来源 | 伯虎财经（bohuFN）
Author | Dreamed
The idle fish that has been ignored is finally seen.
In May, Xianyu held a product upgrade conference and launched the community-based product "Seafood Market", focusing on the dual axis development of "trading" and "community", and building a new community of interest trading and communication with users.
Half a year later, Alibaba announced that Xianyu was among the first-class businesses of Taotian Group, becoming one of the four products with the most development potential within Alibaba. In the same month, Xianyu announced that it would charge software service fees to sellers with "high-frequency and high-value transactions".
Under the consumption downgrade and traffic anxiety, Xianyu, who has been deeply involved in the second-hand e-commerce platform for many years, has come to its own opportunity.
01 Xianyu should be seen
In the context of the entire consumption downgrade, the wholesale e-commerce platform and second-hand business have ushered in their own development opportunities.
Raising soldiers for a thousand days, used for a while, the second-hand and idle labels of Xianyu, the wholesale price positioning of 1688 is fully in line with Taotian's "low price strategy". The long-neglected "1688" and "Xianyu" were upgraded to the first-class business of Taotian Group.
In fact, "idle fish" deserves to be seen.
According to the "2021 China Idle Second-hand Trading Carbon Emission Reduction Report", the scale of China's second-hand idle goods trading has rapidly increased from about 300 billion yuan in 2015 to a market size of more than one trillion yuan in 2020, and it is expected that the scale of China's second-hand idle goods trading will reach nearly 3 trillion yuan in 2025.
At the same time, according to the latest data from the 2023 Xianyu Product Upgrade Conference, the number of Xianyu users has exceeded 500 million, of which 43% are post-95 users and 22% are post-00s, with a release scale of nearly 100 million and more than 1 billion online products. According to QuestMobile data, Xianyu's average monthly active users reached 36.68 million in September 2023, an increase of 18.6% year-on-year.
Trillions of market size, young users, and double-digit growth rates of monthly active users, these three indicators are all golden.
What's more, Xianyu can also drain the traffic black hole through second-hand transactions. As an e-commerce platform, Taotian's traffic anxiety is innate, if Taobao can also be drained through Douyin and WeChat in the early days, then as the mobile Internet increment peaks and the market enters the stock fight, Taobao can use the diversion method is decreasing.
And Xianyu can just be used as a big weapon. Most users who pay attention to second-hand goods are actually potential consumers of first-hand goods. In the case of higher and higher customer acquisition costs, there are strong competitors such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu, Xianyu through the jump advertising implantation in the APP, directly to Taobao products, etc., so that consumers can jump back and forth between Xianyu and Taobao while contributing daily activity to Xianyu, and at the same time contribute to Taobao turnover, why not?
It is not surprising that Xianyu is valued by Ali, whether it is the trillion-dollar market size of the second-hand e-commerce platform or the input traffic of the main station Taotian, but in the face of the future, Xianyu has its own "pain" and "confusion".
02 A life of controversy
Xianyu has always been controversial.
From an internal point of view, in the nine years since its launch, Xianyu has not only experienced multiple responsible persons, but also adjusted its business focus several times.
Compliance has always been a difficult problem for Xianyu to solve. The first person in charge, Chen Weiye, tried to build Xianyu into a product with community culture and localized genes, but he always faced problems such as deception, illegal transactions, and pornography that are common in second-hand transactions.
Xianyu, which has become more important, has made a lot of moves this year.
Xianyu is reinforcing trust.
On the one hand, Xianyu has upgraded its new community products, "Seafood Market" and "Huiplay" Community, to enhance the trust relationship of the entire community through interaction and communication.
On the other hand, for more controllable standard products, in the four major fields of luxury goods, mobile phone digital, trendy shoes and toys, and beauty, Xianyu has launched a worry-free shopping service and a 48-hour worry-free selling service.
It is worth mentioning that on September 11, Xianyu announced the official launch of the "help selling" business, which is also the choice of most second-hand e-commerce platforms.
