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"Do you have a dedication?" At one point, it became the hot terrier of the year in 2015. However, in the seventh year of Alipay's collection of five blessings, the same set of blessings, the focus has long been different.
Recently, Alipay Wufu Activity joined hands with more than 1,000 merchant institutions to issue Fu cards to users through Alipay Mini Programs, Life Numbers, Apps and other private domain positions.
At about the same time, Alipay upgraded the "Life Channel", and merchants began to divert traffic to mini programs through the life number.
It can be seen that focusing on the layout of private domains and completing the in-depth operation of key merchants is the biggest goal of Alipay's five blessings this year.
This is also in line with Tmall's strategy of promoting D2C at the time of Singles' Day this year: from e-commerce global marketing to enterprise global direct service to consumers. However, Alipay is currently responsible for life services, especially the part of localized merchants.
In private domain traffic, mini programs play the most important role, not only in Alipay, but also in WeChat, Baidu, Byte, etc.
Taking Alipay as an example, according to the data in the "Alipay Private Domain Operation White Paper (2021 Edition)", as of June this year, the number of Alipay Mini Programs has exceeded 3 million, and the number of monthly active users has reached 500 million.
In the 2022 WeChat Open Class Pro, the person in charge of the WeChat open platform disclosed data, and in 2021, the daily active number of Mini Programs exceeded 450 million, the number of active Mini Programs increased by 41% year-on-year, and the average number of daily uses increased by 32% year-on-year. Baidu announced at the 2021 Vientiane Conference that the number of monthly active users of Baidu Smart Mini Programs reached 420 million, and the number of Smart Mini Programs reached 660,000, covering more than 270 segments.
Because of the existence of Mini Programs, each super APP once hoped to become an independent app store, and then complete a further ecological closed loop. After nearly 5 years of development, the ecology of the super APP Mini Program has gradually matured, and the gap has narrowed significantly, so at present, what is the competition between the giant Mini Programs? Under the anti-monopoly situation, is it good or negative for mini programs?
Relying on wufu to gather merchants, what chess is Alipay playing?
"Many users do not know that we have a small program in Alipay, and the spread is relatively wide by taking the opportunity of issuing a Fu card."
A merchant told the business data faction that participating in the Wufu activities is not only for traffic, but also to strengthen the user's mind in a way that has a sense of ceremony.
Business data school found that the 1,000 merchant institutions that cooperated with Alipay Wufu this year, including Dongcheng Hotel, Shizu Convenience Store, BBK, Zhou Black Duck, Burger King, etc., are almost all concentrated in the local life field.
According to public information, the three categories of Alipay Mini Programs account for the highest proportion are catering, FMCG retail, and housekeeping services, covering nearly 1,000 subdivisions around local life.
Obviously, Alipay is using mini programs as a carrier of services to cut into local life.
As early as 2020, Ant Group announced that Alipay will be officially upgraded to an open platform for digital life, and unite a number of service providers and developers to use Alipay Mini Program as the underlying facility to complete the transition from "people looking for services" to "services to find people". At the beginning of 2020, Alipay launched a special area for epidemic services, including more than 200 areas such as information inquiry, grocery shopping, medical education, catering, and living expenses, and completed the first wave of service upgrades.
Not only that, from the perspective of Alipay's payment attributes, it is the closest to money and the closest to conversion. However, from transaction to payment is only the result, from payment to the upstream of business services - marketing, is what Alipay wants to "counterattack" to seize.
First of all, from the perspective of the C-end, Alipay's user attributes determine its purpose is very clear. For example, paying phone bills, paying water bills, ordering food, consuming, etc. to Alipay is the user's mind accumulated by Alipay for many years, the user's purpose is clear, the path is direct, and the conversion rate is higher.
A developer revealed a set of the most intuitive data for the business data faction: Alipay Mini Program came in 100 users, there may be 10 single transaction conversions, while another super APP Mini Program came in 200-300 people, there are also 10 single conversions, just look at the conversion rate, Alipay will be a little higher.
Secondly, from the perspective of the B-side, due to the perfect payment ecology, merchants can directly access Alipay's various payment capabilities, such as Huabei, bill staging and various support policies in the early days of the platform, etc., and the threshold for getting started is relatively low, Alipay provides developers with developer services including developer ability academies and video explanations.
