Living on a basic salary? Operations: I don’t dare to change jobs

In the past two years, cross-border e-commerce companies have been struggling to survive, with reports of company closures and layoffs coming out from time to time, and cross-border workers are also in dire straits. Unlike last year's high-salary recruitment of operations, this year's demand for operations in the cross-border circle has cooled significantly. After interviews where salaries are always lower than expected and companies lay off employees, they are now living on basic salaries.

Amazon's current operating situation: earning a base salary of 5,000 yuan and not daring to change jobs    

"The order volume is so poor that I dare not change jobs even though I am earning a basic salary." This is the feeling expressed by some operations staff. We thought that this epidemic would pass quickly, but no one expected it to last so long and have such a big impact on cross-border e-commerce.

Xiao Li, an operations worker, feels this deeply. He has less than two years of experience working in an Amazon operations position and earns a base salary of 5,000 yuan per month. Although the company gives him commissions, they are very little . This situation has resulted in Xiao Li not only having no savings in Shenzhen, but also frequently having negative expenditures.

I wanted to open a small shop as a side job, thinking that any money I could make would be a good deal, but I had insufficient funds. In addition, I had no experience in registering a company or applying for an account, and I didn't know what products to make, so I gave up.

Li wanted to change jobs, but he hesitated again. Compared with last year when he received so many offers and could choose freely, this year he couldn't find many companies that were sincere in recruiting people. He took the initiative to contact companies and send his resume, but he never read the messages and never heard back, as if the positions were just posted there.

Most operations staff agree and understand Xiao Li’s situation. Xiao Liu, an operations staff member, also said: “I have been working in Amazon operations for almost a year and a half. I was very energetic last year, but now I am facing bleak sales every day. I am really afraid that the company will suddenly go bankrupt and I will lose my job.”

The above situation is the current situation of most young operators: working for one or two years, the basic salary is not high, the commission is very small , under the impact of the overall environment, with a basic salary, dare not easily quit, and no side job ...

Unlike young operators, Xiao Zhang is now a senior operator of a cross-border e-commerce company with 100 employees. Currently, the team has about 30 operators. Although the company has not experienced large-scale layoffs, the internal staff turnover is very high. Due to low salaries and unreasonable commission systems, many people left within three months.

In Xiao Zhang's opinion, although he is in a senior operation position, he still needs to do a lot of miscellaneous tasks, such as docking product packaging design, formulating product copy, etc. Of course, there are also endless meetings and endless forms to complete.

Xiao Zhang also thought about resigning. At that time, several cross-border e-commerce startup teams offered her an olive branch, but she refused because the promises of two days off a week, high salary and no overtime made by the startup teams were unbelievable. She was afraid that she would just jump from one pit of fire to another. In addition, with the turbulent external environment, resigning would likely make her a vagrant.

Judging from the current situation, Xiao Zhang's concerns are not unreasonable. The cross-border e-commerce market is sluggish and Amazon's growth has decreased. This year, major cross-border e-commerce companies are no longer blindly expanding their scale and have begun to recruit conservatively to reduce personnel expenses. The demand for operational positions is declining accordingly.

According to data from Zhiyouji, the growth rate of Amazon's operational positions in 2022 fell by 66% compared with 2021. Among them, May this year fell by 79% compared with the same period last year; June fell by 76% compared with the same period last year; and July fell by 78% compared with the same period last year.

On the one hand, the market demand is decreasing, while on the other hand, the supply of operations positions is increasing. Under the imbalance between supply and demand, it is more difficult for operations personnel to find a suitable job. As a result, many people are competing for one position and salaries are constantly being pushed down.

Salaries are suppressed, so operators need to be cautious when switching jobs

Some operators choose to look for new opportunities while keeping their jobs. Some operators start looking for jobs after leaving their jobs for a while, but after half a day of interviews, they find that the salary offered by the company is 2K less than what they expected.

In fact, it is not an isolated case that salaries are suppressed. A former product operations manager in a large cross-border company was laid off and when he looked for a new job, he was offered only 1/3 of his original annual salary. An Amazon operator with two years of boutique operations experience found during an interview that most companies offered salaries of 6.5K-7.5K. When interviewing for independent station operations, the base salary for inexperienced operators was 5K.

One operations manager said: "I went to a company for an interview, only to find out they were only hiring for one operations position, but there were dozens of applicants waiting outside the door. " He then spent several more months and interviewed seven or eight times before he found a suitable job.

This is closely related to the abundant supply of operations personnel in the industry. When the number of operations job seekers in the market reaches an unprecedented high, companies have a lot of room for choice when recruiting, so the salary packages offered by some recruitment companies have also been reduced.

Relevant data shows that Amazon's average operating salary in 2021 was 10.4k, an increase of 11% compared to 2020, but the average operating salary in 2022 has dropped to 9.8k , which is the first time that the average salary of operations positions has declined after rising for several consecutive years.

Many operators also found that their jobs were not as good as the previous one after changing jobs many times, and gave their own advice: even if you are not satisfied with your current job, you have to make do with it for the time being. If you don’t have the hard skills to rely on, don’t take the risk of changing jobs.

Of course, some operations staff also have the idea of ​​changing careers. One operation staff said on a social platform: "I have been working in Amazon operations for almost two years, but the actual sales volume has not met my expectations. I feel very frustrated, so I want to change jobs to other industries."

In this regard, an operator with many years of operation experience gave advice: After two years, you are relatively familiar with Amazon. Regardless of whether your performance is good or bad, you still need to continuously optimize your product selection methods and do a good job of promotion. If you can't meet your psychological expectations, take it slow, learn while adjusting your mindset to improve yourself. This is also one of the necessary skills to strengthen yourself and make yourself better. But if you just want to escape or give up this industry, then just leave.

There is no doubt that the industry reshuffle is pushing the cross-border e-commerce industry towards comprehensive planning, branding, and refinement. In the future, cross-border managers will pay more attention to operations, and operators should be more calm, not anxious, and spend more time to improve their operational capabilities to ensure that they are not eliminated in the industry; if they want to change careers, they should increase their knowledge reserves in other industries.

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