Image source @ Visual China
Text | Wu Yiyi, author | Salted fish fish
As soon as the news of Ali's internal test trend e-commerce APP "State Stick" flowed out, it attracted media attention.
Therefore, along the timeline, the "Douyin Box" previously launched by Douyin, the "Hobby" community produced by Sina Tongcheng, the new channel "Idle Fish Tide Society" launched by Idle Fish, and the official trend number "Trend Potato" that Xiaohongshu once launched have all become evidence that trend e-commerce is about to become the next growth industry overnight.
However, is this really an industry standing on an escalator?
Regarded as the benchmark of the industry, it is true that it has been transformed into a new unicorn due to the trend economy dominated by sneakers and clothing, but on this track, there is no shortage of precedents for falling. YOHO, which has enlightenment significance for the trend circle! At one time, financing was blocked, lawsuits were entangled, and even to the extent of laying off employees and selling themselves, as for the nice and knowledgeable goods that stepped on the shoes and speculated on the dividends, even if they occupied the position advantage, they did not achieve much huge growth from it.
In fact, it may not be the same as the huge wealth expected, the trend of e-commerce has been out of the small and beautiful sneaker trading market, but it does not mean that the next foot has stepped into the fast lane of growth. The addition of giants and the attention of the platform do not confirm that the trend of e-commerce has ushered in structural changes.
A cautious conclusion is that trendy e-commerce is an opportunity that should be welcomed, but it will never be immediately at the head of the tide.
01 Betting on the future consumption of young people
In the eyes of entrants, the value of trend e-commerce is not the present, but the future.
In July 2021, CITIC Securities released a special study on trend consumption, which pointed out that from the perspective of market size, the trend consumption market reached 100 billion yuan and is still in the channel of rapid growth. From the perspective of consumer distribution, Generation Z has become a powerful driver of the growth of the trendy consumer market.
Although the pace of walking is different, the big manufacturers have realized the need to cut into the trend track. Since last year, around the word "trend", Internet companies have been moving frequently.
In December 2021, Douyin entered the market with a high profile, and launched an independent APP - Douyin Box. From the app store, you can see the positioning of this product, "trend fashion e-commerce platform", while slogan is more straightforward, "open the trend life".
In contrast, "Hobby" produced by Sina Tongcheng is less ambitious. It positions the trend party co-creation community, trying to create a community social platform belonging to the Z generation tide group through content co-creation, star society, set card and other gameplay.
As for the Ali stick that is still in internal testing, although it is positioned as an "APP that focuses on the lifestyle of young people", it can be seen that it is different when you open the home page. Compared with the focus on the lifestyle of young people, the product design of the stick, obviously the e-commerce flavor is stronger, click into the APP, the home page is a large blockbuster of product information, and almost every icon on the page is linked to the manager's store and product details.
In fact, taking the above three products as an example, although they are closely following the trend in positioning and slogan, the actual product logic is not the same. Strictly speaking, the Vibrato box is more like an OOTD version of Douyin, the form of the stick is more like an e-commerce platform with trendy content, and Hobby produced by Sina is a trend content community, and the part about e-commerce seems to be still brewing.
However, it does not matter that the current difference is different, the entry point is different, and the end point may be on the same coordinate.
Since last year, the reason why the trend e-commerce track has surged undercurrent is because this combination of content and transactions has indeed brought a new story full of imagination, which has pushed the valuation of "obtained things" to further increase while letting the anxious giants see incremental hope.
For traditional e-commerce giants, content anxiety has long been not a rumor, as early as a few years ago, Taobao is committed to content, community, and sitting on a large number of traffic short video platform, it wants to open up content and consumption, and then open up a new growth curve, after all, in the advertising business growth slowdown at the moment, there is no more than direct goods monetization model.
Now that the breakthrough has emerged, the next step is to compete for the table. At this moment, the mutual penetration of content and e-commerce is a tacit consensus, and the focus on the trend is betting on the future consumption of young people.
Of course, the only problem is that the ceiling of the trend e-commerce model itself may need to be repeatedly discussed, the trend track is too vertical, the competition is particularly fierce, and how much effort has been wasted to resist the siphon of mainstream e-commerce, and now it will use more energy to protect this plate.
