Playing dirty, are we?

Lü Yao did not have much of a reaction to his product being copied. It was simply a manifestation of merchants chasing profit and a reflection of the ugliness of human nature.

He had no intention of defending his rights or launching an anti-copycat campaign.

Even if he applied for design copyrights and appearance patents, it would be useless, at best slightly reducing the degree of similarity.

Actually pursuing legal rights would be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and the costs would outweigh the benefits.

This was precisely why many small merchants were reluctant to defend their rights.

Even a decade later, one could still find numerous counterfeit and shoddy products on major e-commerce platforms.

Therefore, Lü Yao’s initial strategy was quick consumption!

He would ride the wave of high traffic and feast to his heart's content.

Once the traffic dried up, he would immediately launch the next product.

What he hadn't anticipated was that his competitors on the same platform would be unhinged enough to drive keyword bidding prices up to such ridiculous levels.

Lü Yao checked the backend data.

The prices for some of the products in the store had been increased to dozens of times their original levels, yet the click-through rate via keywords had dropped by a third compared to the previous few days.

This indicated that the price for the exact same keywords had been heavily inflated.

Xu Ziqing asked, "Brother Lü, should we ride the hype and raise our keyword bids even higher?"

Lü Yao shook his head. "No need."

Although the keyword prices for many products had been driven up, the prices for their store's brand-specific keywords remained unchanged.

This was precisely why Lü Yao wanted to drive traffic from outside the platform.

No matter how wealthy a competitor was, they couldn't inflate his brand-specific keywords, could they?

If they actually managed to do that, Lü Yao would have to thank them.

Moreover, during this period, a store and its brand-specific keywords were bound together on the platform, granting promotional boosts.

Relying on this portion of the traffic, the sales volume inside Lü Yao's store remained quite impressive.

After reviewing the Express Train, Lü Yao rubbed the space between his eyebrows.

In the early days of e-commerce operations, the main game was the Express Train—a tool created by platforms purely to make money.

Merchants cooperated with the platform through the Express Train to boost sales, which was considered a normal business practice.

However, wherever there were people, there was bound to be corruption.

Initially, the platform's Express Train was relatively normal, but as the stakes grew larger, merchants began engaging in a frenzy of bidding. While this brought massive revenues to the platform, it also bred all sorts of underhanded dealings in the shadows.

Three years ago, achieving a monthly sales volume of one hundred thousand through the Express Train could make someone a Gold VIP.

By 2013, it would probably take a million.

Meanwhile, merchants who had already tasted success would use all sorts of backdoor operations to crush their peers, even resorting to bribing the relevant platform staff.

Later on, news even broke that a platform employee had accepted nearly one hundred million in bribes within a single year!

Lü Yao currently lacked the capital to bribe platform employees, and he didn't even have the strength to heavily burn money on the Express Train.

However, he had no intention of competing in this arena with those veteran rivals.

Lü Yao continued browsing the various data metrics within the store, and finally, his gaze stopped on the negative reviews.

Currently, one of his popular items had thousands of positive reviews.

The negative reviews numbered in the dozens.

Some negative reviews were simply customers trying to fleece the system, forcing the merchant into refunds-only, while others were likely left by people who didn't quite know how to use the product and flew into a rage out of embarrassment.

Yet, over a dozen negative reviews could be identified at a glance as having been left by competing merchants.

"Is the quality of these products this terrible? It broke with barely any force."

"A few pieces of trash chains that cost one or two yuan each are actually being sold for over thirty? The heartless boss must have a cursed family."

"There's even some white, dirty stuff on this. The merchant is so disgusting, actually sending out returned products again."

Looking at the last negative review, Lü Yao couldn't help but laugh out loud.

As expected, the gold content of that famous quote by Mr. Lei about the future continued to rise.

Would I sell returned products from this kind of category a second time at the original price?

Are you kidding me?

I'd list it straight on Weibo with a #UsedFlavor# tag and sell it at five or ten times the price, thank you very much.

