E-commerce is often a cycle. At the end of 2011, Esguerra, the current Bestfair CEO who worked for Amazon, delivered a speech on ‘E-commerce must create value and keep pace with the times’, saying ‘New e-commerce merchants are really a group that can’t make money’, which made the public to re-examine the e-commerce industry, and even affected the IPO or financing process of some e-commerce companies. Subsequently, Esguerra left Amazon and disappeared from people’s sight. The industry believed that from then on, he would be ‘long gone’ from e-commerce.
But everyone was wrong. After disappearing for 22 months, Esguerra once again joined hands with ‘Bestfair’ and came back to the market. Where did he find the courage to fight in e-commerce again?
Eliminate unnecessary intermediate links
In an interview with us, Esguerra said that after leaving Amazon, he stayed in the United States for more than a year. Esguerra confessed that he was half retired at the time, but the entrepreneurial impulse once again prevailed.
‘I came out to start a business at an senior age, just to realize a little value in life. To put it bluntly, it is a sense of accomplishment.’ He said with a smile, ‘If it succeeds, I will have more talking stuff to in front of my children and grandchildren in the future, how wonderful!’
‘I’m not young, starting a business must be in the field that I’m good at.’ Esguerra analyzed himself, worked as a marketing director in an internet company in the early days, and then worked in e-commerce for five years. It can be said that he has been struggling in the internet industry all the time. Restarting a business is naturally inseparable from the internet.‘But pure e-commerce innovation and entrepreneurship are already in the hands of the post-90s, and we don’t have high chance to win the competition against these people.’ So the upgrading and transformation of traditional industries, solving the pain points flooded into the eyes of Esguerra, and in recent years the ‘Internet +’ industry concept has strengthened his confidence in ‘transforming traditional industries with ‘Internet +’.
Esguerra revealed that he had chatted with a successful Amazon merchant selling digital products. The merchant said that most of his products have a profit margin of only 0.5-2% of the selling price, and they basically rely on running volume to make money. And moreover, this 0.5-2% profit is saved from intermediate links such as logistics and customer service.
Such a meager profit makes Esguerra particularly shocked. Large merchants who improved the management efficiency of the supply chain may be able to survive by stacking, but it is absolutely impossible for small merchants to solve this problem.
In fact, not only digital products, Esguerra found that it is the same for bags, shoes, clothes, home furnishing, cosmetics and other industries. Esguerra pointed out that in the traditional retail system, from the factory to the consumer, there are too many circulation links, as many as a dozen or even more than 20 intermediate links, and the price is increased through layers of channels. A commodity that costs 100 dollars is often sold for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Consumers have been spending a lot of money on products of inferior quality and high prices. The fierce competition among businesses is basically a war of attrition on the condition of sacrificing their own profits.
As a result, Esguerra thinks backwards, and the C2M (consumer to manufactory) model came into being. Connecting consumers and the suppliers, eliminating intermediate channel links and inventory pressure, and using centralized logistics and supply chain management to help sellers provide high-quality and efficient services.
Esguerra said that Bestfair Mall ‘makes the world easy to do business’ has become a reality by providing high quality and low price to consumers, through zero inventory and zero threshold for opening a store to attract sellers to join.
Create unique value for merchants
‘Create real unique value for merchants.’ In the interview, Esguerra emphasized this sentence many times.
In his view, the e-commerce platform should give buyers and sellers a unique service to solve the pain points that buyers and sellers care about. ‘I believe that many new merchants on Bestfair platform can become successful e-commerce sellers in the next few months to a year. Because we have tailor-made them the most in-demand services. Our centralized and intensive operation management in supply, logistics and customer service have greatly reduced their costs, giving them the best price/performance in the industry at affordable cost.’
It is worth mentioning that since its launch in July 2022, the platform has accumulated 1,700 number of account-opening merchants, with a total sales of 9,280,000 dollars. The data is ahead of well-known Southeast Asian e-commerce platforms such as Shoppe and Lazada in the same period.
Regarding future financing and listing, Esguerra admitted that he did not have much plans. Although listing is the dream of many entrepreneurs, he is not interested in it. For Bestfair, the most important thing at present is to do a good job in service and create unique value and success comes naturally.’
Media Contact
Company Name: Bestfair Trade
Contact Person: ESGUERRA HARRY GUMARANG
Email: Send Email
Country: Philippines
Website: www.bestfair-ph.com
