The Marketplace Shops Had It Worst Today! While the Whole Team Applauded, His Pocket Was Burning!

At 8:40 on Wednesday morning, seven or eight people were crammed into the company lobby elevator when the phone in his pocket vibrated.

A text from Ma Le. From seven that morning until now: forty-one orders.

Seventy-two orders yesterday, forty-six the day before. And today, forty-one orders in just the first two hours.

It had begun.

When the elevator reached the sixth floor, he followed the crowd out without a trace of expression on his face.

There was nothing he needed to handle today.

This was the hardest day he had faced in the past six months. The shoes were stacked in the west side of the city, the bags piled up in the garage, the sender fields on two thousand shipping labels had all been stamped last night, six students would arrive at eight in the evening, and the courier would make two runs on the eleventh. Everything was over in the residential complex, yet he had to sit in this building until 5:30.

The only thing he could do all day was sit at his workstation and let the thing in his pocket vibrate.

It was not a complete waste of time. He could see most clearly from here what everyone in the group would say today and what expressions they would wear. It might come in useful later.

He started with a price-protection complaint concerning one of the categories under his charge. By the time he finished dealing with it at 9:30, the commotion next door could no longer be contained.

Someone from the women's clothing group shouted that the event page had opened.

The whole room surged toward the hallway.

The mall's event page went live at exactly ten. More than twenty shops were featured in the event, and everyone crowded around the marketing department's computer to watch the numbers.

When the first hour's transaction figures came in, the room fell silent for two seconds before erupting.

"Just one hour?"

"Just one hour."

Some people leaned back in their chairs, while others started calling the merchants in their groups. Zheng Haifeng came out of the meeting room with his phone pressed to his ear, talking as he squeezed toward the computer. He waved off anyone who tried to speak to him.

At 10:40 in the morning, his pocket vibrated.

Ninety-six orders.

At 11:20, one hundred and twenty-seven.

At noon, the cafeteria was half as full as usual. Many people carried their meal boxes back to their workstations to eat. Three or four people sat at Zhou Bin's table, all talking about the event page.

"When today's numbers come out, this day will be a holiday next year." Zhou Bin set down his chopsticks. "Let me tell you something. Who had it worst today? Those little marketplace shops. The twenty-something stores on the event page sucked up everyone on the entire internet. Put up a listing in the marketplace today, and you won't see a single customer all day."

"Brother Zhou's right."

"No event-page slot means no business today." Zhou Bin tapped the tabletop with the tip of his chopsticks. "That shop in my case happened to run into this day. Just watch—if it can get five thousand orders this month, I'll call it damned lucky."

Someone at the table laughed.

Lin Fan kept his head down over his food and did not look up.

The claim that the event page drew in all the traffic was only half right.

The event page had drawn people in, but had they come in just to look at the event page? More than twenty shops could not fill an entire website. Once the flood of users came in, they typed into the search bar, sorted prices from low to high, and screen after screen filled with marketplace shops. More traffic would spill out than remain within the event page—far more. Everyone in the industry would understand that basic truth seventeen years later, but not a single person in this room knew it yet.

Zhou Bin had casually said the number five thousand today.

At 1:30, his pocket vibrated twice. Two hundred and ten orders.

At 2:00, two hundred and sixty-three.

By sometime after three, a merchant qualification document was still open on his screen, but he had not absorbed a single line.

His text inbox was full.

He deleted the earliest few dozen messages one by one until his fingers went numb. Only then did the envelope icon in the upper-right corner of the screen disappear.

As he deleted them, he went over today's curve in his mind.

Forty-one in the first two hours of the morning, two hundred and sixty by noon, rising hour by hour, with the rate of growth itself accelerating. This was not old-customer traffic. Old customers could contribute at most forty or fifty orders a day. These hundreds of orders came from unfamiliar people entering through search, people called online by the event page and then looking for bargains on their own.

That meant the day had not even reached its peak yet.

The daily peak for online activity was at night, from eight to eleven. He had watched that curve for seventeen years in his previous life.

In other words, these two hundred and sixty orders were not today's true volume. They were just the warm-up.

At 3:40, he ran into Su Qing in the hallway. She was hurrying toward the meeting room with a stack of printouts in her arms.

"That shop in your group." She paused for half a step.

"What about it?"

"It's getting orders today. I happened to take a look while pulling event data this morning." She tightened her hold on the papers. "Didn't your guy say the shop would be gone before the New Year?"

"I'm not getting involved in Brother Zhou's conclusions."

"I'll pull a complete report tomorrow." Su Qing left after saying that, her heels clicking all the way down the corridor.

Lin Fan stood there for two seconds before returning to his workstation.

The women's clothing group was the busiest today, busy to the point of madness, yet she had still taken a moment to look. In the entire department, with dozens of people, she was still the only one who would think to click on a small shop that had been sentenced to death on Double Eleven.

At 4:10, Zheng Haifeng came over and slapped his desk. A merchant on the 3C side had listed the wrong event price, customer complaints had come in, and he told Lin Fan to monitor it until it was wrapped up.

He monitored it until 5:20.

At 5:30, as he shut down his computer, Zhou Bin called out to him from the other end of the aisle.

"Lin, first thing tomorrow morning, pull the full-day figures for that shop."

"Today's figures?"

"Today's." Zhou Bin gripped his thermos. "Everyone online came in today, and the event page sucked up all the traffic. What kind of day a shop like that has today shows the problem most clearly. Pull it out and I'll attach it to the final report. This one page will be more useful than ten things I could say."

"Alright. I'll pull it first thing tomorrow."

"That's how you look at a business." Zhou Bin lifted his chin and walked away.

Lin Fan slung on his bag and entered the elevator.

When the elevator descended to the second floor, the thing in his pocket vibrated.

Five hundred and seventeen orders.

He read the text twice, put his phone away, and walked out of the lobby.

In Hangzhou in November, darkness came early. The streetlights were all on, and the roads were full of people hurrying home. He got on his bike. Wind poured down his collar, but his forehead was hot.

Five hundred and seventeen was the number from before he got off work.

The real volume would come in the next three hours.

If it kept rolling upward at the rate it had from morning to afternoon, he did not dare calculate too closely what kind of scene the garage would become tonight. But he knew one thing.

There were more than nineteen hundred pairs of shoes at home.

At 7:10, the courier station at the entrance of the residential complex was open. Old Xu was sitting out front smoking. When he saw Lin Fan, he stood up.

"Little brother, today you..."

"The first truck is at eight tonight." Lin Fan did not stop. "Just as agreed."

As he turned into the complex, the garage's rolling shutter was wide open. The white lights were so bright they hurt his eyes.

The six students had already arrived. Their coats were piled atop cardboard boxes, and three bundles of the two thousand bags had been opened from the corner of the wall.

Ma Le stood at the entrance, holding up his phone in one hand and gripping his hair with the other.

"Brother." Even his voice had changed. "Six hundred and eighty-nine orders."

"When was that number from?"

"Just now. Every time I refresh, it goes up. I'm scared to refresh again."

Lin Fan leaned his bicycle against the wall, walked inside, turned the monitor on the computer desk toward the six students, and said, "The ones reading the orders, sit here."