▲This is the 1285th original article of the spirit beast
Author / East
ID/lingshouke
"Never been so curly". An Internet e-commerce industry insider told "Spirit Beast".
In the era of stock, the competition of various enterprises has opened not a zero-sum game, but a negative-sum game.
In the view of this Internet e-commerce insider, the main tone of Internet e-commerce in 2023 is still inseparable from the involvement.
What enterprises have to face is not the choice of "wanting profits" and "wanting markets", but how to not be overly squeezed and hold the hinterland.
Whether it is Douyin's online "takeaway" or supermarket, it is coveting "local life" services, and Meituan has also made a counterattack in addition to defending.
1 Hinterland mutual exploration
Douyin is involved in local life services, and Meituan is also eager to try it out in the field of short videos.
In July 2021, during the epidemic, Douyin tested "Xindong Takeaway", but the program was offline in less than half a year.
On February 7, in response to Douyin's launch of a national takeaway service on March 1, the person in charge of Douyin Life Service responded that the "group purchase and delivery" project is still being piloted in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, and merchants in the three cities have recently been opened to self-service settlement.
According to Ebang Power, as of March 5, Douyin has launched takeaway business in 15 cities across the country, and the merchants settled in it are mainly concentrated in the catering industry.
In addition, WeChat is also testing the "Store Express" service in the Guangshen region, which aims to help consumers discover high-quality Mini Programs that provide express delivery services nearby.
On the other hand, Meituan launched the "Meituan Live Broadcast" mini program as early as 2020, the content is mainly self-broadcast by merchants, and its online products are group purchase products. In the early days, most of the merchants settled in medical beauty, education and other related industries, users can purchase many related special goods in the live broadcast room.
At the end of 2021, Meituan made new progress on the road of exploring short videos and announced a strategic cooperation with Kuaishou. Kuaishou launched the Meituan Mini Program, which attracted many catering merchants to settle in.
In August last year, Meituan tested the short video function in the app, focusing on watching videos to make money. At present, open Meituan, on the personal information page, you can also see the entrance of "video earning", after clicking, every short video swiped, the background can receive a reminder of arrival.
Meituan's exploration of short videos does not stop there.
In November 2022, Meituan launched the "Go to the Second Floor" function. The location of this function is different from "video earning", located at the top of the takeaway page, and users can slide down to enter the short video interface. The content of this interface is mostly group purchase product information.
According to relevant media reports, "going to the second floor" has been removed, but some consumers can still "go to the second floor" by sliding down on the Meituan takeaway page.
"Spirit Beast" learned that Meituan previously launched short video testing functions in some cities, which was only a small-scale business marketing action. Of course, its main purpose is to improve user stickiness and activity.
Judging from the "hinterland mutual exploration" action opened by Douyin and Meituan, although the platforms are very low-key, the domestic e-commerce market has entered a more cruel era of stock competition and is irresistible.
For Meituan, the community group buying business that lasted for several years has become a protracted war.
Two years ago, Meituan, which has built a deep moat in the field of local life services, extended its hand to instant retail e-commerce, a big cake with a trillion-dollar market. The rapid outbreak of community group buying demand due to the epidemic has become a powerful tool for Meituan to enter this market.
At that time, Wang Xing believed that community group buying was a rare opportunity. However, from a result-oriented point of view, community group buying is not a good cake.
With the continuous involution subsidy war, the continuous burning of money in the supply chain, logistics and other cost inputs, wave after wave of competitors have fallen one after another, although Meituan's community group buying business is still standing, it is still too early to talk about profits.
At present, in the community group buying business, Meituan has ranked first in the first echelon with Duoduo Grocery Shopping. There are also many brokerages who believe that Meituan's competitive advantage and moat, which has won from the multi-group war and takeaway war, still exists.
