Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 Internet jianghu
The Internet industry has a third of the whole process, the three giants are gradually taking shape and standing in a position, does it mean that the e-commerce industry has come to an end?
The more e-commerce giants, the more difficult is business?
The development of the e-commerce industry seems to have become a sad topic on the Internet in recent years.
Even Ali's growth rate on Singles Day last year was only 8.45%, a record low, and major platforms no longer high-profile GMV promotion. Some netizens ridiculed last year's e-commerce festival, and the most ruthless discount may not be the goods you buy online, but the stock prices of e-commerce giants.
Judging from the performance of the platform, it seems that the e-commerce industry has entered the stock stage, and the increment is difficult to find. Since fiscal 2021, Alibaba has mentioned sacrificing some of its profits in exchange for longer-term development at almost every quarterly earnings meeting. Under the competition, the gross profit margin of the three major platforms has collectively declined.
Although the e-commerce industry is in a dismal situation and growth is becoming more and more difficult, ironically, new entrants such as Douyin and Kuaishou still want to enter, respectively, raising the banner of interest in e-commerce and trusting e-commerce, robbing the few cakes left, and the competition has a tendency to intensify, and the two are in stark contrast.
Some media believe that due to the multi-tenant phenomenon of the bilateral network effect of e-commerce, the lack of defense, jitter, fast has the ability to lay a foothold in the e-commerce market. But why is it that choosing to enter a market competition with limited growth is not smart in itself, and it is far less profitable than tapping into the blue ocean?
In the view of the Internet jianghu, the current e-commerce is facing a "pseudo-stock" stage, and the stock is only a symptom. Although the overall Internet user has entered a stage of volatility growth, the online penetration rate of physical goods is not high.
At the CCTV China Economic Person of the Year Awards ceremony in 2012, Ma Yun said that e-commerce will replace traditional stores in 10 years. Wang Jianlin also shot back: "If e-commerce accounts for 50% of China's retail market after 10 years, I will give him a hundred million, if not to him give me a hundred million." ”
Ten years have passed, according to the data of relevant departments, in 2021, the online retail sales of physical goods will 108042 billion yuan, an increase of 12.0%, accounting for only 24.5% of the total retail sales of social consumer goods. If you look at it from the perspective of various categories, some of the categories that are easy to "go online" such as home appliances, electronic products, clothing, shoes and bags have approached or reached 40%. The online penetration rate of medical and health care, fresh food, food and beverage, daily necessities and other categories is still low.
In essence, the e-commerce industry still has the potential for development, but the inherent e-commerce development model has reached a growth bottleneck, and its role in the face of the current situation of e-commerce is weakening.
Unlike other Internet platforms, the more user nodes, the greater the utility of the product. For e-commerce giants, there is an inverted U-shaped value curve, with the growth of users and merchants, the value of the platform shows a trend of first growth and then decline. There are roughly three reasons for this:
First, e-commerce platforms need economies of scale, the larger the scale of buying and selling any party, the more attractive it is to the other party, and the growth of scale can increase the utility of the platform. However, paradoxically, the increase in supply-side competition on the same side of the platform will deduct each other's value. Appropriate or sufficient competition is conducive to stimulating the initiative of enterprises, and now excessive competition is nothing more than an inward volume, resulting in many participants falling into a situation of losing money and making money.
According to the data of Tianyancha Professional App, B2C e-commerce related enterprises have reached more than five million.
Second, in essence, the mainstream of e-commerce platforms is to match transaction information. In the face of scattered and differentiated consumers, through technology to improve the efficiency of transaction information matching, the higher the efficiency, the lower the cost, the greater the profit of the platform side. However, with the expansion of the scale, the difficulty of transaction information matching is also increasing day by day, when the scale reaches a critical point, the efficiency of information matching begins to decline, which is directly manifested in the reduction of matching accuracy and the higher and higher marketing costs of merchants.
Third, the scale makes the information complicated and redundant, and aggravates the information asymmetry. Consumer attention is limited, the more goods, the less attention is allocated to a single product, the ability to distinguish product quality and authenticity will also be reduced, and the platform endorsement effect will also be weakened, which is also an important reason for the birth of Tmall.
To put it bluntly, the scale of e-commerce giants is shifting from advantage to disadvantage.
The wool is out of the merchant, when the business is difficult to do, the platform life is naturally not good, and the cost of the merchant will also be passed on to the consumer. Therefore, the original e-commerce model has been difficult to maintain the positive development of bilateral dynamic balance.
On the one hand, the industry still has a lot of potential space, with the rise in penetration, the industry cake will continue to grow; on the other hand, the e-commerce giant is in danger, and it can be said that it is a good time to dig the foot of the wall, and it is not difficult to understand the end of the market.
Byte has cut off third-party external links, obtained payment licenses, and successively launched policies such as giving brand self-broadcast small shops an additional 20% rebate support last year, reducing the threshold for annual frame cooperation to GMV30 million, and shortening the withdrawal cycle of merchants from T+7 to T+1.
