At 7:40 Monday night, in front of the computer in his rented room, Lin Fan read the notice from beginning to end three times.
Someone had reported the shop for selling counterfeit branded goods. The listing had been suspended, and he had to upload proof of purchase for the batch before the deadline. If the documents failed review, the shop would lose points and the listing would be taken down.
The reports had come in a little after three that afternoon. Three of them, all around the same time.
He opened the review. "Don't buy these fakes." Five words. The order had been placed that afternoon, and the shipping field was still blank.
The goods hadn't even left the door, yet someone had already decided they were fake.
He scrolled back through the orders. There were another six or seven placed that afternoon but left unpaid, with buyer names that looked more and more like random keystrokes.
He didn't need to guess anymore.
A real buyer who thought something was wrong with the goods would complain, demand a return, or send a screenful of question marks. No buyer would quietly place an order, leave it unpaid, then post a bad review for goods they hadn't received—all in the same afternoon.
It was a competitor.
Of the boot sellers in Hangzhou, he didn't need to investigate to know who was hurting most right now.
His listing was priced at thirty-nine. Similar first-hand stock on the market started at fifty-eight. That gap was bound to sting whoever it cut into.
Just over two weeks ago, he had stood outside that factory in Wenzhou and watched their man sit beside a truck on a little stool, checking the count box by box. They had put down a six-figure deposit and booked up five or six factories in the production area from early October until the start of spring. The whole point was to make sure every fur-trimmed boot sold that winter passed through their hands.
Then a Hangzhou shop popped up selling fur-trimmed ankle boots for thirty-nine.
Anyone would have hit the roof.
Footsteps thudded in the corridor. Ma Le pushed the door open, still holding a roll of packing tape.
"Bro, a regular customer just asked why he couldn't open our listing."
"We got reported. They said we're selling fakes."
Ma Le's face went white.
"Selling fakes?" He darted over in two strides, his head nearly touching the screen. "If they shut the shop down, it's my name on the license. And there are still a hundred and twenty boxes in your mom's place."
"They're not shutting us down."
"We can't just sit here and wait, though." Ma Le straightened, then slapped his thigh. "Hang on. Don't you work over there? You're one of those platform guys yourself. Find someone you know and explain it. You don't even have to give your name. Just ask casually."
Lin Fan didn't look up.
It was the best idea Ma Le could come up with. Any other seller would have thought of it first. With hundreds of thousands of shops on the platform, who wouldn't ask around if he knew someone on the inside?
But of everyone on the platform, Lin Fan was the one person who couldn't take that route.
The building he entered every day with his staff badge handled exactly this kind of thing. If he asked, someone might check whose name the shop was under, who bought the stock, and which account paid for it. Once they started pulling that thread, he wouldn't even make it to year's end. He could be packing to go home tomorrow. Dismissal, recovery of earnings, an industry-wide notice—he knew those terms better than anyone.
Other sellers could turn to someone when trouble hit. He could only use the public appeal process available to everyone, and he had to keep his record cleaner than theirs.
"We're not asking anyone." He turned his chair back to the computer. "I'll upload the documents myself."
There was only one thing to do: submit all the proof before the deadline and get the listing live again.
It had already been down for most of the afternoon. Another day's delay would make it two days, and there were only nine days left until November eleventh.
Every day the listing stayed down meant one less day of sales and reviews. Its search ranking had only just climbed to the second page, and now it would start slipping. When shoppers flooded Taobao on Double Eleven, what they searched for and which shops they clicked would depend on the foundation built order by order over these nine days.
He had the documents, and they were solid.
That day in Wenzhou, after they had counted out the money, Factory Director Ye had rubbed his hands and thanked him at length. Lin Fan had asked an old worker who was staying behind for a sheet of paper, crouched over a cardboard box, and written out a receipt line by line: payment settled in full, two thousand pairs, ten yuan and fifty cents per pair, dated that day. At the end, each of them had pressed a thumbprint onto it.
Factory Director Ye had laughed at the time, saying that in twenty years of doing business, he had never seen a buyer write himself a receipt.
The second piece of proof was the waybill. Factory Director Ye had personally taken the goods to the freight depot early the next morning and sent them on the direct route to Hangzhou. The tracking number had arrived by text. Lin Fan had picked up the goods in Jianqiao on Wednesday afternoon, and he still had the collection slip.
