Chapter 530 - 388: Admit Your Faults and Take Your Punishment! Big Business Starts from a Small County

Xucheng, Delta Villa District, Villa 108.

"Your massage technique is pretty good. You seem like a real pro."

Chen Yansen was lying on a soft couch, his eyes slightly narrowed in an expression of pure bliss.

Ye Qiuping chuckled softly. Instead of lingering on the topic, she changed the subject to the Jingdong product bug. "Boss, do you think Liu Qiangdong will honor the orders?"

"It’s only 50 million. Handsome Dong can definitely afford it. It just depends on how he weighs the pros and cons," Chen Yansen said casually.

If he wanted to win over users, he should just bite the bullet and accept the loss. You have to own up to your mistakes and take the hit.

Regardless of the reason, since customers were able to place orders and pay successfully, it meant the transaction was valid.

If there was a mistake, it was Jingdong’s fault, not the users’.

If he didn’t want to lose money, he could just cancel the orders and pay ten or twenty yuan in compensation.

After all, the order price was only one yuan. Wouldn’t that count as ten times the compensation?

He remembered clearly that Jingdong would be plagued by similar bugs for the next decade-plus.

For example, seven years from now, a Jingdong operator would mistakenly change a 200 yuan coupon, originally for a limited category with no minimum spend, into a coupon for all home appliances. This resulted in ovens selling for just 6 yuan, rice cookers for 3 yuan, and electric kettles for 1 yuan, causing losses of fifty to sixty million.

But that time, Liu Qiangdong had honored the sales and shipped the products without hesitation.

Right now, however, Jingdong wasn’t nearly as wealthy as it would be in a few years. It was hard to say whether he’d acknowledge the orders.

All you could say was that Jingdong’s back-end system was a pain to use. Otherwise, how could there be so many bugs?

"If Pinbei had a similar pricing loophole and the losses exceeded 50 million, would you have the merchants ship the orders normally?" Ye Qiuping asked.

"Conducting a post-mortem on the incident is more important than the 50 million, and finding a solution is even more important than the post-mortem," Chen Yansen replied slowly.

Pinbei’s merchant back-end had an algorithmic error-correction mechanism. For an item that normally sold for 100 yuan, if the price was changed to less than 30% of the original, the system would trigger a pop-up reminder, adding a secondary confirmation step.

For the platform itself, if there were more than 100 orders with abnormal prices, an alarm was automatically triggered, and the involved product was immediately delisted. This reduced the risk of people exploiting the system.

As for why Jingdong was so bug-ridden?

Who the hell knew!

"A little harder!"

Chen Yansen rolled over and ordered Ye Qiuping.

Ye Qiuping giggled, her hands tracing the edges of President Chen’s abs.

"What do you think you’re doing?" Chen Yansen demanded with a stern face.

’She actually dares to be so insubordinate!’

"Giving you a massage," Ye Qiuping replied coquettishly, squirming a little.

"There’s a problem with your technique. Let me teach you. Remember, I’m only demonstrating this once," Chen Yansen said with a straight face.

Before he could finish, a pair of large hands reached out.

Meanwhile, Liu Qiangdong sat on his sofa. He had been racking his brain for hours but still couldn’t make a decision.

In the meantime, he had spoken with the Market Supervision Association.

He tentatively mentioned Xu Lei’s proposed solution, but their response was noncommittal, their attitude unclear.

Logically, canceling the orders and compensating ten times the value shouldn’t have been a problem.

But the transaction price was only 1 yuan, while the actual value of the products was close to 1,000 yuan. Nobody would agree to a compensation of just 10 or 20 yuan.

’These sons of bitches are all garbage users, just here to exploit loopholes. Does Jingdong need them? No!’

’Keeping one’s word is important for a businessman, but it’s also not. If we lose our users, how far can Jingdong go?’

Whenever Liu Qiangdong closed his eyes, it felt like two voices were arguing in his head.

Just as he was wavering, Zhang Jindong of Sunning posted a taunt on Weibo: "If Sunning encountered this kind of situation, we would definitely honor the contract. From a contract law perspective, the moment a user completes an order, the contract is formed."

The implication was that if Jingdong dared not to fulfill the contract, users could sue them.

He was clearly fanning the flames!

At three o’clock that afternoon, Jingdong began canceling user orders in bulk. All orders with a quantity greater than one were canceled.

However, orders with a quantity of one were kept.

Liu Qiangdong’s stance was clear: the people exploiting the loophole weren’t real Jingdong users, but rather gray and black market operators.

In the end, they calculated that they only needed to bear a loss of just over 20 million to appease 99% of the users who had placed orders.

Although the loss was still significant, compared to 50 million, it wasn’t unbearable.

Furthermore, the bug incident on Jingdong’s Group Buy channel had trended on Weibo, driving a lot of traffic to the new product. They could just consider it money spent on marketing and promotion.

But those who had placed orders for tens, hundreds, or even thousands of items were not happy. After Jingdong canceled their orders, they were only compensated ten yuan.

Ten yuan?

What a fucking insult!

Instantly, the Yanjing City Supervision Association’s landline was flooded with complaint calls from Jingdong users across the country as soon as business hours began.

Among them, Li Chang, who had placed 3,000 orders, even appeared on the public affairs program *Jinling Close-up*.

Unexpectedly, instead of receiving sympathy, he was met with a barrage of criticism.

"3,000 orders? Is he crazy?!"

"Liu Qiangdong, fire your entire tech team."

When Jingdong’s R&D staff saw this comment, their vision went dark, and they cursed under their breath, ’What the hell does this have to do with tech? This is the testing and operations teams’ fault!’

"Come on, you can’t be that shameless! Other people buy one, you buy 3,000. Is that reasonable?"

