All entrepreneurs should browse around auction platforms.
Some people hunt for bargains on auction platforms, while others start their businesses there.
When a platform develops to a certain stage, unexpected hidden functions will inevitably be developed by users.
Some people go to courts to attend public trials, where dispute mediation scenes are even more exciting than reality shows; credit inquiry websites have been developed by young people as background check tools before blind dates; and auction platforms are living textbook libraries for entrepreneurs.
Human exploration of auction platforms is less than 1%, where money, games, opportunities and lessons are everywhere. It is also a place where ordinary people can get the most access to deadbeat debtors, bankruptcy stories and entrepreneurship skills.
Source: JD Auction
Browsing auction platforms feels like a doctor flipping through medical records. Every asset package sold at a heavy discount is a cruel story of business: some bet on the wrong track, some expanded too fast, and some just failed to survive the last winter.
For entrepreneurs, this is the best beginner's cultivation manual. Since failure is the mother of success, the auction platform is the base of maternal samples for success. Great cities are always built on countless ruins, and the relics left by predecessors are the most practical pit avoidance guide for the next adventurer before heading to the battlefield.
Relics of losers, alma mater of entrepreneurs
If you want to start a company but don't know how much it will cost, go look at those bankrupt peers. Their auction lists can always give you some inspiration, such as Zhong Xuegao, which has been repeatedly discussed recently.
Source: JD Auction
On September 12, Luo Yonghao complained on Weibo that Mr. Savage's ice cream tasted bad, and called out Zhong Xuegao: "It tastes much worse than Zhong Xuegao, I miss Zhong Xuegao." This triggered a new round of public debate around ice cream and Luo Yonghao.
Zhong Xuegao, which was mentioned by Luo, announced on September 14 that 508 intangible assets under its name had been transferred to new buyers through the auction platform. Shortly afterwards, the reborn Zhong Xuegao appeared at the Tianjin Ice Cream Expo on September 16. A series of coincidences are more dramatic than marketing scripts.
Among the remaining auctionable assets of Zhong Xuegao, 492 are registered trademarks, which contains a lot of wisdom. Zhong Xuegao has registered many trademarks that may become counterfeit versions of its own brand, including but not limited to Zhong Bugao, Zhong Xuedi, Zhong Xue Bugao, Song Xuegao, etc., leaving no room for piracy; not only food trademarks, but also categories such as ammunition and fireworks, fitness equipment, jewelry and watches have been preemptively registered by Zhong Xuegao, not even giving cross-industry counterfeiters a chance.
Source: JD Auction
Even though these trademarks include a bunch of homophonic puns and totally unrelated industries, they were still sold as a package at an auction price of 21.1 million yuan after Zhong Xuegao went bankrupt. Tianyancha shows that Changsha Zhong Xuegao Food Co., Ltd., which was newly established in August this year, is backed by Changsha Hujia Food, whose Royal Xiaohu brand mainly sells frozen food but does not have ice cream products. By buying the household-name brand Zhong Xuegao, they successfully entered this track through auction.
In addition to learning from peers to avoid risks, you can also find bargains from peers. The ready-made patents of peers can save you several years of detours, and Zhong Xuegao's bankruptcy package includes 8 patents.
Patents on auction platforms are a seriously undervalued asset pool. Auctioneers usually convert them according to how much cash they can exchange for, but for entrepreneurs, patents also need to consider the previous R&D costs and future benefits, and the price difference between the two is the arbitrage opportunity.
You can find a wide variety of invention patents on auction platforms, such as a bulb-shaped decanter, an automatic crab-binding machine, a ganoderma lucidum cultivation method, a mushroom-shaped cat litter box... Even the show *I Love Invention* on CCTV-17 would have to shoot three episodes about them.
Source: JD Auction
Of course, there are also many traps here. You need to check the patent term and scope of application carefully. We would like to seriously warn you that if you want to make money with the mentality of hunting for bargains, you may end up just working for the judicial auction company.
There are also successful bargain-hunting cases. In April 2025, a batch of Disney merchandise confiscated by the customs was listed on JD Auction. The information showed that it included 16 keychains, 34 hair bands, 32 hair accessories and 653 dolls. The blurry photos triggered unlimited reverie among netizens.
