Alipay, is it still a national APP?

How to truly revitalize the sleeping 1 billion users, Alipay obviously needs to do more.

"If it's not Taobao, who still uses Alipay?" This sentence, I don't know if it is heart-piercing for the management of Ant Financial.

According to data from Jiuqian Zhongtai, even in an annual drama such as "Ji Wufu", users only spend 10 minutes in Alipay every day. Next door has 11 times the sound, and another green chat app is 8.6 times better.

This comparison is not fair enough, after all, Alipay is only a payment tool, but it is clear that Alipay has always had a dream to turn itself into a super APP, and Ali is installing a lot of businesses related to payment scenarios.

In the past few years, AutoNavi seems to be replacing Alipay, and Alibaba's expectations for Alipay are decreasing.

Therefore, when the word-of-mouth business was merged into AutoNavi, Ele.me became freely adjustable in the C position on the Alipay homepage, and Alipay was also full of anxiety, the user's online time, the continuous decline in traffic, and even forced out live broadcasts and short videos in Alipay, a payment APP is using its own aging flesh to hit a wall everywhere.

"Alipay is pushing the NBA, and we can't understand it internally." In early March, a female employee of Ant complained to Lu Jiu Business Review. In fact, Alipay, which has been delayed for more than 2 years because of the delay in listing, seems to have been doing its job: blockchain, digital collection NFT have little to do with ordinary users; Ant Forest and Ant Manor are only particularly boring users who think of active clicks; Because of the rise of short videos and live broadcasts, the launch is similar to Douyin's live streaming e-commerce business, which actually overlaps with Taobao.

Alipay, which is anxious about traffic, chose to use short videos, live broadcasts and other content to find new traffic pools. However, the practice of "opening a live broadcast in a bank APP" is undoubtedly contrary to its previous tool positioning. After "cutting seats" with Ali, can you keep your position as a national APP by only paying traffic to "do a dojo"?

Alipay bills are actually shorter than Meituan

Once, as the second growth curve of Jack Ma's business empire, Alipay evolved from Alipay to Ant Financial, as the core product of the world's largest unicorn company, Alipay has always been the second largest number of Alibaba's APP.

However, with the birth of WeChat Pay, Alipay's good days came to an end, followed by a decline that lasted for many years, but there is no doubt that Alipay has not continued to recognize, they have been struggling, but the end of the struggle is tragic, and now many users frankly say that Alipay's bill length is not as long as Meituan and Didi.

"I may spend one or two thousand a month on Meituan, one or two thousand on Didi, but the bill on Alipay is only a few hundred." Li Liang told Lu Jiu Business Review that if it weren't for the monthly repayment, these hundreds of consumption might not be able to be saved.

Li Liang travels all year round, in addition to meeting customers offline, the online communication scene is on WeChat. Although Alipay and WeChat are bound to bank cards, it is more convenient for him to switch directly to the payment page in WeChat than to start another APP.

As for takeaway and in-store consumption, Li Liang chose Meituan. For no other reason, most of the in-store purchases tend to have better discount packages. When it was inconvenient to cook at home, he also used Meituan to order takeaway.

Please note that none of the above consumption scenarios involve Alipay.

After the "Alipay removal" turmoil two years ago, although Meituan re-supported Alipay, its own payment channel "Meituan Pay" has been launched. Lu Jiu Business Review also found that Meituan Pay, digital yuan, and WeChat Pay ranked in the top three payment methods on the default payment page, and Alipay will be mercilessly folded if it is not set in advance.

Of course, there is one exception that prompted Li Liang to take the initiative to use Alipay, and that is when he arrived in Hangzhou. "During the epidemic, when I went to Hangzhou, I had to scan the health code to report."

Meituan, Shell, Didi, Vipshop, Tongcheng-Elong, Kuaishou... Behind a series of high-frequency payment scenarios, Tencent's name has nothing to do with Alipay.

Even Tencent's enemy, ByteDance, has bypassed Alipay and built its own payment system, even if Douyin recently opened the payment function of Alipay collection code, it is extremely cumbersome steps.

After "scanning" in the upper right corner of Douyin, users still cannot directly enter the payment link, and need to jump to a page to open the Alipay APP. Multiple jumps instead of "one step" are obviously dissuasive for some users who are afraid of trouble.

The competition of mobile Internet products has entered the second half, and it is still the key to success or failure in traffic, users and application scenarios. After the past three special years, users and traffic have further focused on the two major software at the head, and when Douyin and WeChat form a huge siphon effect, other software is difficult to deserve the title of "national software". Due to offline scenarios and fulfillment capabilities, software such as Meituan and Gaode can barely cope with the two giants, and the most embarrassing is Alipay.

Now and in the foreseeable future, Alipay faces at least three challenges: 1. Users do not stay, simple payment software, there is no point in staying. 2. The online scene is not friendly, and most of the trading companies are Tencent. 3. The offline scene is not friendly, and the people are more accustomed to using WeChat.

Can Alipay really leave Taobao?