Lü Yao called Xu Ziqing over, pointed at those negative reviews, and asked, "You guys saw these dozen or so negative reviews, right?"

Xu Ziqing shouted, "We contacted all of them, but they keep ignoring us. The chat logs are still right there."

Lü Yao smiled. "I'm not blaming you. I'm having you look at this so you can copy these exact negative reviews word for word, and then post them in the stores of the same category. Post them in all the top twenty stores!"

"There's an extra bonus for this!"

At the mention of a bonus, the employees in the studio instantly perked up.

Xu Ziqing, however, asked in confusion, "Can this solve the problem?"

Lü Yao smiled. "Some buyers will check the negative reviews right off the bat. If they see these negative reviews in our store, back out, and then see the exact same negative reviews in another store, what do you think they'll think?"

Xu Ziqing had a sudden flash of insight!

This was mutual smearing and malicious competition!

Seeing this, Lü Yao smiled again. "And it doesn't stop there. If I distribute the negative reviews indiscriminately to all our competitors, how will those rivals react when they see identical negative reviews of the same type?"

Xu Ziqing had another sudden realization: "Dogs biting dogs?"

Lü Yao smiled. "Exactly."

The negative reviews in Lü Yao's store probably weren't all from a single rival; they might even have colluded.

But in business, who the hell trusts anyone?

One rival grabbed the keywords and made a killing, while the others didn't make nearly as much!

Wouldn't it be completely normal for them to be smeared by other competitors?

And even if they were smart enough to figure out that Lü Yao was behind it, so what?

You're allowed to smear me, but I'm not allowed to fight back?

After being enlightened by Lü Yao, Xu Ziqing felt a sense of mental clarity as if a window had been opened in his brain. He smacked his lips and said, "Damn, Brother Lü, where do you come up with all these sly tricks? They're so slick they're about to sprain my back."

Lü Yao chuckled. "This is just an eye for an eye; I haven't even really fought back yet."

Huh?

Xu Ziqing was stunned again. "You call this not fighting back yet?"

Lü Yao stood up. "Keep an eye on the store. I'm going to go prepare some positive reviews for our competitors."

Positive reviews?

Xu Ziqing was baffled. "Wait, why are you leaving positive reviews for them?"

Lü Yao smiled. "You don't understand. Once the competitors see the positive reviews I leave them, they'll come begging us on their knees to delete them."

Didn't they like playing dirty?

Then let's play!

Lü Yao left the studio.

He had rehearsals in the afternoon and a performance at NFA in the evening.

He was busy day in and day out.

However, all of this was the accumulation and deposition of his momentum. Not a single girl he was flirting with now would be flirted with in vain!

After getting into his car, he first sent a message to Zhu Junyan: "Come out for a drink tonight."

Zhu Junyan replied instantly: "I'll definitely be there!"

Then, Lü Yao drove to the place where Jian Xiaojie worked, placed the souvenir he bought for her at the front desk, and texted her: "Sister Jian, I brought back a souvenir for you from out of town and left it at your company's front desk."

A few minutes later, Jian Xiaojie replied: "(♡ᴗ♡) Wow! So thoughtful~"

Lü Yao: "I've always had Sister Jian on my mind."

Jian Xiaojie: "So happy~~ When you're free, I'll treat you to seafood~~"

Lü Yao chuckled.

He wondered if that seafood was going to be decent or not.

However, his goal of maintaining personal relationships was successfully achieved.

Human connections had to be maintained in advance and kept up regularly.

Many people believed that a gentleman's friendship was as pure as water, and that true friends could not see each other for years yet still chat and joke without any barriers when they reunited... That was sheer nonsense.

No matter how close of a best friend you were with someone, losing touch for a long time would inevitably lead to awkwardness upon reuniting.

A gesture like a playful punch to the chest that once symbolized friendship would definitely make the other person frown and feel annoyed if used after a long separation.

That was a lesson Lü Yao had learned the hard way.