Recently, many netizens have suddenly found that the web version of JD.com seems to have become a little different. If you search for a product or check the price without logging in, you will be immediately redirected to a verification page, and you must log in to your account to complete the relevant verification. In other words, in the JD web version, if you want to search for products to view details, you must log in. But at the same time, JD.com's WAP side can search and other related operations normally without logging in.
In fact, not only JD.com, but also Taobao currently has a similar situation. In this regard, some netizens complained on social platforms, "After entering Taobao to search for products with a browser on the computer, clicking on the details page is not displayed, you must log in." ”
Obviously, this design of JD.com and Taobao is causing trouble for users, almost forcing users to use their own cookies to ensure automatic login. So why do they have to create this barrier for users to browse?
In fact, similar situations not only appear on e-commerce websites, such as Zhihu, Douban, Baidu Tieba and other platforms, the complete content is only open to logged in users, and if you are not logged in, you can only see fragments, and even more so, when you use a mobile browser, you will find that "open the app, read the full text" flood. Product managers across apps seem to be surprisingly unanimous in getting users to log in, but it's all business interests behind it.
Initially, product managers chose to castrate the experience of non-logged-in users, or visitors, for cost reasons. After all, there are countless bots such as web crawlers on the Internet, but in addition to making the website's visit data look better, these bots will neither click on ads nor contribute content. Therefore, in order to curb the access of robot users, a way to castrate the visitor experience was developed, and then combined with the captcha system, and finally realize the separation and rule of the robot and the real user.
Of course, the ultimate goal of reducing the visitor experience is to turn visitors into registered users. In all consumer Internet business models, because the product is directly oriented to users, revenue also needs to be generated by user behavior, which leads to the scale of users are the top priority, and the number of users, the length of user use and the valuation of Internet companies also show a highly positive correlation. Therefore, Internet manufacturers also have sufficient motivation to attract users to register and continue to use their own products.
After entering the era of big data, the motivation of Internet vendors to distinguish between users and visitors has been further enhanced. With the advent of cloud computing, the improvement of computing power has made unstructured and semi-structured data, which originally seemed difficult to collect and use, easier to use, and after the value of user data is fully exploited, the information collection and processing capabilities between Internet vendors and ordinary users have formed a generational gap.
Since the user's behavior trajectory will be retained in the form of data on the Internet, Internet manufacturers can analyze the user's behavior, and then summarize the preferences of a certain type of user group, and even directly target individuals. The concept of end-user portrait also came out, that is, collecting various data and behaviors of users, so as to derive some basic information and typical characteristics of a specific user, and finally form a character prototype. Usually, the user portrait will be composed of three information dimensions, namely basic attributes, consumption and shopping, and social circle.
With the help of user profiles, Internet manufacturers can know what age, gender, city they live in, approximate income level, shopping brand preferences and type preferences of each user. The user portrait established on the basis of big data has also become the key to achieving accurate delivery of Internet advertising, and it is also the basis for the optimization and upgrading of Internet products, and will also be subdivided into the basis for e-commerce platforms to issue different coupons to different users, the source of music streaming media platforms to recommend music to users, and even one of the guidance for improving risk control in Internet finance.
However, such a "magical" user portrait requires the help of the user to achieve, if the user "degenerates" into a visitor, then everything becomes a castle in the air, once the Internet manufacturer has no way to know the user's behavior, naturally can not accurately find your joy, anger and sorrow from the vast sea of people. For example, taking Jingdong and Taobao, which were complained about by netizens this time, as an example, in the personalized recommendation mechanism of thousands of people and thousands of faces that they are proud of, the content that each consumer sees is based on user portraits, and even different users may see different results even if they search for the same type of goods.
But if the user does not log in to the account of Jingdong and Taobao, then in the eyes of the platform, you are a blank piece of paper and completely unknown. If all users do this, how will the user portrait system of JD.com and Taobao be updated and iterated? Once the user portrait system cannot continue to evolve, where to start by pushing products to users and improving the conversion rate of products.
You know, search behavior is a concrete embodiment of the user's subjective initiative, a user on the e-commerce website, not on the search engine to search for keywords related to the product, the probability is to be interested in the product, obviously this data is extremely important for the e-commerce platform. Therefore, e-commerce platforms have sufficient motivation to "stumble" visitors in search and reduce their experience, because only in this way can everyone be forced to complete the login of the account.
If many Internet manufacturers design daily check-in to send points is from the perspective of positive feedback to attract users to log in, then similar to Jingdong, Taobao web version must now log in to get the complete experience, is to use negative feedback to force users to log in. When data becomes the cornerstone of Internet vendors' market competitiveness, it is not surprising that they have such bizarre operations.