Liu Chuanjun, CEO of Meicai, once revealed in a public interview that Alipay provides us with not only traffic, but also a complete set of services, such as providing technical support for our small program development, which took only 7 days to go online.
However, even if the Alipay Mini Program is highly compatible with local life, from 2020 onwards, this track is already very crowded.
According to Trustdata's "2020 Q3 China Mobile Internet Industry Development Analysis Report", from January to September 2020, the difference between Meituan and Ele.me users gradually enlarged to 12.607 million; Douyin also competed for this cake through content + group purchase. If you want to rely on local life to qualify, the competition faced by Alipay Mini Programs is still very fierce.
The dispute over mini programs, the ecological differences of super APP
Not to mention the pressure of local life, just look at the field of small programs, competition has begun to rattle.
The core advantage of WeChat Mini Programs lies in social attributes, and decentralization is one of the most important features. Alipay is based on strong transaction attributes, and the ecological attributes of the two are completely different, which also allows Alipay to take a different path: centralized + decentralized combination of play.
WeChat has always been adhering to the "decentralized" model: how much traffic and conversion mini programs can get, completely rely on the ability of private domain operations of merchants, after years of operation, in recent years, there has been a phenomenon of traffic concentrated in the head of the mini program. This means that medium and long tail small businesses and new developers are starting from pure private domain operations, which is even more difficult. At this stage, they need more impetus from the platform, and platform centralization is an opportunity they can seize.
First of all, let's look at alipay centralized recommendation, which is roughly divided into two stages.
In the early stage, it is classified according to the different life scenarios: my express delivery, insurance channel, membership channel, community life and a series of service centralized positions. For example, on the "My Express" page, including SF, Lala, Flash Delivery, Postal EMS and other express delivery Mini Programs, users can directly access the home page with one click to quickly drain the business Mini Program.
In the later period, the nine-square grid of the home page is open to ecological players, as long as the user adds the mini program to the home page, it can be directly connected to the nine-square grid with one click. My Mini Program, home page push stream, life channel, etc., not only that, Alipay also frequently launched platform activities to invite merchants to participate together, such as this Wufu activity, which is to promote the development of Mini Programs with the power of the platform.
In terms of decentralization, it is mainly focused on the tools operated by the merchants themselves, and the merchants can rely on these tools to play with features and tricks, including these three aspects:
l Tools: Provide merchants with self-operating tools, such as first-level entrance sweep on the home page, template messages, intelligent customer service, mini program gifts, post-payment recommendations, etc., and merchants rely on basic capabilities to create primary mini programs;
l Gameplay: This is an advance to ordinary abilities, including cash red packets, marketing activities to send red packets, large carousel gifts, no funds merchant coupons, merchant membership cards and other types of marketing play;
l Search: As well as configure search keywords, service keywords, direct functions, direct services and other self-operated gameplay, obtain private domain traffic from the public domain.
In addition to having two different traffic models to complement each other, Alipay has also formed a private domain to drive the public domain, similar to Taobao's "traffic grassland" strategy, that is, the better the private domain operation of the merchant, the more likely to get free incentives for centralized traffic, and the merchant can see in the background that the private domain promotion direction corresponds to the public domain resource type, which is Alipay's "support plan".
In fact, such a centralized + decentralized model is more suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises and developers, ensuring that "everyone has the opportunity to fight", driving centralized traffic with decentralized traffic and forming a traffic cycle. However, it is precisely because the strong transaction attribute limits the diversity of Alipay Mini Program categories, such as free tool Mini Programs, which are difficult to start in Alipay.
At the same time, due to the lack of social scenarios, the private domain retention and subsequent conversion of Alipay Mini Programs have become relatively difficult. According to the understanding of the business data faction, in 2021, Alipay has successively launched capabilities such as "collection guidance" and "open life channel" to help mini programs complete follow-up retention.
The Ecological Battle, the "Battle of the Middle"
With the continuous improvement of basic capabilities and the continuous prominence of ecological attributes, the mini program pattern of giants has also ushered in a new stage.
