Regarding Amoy e-commerce, there are two small news recently. From April 19th, Tmall will begin to implement the “trial operation” period for the first time in multiple industries. Previously, the “three treasures and one coupon”, which are very important operating tools for Taobao merchants, namely “shop treasure”, “single product treasure”, “match treasure”, and “coupon” will also be changed from the original charging model to free.
These changes are directed at the business side.
Today, when the production capacity is highly developed, those conventional goods are rarely available on this e-commerce platform, and those that are not available on that e-commerce platform. Similarly, in the current situation where e-commerce platforms such as Taoxi, JD.com, and Pinduoduo coexist with multiple content e-commerce platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, merchants no longer limit their business to a certain platform, and multi-platform operation has become normal.
Kaifu, the person in charge of Taobao industry, believes that “Taobao’s increase is in new categories and new supplies.” New supply must come from merchants. To some extent, compared to the user side, merchants are the focus of future e-commerce competition. For businesses operating on multiple platforms, which platform should invest more resources and energy? For businesses with differences and uniqueness in supply, which platform should they choose as their main business position? This is the key to determining the long-term operating conditions of different platforms.
How to grab the heart of the business?
Tao Department has been in business for nearly 20 years, and attracting merchants has always been a core strategic task. But in the near future, a series of changes in Taobao and Tmall are still worthy of attention, and they have further released strong signals to lower the threshold and reduce costs.
Zhang Yong, chairman and CEO of Alibaba, said in a conference call on April 12, “We will first lower the barriers to business access and help merchants reduce business operating costs.” At the same time, the company has also prepared billions of dollars in funds. Support new projects and increase investment to improve merchant training.
The upcoming “Tmall Trial Operation Period” is to optimize the entry process of new businesses. The qualification review process for new merchants will be further simplified. After passing the 7-month trial operation capability assessment, the store can be officially opened.
In Taobao, the “three treasures and one coupon” is an important tool for the daily operation of merchants. For example, whenever they arrive at a promotional node, the merchant will use discount coupons and other promotional methods to attract consumers. These are all set through these “operational artifacts”.
For the free of these tool products, Cave is very supportive, “We hope to help merchants reduce costs and turn the previously charged things, such as shop tools, business staff, etc., into free. These things are actually counted in Alibaba’s overall There is not much money in the income, but it happens to be stuck in the business’s immediate needs. To put it bluntly, this is money that should not be collected.”
In addition, before the Spring Festival this year, the sales transactions brought by Taobaoke (Taoke for short) were included in the statistics of Taobao search. Cave said, “Now we think it is good for the whole ecology to include Taoke in the search statistics. Taoke’s transaction will drive the growth of natural traffic in the station, and more merchants will be more willing to promote for this reason.” This also means Although the main position of the merchants is the Taobao department, they can still effectively use external traffic and achieve higher operating efficiency in the integrated management framework of Taobao inside and outside Taobao.
In fact, on the eve of Double 11 last year, the first change in Taobao took place on the mobile phone: the homepage removed the focus image, and the information flow product “Guess you like” was mentioned. After the user clicks on the corresponding product image, he will enter an integrated similar product recommendation. Pages, these pages are presented in various forms, with both video and image content.
As a result, the positioning of the homepage becomes more clear-it acts as a commodity conversion field, allowing businesses to display their products in a more media-rich way and improve conversion efficiency. From a numerical point of view, after the revision, the click-through rate of the entire homepage has increased by 20%, and the length of time users spend on the homepage information stream has also increased by 20%.
Cave recently also re-emphasized the significance of the recommended information flow for businesses. “In the recommendation position, the most popular products are basically non-standard, long-tail, and distinctive products. For example, recommendations may be useless for merchants selling standardized small appliances. They are just stuck in the search position. But for merchants who sell long-tail, non-standard products like clothes, recommendations are the most beneficial to them. This is also one of the reasons for the good growth of our waist businesses.”
At the end of last year, another big change in Taobao APP was the upgrade of “WeTao” to “Subscription” and the launch of a new content community “Wang Huan” at the same time. In addition to creating a content community, it also allows businesses to strengthen channels to reach consumers through the combination of Taobao live broadcast, shopping and subscription, and achieve in-depth operation of fans.
These targeted actions of Taoist e-commerce companies can indeed help businesses to better respond to industry competition while reducing their burdens. In the past year, Taobao’s active merchant growth has set a record high in five years. As Zhang Yong said, the most important work of Tao Department this year is to reduce costs and thresholds for merchants, and create a more open, fair, efficient and shared platform environment for merchants.
“Business field”, the moat of Taoist e-commerce
For a long time, e-commerce platforms have attached great importance to “traffic”. After content platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have entered “e-commerce”, the outside world is often very optimistic about their traffic value as high-frequency software. However, if you look at Taoist e-commerce from the Internet traffic thinking alone, it may be more one-sided. From the beginning, the Taoxi platform was not just a traffic field, but a “business field”.
