Column | chapter nine algorithm

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It’s black Friday again. Each business riveted full strength, ready to do a big, efforts to “blood”.

01. Black Friday in the US in the past two years

Black Friday refers to the fourth Friday in November, but more and more retailers are extending the holiday to boost sales. The most intuitive is the overall sales of Black Friday in 2017. Last year, Black Friday was on November 24, 2017, but the overall traffic increase period lasted from November 12 to December 13, lasting nearly a month.

Photo credit: Jumia

The long promotion period and the increase in traffic have become the main factors of black Friday sales surge. According to Adobe Analytics, a retail Analytics firm:

  • In 2016, Cyber Monday generated $3.45 billion in sales, while Black Friday generated about $3.3 billion in online sales.

  • In 2017, Cyber Monday generated $6.6 billion in sales, while Black Friday online sales reached a record $7.9 billion, up 17.9 percent from the same period last year.

02. Taobao’s Singles’ Day sales are better

In 2017, tmall’s Singles Day saw 168.2 billion yuan worth of transactions.

In 2018, sales on Tmall’s Singles Day broke the 200 billion yuan mark for the first time, locking in at 213.5 billion yuan. What is particularly noteworthy is that it only took 15 hours, 49 minutes and 39 seconds to reach the final sales volume of Singles Day 2017.

In comparison to Amazon, the 2018 Tmall Double 11 has surpassed this year’s Amazon Prime Day (Membership Day) sales of 4.2 billion DOLLARS in just 10 minutes. This gap, no comparison, no harm!

2018 is the 10th year of Tmall Double 11. Besides transaction amount, this year also set a new record in other aspects:

  1. Logistics orders broke 1 billion for the first time;

  2. More than 200 brands (210 in the latest data) have a turnover of over 100 million;

  3. The use of various “black technologies” (fingerprints and face brushes account for 60.3% of payments) has increased, changing the consumption experience;

  4. Strong technical support (according to statistics, the peak value of real-time computing and processing on Singles’ Day was 1.718 billion/second) ensured the smooth shopping of consumers on Singles’ Day;

  5. Offline new retail stores and key business areas joined the Double 11 war at the same time, and the online integration.

03. Black Friday “Black Technology”

The rise of Chinese e-commerce benefits from the natural advantages of Chinese characteristics: relatively dense geographical distribution of purchasing power, abundant supporting financial products, and low labor price

For the United States, where cheap labor is scarce, they have always been good at “manpower not enough technology”. The US retail industry is more self-reliant, taking more initiative in the new AI race.

1.Amazon Black Five Black technology Amazon

There are many black-tech shopping and sales models. For example, Amazon is the best in warehouse construction at present. It not only optimizes warehouse distribution technology by using tally robots and machine learning to record the route of employees, but also reduces the cost of taxes and fees. Different states have different tax policies, and Amazon can improve efficiency from the shipping stage by building warehouses in Central America and duty-free areas, and further compete for competitiveness in states with higher tax rates.

In this year’s promotion, Amazon will also offer a new way to shop: a new AR View feature in its smartphone app that allows consumers to View items in their homes before making a purchase.

2.Walmart Black Five Black technology

Walmart has been buying machine learning, big data teams since around 2015. Today, walmart uses ARTIFICIAL intelligence to coordinate inventory data, price items and so on, and has installed cash360, a money-counting robot, in its stores.

Walmart LABS is walmart’s black technology division, which is responsible for the development of various black technology. Such as the “pick up tower”, which is very similar to the concept of unmanned retail machines, orders can be placed online and picked up in the machine. Walmart’s facial recognition isn’t just about identifying your ID to unify online and offline user data, it’s also about determining how you’re feeling. If you make a bad face in the checkout line, they might even ask the cashier to speed up the process. Walmart is also said to be developing its own neural network cluster this year to train more AI applications and even export its capabilities across the retail industry.

For example, walmart and Amazon are testing “unattended delivery services” that combine smart locks and surveillance cameras to allow couriers to deliver goods to unattended homes under the supervision of smart devices.

Therefore, the rapid development of black technology in logistics, retail and after-sales service of American e-commerce may be the most important development direction of China’s e-commerce in the future.

04. Is Black Friday far from programmers

1. Black Friday for Amazon programmers

The explosion of sales during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping seasons means that amazon employees are under more pressure, with more work and more demanding demands.

Amazon programmers reportedly worked 55 hours a week during this period. Programmers in charge of amazon logistics, in particular, worked from 7.30am to 6pm with only two half-hour breaks, just enough to eat in the canteen.

The high intensity of labor causes employees to often fall asleep standing up or sitting down, and some people are even taken away by ambulance because of overwork and physical discomfort. Staff in Amazon Scotland were taken away by ambulance 43 times in the past year alone, figures show.

Some employees were dragged to the hospital because they were not tired. After seeing the news that they still had to work 55 hours a week during Christmas, some employees were frightened by the mandatory overtime system and went to the hospital. It’s probably not tired, it’s scared!

Ahead of Black Friday in 2017, Amazon employees in Germany and Italy went on strike to protest long hours and poor pay.

In fact, 55 hours a week even if the high intensity of work, it really makes Chinese programmers feel helpless, calculate their working hours, even without the shopping season, every day in high intensity work.

2. Alibaba’s Double Eleven

Ali programmer’s Double eleven – 72 hours without sleep, employees ridicule whether they can live through the double eleven

Double 11’s huge traffic is undoubtedly a major challenge to the stability of the server, while the Internet users start the crazy shopping mode, e-commerce enterprise programmers also need to start the overtime standby mode.

On November 11, 2018, Ali programmers also started a 72-hour all-nighter mode. Companies have tents for programmers to stay up late.

Here’s what ali’s programmer had to say:

01 @ Oh ka ji stroke hair, see how many you lose, since became a programmer, hair is less and less, double eleven need to buy overlord store. 02 @ Yin Su Su is too depressed to make fun of. For the double Eleven, has been 11 consecutive days without a rest, tired to death, I don't know if I can survive the double eleven.Copy the code

Black Friday for the average programmer

Back to our lives, many people say that the discount policy of Black Friday is easier to understand than the complicated discount form of Singles’ Day. However, faced with the dazzling discount of Black Friday, many programmers around us have the following confusion:

Black Friday confusion for programmers

  • The most widely discounted – clothing, no need, a free Google Tee is the biggest brand in the coding world;

  • The biggest discount — television, can’t grab, target 500 people to grab five TVS;

  • The most attractive programmer – game machine, very like, but bought last year;

  • Just an expensive BMW Benz Tesla, hey hey, still can’t afford;

  • In fact, most want – girlfriend, alas, money can not buy.

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