Starting around April, many distributor friends have been calling me, saying business is particularly tough this year. This sounds familiar—almost every year, business gets worse. They ask for advice, and soon the conversation turns to whether cooperating with community group buying platforms is still an opportunity, whether opening stores on Pinduoduo can still make money, and whether the recent popularity of membership warehouse clubs is worth pursuing.

After talking with a dozen or so distributors, I noticed a common trait: they tend to seek solutions externally rather than internally. What does that mean? When business is tough, they don't first look at their own issues—like whether their management has problems, whether their sales staff's performance pay is flawed, whether their distribution density is insufficient, or whether their product placement is correct. Instead, they habitually attribute the difficulty to external factors: the industry downturn, intense market competition, and the impact of e-commerce.

Indeed, these external factors do cause sales declines, but few distributors consider whether there is room for optimization in their own management and refinement to pull sales back when facing a harsh environment. It's understandable that pulling sales back isn't the key to solving the decline; finding a second growth curve is the priority. New business opportunities under new circumstances might be the antidote distributors are looking for. This article doesn't discuss how distributors can seek solutions internally; rather, it follows their mindset and focuses on the directions they can take when seeking externally, hoping to provide some inspiration and food for thought.

-01- "Seeking Externally" 1: Cross-Online Business

The online business here refers not only to Taobao, Pinduoduo, and JD.com, but also to live-streaming e-commerce and community group buying that have emerged in the past two years.

The pandemic and the rise of community group buying have, I believe, had a profound impact on the offline market. This impact is not just about direct sales cannibalization; it's more about changing perceptions and educating distributors, making them realize that a bottle of drink, a bag of chips, or a carton of milk can be sold online, not just offline. Online transactions with offline delivery—except the delivery isn't the traditional courier service we used to know.

Seeing these changes, many distributors have considered going online. Since online is the trend and the future, and it's so hot now, can I do it? Regarding whether online is viable, it's not absolute to say yes or no. I'll provide five dimensions to help distributors judge. If you have the following advantages, I think you can consider it. Conversely, if you don't, you might as well forget it.

First, Cost Advantage

This cost includes two aspects: courier costs and procurement costs. For example, some distributors are in Yiwu, Zhejiang, which clearly gives them a courier cost advantage. If you deal in high-value goods like daily chemicals or seasonings, you can leverage the courier cost advantage, obtain brand authorization, and operate standardizedly on Pinduoduo, JD.com, or Tmall—there's an opportunity. On the procurement side, if you're a large distributor, you can get favorable policies from upstream suppliers. Compared to the same brand online, if you have a clear price advantage, that's also worth considering.

Why do I still think online business is an opportunity for distributors with cost advantages, even though traditional e-commerce is so mature? The core is that distributors who have scaled up understand corporate operations. In fact, many online sellers are still mom-and-pop operations without scale or system. Some offline trading companies with standardized operations know how to work as a team and divide functions. Teamwork has a clear operational advantage over individual businesses. With the support of cost advantages and long-term business goals, online business can be done.

Of course, if your offline business is only 30-40 million or 50-60 million yuan, I suggest you don't consider going online. If you haven't done well in your own territory, don't think about grabbing others' business.