Chapter 054: Brainstorm

Returning to the main topic, everyone immediately became serious.

After listening to Chen Xujia’s summary, Chen Danling thought for a moment before saying:

“As for grading brands and products… we’ve never actually done that before. Right now, our database only has place of origin labels. But if we just classify and rate based on whether something is domestic or foreign, that wouldn’t be fair. There are plenty of well-made domestic products, and in our product pool, domestic goods clearly make up the majority.”

“That’s not all,” Chen Danling furrowed her brows, “if you want to categorize brands by levels, what will the basis be? Will suppliers even acknowledge these levels if we define them?”

When Chen Danling finished, the entire meeting room fell into deep thought.

Lin Luyou lowered her head even further, feeling she’d oversimplified things and overlooked too many details.

“What if we go by sales volume?” Tan Fang suggested.

But as soon as he’d spoken, he dismissed his own idea:

“No… If we only look at our own platform’s data, suppliers will argue it’s because we haven’t given them enough traffic support. But if we want data from all platforms, we probably can’t access our competitors’ sales figures right now. It’s not feasible.”

“Then what about going by brand positioning?” Lin Luyou softly proposed again.

“That won’t work either. Every supplier is desperate to call themselves ‘the best in the world’—it’s almost impossible to expect them to admit to being second or third tier. If we really do it that way, after everyone’s filled it in, we’ll just have to downgrade them all by one level to get a realistic picture.”

He Suzhen had transferred from the marketing department. Back in marketing, she’d done plenty of supplier research and bargaining. She considered herself pretty adept at guessing what suppliers were thinking.

Whenever they discussed partnerships, small brands would try to use their platform to get more exposure, but the platform wasn’t interested. Meanwhile, when they sought out high-end brands to join, those brands weren’t interested either. It wasn’t that they looked down on small brands just for their size or lack of profit—they simply found the quality and styles lacking.

As for the more capable suppliers, they all believed their companies deserved more resources from Max. But as a rising e-commerce company, Max simply couldn’t promise that much traffic.

The eight of them brainstormed together, each proposing numerous possibilities, but in the end, none of the ideas won unanimous approval.

Knock, knock, knock.

The meeting room door was rapped on. A colleague Lin Luyou hadn’t met before walked in and, a little apologetically, pointed to the time and said, “Excuse me, your reserved time is up. We need the meeting room for the next two hours.”

“Ah, sorry, we’ll just wrap up quickly!” Chen Xujia checked the time, then rattled off quickly, “Let’s do this. We’ll start by looking at click-through and conversion rates, and pull the basic product data. Tan Fang, you’ll handle the data requests. Meanwhile, everyone else, think about how we can break down the metrics even further.”

Chen Danling listened and nodded. “Alright, keep brainstorming. When you’ve made some progress, come and get me.”

And so, Lin Luyou’s very first meeting ended abruptly at its climax.

Just as they walked out of the meeting room, Cheng Li suddenly appeared in front of Lin Luyou out of nowhere.

“Luyou, can you carry my and Fang’s laptops for us? We need to go upstairs to the data analysis team, and it’s a hassle to bring these along…”

As she spoke, she stacked two laptops on top of Lin Luyou’s own.

Feeling the weight suddenly press down on her arms, Lin Luyou hadn’t even had a chance to say anything before Cheng Li had already dashed off.