In layman’s terms, Taobao can be compared to a “night market street”. It is not only a sales platform for merchants, but also a complete ecosystem of different goods, merchants and business partners. Taobao guarantees the efficient matching of user needs and commodity supply in terms of entry barriers, operating tools, search/recommendation, and consumer evaluation systems, while establishing a good transaction order. This “night market” is not only lively enough, but also “fireworks”, and the rights and interests of businesses and consumers here are also well protected.
Merchant means supply. The reason why Taoxi platform actively “reduces” the merchants is precisely because for them, supply is the core competitiveness of the entire business field. To provide convenience for businesses is to strengthen their core competitiveness.
Taobao’s “business field” attribute is its important moat.
Considering practical factors, although Alibaba’s mobile MAU in the Chinese retail market exceeded the 900 million mark for the first time in the fourth quarter of last year, the year-on-year growth rate was only 9.4%. In other words, the growth rate of Amoy e-commerce users has slowed, and we cannot rely solely on extensive traffic growth. How refined operations are the key to future business growth.
At this time, Taobao’s previously accumulated business field advantage provides a viable breakthrough. By attracting merchants to invest more heavily on the platform, the Taoxi e-commerce product pool will be further enriched, and new categories and new supplies will be the growth points of the platform.
As mentioned earlier, after more than ten years of accumulation, the Tao system has settled down a relatively mature payment, logistics, platform governance, and consumer evaluation system, which objectively ensures that the Tao system is a stable and predictable operation of input and output. platform. On Taobao, there are zero thresholds and zero fees for opening a store. As an integrated platform including payment, logistics, and finding the upstream and downstream of the supply chain, Taobao actually has a comprehensive cost advantage for merchants. In this system, Taobao’s protection of the rights and interests of merchants is also the most complete and systematic.
In the past few years, Taobao and Tmall have had about 1 trillion business increments each year, and the market has great potential for merchants. Taobao’s “full supply” strategy is also attractive to businesses of all categories. In other words, Taobao is the “most unbiased” platform. At the same time, Taobao relies on its advantages in technology and traffic, through data integration and analysis, to accurately understand user needs and provide data support for merchants’ commodity supply.
“Creating a New Movement”
Tao Department not only continues to attract new businesses to settle in, but also helps many new businesses grow into brands from small to large. The rising channel from Taobao to Tmall not only brings more business options and imagination to merchants, but also continuously enriches the supply pool of the entire Taobao department.
In the past three years, 100,000 new brands have entered Tmall. In July last year, Tmall announced the launch of a new brand growth plan. Alibaba vice president Jia Luo said, “In the next two years, we hope to incubate 5,000 unicorns with annual sales of over 100 million yuan, and will also greatly help foreign trade. The factory is transforming to branding, achieving annual sales of 20,000 brands of more than 10 million.”
Last year’s Double 11 is no longer the pattern of traditional big brands “dominating the rivers and lakes” in the early years. Statistics show that the turnover of more than 1,800 new brands on November 1 surpassed the entire day of 11.11 in the previous year, and 94 new brands increased by more than 1,000%. Tmall also opened an exclusive marketing track for new brands for the first time, and helped new brands achieve business growth and brand upgrades through the “Double 11 Treasure New Brand” program.
In general, a large number of new brands have emerged in Amoy e-commerce. Behind this, Amoy e-commerce’s ability to support new brands is constantly strengthening.
Even in the era of e-commerce, it is difficult for merchants to judge consumer demand trends based on their own sales data alone. Therefore, the data capabilities and consumer insights possessed by Taoxi e-commerce have an added advantage for merchants. In the past few years, the Taoxi platform has gradually penetrated into the upper reaches of the merchant’s supply chain, helping them to do new product research and development, and shorten the path from new products to explosive models. Specifically, Tmall has formed a complete set of support processes from accurate portraits, positioning and reach of consumers, to new product development, design, and marketing.
At the same time, compared with traffic-based e-commerce, the most significant difference between Taoxi is the store-centric operation model. In the Tao Department, merchants are not only pursuing single-product explosions, but accumulating brand minds and obtaining more predictable long-term benefits.
After years of precipitation, brand owners and small and medium-sized merchants on the Taoxi platform have jointly built a rich product pool. At the same time, due to the openness of Taoxi e-commerce on the supply side, they can also adapt and lead the changes in consumer consumption habits very quickly. Efficient matching of supply and consumption.
Looking beyond the e-commerce industry, the stores and brands that grew up in Taoism are actually the epitome of China’s consumption revolution. With the development of China’s economy, the needs of consumers have become more and more diversified, and merchants have continued to iterate. Taobao’s largest moat is actually a symbiosis with consumer trends, consumers, brands and innovative businesses in the process of China’s economic “big and big fish.”
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