The 3 A.M. Bad Review

Jiang Ning, a laid-off cross-border e-commerce operator, takes over a half-dead store: eight SKUs, a bad-review rate just over five percent, and two more bad reviews will get the store locked. He can only keep watch late at night—3 a.m. in Beijing is broad daylight in Moscow. One night, a Russian-language bad review says "the jacket is made of paper, it tears open with one pull," but his store has never sold jackets; another order, refunded successfully three months ago, has a buyer saying "the shoes are still here." He clicks open that bad review—its status is read, yet he never read it. Then he hears it. The text of the bad review is just a shell, and behind the shell is the buyer's real scene at this moment: footsteps in the kitchen, the tape tearing open a package, a "don't come over here" pressed low in the throat. His old supervisor left behind a "Eleven Rules of Customer Service." The rules are not there to protect buyers; they are there to protect him: bad reviews cannot be deleted, only replied to, and once you reply, you have accepted it; you may accept at most three in one night—accept a fourth, and dawn will not come. Every time he accepts one, he must lose something of his own. In the backend there is also a twelfth order that does not exist. That batch of goods was sent to an address that cannot be found, and every recipient is himself. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: The 3 A.M. Bad Review — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