What was your first impression when it comes to Taobao?
Is it the flood of fakes, the shopping spree of "Double 11" and "618", the shouting of "buy it" in various live broadcast rooms, or is it the dazzling people around all kinds of coupons today?
From an unknown website, it has developed into an e-commerce giant today, and Taobao has refreshed our understanding of online shopping more than once.
From ensuring shopping safety, to online and offline synchronous sales of brands, to the launch of various life services, consumer communities...
Taobao is always evolving.
Count it up, Taobao, 20 years old this year.
In 1999, Jack Ma and his "eighteen arhats" founded Alibaba in a small apartment in Hangzhou to provide data transfer services to small and medium-sized businesses.
After the turn of the millennium, the Internet developed rapidly.
Alibaba began to turn a profit after receiving $25 million in funding, and Ma's eyes looked further afield.
In 2003, when SARS was raging, many people staying at home began to go online.
Ma Yun set his sights on a business called "Internet trade" and quietly sent a backbone team to secretly poke and plan a major event.
This mysterious force was studied for 1 month, and a website called "Taobao" was officially born.
The site initially had no users, so entrepreneurs took out their unused belongings and hung them on the web page for sale.
Coupled with the "registration cashback" campaign similar to MLM, Taobao welcomed nearly 10,000 new users in just 20 days.
Users trade idle items with each other, everyone is a buyer and a seller, and the market comes alive.
Alibaba, which got the "red door", decided to spend 100 million yuan to support Taobao.
At that time, the online trading market was basically monopolized by "eBay", and Taobao took the start-up capital and decided to go the other way and attract users by "free".
Taobao claims that it only acts as a market manager, only collects market management fees from sellers, and exempts transaction commissions.
Many sellers, tormented by eBay's commissions, immediately threw themselves into Taobao's arms.
There are buyers and sellers, so how do you trade?
Unlike offline shopping, the Internet is a virtual platform, and almost no buyers dare to directly pay the money to unfamiliar sellers.
As a result, Alibaba launched a third-party payment tool, Alipay, to provide transaction guarantees for both buyers and sellers.
In this way, everyone can trade with confidence, and there are naturally more and more users.
The more buying and selling transactions, the communication problem arises.
When a buyer has a question about a product, the seller often needs to answer it at any time, but the chat history communicated on the webpage can easily be lost, causing disputes between the two parties.
As a result, Alibaba launched the instant messaging software "Want Want" for buyers and sellers to use to mean prosperous business.
Unexpectedly, just a few days after using it, Snow Cake came and said that it was infringing, so Alibaba gave its "surname" to Want Want and changed it to "Ali Wangwang".
In 2004, watching the savage growth of Taobao, the "stunned blue", the big guy eBay stopped working, and joined hands with Yahoo, Google, Baidu and other major portals to "block" Taobao.
At that time, there was an advertisement: "Do you want to hunt for treasures? Come to eBay! ”
In just a few words, Taobao was blocked.
Not to be outdone, Taobao decided to adopt the strategy of "surrounding the city from the countryside", placing advertisements on outdoor street signs, radio, television, public transportation, and also cooperating with many personal websites to accurately promote itself.
Unexpectedly, this strategy worked surprisingly well.
The next year, the big websites with search engine functions, led by MSN, threw olive branches to the young Taobao, and Taobao won the siege for the first time.
Attracted by advertising, it didn't take long for Taobao to leave its old rival eBay far behind, and successively defeated Wal-Mart and Yahoo, becoming the first place in C2C online shopping among China's top 50 Internet brands in 2005.
That year's advertising slogan said: "To buy something online, you must choose a reputable and reliable transaction, and use Alipay on Taobao to spend the safest, come and try it!" ”
The empathetic description gives great affirmation to Taobao.
By 2006, Taobao had grown rapidly into Asia's largest shopping website.
According to some data, on average, about 9 million people "shop" on Taobao every day.
It can be said that Taobao has entered people's lives.
And it was only 3 years since it was born.
In 2008, two major events occurred on Taobao.
The first thing is that the first generation of Taobao leaders left, and Taobao ushered in a new leader.
The second thing is that Alibaba Group decided to invest an additional 2 billion yuan in Taobao and 5 billion yuan in Taobao over the next five years.
All indications are that Taobao is brewing a "big thing".
On November 11, 2009, Taobao took action.
This day was originally known as "Singles' Day", but the management team at the time held an online cue sales event on this date, and with only 27 merchants participating, the previously unknown November 11 recorded a transaction volume of 50 million.
The sales champion of the day was the clothing brand "Jack Jones", with a turnover of more than 5 million.
This number, which may not seem like much now, was undoubtedly a shot in the arm for the entire team and the market at the time.
They know they're on the right move.
Other stores saw such huge consumption potential and entered Taobao.
The number of participating brands has grown exponentially, and to this day, the number of brands has exceeded 180,000.
Of course, these are all afterwords.
Seeing the influx of brands, Taobao followed the trend and founded Yitao.com in 2010, where users can enjoy various shopping preferences, such as red envelopes and consumption F-profits, to promote consumption.
For users who do not have a Taotao.com, Taobao has also "intimately" set up the "Juhuasuan" module, that is, to give benefits to specific products at a specific time to promote sales and enhance user stickiness.
Several plates burned together, and Taobao's development became stronger and stronger.
But with that, comes the quality of the product.
Around 2011, Taobao's shopping experience was similar to that of opening blind boxes, with uneven quality and after-sales problems.
Some jokingly claim that Taobao is China's largest distribution center for counterfeit goods.
It has to be said that this is related to the free settlement policy at that time.
At that time, Taobao sellers were basically individual merchants, and Taobao's model of only charging market management fees basically had no threshold for counterfeiting merchants, and the market was flooded with natural fakes.
