Jiang Ning, a cross-border operations specialist who was laid off, takes over a half-dead online store: eight SKUs, a review rate just over five percent, and two more bad reviews will get the store locked. All he can do is keep watch late into the night. At three in the morning in Beijing, it's broad daylight in Moscow.
That morning, a Russian review says, "The jacket is made of paper. It tears as soon as you pull it," but his store has never sold jackets. Another buyer says, "The shoes are still here," on an order that was refunded successfully three months ago. He clicks on the review. Its status is "read," even though he never read it.
Then he hears it. The text of each bad review is only a shell. Behind it lies the buyer's real scene in that very moment: footsteps in a kitchen, tape tearing off a package, and the words "Don't come any closer" caught in someone's throat.
His former supervisor left behind a document titled "Eleven Customer Service Rules." The rules aren't there to protect the buyers. They're there to protect him: bad reviews can't be deleted, only answered, and answering one means accepting its terms. He can accept at most three in one night. If he accepts a fourth, dawn will never come. For each one he accepts, he has to give up something of his own.
There's also a twelfth order in the system that shouldn't exist. That shipment was sent to an address that can't be found, and every package is addressed to him.