The first stage is a contest of capabilities and techniques. WeChat Mini Program was officially launched in 2016, and in the following three years (2017-2019), WeChat Mini Program ushered in rapid development, according to incomplete statistics, WeChat updated and iterated more than 200 capabilities in two years, including social capabilities, e-commerce capabilities, marketing capabilities, matrix capabilities, etc. By 2019, WeChat Mini Programs have begun to iterate slowly, and have now become the standard for enterprises to enter the digital transformation of the WeChat ecosystem, with more developers and service providers entering the game, and growing into a large-scale service provider system such as Youzan and Weimob, entering a mature period.
Alipay followed suit, launching a light application in 2018, and then officially renamed "Alipay Mini Program", according to the "Alipay Private Domain Operation White Paper (2021)", Alipay Mini Program has covered 1,000 life services such as living expenses, social security provident fund, food, clothing, housing and transportation, laying a good digital foundation.
Although Baidu started late, but the goal is very clear, the reason why Baidu named the intelligent Mini Program, from the beginning of the development of the "search + information flow + AI" ecological architecture program, through Baidu search, Baijia number information flow and other entrances to promote the intelligent Mini Program, but also for developers to provide more than 60 AI interfaces.
Due to the difference in native ecological attributes, the advantages and disadvantages of the final development of the Mini Program, as well as the development path, are also completely different.
A service provider told Business Data Pie: "Operating the two Mini Program platforms weChat and Alipay at the same time, you can clearly find the difference in the growth path of the Mini Program, the initial traffic of the WeChat Mini Program is very low, and it can only rely on its own private domain traffic and operating tools to slowly accumulate." But when it accumulates to a singularity, it will usher in the first wave of outbreaks, the user stickiness is relatively high, basically there will be a return visit every week, but the transaction rate can only reach about 10%. And Alipay because of the centralized traffic support, if you meet the platform conditions can be recommended on the home page, the initial traffic poured in at once, but it is more difficult to maintain it, but relatively speaking, the conversion rate is higher, and the conversion rate can sometimes rush to about 20%.
The traffic in Baidu is mainly search traffic, which is highly targeted and has a very high conversion rate, if the keyword configuration is clever, the Mini Program can quickly start the volume. But it also brings limitations to Baidu smart Mini Programs, one is that each Mini Program must have content as the bearer of the search landing page, a single tool-based Mini Program cannot go through, and the second is that the new traffic in the early stage has soared, but the retention and transformation in the later stage are weak.
Although the current trend of differentiation is obvious, from the perspective of recent actions, there is a trend of the same destination, that is, open source.
Although mini programs break the information islands between apps, they still stay at the tool level, whether it is WeChat, Alipay or Baidu, they are trying to gradually expand the boundaries of mini programs.
WeChat Mini Program based on social scenes, has formed a ubiquitous sharing and dissemination within WeChat, but has not yet formed a large enough external open source ecology, but this is likely to become the next trend, just this year's WeChat open class pro, Mini Program through the video number, enterprise WeChat and other Tencent ecological tools, the force of B-end enterprise services.
Alipay is focusing on the transaction scenario, in fact, in the past two years, Alipay's exploration of service search has also been strengthened, hoping to open up internal traffic to form a broken circle. In the matter of opening up scenes outside the App, Alipay has formed a development and multi-terminal operation with other brothers of the Ali Group Army, that is to say, the development of an Alipay Mini Program can be run on the internal member app of the Ali economy, such as AutoNavi Map.
Baidu joins hands with Baidu Alliance to achieve one-end development and multi-terminal operation, in addition to Baidu system products such as mobile phone Baidu and Baidu Tieba, Baidu smart mini programs can also run on the platforms of partners such as iQiyi and Xiaohongshu. At the end of 2021, Baidu and a number of head mobile phone manufacturers released a superconductivity plan, and smart mini programs can be run in the browsers brought by many mobile phone manufacturers.
Today, the game of small programs may have come to the "battle of the middle game", the infrastructure has been set up, and whether open source can become a result from the trend depends on the long-term evolution process.
But as Russell said, variability is the source of happiness. The future of Mini Programs is not in the hands of a certain platform, whether it is WeChat, Alipay or Baidu, they are trying to tell the story of Mini Programs in their own way.
*Images are from the Internet