What started as an advantage has now become a disadvantage.
At the same time, Taobao is also facing the "pinch" of peers.
Shopping websites such as Suning.com and Dangdang have successively blocked the search method of "Yitao" to grab goods, and the slogan of "genuine licensed goods, cash on delivery" has become the first choice for netizens to buy home appliances and electronic products, sharing nearly 37% of the market share.
Amid internal and external troubles, Taobao decided to make changes.
In October 2011, Taobao launched the "Taobao Mall", determined to strictly manage everything from certification to supervision to ensure the quality of the goods purchased by users.
With the increase in "service fees" and "deposits" that sellers need to pay, many sellers once thought that Taobao would abandon themselves and resisted joining the mall.
The management team had to bite the bullet.
Fortunately, one month later, Taobao Mall contributed 3.36 billion to the "Double 11" with a variety of preferential activities, so that the various "too expensive" merchants saw the sweetness.
Some merchants see the protection of brand reputation in the mall, even if they pay more, they have to enter; Some offline brands saw the attractive sales of "Double 11" and were determined to join in and get a piece of the pie.
As for the original individual merchants, who are reluctant to join the mall, Taobao still provides a trading market for them.
Sellers have made choices according to their needs, and the situation has stabilized.
The following year, "Taobao Mall" officially changed its name to "Tmall", with its own logo, and lived up to expectations, setting a world record of "selling 10 billion in 13 hours" in that year's "Double 11".
At that time, there was such a saying: what you want, you can find on Taobao.
A wide range of goods, coupled with high-quality service, the word "Taobao" is preceded by an adjective, "omnipotent".
In 2016, Taobao made a new move.
In May, a girl named Weiya received a call from Taobao officials during her vacation and started her first live broadcast.
At that time, the live broadcast did not bring the content of goods, and the anchor just chatted with the audience to attract traffic to his own store.
Unlike the later popularity of the whole network, Weiya's live broadcast only had 200 viewers.
But not long after, Taobao changed its strategy and held a "live broadcast for 10 hours" event, and Weiya sold more than 20,000 orders in one hour and won the first place in the clothing category.
In that game, the first place in the beauty group was a boy, Li Jiaqi. He and Weiya became the two giants of the live broadcast industry many years later, and they are also the guides of thousands of "chopping parties".
In fact, Taobao's strategic transformation can be traced as early as 2013.
In 2013, Taobao dominated the C2C market with a 95.1% market share.
As an industry leader, Taobao has shifted its focus from "fighting rivers and mountains" to "protecting rivers and mountains".
If you want to "protect the river", you must do two things well: one is to ensure the trust of existing users, and the other is to attract more users to use Taobao.
As a result, the management team decided to start with the quality of service and the sense of user experience.
Taobao has accessed the national CCC certification information database to avoid unlicensed and counterfeit certified products to the greatest extent, and also subdivided and reorganized the categories of front-end and back-office goods to meet the needs of different groups of people and scenarios.
Although Taobao works hard, the effect is not obvious, and many users always have doubts about the graphic details of the product, and they cannot trust the cold "customer service Xiaoer" on the screen.
When there was chaos, a short video blogger named Papi sauce attracted the attention of the whole network.
In April 2016, Papi Sauce received a project investment of 12 million yuan, and just one month later, it auctioned its short video advertising rights for a sky-high price of 22 million yuan.
At the time, someone muttered, "Isn't this TV shopping?" ”
The management team woke up: yes! We can bring TV shopping to the Internet!
As a result, Taobao began to move towards "online live broadcasting".
Since Taobao tested the water live broadcast in 2016, there have been successive anchors who have tried it, and the results have been surprisingly good.
Because users can see the real details of the products in the live broadcast, the enthusiastic attitude of the anchor also makes users' "sense of respect" soar rapidly.
At the same time, live streaming will also give people a sense of "shopping", which greatly increases the chance of new users placing orders in casual browsing.
Two things that the management team wanted to do well are now achieved in the live broadcast.
In 2017, Taobao Live has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, with 600 anchors running a total of 8,032 broadcasts on Double 11, totaling about 36,000 hours, guiding about 78 million people into the store.
It can be said that the record-breaking sales of 162.8 billion yuan on Double 11 that year made a great contribution to live broadcasting.
Seeing that the anchor brought goods well, the brand side was also very happy, inviting major stars to live broadcast, all kinds of benefits were sent non-stop, buyers and sellers were happy to keep their mouths together.
After the rise of short video platforms, Li Jiaqi and other popular Taobao anchors have created their own personal accounts on major platforms, and novice anchors have also poured into this fertile land, digging in hidden consumer groups to attract traffic.
Taobao, on the other hand, has intimately opened the "Taobao University" to help anchors get on the right track faster.
As the management originally thought, Taobao is transforming from a simple C2C platform to a more integrated retail platform, from a simple trading market to a consumer community with content.
During the epidemic, Chinese people stayed at home to swipe their mobile phones, and live broadcasting also took advantage of the opportunity to develop rapidly.
In addition to developing live streaming, Taobao has also opened convenient services such as online grocery shopping and offline supermarket online shopping, expanding the online consumer community to offline and deepening into people's lives.
Today, Taobao has changed from a trading tool to a trendy lifestyle.
You can buy goods on Taobao or find the joy of shopping in live streaming.
As long as you think of it, there will be it on Taobao.
Looking back on these 20 years, Taobao has been doing one thing:
To provide a marketplace for buyers and sellers, protecting the trading process on both sides, and has been committed to this.
However, in today's rapid development of the Internet, there are all kinds of e-commerce applications, with JD.com in the front, and Pinduoduo in the future, we wait and see what the future of Taobao will be.
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Author: Jiang Xiaoxiao
Editor: Moon Companion Starship
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