Since 2011, Alipay has been separated from Alibaba Group and has become independent software. However, due to the background of Taobao, Alipay, who was born at the age of 7, still came from Taobao for more than half of its transaction traffic. Although the number of users is already 1 billion and it claims to be national software, how to attract traffic and users outside of Taobao has always been an important issue for Alipay and even Ant Group.

In 2019, a Chengdu citizen took the initiative to share that his life scene in Alipay was extremely rich. He told Lu Jiu Business Review that every morning, he will collect energy in Alipay as usual, feed the chickens by the way, in addition to the monthly utility bills, some of his work needs on social security and provident fund will also be completed on Alipay; Recently, when I used AutoNavi to take a taxi, I began to increase more, and I also contributed some of the payment of Huabei.

The above-mentioned "collecting energy and feeding chickens" mainly refers to the ant manor and ant forest in the education public welfare sector of Alipay mini program, while water and electricity payment and social security provident fund refer to living payment and social security provident fund mini program, which are classified into two categories: education public welfare and convenient life. If they are not deliberately adjusted, they will undoubtedly lie in Alipay's default homepage app, and AutoNavi Taxi replaces the previous Didi Taxi and can be used by Jun.

In 2022, this Chengdu user, except for shopping on Taobao, will almost never actively log in to Alipay.

Is Alipay's perception of users really decreasing? In order to confirm this speculation, Lu Jiu Business Review launched a small-scale survey on consumption habits in communities of different ages, genders and circles. The results received show that Meituan accounts for 62.2% of consumption in the food delivery sector with the highest frequency of local life, while ordering food through the Ele.me independent app and Alipay accounts for 20% and 17.8% respectively. Alipay's disadvantages in takeaway, travel, and transportation are almost a reflection of Alibaba's local life business being gradually eroded.

E-commerce may be the only area where Alipay has a clear advantage. According to the survey data, more than 60% of respondents use Taobao as a popular shopping platform. JD.com, Pinduoduo and short video e-commerce each accounted for the remaining 40%, not including Alipay as a means of settlement. However, when communicating with Lu Jiu Business Review, some respondents mentioned a phenomenon that compared with WeChat, the operation cost of jumping to scan the code to pay, Alipay is significantly higher.

In fact, Alipay is still the largest market in the third-party payment platform, but Alipay's market share in the past ten years, from a single largest share of more than 70% to the current situation of about to lose 50%, is indeed there, in addition to the huge impact of WeChat Pay, Meituan, Didi, Douyin are pushing their own online payment tools.

Since Alipay and WeChat Pay do not disclose relevant data, the transparency of the industry is not high, and relevant media have previously done similar offline research, believing that Alipay and WeChat Pay have been overtaken by the latter in offline scenarios, after all, picking up WeChat scan code payment, far simpler than Alipay.

Lu Jiu Business Review found in many visits that Alipay still has a relatively high applicable group in the group of college students, first of all, Alipay can provide flowers, so that college students can overdraft consumption; Secondly, Taobao is the main shopping platform for college students, and Alipay's payment convenience on Taobao is fully reflected; Alipay's points system does a better job than WeChat, allowing young people to get some additional rewards, and most of these rewards come from the benefits provided by some strategic partners of Alibaba Group.

When the outside world feels that Ele.me, Hellobike, Fliggy and other businesses are streaming wool on Alipay, in fact, Alipay has also used these businesses to enrich its own payment scenarios, a payment tool without ecology, and there is no reason to dislike any payment scenarios.

Without the support of Taobao and Alibaba's related businesses, how many users can Alipay, as an independent company, remain? This is perhaps the top management of Ant Group in the past three years, in addition to combing the shareholder structure to comply with regulatory compliance, may be this is probably the most thought about Alipay's business.

Alipay has the disease of super APP

"Alipay's traffic anxiety is known to passers-by." , a former Alipay employee laughed that in his opinion, Alipay is a super APP disease, but there is no super APP life, worldwide, there is no payment tool can be made into a platform for people to log in every day, which is not in line with business logic, Alipay is down-to-earth to streamline the page, do a good job of payment, may be more effective than a lot of messy functions.

After enriching so many application scenarios on the homepage, Ant's top management suddenly found that Alipay's active opening was rare, and instead, the proportion of traffic from Taobao was getting higher and higher, almost returning to the moment when it became independent from Alibaba Group twelve years ago.

Local life and offline consumption are a random occasion, and random means low frequency. From this point of view, Alipay chooses to open its own ecological interface, essentially further strengthening Alipay's tool mentality, and the direct result of this is that the user time becomes less.

According to data from Jiuqian Zhongtai, in January 2023, Alipay had an average daily duration of only 10 minutes under the premise of 931 million monthly activities. The same is more than 900 million monthly activities, Pinduoduo and Taobao are both about 20 minutes, and WeChat is 86 minutes. In terms of the average number of daily openings, Taobao and Alipay are both opened 1.7 times a day, which is far behind WeChat with 40 times and Douyin with 7.2 times.

