Will fake orders turn your shop gray? Read this and you'll understand

By: DADa

Taobao is a popular online shopping retail platform in China, with nearly 500 million registered users, more than 60 million regular visitors every day, and more than 800 million items online daily, with an average of 48,000 items sold every minute. This was originally something that brought convenience and value, yet wherever there is profit there is competition, and wherever there is competition there are people who want to take shortcuts and win through cheating. Taobao fake orders are precisely a product of this background.

As everyone knows, shops on the Taobao platform are ranked and rated according to sales volume and customer reviews. Taobao fake orders refer to the cheating behavior adopted by Taobao shops in order to obtain a better Taobao search ranking for a single item or the shop, and fake orders are often paired with overseas shopping traffic boosting and empty-package express deliveries. Good grief, if fake order behavior is allowed to continue, we online shopping consumers, who can we still trust? We already know very little about the information of products bought online, and after the negative impact brought by fake order behavior and the lack of integrity, what can we vast numbers of online shopping consumers rely on to choose products?

Whatever exists is reasonable. What little-known hidden circumstances lie behind Taobao fake orders?

Fake orders, fake orders, are nothing more than using a low-cost method of operation to gain recognition. Nowadays, every industry in the world is competing, various products are substituting for one another, and customer needs are increasingly diverse, personalized and privately customized. Saying business is hard to do is an understatement; this is completely a buyer's market. Against this background, either you have fairly massive assets to build momentum for yourself, or you have an exclusive "formula" that you can "enjoy alone"; otherwise, you should calm your restless inner self and give up the daydream of getting rich overnight. "I have a dream, and that is to make the daydream come true, and the method is 'cheating'!" Unlike ordinary corporate advertising, fake orders emphasize sales volume and good reviews. The aboveboard approach of accumulating popularity and sales day after day is extremely inefficient for certain products, for example: the food and clothing industries, where the substitution rate is 100 percent. Perhaps someone else opened a shop on Taobao one year earlier than you, yet he holds ninety percent of the market share, and during this one year he used the funds he accumulated to expand reproduction and improve services, binding customers firmly to his chariot and giving latecomers not a single chance. When you invest your funds in this industry, you are destined not to make big waves. What do you do when things go contrary to your wishes? How many regret it? How many are helpless? How many are unwilling? Some people quietly disappear after several months of bleak operation, while others believe in the principle of "there are always more methods than difficulties" and "if the white path is blocked, I'll take the black path." Thus the method of fake orders entered their eyes and was applied on Taobao.

"If cheating isn't caught, there will be no actual loss." The benefits of fake orders are still many:

1. Boost shop reputation. Through fake orders you can boost the overall reputation of the shop, thereby retaining users.

2. Boost item sales. The vast majority of discount activities on Taobao require a Taobao shop to have a certain sales volume and a certain number of good reviews before it can sign up. Moreover, buyers have herd mentality, and an item with zero sales makes it very hard for customers to make up their minds to buy. On the contrary, products with high sales and many good reviews draw crowds of buyers.

3. Boost ranking. Taobao search results are greatly affected by sales volume. The greater the sales volume, the higher the possibility of ranking near the top.

4. Boost Direct Train clicks and conversions. Improve click-through rate and conversion rate to achieve Direct Train promotion at a lower cost.

However, if you want no one to know, unless you never do it yourself! You sell on the Taobao platform and transfer and pay on Alipay. You fake order people, you're lighting a lantern in the toilet! You really are bold! Let's look at the harms of fake orders to Taobao:

One: Raising ranking yet lowering conversion rate, not worth the loss

Some so-called fake order experts can indeed, to a certain extent, fool the system, raise search weight and optimize ranking. But hidden dangers also exist. If the item the seller fake orders does not match the needs of search buyers, then even if the item gains a certain ranking and click volume also rises, because the search term does not match the item well, or does not satisfy the buyer's needs, it will inevitably lead to a low conversion rate or even no conversion rate, and once fake orders stop, the item's ranking quickly drops. To maintain ranking, you can only continue fake ordering round after round, thereby maintaining this low conversion rate, not worth the loss.

Two: Wasting energy, and easy to encounter scammers, with high costs

Fake ordering actually costs sellers a great deal of energy. Not only must you ensure you choose the right item, you also have to find different people every day to carry out operations, so you have no way to operate your online shop normally, and the loss of some customers is no small loss either. Moreover, in the process of fake ordering you will inevitably run into some online scammers. Scammers exploit certain loopholes in Taobao rules to commit fraud, but because the seller's own fake ordering is also a shady practice, they dare not report it, letting scammers swindle money for nothing.

Three: Once discovered, you face Taobao penalties

Fake ordering is actually still quite easy to discover. Once detected, you face penalties from Taobao search officials. The Taobao system backend keeps a record of every online shop's violations. Although some are temporarily not caught or penalized, if violations are too frequent or violation transactions exceed the corresponding number, Taobao will deduct points, reduce weight and delete reputation for the shop. If you have painstakingly managed an item, and after fake ordering is caught the item is demoted for 30 days for fake transactions, then according to Taobao's rule of updating once every 30 days, this item starts over from scratch, and all your previous effort and costs are swept away. Even if the shop is closed, then years of effort are wasted, and you truly feel like crying with no tears, losing big for a small gain.

Standing on the side of the vast numbers of consumers, I despise the souls of cheaters; standing on the side of the pitiful shop owners, I hope you can find another way out without too great a loss.