Came across this article that eBay is getting out of China. The report indicate that eBay is planning to sell the eBay and PayPal business in China to Tom.com.
Those following online business in China may recall that eBay brought Eachnet about 2 years ago making the founder (forgotten his name) one of the riches guy in China.
Yahoo also sold their operation to Alibaba last year. And Alibaba again is behind the site Taobao which is eating eBay’s pie in China.
Reading the comment that follows the article, I have to agree that eBay do not know how the fine art of doing business in China.
Also mentioned, the undercurrent of protectionism is very real. Certain policies are unwritten but through execution can legally create barriers. In the offline arena, Walmart is also feeling similar heat.
It is worth noting that there are incentives to grow local (ie Chinese) business that can compete with their foreign, especially US, counterpart.
For the intrepid entrepreneur, it means there are still plenty to do in China.
This may sounds familiar.
You did everything right and was expecting to deliver a job well done to the customer. Then out of nowhere problem came. What’s worst part is that the problem was not caused by you and there is no way you would have anticipated that.
Just this shit happened to me last week and the aftermath dragged on to this week.
We did a job for a client, exceed their expectation, below budget and well within schedule. How perfect can it get? We were going to surprise the customer. But alas, we were suprised instead.
The first sign of storm came when the customer emailed us to say that they did no received the goods at the specified time. We called the shipper and was told it was in the custom processing. That was before the weekend so everyone happily put it at the back of the mind.
Last Wednesday, another email. This time the warning sounded.
Countless calls later we dugged up a whole can of worms. How the whole thing could happen still baffles me. Some might say “Well, it is China.”
Suffice to say some heads rolled but that isn’t going to save us. The goods that was supposed to be in the customer’s hand is now sitting somewhere held ransom! It wasn’t our problem but we got dragged in nevertheless.
More calls and negotiation later, the boxes of goods returned back to our office. By now we are now a week late. Digging into our pocket we sent some of the goods via UPS so that the customer could use them immediately. That arrived today. The rest of the goods is leaving office tomorrow.
Hopefully no surprises this time. But who know, touch wood.
Recent Comments