You know, this is already the data half a year after Alipay upgraded the life number from graphics and text to short videos. Lu Jiu Business Review observed that even if the current life number replaces the word-of-mouth business and occupies the golden entrance of the bottom tab of Alipay, users' perception of it is still limited. The more direct reaction is that Alipay's short video content is not known.

The other is informed, but does not choose to spend time watching videos on Alipay. The aforementioned Hangzhou citizen Xiaoyu admitted to Lu Jiu Business Review that outside of work, most of her time is allocated to overtime and playing games, and the rest may be spent on Douyin, and there is really no extra time to allocate to Alipay to brush short videos. "Do you watch short videos in the bank app?" She asked.

Even if Alipay entered the game at this time, it "caught up with the late set".

First of all, from the perspective of time, the three years from 2019 to 2021 are a structural bull market, and banking and investment and wealth management content began to enter the window period, during which "100 billion top" fund managers such as Zhang Kun and Gülen emerged, and trading platforms such as Futu, Xueqiu, and Tiger began to vigorously layout related content communities.

Although Alipay is not idle, the "financial management" function sheet is taken out as a first-level entrance, and the tool attributes still occupy a prominent position on the first screen. The tiles of the community attribute are still deeply hidden and need to be pulled down to discover. What's more, at the best entry time, Alipay is still stuck in compliance, and the priority of content ecosystem construction is not high.

Secondly, although Alipay also has some support for the video content of Life Number, from the introduction of talents with subsidy policies to the introduction of popular IPs such as the NBA, it is not very strong. In March 2021, Alipay began to recruit MCN institutions and influencers in the life and tourism categories, and set up traffic support and cash rewards. However, according to media reports, in the latest incentive policy, the "account incentive policy" has been suspended, and the active account rewards for thousands of fans and thousands of fans, as well as the reward for rising fans in Alipay, have been canceled.

The same happened with the "strategic cooperation" with the NBA. Up to now, although NBA China has reached a strategic partnership with Ant Group, compared with Tencent Sports, which signed a five-year contract and has the live broadcast rights, Alipay's "NBA" entrance is the program broadcasting rights. In the face of Tencent Sports' exclusive advantages, the effect of user retention is still debatable by relying on short videos and tiger-style text broadcasting.

According to Alibaba's latest quarterly results announcement, its investment income in Ant Group in the fourth quarter of 2022 was 1.005 billion yuan, and if the 33% shareholding ratio is used, the net profit is roughly 3.045 billion yuan, down 83% year-on-year. According to this calculation, Ant's net profit in the first three quarters of 2022 totaled 21.495 billion yuan, and the NBA's exclusive streaming broadcast rights in the new season, its starting bid price is $1 billion. To put it bluntly, if Ant Group wants to stud on NBA copyright, it is ready to invest one-third or more of its net profit, but in terms of the current investment in the content field, Alipay has obviously not made up its mind about it.

In order to solve traffic and application scenario anxiety, Alipay's efforts in the past few years can be reviewed from three stages.

Stage 1 "Service": Provide various life services, such as water, electricity, and gas. The second stage of "carrier": put Ali's various businesses into the brain, thinking that it could solve the scene problem, and finally found that Alipay itself lacked traffic. Therefore, it gradually opened up the ecology and changed its own business to an open carrier. Stage 3 "Content": Do live broadcasts and short videos. As a result, there is the "female users' complaints about NBA short videos" at the beginning of this article.

It can be seen that Alipay has been working hard in terms of user stickiness, traffic and duration, but it has never had strategic determination and methodology.

Ant Financial is inseparable from Alipay

In 2020, on the eve of listing, Ant Group's revenue came from payment business and merchant services, 39% from small loans, and the remaining 25% from wealth management, insurance and blockchain business.

Although the revenue ratio of the payment business segment has gradually declined from 55% in the past three years, it is undeniable that it is the existence of this part that has brought huge revenue from loan business and insurance and wealth management.

Guosen Securities also pointed out in the research report that Ant Group mainly monetizes through micro-loan technology platforms, wealth management technology platforms and insurance technology platforms, while contributing user stickiness and consumption scenarios through digital life services. Here, digital payments still assume the role of infrastructure. The infrastructure here is largely a pool of Alipay's 1 billion users created through C-end scenarios and user experience.

Under such an inverted triangle relationship, if the scale of digital payment business gradually declines, it is obviously only a matter of time before the two major businesses become castles in the air.

Under the current B-end ecological opening strategy, Alipay has made good progress in the private domain traffic operation of merchants, and the value of Alipay in merchants is constantly increasing. However, as mentioned earlier, a large number of life service mini programs further reduce the overall time users spend on Alipay. Reflected in the financial report, it is the most profitable loan business and wealth management service revenue fell sharply year-on-year.

It can be said that Taobao is the entrance to Alipay, and Alipay is the entrance to the entire group of ants. As He Yongming, vice president of Ant Group, said, "Behind the traffic are numbers, but behind the numbers are real people." "How to truly revitalize the sleeping 1 billion users is the burden that ants put on Alipay's shoulders.