Of course, some people did support Li Chang. Their main issue was with Jingdong unilaterally canceling user orders, which made netizens feel that e-commerce platforms were too domineering and could manipulate user accounts at will.

In that case, was the balance they kept in Jingdong Pay even safe?

The direction of online public opinion quickly shifted.

Chen Yansen realized something was wrong. He immediately sensed someone was fanning the flames from behind the scenes—perhaps a bank, or maybe a financial company.

He immediately called Zhang Yinjia. After a discussion, Orange Pay’s operations department urgently issued an announcement: "If you lose a single cent, we’ll pay you a million."

If a user’s Orange Pay account balance was short by even one cent, the platform would pay out one million Hua Yuan in compensation.

It was an extremely forceful response!

Upon learning of Orange Pay’s response, Ma Liyun and Ma Wenteng immediately smelled a conspiracy. They reacted quickly, adopting the same strategy.

WeChat Pay announced publicly: "If you lose a single cent, we’ll pay you five million."

Wealth Treasure’s slogan was: "If you lose a single cent, we’ll pay you ten million."

Senlian Capital, Ah Li, and Penguin were powerhouses. As China’s top-tier internet companies, even though someone was trying to stir up trouble, the panic instantly dissipated in the face of their three statements.

In particular, Yu’e Bao’s "Share 10 Billion in Trial Funds" event was completely unaffected.

The person at the top of the leaderboard already held over 30 million!

Second place: 29.7 million!

Third place: 28.4 million!

Fourth place: 4.9 million!

Evidently, there were currently three people vying to have lunch with President Chen.

The next day, the "National Master," Zhang Yimou, responded for the first time to accusations of violating the one-child policy.

It was like a single stone setting off a thousand waves. The news exploded across all major web portals, Weibo, and Toutiao.

The attention on the Jingdong bug incident rapidly faded.

Although Liu Qiangdong’s move was risky, it also won him some public goodwill.

Chang Wei of Little Yellow Bike also dodged a bullet. After successively launching the "Instant Refund" and "Top-Up Deposit" features, users slowly began to forget about the previous deposit refund scandal.

On March 11, Yiguan Data’s long-awaited Group Buy industry report finally announced the core data for February.

First place, unsurprisingly, was still Kuai Pao, with a monthly transaction volume of 1.76 billion.

Competitors couldn’t help but gasp when they saw the numbers.

You had to remember, February had the Spring Festival, meaning half the month was an industry-wide off-season.

How did Kuai Pao manage it?

’This growth rate is insane!’

Based on the February data, wouldn’t March break 2 billion?!

Second place: Qian Du Group Buy (Lashou Network), with a monthly transaction volume of 1.13 billion.

Third place: Dianping, with a monthly transaction volume of 760 million.

Fourth place: Meituan, with a monthly transaction volume of 390 million.

Wang Xin immediately jumped out to refute the report, claiming Meituan’s actual transaction volume for February was 460 million Hua Yuan.

But industry insiders knew that ever since Juhuasuan terminated its partnership with Meituan, Meituan’s business volume had shrunk again. It would be perfectly normal for it to be below 400 million.

’Meituan is about to be eliminated!’

The Matthew effect in the Group Buy industry was pronounced. Kuai Pao was leading the pack, with Qian Du Group Buy following closely behind, and Dianping barely hanging on.

But Chen Yansen wasn’t satisfied with the expansion speed of Kuai Pao’s Group Buy business. A monthly transaction volume of just over a billion meant a daily average of less than a hundred million.

In his view, the Group Buy industry’s potential was yet to be fully tapped.

After conquering the first- and second-tier cities, there were still third- and fourth-tier cities, as well as county-level markets.

Therefore, under his direction, Pei Yi selected 10 counties in Huian Province as pilot sites to test the business potential of county-level markets.

If the net profit generated each month could cover the costs of manpower, promotion, and management, then they would extend their business reach to the county and town level a year ahead of schedule.

...

...

「Chunshen, Chessboard Street.」

"Wang Bin, my boy, are you really the big boss’s classmate?" asked the leader of the trio, on-the-ground sales manager Wang Tianming.

"Heh, why would I lie to you?" Wang Bin replied smugly.

He was indeed Chen Yansen’s high school classmate, but they hadn’t interacted much. You could count the number of words they’d spoken to each other over three years of high school on one hand.

"The gap between people can be so huge," Wang Tianming remarked subconsciously.

"Brother Wang, if you don’t have anything nice to say, you don’t have to say anything at all," Wang Bin said glumly, his face falling.

"Alright, you’re not doing too bad yourself. The boss is still in school, and you’re already working. Doesn’t that make you feel a bit better?"

Wang Tianming offered the comfort with a dry laugh.

’Fuck!’

’That’s because I went to a vocational college! The school kicked me out before I even graduated.’

Wang Bin felt even worse.

"Brother Wang, we need to hit the streets!" the other young man urged.

The three of them were all on-the-ground salespeople for Kuai Pao. Wang Tianming was a key employee transferred from Luzhou, while Wang Bin and the other guy were local hires.

In this huge county, the three of them were the entire business development team.

If they could sign up all the restaurants, hotels, KTVs, movie theaters, and foot massage parlors, they could easily make a few hundred thousand a year in commission.

"Big Head’s right. Making money is what matters most. The weather’s cool this morning, so let’s use the time to sign up a few more places," Wang Tianming said with a nod.

"Brother Wang, my name is Wu Xingyu. If you call me Big Head again, I’m going to start calling you Old Wang," Wu Xingyu said, annoyed.

"Okay, Big Head. You take South Street, Wang Bin, you take North Street," Wang Tianming replied with a grin.

’Motherf...!’

Wu Xingyu shot him a furious glare.