In July last year, Xiaogu, the head of Kuaishou e-commerce, put forward three keywords for Kuaishou e-commerce in 2021: big trust e-commerce, big brand, and big service provider. It is announced that the strategy for 2022 will add a new "large-scale industrial belt", under the "Wind Maker Plan", in the future, 50 service providers that can incubate 50 successfully transition merchants and 100 service providers that can incubate 20 successfully transition merchants will be cultivated.
How can we break the appearance of "pseudo-stock"?
Whether it is the end of the jitter, or the launch of Taote and Jingxi, a big role is actually to differentiate the scale, so that it can focus more accurately on subdivided consumer groups, reduce costs and increase efficiency. This is good for the entire e-commerce industry, but major e-commerce platforms also have a tendency to compete viciously for user attention.
For the sake of traffic, the platform will also be kidnapped. Taobao chooses to enrich its own content ecology, after shopping online, it has officially occupied the first-level entrance of Taobao's home page; Pinduoduo uses its own gamification characteristics to grasp the weaknesses of human nature in place, so that users can participate more in the game; as for Douyin Kuaishou, its own entertainment content is naturally attractive to the user's attention.
User attention has already moved towards the stock, and excessive chasing of user attention makes traffic more scarce, resulting in rising traffic costs. The platform has actually been kidnapped by traffic, knowing that excessive competition for traffic will lead to traffic costs continuing to rise, but it cannot be stopped. For traditional e-commerce platforms, do not buy traffic and wait for death, buy traffic to find death.
There are actually two value points for e-commerce platforms to monetize, one is the transaction information matching mentioned above, which is the direction chosen by most e-commerce platforms. The other is transaction execution matching, which is popularly speaking how to better ensure performance. Typical examples such as Jingdong have established their own self-operated, warehouse and other foundations, and Taobao's newly launched cat sharing is actually a breaking point in this direction.
Transaction execution matching can bring value, but it is difficult to bring advantages to e-commerce platforms. JD.com's own business is the value point of using transaction execution matchmaking, but it has been overpowered by Ali for many years. The domestic four links and one reach and SF can cooperate as long as they give money, so that the implementation of the contract has lost barriers. For example, Douyin, which launched its own electronic face sheet in August last year, successfully completed docking with express delivery companies such as SF, Tee Yida, Best, and Jitu.
This is also the reason why most e-commerce platforms are dead in the matching of transaction information, so is there a solution to the matching of transaction information?
In the view of the Internet jianghu, the transaction information matching of the past e-commerce platform buying and selling traffic has gradually become ineffective, and the next thing to think about is how to integrate the two values, such as building an e-commerce brand.
The added value of white-brand products is low, it is difficult for e-commerce platforms to obtain profits, and some of the big-name brands have high influence, rely on low information matching on e-commerce platforms, e-commerce platforms do not have the right to speak, and profits are naturally small. However, e-commerce can fully participate in the incubation and creation of brands.
For example, Ali, at the 2021 Tmall new brand strategy conference, Alibaba vice president and Tmall vice president Chui Xue said that Tmall will transform from B2C to D2C service platform to help enterprises directly face global consumers, and plans to invest tens of billions of yuan in 5 years, focusing on incubating 2,000 potential new brands.
As the traffic dividend and the rule dividend slowly disappear. E-commerce platforms need to move from the wool of the brand to the symbiosis with the brand, from the game relationship to the symbiotic relationship, to help the brand amplify the potential energy and share the soup from it.
From the perspective of traffic, cat and dog fighting belongs to the away battle, with the short, the long of the attack, in the game with the trembling fast is in the inferior position. Therefore, this is also equivalent to avoiding the advantages of the other side and competing misplaced.
There have also been many Taobao brands on Taobao before, growing rapidly, but often short-lived, fleeting, and very little can be left, because the brand is too thin, often just a brand name.
In addition to consumer cognition, the real brand also needs to have products, marketing, price and other elements, such as whether the product can be in its own hands, rather than in the hands of the foundry, whether it has the pricing power of the product, rather than engaging in promotions at every turn. Since influencer brands do not have the ability to operate sustainably, e-commerce platforms can work together to create value together.
At this time, the e-commerce platform needs to help it complete other capability elements of the brand, in addition to D2C, it also needs to have D2B (direct to business) capabilities.
Different from traditional offline channel distributors, e-commerce platforms do D2B basically online. Different from JD.com's self-operation, D2B is not operating a brand, but co-creating a brand. This may also be the reason for the birth of cats.
On January 6, 2022, Alibaba's Dai Shan announced a new organizational structure for Taobao's Tmall business. Taobao Tmall is fully integrated, and the "Big Taobao" structure is out, and preparations have been made for this. From Ali's point of view, Taobao and B2C retail business groups, Taocaicai, Taote and 1688 and other first-level organizations have jointly formed a "China digital business sector". The "Tao System" and the "B Department" are fully connected in terms of organization.
Daniel Zhang has said that Ali's very important positioning and direction towards the future is to become a two-wheel drive company of consumer Internet and industrial Internet. E-commerce brands are actually equivalent to becoming an intersection of Ali's consumer Internet and industrial Internet.
Perhaps through the docking of D2C and D2B two gears, strengthen the consumption and industry at both ends, left-handed traffic matching, right-hand supply chain performance, the integration of the two means the formation of a new e-commerce value closed loop, as for the effect, it remains to be proved by Ali.