02 Not very trendy e-commerce
As mentioned above, "trend" as a new theme is now being favored by giants.
Whether it is traditional e-commerce, short video upstarts, or social media platforms, they are all stretching out their tentacles as much as possible, and they each feel that this business can essentially be included in their own business coverage, and they have traffic and financial advantages compared to the current players on the track.
However, the business of trend e-commerce may not be as easy as imagined. It is not like other e-commerce, sku enough, fast enough, good enough quality, can seize the market, the trend of e-commerce is to do content business, to use cultural identity and brand consensus, to meet the needs of young consumers.
The implication is that compared with the characteristics of cost performance and functional attributes that traditional e-commerce usually pays attention to, trend e-commerce has different emphases. To some extent, the consumption logic of trendy e-commerce is actually somewhat similar to the luxury market, just like women will never have enough clothes, always willing to try new perfumes and lipsticks, and the hipster men on the street will never mind having an extra pair of expensive limited editions in the cabinet.
It is precisely because the trend market and the luxury market are similar, it is an industry without boundaries, restrictions and quantifications, and all the stockX that has a good and harmonious future is immeasurable.
If you ask a post-00s why they trust things, his first reaction may be fidelity, that period of vigorous shoe speculation era in the tide shoe culture to the climax at the same time, but also the young community of consumer confidence fried up, aurora blue shoe box, frosted black seal, mint green anti-counterfeiting buckle, and the crisp identification certificate, anti-counterfeiting four-piece set in addition to environmental pressure at the same time, but also let the trust increase dramatically.
This trust is very precious, just like the previous generation of Taobao shopping trust official flagship store, Jingdong order to choose direct sales, for the young Z generation, the anti-counterfeiting four-piece set is the fidelity mark of their generation.
If you look at the TikTok box and the stick according to this logic, they obviously did not go to this step. On the road to becoming a trend e-commerce, they seem to have just taken the first step: a trend-following UI, a basic column classification, and a part of the tide brand with little sales.
Moreover, a neglected fact is that latecomers want to do it in one step, but the trend of e-commerce has its own transaction logic. Regarded as the two most potential products in the field of trend e-commerce, dewu and Xiaohongshu, in fact, should be called the trend community, in their basic disk, e-commerce is attached, the combination of content and transactions is after countless rounds of UGC precipitation after accidental stimulation.
But the purpose of the stick and the vibrato box is very strong.
The launch of the vibrato box, behind the vibrato poured energy into the special interest in e-commerce, we can even say that it is the product of vibrato to speed up the monetization speed, it has been paved with grass-type content from the first line, the desire for growth and realization is engraved in every frame of the picture.
The form of the stick is even less convincing, a net red spice girl cheongsam, Taobao price of 100 yuan, but put on the trend of the shell, the price can be tripled, which is obviously very un trendy. Also, when the sweet and spicy wind spreads across the page, do you really feel that it is trendy? Most people will only think that this is the new popular Internet celebrity style.
And so lies the paradox.
At present, most of the content of the vibrato box is mechanized handling vibrato fashion bloggers, which also makes the natural interaction and evaluation of the entire product extremely thin, so why does it talk about leveraging the content cycle?
The ideal rhythm of the stick is the balanced flow of content and consumption, but it currently seems to have changed from a comprehensive commodity market to a commodity market with select themes, and has not shown a deeper transformation.
03 Trendy e-commerce is not very wow
Although they all call themselves trend e-commerce, the above players seem to have more than just a different starting point.
Before the strong appearance of the thing, the trend e-commerce track is not without short soldiers to take over, the first generation of trend e-commerce Yoho! He was the first person to eat crab in the fashion trade, but he still lost his front hoof in the race against the goods.
Looking back, it's trendy enough, and there's no shortage of community stickiness, but why did it fall behind? Some people believe that this is determined by the merits of the model. Yoho！ The B2C model is too heavy and obviously not as flexible as the C2B2C mode.
