Dialogue with He Yongming, vice president of Ant Group: "Alipay does not benchmark douyin"

Image source: Visual China

If you pay enough attention, Alipay has recently undergone some "makeover" changes.

On the homepage, Alipay has carried out obvious product slimming - the nine-square grid and service cards can be edited, a large number of waist seal marketing information is removed, the information flow waterfall is cut off, and the intelligent service card is launched. Self-operated local life business (Fliggy, Ticket Taobao, Hungry, etc.) has been untied from the flow of land.

The more prominent change occurred in the bottom tab bar, where word-of-mouth services disappeared and replaced it with a "life" channel, presenting a stream of information, including pictures, text, and short videos. "Life" is a feature launched by Alipay in 2016, where merchants can provide services to consumers, publish information, etc., but the previous entrance was very hidden. In the current version, the C-end "signing master" is also stationed in it.

In short, Alipay's life channel presents a product form close to that of short video apps. Alipay can also give you the feeling of brushing "shake fast".

Alipay officials define the current operation strategy as "decentralization as the mainstay, centralization as a supplement", that is, diversion of the private domain of merchants and opening up more resources to third-party ecological merchants.

In this context, Alipay, which has not held an annual conference in the past two years, has held a partner conference to save a bureau for merchants and service providers. Alipay announced that it will invest 10 billion yuan in the next year to support merchants and service providers to reduce costs and improve efficiency. The 10 billion capital resources will focus on two major parts, one is the preferential rate and rebate for merchants and service providers to help reduce costs; The second is to provide free public domain traffic incentives for merchants and service providers, focusing on improving efficiency.

After this partner conference, Titanium Media App and He Yongming, vice president of Ant Group and general manager of Alipay's ecological development business department, launched a dialogue. In the dialogue, "openness" and "service" are the most frequent words mentioned by He Yongming.

Re-establish the boundary

Lifting some of Ali's privileges to "the sons" and unbinding the word-of-mouth from the home page and tab column is a clear and unambiguous signal that Alipay is determined to open up.

In 2019, Titanium Media App also had an in-depth communication with He Yongming, who was still the general manager of the Mini Program Division at the time, and he Yongming's view was that the combination of Taobao and Alipay Mini Programs was regarded as "the beginning of the collaboration of Ali system APP", and said that "the cooperation of Ali system in 2019 will be closer, which is very firm." ”

In today's view of He Yongming, the reputation that originally occupied the C position of the application is now just an ordinary ISV (service provider), which is no different from other service providers. Instead, the life channel will no longer consider problems such as tilting more traffic to a "dry son".

The issue of "kissing the son" and "drying the son" was once the key issue of Alipay's opening up to the outside world. For external merchants, this is clearly a traffic privilege.

Re-establishing boundaries means that the core role needs to shift from the dominant player to the service provider.

How is it served? Alipay released the "C-CARE" of the merchant's digital self-operation model, that is, with user value as the center (C), starting from the four dimensions of expanding user scale (C), promoting user activity (A), stimulating user potential value (R) and improving operational efficiency (E), helping merchants solve the problems from customer acquisition, conversion, repurchase to user precipitation.

The starting point of this process is the 4-point product of mini program, life number, merchant coupon, and public domain promotion system.

Specifically, Alipay opens the search for "Mini Program Direct", and all merchants can configure a personalized search direct area as long as they have a Mini Program; The "Message" function is upgraded, and the merchant Mini Program can push order messages, payment messages, and subscription messages to users through the message reminder on the home page of the Alipay App, and carry out user recall, while the payment message is open, and the merchant can expand the private domain operation space based on the payment binding Mini Program; The "Daily Promotion" function of the public domain is launched, and merchants have the opportunity to receive free traffic recommendations.

For example, this year, Alipay directly opened the Wufu IP, more than 1,000 merchants can issue their own Fu cards, in addition to the Alipay public domain, but also in their own private domain Mini Program, directly linked to coupons and conversion. According to media statistics, the time for many brands to issue Fu cards is one week earlier than the official of Alipay, replacing Alipay as the person who fired the Jifu starting gun.

Merchant coupons are a more in-depth example of openness. In June 2022, Alipay fully opened the merchant coupon interface, helping merchants and service providers to open up their own marketing background and Alipay operation position, and issue coupons in multiple scenarios such as merchant mini programs and their own APP, realizing the distribution of one coupon throughout the network.

