Customer migration to the Web is an inevitable trend, so why not migrate customers to their own online sales platform? If the company does not carry out customer migration, the lost customers will either be captured by new e-commerce C2C companies such as Taobao, eBay, Dangdang, excellence and other new e-commerce C2C companies that are born in response to the development trend of the Internet, or they will be plundered by direct competitors in the industry who have already implemented customer migration. Whether customers are taken away by Taobao, Dangdang, or by competitors in the industry, it is an irreversible nightmare for the company itself. This makes the network migration of customers of traditional enterprises an urgent new issue.
However, companies cannot solve the problem of customer migration by simply building online sales channels or sales platforms. The initial stage of the self-built network platform of the enterprise is bound to be sparsely visited (traffic), which should have been the direct driving force for vigorously promoting the customer migration strategy, but enterprises often open stores on Taobao for short-term benefits. But relying on or even relying on third-party platforms such as Taobao is indeed a huge misunderstanding.
Let's take a look at the cooperation between Gome and Taobao.
The growing popularity of Taobao has impressed the traditional channel giant Guomei. In 2008, Gome announced its entry into Taobao and opened an online store. But within three months, the partnership ended in a breakup.
Why is this happening?
The purpose of Gome's online store on Taobao is to implement customer migration. The result of the cooperation is that Gome's customers did migrate, but they migrated to Taobao's customers. Due to Taobao's series of processes, including payment and other important links, Gome's sales data and customer information are inevitably mastered by Taobao, which is of course intolerable for Gome, a channel giant that is accustomed to using its own channel strength to call the wind and rain on the entire industrial chain.
In 2008, Taobao has generated 500g of user behavior data every day, and the background of Taobao has carried out in-depth mining and application of data through technical means, so that Taobao can not only charge B2C merchants to promote according to the effect, but also provide them with personalized data analysis services.
The traditional advantage of Gome lies in the firm grasp of customer resources and customer data. Once this advantage is transferred to Taobao, it is a kind of self-weakening for Gome, which is obviously extremely unfavorable to future development. Therefore, the breakup between Gome and Taobao is an inevitability. Gome turned to vigorously developing its self-built online sales platform.
This case is also very revealing for other traditional enterprises. In his early years, Ma Yun had the goal of making Taobao into an "online Walmart". Wal-Mart (as well as Gome and Suning) is also famous for its grasp of terminal discourse (obtained by pleasing customers at low prices), and its extreme squeezing of suppliers' profit margins is also well-known.
Therefore, if a company hopes to achieve online sales growth through cooperation with Taobao, it is actually just a naïve idea of wishful thinking, to put it more seriously, it is to drink doves to quench thirst. Performance may grow rapidly in the short term, but the customer resources that are ultimately vital to life are controlled by Taobao.
HP kept a clear head on this. At the time when competitors Lenovo and Dell have entered Taobao, HP did not blindly follow, but focused on developing its own online sales technology and platform. HP invested professional personnel, built an e-Marketing team with professional technology and professional services, advocated Making Connections, and strived to create an IT application environment with its own control over the Internet for consumers.
In fact, the Internet is a unique field without time and space restrictions, unlike the traditional physical sense of the market, you must open a store in a popular place to make a profit. On the Internet, search plays a decisive role. Of course, the popularity of Taobao is booming, but customers must also search for your online store on the complicated Taobao website. If that's the case, why not search for your own online store directly through Google or Baidu, and why search for an online store on Taobao?
For example, Haier has both a self-built online Haier mall and an online store in Taobao mall. Customers who want to find it online need to go through a single search. However, Haier Mall provides a full Haier interface (the dominance is in its own hands), while Taobao is an interface full of other information (the dominance is in the hands of Taobao). If the company sets the search keywords, it is very easy for customers to find this sales platform on the Internet.
Therefore, the correct strategic choice for traditional enterprises should be to build their own B2C platforms, and take a series of measures to smoothly migrate the original customers to the self-built B2C platform (of course, this is for traditional enterprises with strength and brands. For small and medium-sized retail investors without strength and brand, Taobao is a better choice).