The third—and most concrete—piece of proof was the goods themselves.
The foreign lettering was still on the boxes, as were the seals. He hadn't thrown away a single inspection card from inside them. This was export stock inspected by overseas buyers; even the stitching was tighter than on the first-hand stock sold locally.
They accused him of selling counterfeit branded goods, but he had never put a brand name anywhere on the listing. The title had only a few terms: fur trim, ankle boots, thickened lining, genuine leather soles. They could comb through the page and never find anything else.
And he could learn something else from the whole ordeal.
The other side was desperate enough to act. That told him someone had noticed this batch of shoes and taken it seriously. No one would bother with all this over a no-name little shop that didn't matter.
Besides, they had made their move nine days before Double Eleven. Too early.
Three reports, one bad review, a handful of unpaid orders—that was their playbook, and they had already shown it. Now he knew what to expect over the next few days.
He pulled the receipt from the innermost compartment of his backpack. The paper had grown soft from being pressed flat, and the thumbprints in the lower right corner had darkened to a deep red.
He found the collection slip in a drawer and scrolled back through some thirty text messages on his phone. The one with the waybill number was still there.
Taking Ma Le's digital camera, the two of them went downstairs and opened the garage.
They raised the rolling door halfway. Boxes of boots were stacked chest-high. Lin Fan opened a box on the outside and photographed the foreign lettering on its side, the seal, the inspection card inside, and the label on the boot's tongue, one by one. Then he took out a pair, set them on a newspaper, and photographed them from both sides.
"This counts as proof?" Ma Le asked, crouching beside him with a flashlight.
"It does."
At a quarter to nine, the print shop by the entrance to the residential complex was still lit. The owner was just getting ready to close.
The receipt, the collection slip, and the waybill stub: three scans, one yuan apiece.
Back home, he uploaded them and wrote four lines in the explanation field. The goods were export-order cancellations from a foreign-trade shoe factory in Wenzhou. The paperwork was complete. The product page had never named any brand, and the person reporting him hadn't even specified which brand the shoes supposedly copied.
He clicked Submit, and a line appeared saying the documents were awaiting review.
He left the computer on.
He filed an appeal against the bad review too. Order number, order time, shipping status—laid out together, they showed the package hadn't even been collected. Yet the reviewer had already declared the goods fake. There was no way to make that add up.
He copied down the names of all three reporting accounts, one by one, and added them to the appeal along with the six or seven accounts behind the unpaid orders.
While he was at it, he changed the listing's inventory setting so stock would only be reduced after payment. From then on, anyone who placed an order without paying couldn't tie up a single pair.
At nine the next morning, he sat back down at his desk to check merchant qualifications, opening other sellers' business licenses, authorization letters, and purchase orders one after another until his eyes ached.
His three images were now somewhere in another queue inside the same building. How many cases were ahead of his, how long it would take—like any seller outside, he had no one to ask.
A little after four that afternoon, his phone buzzed in his pocket. Ma Le had texted: the listing was open again.
When he got home that evening, he saw the documents had passed review and sales had resumed. The "Don't buy these fakes" review had been removed. A new one beneath it said the fur lining was thicker than expected.
The listing had been down for more than a day, breaking their run of orders. But from nine that night until they finished work, thirteen orders came in—more than on either of the two days before the suspension. Regular customers had placed a day's worth of pent-up orders all at once.
Ma Le spent the whole evening sealing boxes at the garage entrance. After the last one, he straightened and asked, "That's it? It's over?"
"It's over."
"I thought this would drag on for ten days, maybe half a month." Ma Le tossed the tape roll onto a shelf. "Bro, what's wrong with these people? We sell ours for thirty-nine. What did we ever do to them?"
"We did plenty."
The other side had been testing them. Now they knew: the reports hadn't worked, the paperwork was real, and so were the goods.
There were plenty of ways to kill a shop.
Someone who made a move nine days before Double Eleven wasn't going to sit back and watch on the eleventh.
"Find half a day in the next couple of days." Lin Fan pulled down the garage door. "Come with me to the west side of the city. We'll restack the boxes by size. Put the thirty-sixes and thirty-sevens by the door."
"Why sort them now?"
"There won't be time later."
Before you continue