According to the analysis of Kaiyuan Securities, Douyin has obvious limitations in consumption mentality and transportation capacity, and it is expected that before the above problems are solved, Douyin's takeaway unit volume growth space is relatively limited. The limited unit size will also affect the subsidy resource investment of merchants on the platform, and relying on the platform's own investment is less likely to lead to industry price wars. Douyin's pilot takeaway business has limited impact on Meituan in the long run.
However, there are still challenges in Meituan's new business, and the existing business still needs to be on guard against the invasion of competitors.
2 The boundaries are no more
For the old traditional e-commerce, it is still facing a fragmentation crisis of not advancing or retreating.
In the case of Taojie e-commerce, after segmenting the sinking market, it is facing continuous attacks from short video content e-commerce. In response, at the beginning of this year, Alibaba Group announced the merger of its two major e-commerce business groups, Tmall and Taobao, and integrated into the user operation and development center, the merchant industry operation and development center, and the platform strategy and operation center.
After the integration of Tmall and Taobao, sharing all users and a common operating mechanism, the clear boundaries between B2C and C2C business models in the early years are no longer clear.
Since last year, Taojie e-commerce has proposed a new core strategy - from transaction to consumption. Behind its drastic reform is also the dilemma of the peak of the demographic dividend, the disappearance of the incremental e-commerce market, the slowdown in the growth rate of online traffic, and the fierce competition in the stock market.
In fiscal 2022, the GMV (merchandise transaction volume) of Alibaba's e-commerce business reached 7,976 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of only 2%, and after excluding factors such as the consolidation of Sun Art's retail balance sheet and the 17% year-on-year growth rate of the wholesale business with GMV of 323 billion yuan, the GMV of the e-commerce business with Tmall Taobao as the core actually grew negative.
Entering fiscal 2023, the GMV of Taobao and Tmall is still difficult to hide the decline.
Its latest quarterly earnings report (as of September 30, 2022), the GMV of physical goods on Taobao and Tmall (excluding unpaid orders) fell by single digits year-on-year.
In the "Double 11" shopping festival, which has always been a must for various e-commerce platforms, Taojie e-commerce is no longer as glorious as it used to be.
In 2021, Tmall's turnover growth rate in "Double 11" was only 8.45%, a sharp decline from the growth rate of 85.62% in the previous year, and began to show signs of weak growth.
In 2022, in the latest quarterly earnings call, Daniel Zhang frankly said that Tmall's GMV in "Double 11" is basically the same as last year. It is worth mentioning that the specific results of Tmall's "Double 11" in 2022 have not been announced, and this is the first time Tmall has not disclosed its results since the birth of "Double 11" in 2009.
Judging from the actions of Taoji e-commerce's "moves", it has realized that the sea area of domestic e-commerce is no longer a blue ocean of barbaric expansion, but a red sea that needs intensive cultivation.
In the new era environment, Taojie e-commerce began to focus on the consumer as a commercial entity, and the starting point is "from transaction to consumption", which also means that it began to abandon traffic competition and return to the commercial essence of consumption.
In addition to Taojie e-commerce, 2022 is also anxious about its strong competitor JD.com for many years.
In the first three quarters of 2022, JD.com's revenue was 239.7 billion yuan, 267.6 billion yuan and 243.5 billion yuan, with year-on-year growth rates of 17.95%, 5.4% and 14%, respectively. In Q2 2022, due to the impact of the epidemic in Shanghai and Beijing, logistics was blocked, and JD.com's revenue growth rate rarely fell to single digits.
In fact, since Q2 2022, JD.com's revenue growth rate has continued to decline, and it will not improve until 2023.
In order to get out of the dilemma of weak growth, JD.com has also made efforts in many aspects in the past year.
In the past, the self-operated model was the killer tool for JD.com to provide high-quality services, but now that consumers have more and more choices, JD.com has also begun to open up to third-party merchants to enrich its SKUs.
In addition, JD.com has also increased its layout in O2O fields such as supermarkets and fresh e-commerce.