This also means that merchants issue coupons on Alipay, and the coupon users can go to other platforms to verify and use them.

"Let merchants have a stronger ability to operate independently within the Alipay terminal." He Yongming said.

"Not against TikTok"

The difference between Alipay and Douyin, Kuaishou, etc. is one of the main topics of our dialogue with He Yongming, which is unimaginable in the past.

This refers to the newest member of the Alipay tab, the "Life" channel. From the perspective of product form, it is very similar to short video Apps. In the early days of the launch, the content of the Life Channel was presented in a single column, and in the current version, "Attention" and "Discovery" were separated. For merchants, this is a window to reach users directly.

On the whole, the merchants stationed in the life channel include life services, beauty and clothing, consumer electronics, catering and other businesses, and some personal IPs such as "Wu Xiaobo Channel" have also begun to settle in the life channel.

He Yongming does not think that the core appeal of doing life channels and launching short videos is to increase user stickiness, "Our operation personnel understand that as long as short videos of beautiful women are allowed to go online, operational data can be significantly improved, but this is absolutely not allowed." ”

"Our content is for the sake of service, and it's not in the same market as the standalone short video app." He Yongming said, "Alipay has gone through too many detours in this regard. The user is God, and you must serve God well. ”

How content provides services for services, the most important grasp is the mini program.

In order to make the business path of the merchant's private domain more perfect and smooth, the life number and mini program have also been opened. For example, after watching a merchant's video, if they want to buy goods, they can directly jump to the official mini program through the video to buy, and even connect with offline stores and coupons.

A product manager at Alipay gave the example of a restaurant brand "Western MCA" broadcast live through the Life Channel, where a Beijing user received a coupon in the live broadcast room, and 15 minutes later the user checked the coupon at an offline store. For another example, the Beijing Aquarium released a video during the Wufu period to participate in the Fukuka activity, which brought more than 3 million visits in one day, and the number of single videos played was as high as 4.6 million.

"This allows us to see that the life number is very close to life, and the content and merchant coupon tools in this channel can really bring the possibility of offline customer flow to the merchants." The product manager said.

Ants in listing rumors

On a larger scale, the isolation between Alibaba Group and Ant Group is being fully promoted.

Alibaba's fiscal 2022 annual report released a few days ago shows that the two sides have made important adjustments in terms of partner structure, business cooperation, and data sharing. According to the latest list of partners, in addition to some members who previously announced their retirement, seven management members of Ant Group have withdrawn from Alibaba Group's partner team in the past fiscal year.

According to the newly revised Partnership Agreement, Alibaba Partners shall be Alibaba Group persons, and Alibaba Group's affiliates will no longer be partners.

In addition, the day before the financial disclosure, Alibaba and Ant Group had revised the Equity and Asset Purchase Agreement and the Alipay Commercial Agreement, which will take effect on August 13 this year. Colleagues, Alibaba also terminated the Data Sharing Agreement with Ant Group, and the annual report reads, "We and Ant Group will negotiate the terms of the data sharing arrangement on a case-by-case basis and in accordance with applicable laws and regulations to the extent necessary for both parties to provide services to their respective customers." ”

This is a process of establishing the rules of "brotherhood and accounting". Alipay's reconstruction of the border is, to some extent, to comply with this trend.

Within Ant, finance to finance and technology to technology are also a certain event, the former applied for a financial control license, and the latter once again sought to go public.

In June 2022, Ant released the 2021 Sustainable Development Report, which redefined Ant itself - the Internet Open Platform, and the report also mentioned that Ant's latest five main business segments are: Digital Payment Open Platform, Service Industry Digital Operation Open Platform, Digital Finance Open Platform, Digital Technology Service, and International Cross-border Payment Service. The color of weakening finance is very obvious.

This means that today's ants must reduce the proportion of revenue and profits in the financial control sector in the entire group, expand the proportion of revenue and profit in the technology sector, and shift the profit method from finance to non-profit through scientific and technological capabilities. This is the key premise for whether Ant can successfully go public in the future.

From this point of view, for the current Alipay, rebuilding borders, service merchants and service providers is exactly what must be done is difficult and correct. (This article was first published on the Titanium Media APP, the author | Cai Pengcheng)