For example, Zhuan Zhuan and Aihuishou are committed to establishing a complete set of product recovery and inspection processes, and even spend money to build their own inspection team, which can play a role in forcing professional sellers to improve service quality and ensure performance results.
At the same time, Xianyu is constantly improving the platform trust system. At present, three sets of credit scores have been introduced, including Sesame Credit introduced from Alipay, which represents the idle gas value of account security (accounts with an idle gas value lower than 80 will be restricted from permission), and represents the fish power value of the user's credit score (seller points + buyer points).
It's just that these efforts made by Xianyu have yet to be tested, because the "trust" of second-hand e-commerce platforms is too difficult to establish.
03 The future is unknown
"Trust" is not only a problem of Xianyu, but also a problem of all second-hand e-commerce platforms.
As of press time, Bohu Finance found that in terms of black cat complaints, there were as many as 145252 complaints related to Xianyu, and 79,671 related complaints were transferred.
At present, the core problem of the domestic second-hand trading market is the asymmetry of information. This leaves room for counterfeit sales, shoddy goods, and online fraud, and if one party has the intention to conceal or even guide, the other party will easily fall into the trap, which will increase the difficulty of the governance of fake goods on the platform.
At the same time, the transaction volume of second-hand goods is large and complex, and the majority of non-standard items are even more difficult to identify, coupled with the wear and tear of second-hand goods and traces of normal use, it is difficult for the platform to measure the value of goods by a single standard.
It is obvious that second-hand e-commerce platforms want to move closer from pure C2C to C2B2C, and the platform is more involved, so as to increase the degree of intervention in the transaction process, buyers and sellers, and the quality of goods, and strive to make everything relatively more standardized. But on the one hand, there are still a lot of complaints, users are still difficult to satisfy, the industry is still temporarily lacking a unified regulatory standard, on the other hand, the role of the platform as both a referee and a player is easy to cause controversy, and the recent second-hand platform has been mired in the controversy of "recycling standards".
This also makes the public wonder whether the domestic second-hand e-commerce industry can grow like the United States and Japan.
However, there are more obvious optimists. For example, the competition of domestic second-hand e-commerce platforms is becoming more and more fierce.
According to a survey by Zhiyan Consulting, a total of 9 platforms in China's second-hand e-commerce field will receive financing in 2021, with a total financing of about 5.81 billion yuan. At present, the second-hand e-commerce market has not yet run out of top giants such as Ali and Pinduoduo, on the one hand, there are head players such as Xianyu, Zhuan Zhuan, and the listed All Things New are secretly exerting their efforts, and on the other hand, short video giants such as Douyin and Kuaishou have begun to enter the game.
Interestingly, when Xianyu announced that it would charge software service fees to sellers with "high-frequency and high-value transactions", it triggered a discussion about Xianyu's business model, and Ji Shan (the nickname of "Ding Jian" above) clearly replied to this question.
"The commission for professional sellers is not only to spread part of the cost of maintaining the operation of the platform, but also to make a statement that if you want to do business in Xianyu for a long time, you need to use a more commercial logic. Regarding the core business model of Xianyu, Ji Shan's answer is, "Through value-added services, such as providing users with inspection services." ”
Although China is even ahead of the curve in many areas, at least in the second-hand e-commerce industry, Son's time machine theory still applies. With the rise of the middle class, the scale of the second-hand e-commerce market will continue to expand, how to establish a set of mechanisms to make the transaction process more transparent, so that buyers and sellers are more assured, is obviously what Xianyu needs to focus on.
Reference Sources:
1. Retail business finance: Xianyu on the cusp of the storm provokes Ali's beam
2. Knowing the danger: Xianyu and 1688 have been upgraded to first-class business: Taobao, whose traffic has peaked, is looking for a new moat
3. Late latepost: Late Exclusive|1688 and Xianyu were upgraded to the first-level business of Taotian Group
4. Value Research Institute Pro: In 2023, Xianyu is crazy to kill!
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