time, I could clearly sense the irresponsible attitude and working style of the mainland China contact.

The company's shipping department only began taking action after I urged them, even though six cross-border e-commerce shipping orders had already been delayed for a week. They even asked me to create a spreadsheet so they could calculate shipments (Amazon FBM). Not only were the quantities counted incorrectly, but because the owner chose the cheapest shipping method, the shipment was expected to arrive in the United States two weeks later. I do not know which ordinary B2C buyer would accept waiting three to four weeks for something purchased online to ship, especially when the price was several times higher than those of competitors. In addition, right before e-commerce promotional campaigns, the company basically doubled the product prices...

While business matters were constantly stalled and time was wasted, it was often possible to hear the owner yelling at people from his office. I almost never heard the owner not scolding someone. If employees frequently hear the owner yelling in the office, morale can easily be affected. In addition, the owner liked to exploit employees' time and services cheaply. I was repeatedly asked to take product photos and produce videos, even though I had already said during the interview that I was not very capable in these areas and would need support and training. The owner would even consider keeping you in a meeting until 8 p.m. an appropriate use of his valuable time, or ask you to cut flowers and grass. I was also asked to support the company on Saturdays and Sundays. There was no overtime pay; at most, I could take compensatory days off, and they even said this was because of my low job grade.

The final straw was two things:

1. The mainland China “consultant” questioned me about why I had changed the e-commerce prices, even though the prices had been set by the owner. The consultant had not even done the work before coming after me...

2. The supervisor clearly said that a Japanese agent would handle Yahoo Japan and Amazon Japan, but then said that the agent had already listed the products but would not operate the stores, and asked me to take over. Since I work in e-commerce, apparently my value was that I could do it. However, the next day I discovered that Amazon JP was blank. I told my supervisor that I did not speak Japanese, but he still expected me to translate the Amazon US content into Chinese and then into Japanese. I replied that the buyers were Japanese, but he said, “What else can we do? I don’t know.”

So I resigned that afternoon...