Recently, JD.com announced in an internal email that it will launch the "tens of billions of subsidies" channel on March 8. This move is also regarded by the outside world as a benchmark for Pinduoduo, which is good at low-price subsidies. Jingdong's new strategy to ward off enemies also reflects that the Internet e-commerce platform, under the newly changed stock competition pattern, has entered the "never so involved" environment.
3 New "Gong Shou Dao"
From the perspective of 2022, according to financial reports and estimated data, there are six e-commerce platforms with GMV exceeding or approaching trillion in scale, followed by Taobao 8.3 trillion, JD.com 3.47 trillion, Pinduoduo about 3.3 trillion, Meituan 1.6 trillion, Douyin about 1.5 trillion, and Kuaishou about 0.7 trillion.
China's e-commerce industry will truly enter the competition stage of the existing market from 2023, and the most obvious feature is that the growth rate of platform GMV and users continues to slow down, or even negative growth.
From the current point of view, whether it is traditional e-commerce, cutting-edge content e-commerce, or vertical field e-commerce, each company has begun to compete in traffic attraction, user retention, commercialization and other aspects.
In the face of the increasing saturation of the domestic market, many e-commerce platforms have also opened up hinterland mutual exploration and new overseas battlefields.
In such fierce competition, the once relatively stable domestic e-commerce competition pattern is now permeated with new changes, JD.com reiterates the "low price" strategy, Douyin opens takeaway cooperation with Alibaba's Ele.me, Meituan tests the water short video and Kuaishou reaches strategic cooperation in the field of short video...
What kind of strategy will the leading e-commerce platforms adopt to maintain their existing market position and compete with other platforms at the same time is a new "meritorious road" to face under the law of the jungle.
In terms of local life services, it has always been a must for Internet giants, and after the "100-regiment war", Meituan currently ranks first with a market share of 60%, and the competition pattern is beginning to appear.
But the news from February 2023 - Douyin will launch a national takeout on March 1. This seemed to break the existing pattern, and Douyin quickly denied the news, saying that it was only piloted in three cities, and there was no specific timetable for subsequent pilot cities.
Counting Douyin's actions in the e-commerce field in the past two years, it has also made frequent moves - Douyin e-commerce, Douyin supermarket, and Douyin group buying have been launched one after another.
In this regard, industry insiders said that short video content naturally has the attribute of shopping guide and is the easiest to monetize through local life. Douyin cuts into local life to bring a new way of playing - that is, based on the content that users are interested in, to achieve matching people and goods. In the past, users had needs and then searched for goods, while Douyin created demand for users through content.
As an emerging star in the e-commerce platform in the past two years, Douyin e-commerce debuted as a live streaming e-commerce in 2020, and launched a content interest e-commerce in 2021 with its good algorithm recommendation mechanism, creating a different way to compete in the traditional e-commerce represented by Tmall Taobao.
In 2022, Douyin e-commerce has changed its development strategy - shifting its focus from interest content e-commerce to shelf e-commerce.
The reason for the shift in the focus of development is also clear - the interest e-commerce that was previously vigorously developed has entered a bottleneck period.
At the beginning of this year, Douyin e-commerce announced that it would embed Douyin supermarket in Douyin Mall. This also means that Douyin's shelf e-commerce has taken a big step forward.
However, compared with Jingdong Supermarket, Tmall Supermarket, which have been deeply cultivated in the market for several years, and even Meituan Supermarket, which has rich offline channel resources in the local life O2O field, even though it has cooperated with Ele.me, SF City, Dada, etc., the latecomer Douyin Supermarket is still quite immature. After its launch, Douyin Supermarket has been complained by consumers in terms of SKU richness and delivery speed.
In a sense, Douyin e-commerce is another important way for Douyin to commercialize after advertising, and it is also the key point for Douyin to continue to maintain rapid growth. Douyin, which is well versed in the way of "sailing against the tide, not advancing or retreating", is also facing a greater challenge.
In the era of stock, competition will become more intense, and "mutual business grabbing" may become the norm.
(Original work of Spirit Beast Media)