Source: JD Auction
The self-proclaimed original owner of the confiscated goods @Strawberry Flavor (now deregistered) posted on Xiaohongshu admitting loss, and vaguely mentioned "there are 271 green Belles inside", which immediately ignited the onlookers' enthusiasm. Because the green Belle was very likely to be the hot limited-edition strawberry series LinaBell at that time, which was once speculated to sell for thousands of yuan each. Some interested people estimated that the total value of this batch of merchandise exceeded 210,000 yuan.
Thus, a fierce auction with 135 registered bidders and 37,508 onlookers was launched. After 60 rounds of bidding, the starting price of 32,000 yuan was finally raised to 280,000 yuan. With a 5% commission and 1% service fee, the final transaction price was around 296,000 yuan.
After getting the goods, the buyer found that there were only dozens of strawberry LinaBells, and the so-called green Belle was actually the green-headed strawberry series Gelatoni, whose market price was only one-tenth of the strawberry LinaBell, and the quantity was also only dozens. Netizens estimated that the total value of this batch of merchandise was just over 120,000 yuan.
The Disney version of "substituting a civet cat for a prince"
At this point, the story sounds like a tragic case of huge loss. However, the seemingly stupid buyer Claw, which runs online claw machine platforms, spent 280,000 yuan to advertise itself, and also got a batch of popular traffic merchandise for its own platform, which made it a genius entrepreneur in a blink of an eye.
Source: Douyin @Claw
The unique business you are ready to go all out on may be exactly the reason why others fell to the bottom; the difficult problems you cannot solve have ready-made answers being sold in packages, and bargain-hunting even turns others' failures into your own startup capital. The ocean of auction is endless, and learning has no boundaries. Browsing auction platforms is a coming-of-age ceremony that every entrepreneur should experience once.
When auction meets daily life, it becomes a discipline of economics
Starting a business is still too far away for ordinary office workers, and most people can only watch the fun of small self-employed people in Yongge's live stream. But auction platforms are very close to us, and sometimes browsing them is even more fun than buying things.
In judicial auctions, you can learn about the lives of deadbeat debtors through foreclosed properties; in bankruptcy bargain-hunting sections, you can watch the end of one company after another; when you open customs auctions, you will find that what makes smugglers risk their lives is not necessarily Shuangshi Earth brand watches, but also radiators and LABUBU toys.
Source: JD Auction
Search what office equipment bankrupt companies are auctioning, see which ones still have value, so that you will know what to take as collateral to move home if the company goes bankrupt and owes salaries. This is a sad but practical skill for office workers. Hope you never need to use it, because it is illegal.
Occasionally you can also make a move to hunt for bargains. In the past, auctions were aristocratic games in private salons, but now they can also be amusement parks for the public, testing everyone's courage and speed to make a move. If you are slow, you get nothing, which is the real meaning of "time is money".
And the real tough guys have already started looking at stocks on auction platforms. Many equity auctions here come from judicial compulsory enforcement, and the starting price may be lower than market expectations, but behind the low price there are often more complex risks. Experienced players will not only stare at the discount, but first study the company's shareholder background, financial status and dividend records, check whether the equity has burdens such as pledge or freeze, and then decide whether to make a move.
Source: Xiaohongshu
What is more interesting is those bulk equity transactions. When the major shareholder's equity is auctioned, who will take over, how much they take, and what they plan to do next may affect the trend of the stock market in the future.
After this learning journey, the auction platform has become the most hardcore economics teacher for ordinary people. There are no mock exams, all settlements are made with real money. However, don't just be an audience watching for fun. If one day the roles are reversed, and you are stuck with a bunch of messes, the auction platform may also be your most realistic fallback option.
If you have a factory building, a warehouse of leftover goods, or several machine tools that you don't know who to sell to, no one will take over them on traditional second-hand platforms. At this time, you will find that auction platforms are actually the ultimate e-commerce platform for bulk assets.
What if you really have an excavator? Source: JD Auction
In the commercial asset section of JD Auction and the commercial institution auction section of Alibaba Auction, there are many such personal bulk second-hand auction items with no judicial disputes, because here they can directly face buyers all over the country; the automatic bidding and price increase mechanism also avoids the process of haggling, and leaves the upper limit of pricing to the market. Of course, for buyers, this is also an open market where they do not need to travel all over the country and can directly see the reserve price.
Traditional commercial transactions are still competing for relationships and finding channels, auction platforms have long used a set of simple and crude bidding rules to clearly price all assets, competing for the most primitive and ultimate efficiency in the business world, which is a commercial practical class that ordinary people can attend at any time without spending hundreds of thousands of yuan on MBA courses.