However, is this flexibility and mobility really tempting enough to make Douyin and Taobao can't stand it? Third-party statistics tell us that we may not, in 2021, the market share of e-commerce retail platforms, the top five market share are: Taobao accounted for 51%, JD.com accounted for 20%, Pinduoduo accounted for 15%, Douyin e-commerce accounted for 5%, Kuaishou e-commerce accounted for 4%, the remaining less than 5% of the market share by Suning Tesco, Vipshop, Dewu and other platforms divided.
In this way, the trend of this cake does not seem to be so big.
In fact, there are more details that seem to inadvertently reveal a signal that the problem of trendy e-commerce is not just that the cake is not big.
As we all know, in the trade of fashion goods, in addition to scarcity, the greatest demand for fidelity. For a hipster, there is nothing more terrifying than his single product is fake, so the moat that leads the trend of e-commerce has always been considered anti-counterfeiting identification.
In the early years, the acquisition of things also rose by virtue of this fame. Speaking of which, Taobao also gave the goods to guide the flow, when the tide product transaction was not popular, there were many unofficial directly operated tide goods purchasing stores on Taobao, most of which were tide shoes, at that time, the stores in order to prove the authenticity of the goods, will be specially marked on the shopping details page to support the information of the test, which is commonly known as the poison. Later, with the rise of the tide shoe trade, this wild identification was more and more recognized in the circle, and it has developed to the present, in the younger generation, buying shoes over poison has almost become a consumption ritual.
However, the rampant trend of "over-poisoning" may not be a good thing for the obtained thing. The more people who have come to poison, the greater the pressure of identification, and the mode of human flesh identification of appraisers is too unspecified. Some media interviewed appraisers who had a good time, but the interview results made people call "too leek", among them, the appraisers identified more than 1,000 products per day, and the average time of a product was more than ten seconds.
Based on this, it is difficult for us to consistently use anti-counterfeiting identification as a moat for things, after all, when consumers know that the number of goods sold in the sky is more than three times the global limit, it is difficult to convince themselves to maintain consumer confidence.
Let's extend it, if the object always adheres to this model in the later stage, then the anti-counterfeiting identification is not only its ascending stone, but also its ceiling.
04 Which to buy? Why?
Dai Yusen, a partner of Zhen Fund, once released such a dynamic on a social platform, 100 billion US dollars of shein, 65 billion US dollars of Pinduoduo, 10 billion US dollars of things, which one to buy? Why?
In the first six comments, the highest number of likes was chosen, on the grounds that "30 billion US dollars is easier than 150 billion US dollars of Pinduoduo."
In connection with reality, this logic seems to have some truth. According to the late report, in the year ended September 30, 2021, the number of people who have purchased in Alibaba's Chinese retail market platform has reached 863 million, which means that Alibaba continues to acquire new users while more importantly retaining the most valuable users.
Since last year, in order to achieve this goal, Ali has made many changes, increasing content, focusing on the shopping experience, and even shifting from super APP to building app matrix to meet the different needs of various types of consumers.
Taote's sinking economy, idle fish for the second-hand economy, and the stick for the trend economy can be said to be the product of this idea.
In contrast, it is vibrato. It's hard to see the TikTok box's desire for the trend circle in its form, even if it mentions the trend repeatedly in the introduction of the app store. In fact, rather than becoming a thing, the vibrato box obviously wants to be itself, open the APP, it is more like an e-commerce system that has been stripped down, with familiar waterfalls, batch grass anchors, and a variety of grounded small commodity categories.
Therefore, from the current situation, it is not difficult to understand why some people will stand up and say that "trend e-commerce is actually a bit of a false proposition".
Referring to CITIC's research on trend consumption, trend e-commerce should also have the importance of brand, aesthetic importance and media importance, but in fact, for new entrants, they seem to be not here, and their so-called trend e-commerce, at this stage, is more like "changing the posture of the old bank, and doing it again".
However, even if the trend e-commerce is a bit of a pseudo-proposition, the young consumer group behind the trend e-commerce is real. In communities like Little Red Book and Dewu, the distance between content and consumption is just a picture, and bloggers have asked from head to toe even if they just post a daily outfit.
For traditional e-commerce, such a strong curiosity, although it is now diverting, but in the future, it may not be impossible to divert.