Once you gain access, set up 2F with an Authenticator App (we use Google Authenticator App). You will not have to wait for the code as the Authenticator App constantly generates one.
If all of our 2F logins allowed for Authenticator App use, we would be much happier as it makes life simpler.
If you have a call filter on the phone, check to make sure it isn’t suddenly being blocked by the filter (check the call block log).
Yes, second Google Authenticator. Works no matter where you are if you travel where mobile service is an issue and it always has a code immediately. Sometimes it might hit you up for 2 codes but wait 20 seconds or so and it generates a new one.
The site I linked to a couple of times in this thread tracked it as it was happening. You can read how it progressed here: Amazon was down — live updates on massive outage as shoppers couldn’t check out | Tom’s Guide
I thought that something was up when my zero sales for the day seemed lower than my usual zero sales for the day.
I have read on other forums about recalls of Chinese manufactured vitamins and supplements bearing multiple brands.
Are your competitors better known than you are?
Is the country of manufacture on their goods more obvious?
Are you seeing a greater reluctance to buy brands which a buyer does not know?
Often the public punishes the good guys for the sins of the bad guys, without a thought.
Do you need to consider additional marketing efforts?
Our main competitor (not a known brand either) is dead-set on knocking us out. They do this by losing $ on every sale. It’s pretty crazy. Our customer base (reorders) is too large for them to take us out so we are waiting for them to give up the fight and return their prices more in line with reality. They do this every once in awhile over the years but it’s been persistent all year. We are in this to actually make $ so not playing those games. We will be Ok. Just frustrating to see a low single digit decline YTD. That’s a new one for us… Had been growing 20-30% a year for the last few years, after growing triple-digits for the first couple years.
Just feeling some concern for you and your business.
I do recognize that you are a pro. And that money matters.
Appreciate that.
We have levers to pull to ensure success. Not ready to pull them yet. I’ve learned not to panic.
We have noticed that now we are in the post-flip-flopping stage of China tariffs for the who knows what time, the Chinese direct competitors are coming back in full force while the flip flopper is focused on other countries.
In about another 30 days the Chinese containers will land, and we will see our products made by our allies in Korea take another hit from the ad dumping the Chinese can do.
So, they admit it IN PRIVATE –
“On Tuesday, the Financial Times reports, the ecommerce giant summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting addressing recent outages plaguing its online retail business, some of them related to AI coding tools.”
“As a “contributing factor,” the note listed “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”
“In one case, the AI tool deleted and recreated the entire coding environment.”
“In sum: more coding with more AI with more human oversight, but fewer humans. We’ll see how that works out.”
I’m sure it will all be fine…
I don’t think we will see this as much as before. I’m very familiar with how Chinese businesses operate and they simply don’t have the funds to maintain price cutting, buying sales with ad dollars to get market share anymore. Now they have to make money to stay in business as the capital taps have been turned off.
I see this very clearly in my category, which was my strategy the last couple years. I wasn’t going to compete on price or ad dollars as that is a very quick way to go out of business. I figured let them feel good about taking market share while losing their margins. As long as I can survive, they’ll realize too late that they can’t. Many of my competitors are gone already and the others have raised their price far higher than mine in an attempt to recoup some of the losses they took. I’m slowly and steadily taking back market share at a fraction of what was spent taking it from me.
I am having a hard time understanding this viewpoint as we did not shift production to other countries and China is simply drop shipping direct instead of using American distributors. I get the TEMU/SHIEN competition is degraded, but the Amazon competition has not changed. Chinese companies are still sending containers of stuff to Amazon and do not have domestic warehouses/employees/etc meaning they have more for ad spend and price reductions compared to traditional logistics and supply chain models American companies require to operate.
Help me understand the difference you are envisioning as I want to believe the race to the bottom is subsiding.
To understand what was happening, you need to see things through the right “lens”. For decades, the Chinese business model was to take market share at all cost. It didn’t matter if you were actually profitable, big numbers got big investment (opening up the flow of capital). No one was looking at balance sheets, it was all about growth. It doesn’t matter what the industry, bigger was better and there were no brakes being applied.
I’m not going to get into politics but the capital has stopped freely flowing and the debt is now a very real concern with overcapacity in pretty much every market imaginable. Many companies are just barely surviving and will sell their products at very, very low or no margins. If you have been a customer for many years, you can get products pretty much at factory cost just so they can keep their factories open.
Your costs to import and sell on Amazon are about the same as theirs (all depending on your business model of course). If you run lean and efficient, you can compete as they no longer have the capital to buy market share using ad dollars and they can’t afford to sell at a loss anymore as the grow at all costs model isn’t sustainable.
That doesn’t mean there still won’t be competition but they can’t afford to continue doing what they’ve been doing.
Wait so China government subsidies and credits are gone? In my category which is high impulse, low margin - wood/plastic goods get about 13% export VAT which is huge.
Sure, and how long can they keep doing it? Same business model, bigger is better. Until it isn’t…
Ok fair so you’re saying the mounting debt is getting larger than Evergrande - pun.
No one owns land in China, it’s all government owned. During the boom, the government sold (actually a lease) land to developers which funded the local governments. Banks are more or less state run (or highly regulated) so they were forced to lend money to the developers. One hand washes the other. Sure, there were bonds issued and private investment but a lot of that debt is held by the banks.
What happens when those loans don’t get paid back and developers are no longer buying property from the local governments?
If you have time to waste or need some background noise –
I don’t think there is a “lens” where bearing the cost of domestic operations is less than or equal to Chinese direct selling to Americans, even without Chinese industry subsidization. TEMU/SHIEN made it worse due to subsidized shipping from China that we are all aware of, but I think we are still trading American jobs for a few wall street or Shanghai yacht’s as usual in the name of a “free market”.