Li Jing, a reporter from Beijing, reported from Beijing
On May 25, Baidu officially released the e-commerce brand "Baidu Preferred". He Junjie, senior vice president of Baidu Group and general manager of Baidu's mobile ecosystem business group, said that in the just-released Baidu first quarter financial report, e-commerce revenue has become a new highlight of the mobile ecosystem, and the quarterly GMV promoted by Baidu search in the first quarter increased by 55% year-on-year. Baidu APP has 657 million monthly active users, and about 100 million people make shopping transactions in Baidu APP every day.
Baidu believes that the wave of new generation technology in the e-commerce field has arrived, and Baidu will further use AI technology to empower products and services based on large models, and use Baidu Preferred as the incision to reconstruct Baidu's mobile ecology with AI native thinking.
Ping Xiaoli, vice president of Baidu and general manager of Baidu e-commerce, said in an interview with China Business News: "Baidu is not going to be another JD or Taobao. Baidu does e-commerce to meet the needs of Baidu APP users, that is, starting from the starting point of user search, under the product recommendation field, further undertake the user's transaction appeal, and at the same time stimulate more needs of users to satisfy, and finally gradually develop the user's preferred trading habits in Baidu, precipitated to the mall for long-term retention. ”
Baidu opens the era of smart e-commerce
According to reports, Baidu Preferred is positioned as an intelligent e-commerce platform integrating "search and shopping", relying on the e-commerce brain, Baidu Preferred can link and interact with users and scenes in four fields of search, live broadcast, video and shopping mall, deeply integrating people to find goods, goods to find people, and promote transactions. By effectively combining information flow delivery and user search behavior, Baidu Youyou chooses AI intelligence to drive e-commerce productivity, creates a one-stop shopping decision-making platform for "search and push", takes user search trigger behavior as the basis, and multiple information flow push as a means, and uses AI technology to build an online shopping mall with "super selection" for the majority of users.
Artificial intelligence is gradually changing the Internet industry. Around the e-commerce business, Baidu believes that AI is bringing new opportunities to e-commerce. Relying on generative AI technology, Baidu can better understand users and match needs, thereby improving decision-making efficiency and ultimately assisting transactions.
"In the e-commerce scenario, we hope that AI can subvert the new scenario of shopping, and improve the overall efficiency and innovation of the current link of people looking for goods or 'finding' in goods and people, so that users and merchants no longer have to struggle to find, but directly promote the most efficient matching of people and goods through the empowerment of AI." Ping Xiaoli said that Baidu e-commerce is in the direction of intelligent e-commerce to meet the needs of users and merchants that are not well met in the modern market.
For example, users searching for keywords such as "washing machine", "how to choose an air conditioner" and "how to choose a refrigerator" in Baidu can see Baidu's preferred page, Baidu preferred provides brand lists, including entry list, popularity list, sales list, praise list and other different dimensions. Among the popular products on the whole network, Baidu prefers to adopt an aggregation mode to display products from third-party platforms such as JD.com, Suning.com, and Pinduoduo. It is reported that consumers can also quickly select products and compare prices through Baidu's preferred AI shopping assistant.
According to reports, Baidu e-commerce now has two major types of commodity supply side, one is to cooperate with large e-commerce platforms, the other is to settle in closed-loop merchants, these two will coexist for a long time. Ping Xiaoli told reporters: "Baidu search user demand is extremely scattered, there is long-tail characteristics of content and user ecology, its demand may be refined to a small size, if you want to meet the shopping demand experience of Baidu users, you need a huge supply of goods, which requires cooperation with other e-commerce platforms to achieve." ”
It is revealed that Baidu is also attracting merchants with its own supply chain. "In the past period, especially brand merchants who do clothing and accessories sales, they have found that they have operated and opened stores on several large platforms, although the volume of Baidu platform is not as high as other platforms, but the unit price of customers on Baidu platform is the highest." Ping Xiaoli told reporters, "Baidu will explore more features of its own platform in the future, explore more categories in depth, and help merchants with high-quality supply capabilities that match the attributes of Baidu's platform." ”
From content e-commerce to smart e-commerce
For the newly launched Baidu Preferred, Zhang Shule, a commentator in the Internet industry, believes that its thinking is from the previous content distribution to the direction of AI intelligence. "Baidu's content system has Baijia number, Baidu Encyclopedia, Baidu Know, etc., and the amount of content it has is not weaker than that of the byte system, but Baidu has always wanted to build an internal closed loop, which makes the conversion rate of its traffic low." But even in the era of mobile Internet, search is still a rigid demand for many users. From the current product form, under the empowerment of AI, Baidu Preferred is a more sophisticated shopping guide platform in a sense. ”
Baidu's search scene is a natural starting point for shopping decisions. Baidu e-commerce can cover the entire process of users' shopping decisions from the starting point, from the primary selection stage of shopping to the stage of selection and price comparison, and then to the final transaction transaction. "Baidu platform has differentiated advantages in the understanding and evaluation decision-making process before users shop. Under the search field, Baidu provides more content, knowledge, product evaluation and price comparison content to help users consume choices. Ping Xiaoli revealed: "Baidu's user base is large, and the intersection of Baidu and other e-commerce platforms after research is small, and there is still a lot of room for conversion dividends." ”
Hong Yong, an expert at the think tank of China Digital and Real Integration 50 Forum, told reporters that Baidu's preferred strategy and method is to use itself as a traffic entrance, aggregate product information of major e-commerce platforms, and achieve intelligent shopping experience through recommendation algorithms and personalized recommendations. At present, Baidu prefers to purchase goods mainly by jumping to the path of third-party e-commerce apps such as Jingdong and Suning, which is similar to some e-commerce shopping guide platforms. At the same time, Baidu also has a mini program landing page and other methods, which can directly display products in Baidu to achieve a smoother purchase experience.
Hong Yong believes that Baidu's core strength lies in its massive user data and AI technology, which provides advantages for its work, allowing it to better understand user needs and personalize recommendations for goods and services. In addition, Baidu Preferred can further improve its competitiveness by establishing partnerships with e-commerce platforms to optimize products and services.
Ping Xiaoli further explained the new opportunities brought by AI to e-commerce, and the combination of big language model and e-commerce will accelerate the development of content e-commerce and promote the automated operation of e-commerce. For example, help e-commerce plant grass, carry out intelligent marketing, better understand users for data mining and personalized promotion to accelerate the development of content e-commerce. It can also promote the automated operation of e-commerce through intelligent shopping guides, digital human live broadcasts, 7×24 virtual customer service, improve the accuracy of automatic personalized recommendations, and realize inventory management and forecasting, etc., to improve the efficiency of merchant operations and sales data.
Regarding the future development of Baidu Preferred, Ping Xiaoli said: "At present, the transaction scale of the entire Baidu e-commerce is still in its infancy in the entire market, but after this value is verified, I believe that the next three to five years should be able to present a relatively large outbreak, coupled with the blessing of AI, it will be more optimistic about the future." ”