According to Xianyu's official news, the first Xianyu circulation store will land in Gongshu District, Hangzhou, and will officially open on January 28.
Xianyu officially said: "We will provide all categories of idle consignment services...... It is the first full-category second-hand physical store of the same name of Xianyu APP to land offline, and it is currently mainly in the form of community stores, serving consumers two kilometers around the community and even in the same local city, and truly opening the store to the doorstep for the first time." Judging from the announcement, this offline store can also hang out service-oriented goods, such as running errands, walking dogs, and shoveling feces......
It is not new for large Internet companies to open offline stores, especially those with community attributes. The success of Tmall and JD has long proven the viability and synergy of online retail business to the community. In terms of synergy, online retail can provide offline stores with synergies such as product selection insights and supply chain management, and the network structure of offline stores can also support services such as "hourly delivery" and "half-day delivery" for online retail to improve delivery timeliness.
Xianyu is now the largest idle second-hand trading platform in China, both sides of the transaction are mainly individual users, the transaction link is the seller releases the product - the buyer communicates to place an order and pays - the seller sends the goods - the buyer confirms the receipt - the seller receives the payment. In this process, buyers and sellers can also discuss meeting offline transactions and self-pickup goods, and the Xianyu platform can provide security guarantees such as capital and reputation for C2C transactions in the same city.
It can be seen that the attributes of Xianyu's near-field trading are already strong. According to the observation of "New Position", Xianyu APP not only has a local recommendation page module, but also subdivided modules such as "Nearby Leakage" and "Self-pickup and free postage", click to enter the "Nearby Leakage" module, you can brush idle goods within the range of 5 kilometers and 10 kilometers nearby, but it will not show the positioning of the name of the specific community.
With such a more centralized trading scope as a foreshadowing, it is also a reasonable attempt for Xianyu to open an offline community store, but the reasons are far more than that.
Platform intervention and compliance upgrades
This is not the first time Xianyu has explored the community scene.
Previously, Xianyu had a "fish pond" module, which was similar to a themed micro-community, and if the "fish pond" was created with the name of the community, it was equivalent to the community's own online second-hand market. Xianyu may have intended to increase the social stickiness of users. According to media reports at the time, the "fish pond" problem occurred frequently: "low user threshold, false publicity, pornography and fraud, gray transactions and many other problems were exposed".
It is reported that in September 2020, the Zhejiang Cyberspace Administration issued a message saying that it would "supervise the Xianyu platform to carry out the "100-day special action", requiring enterprises to further improve their awareness of information security...... Create a good network ecology". Xianyu also took the initiative to shut down the "fish pond" module.
As for how the gray transaction and information security problems in the community scene arise, you can give a practical example to perceive that there is such a portrayal in the family urban drama "Xiaoman Life" starring Jiang Xin and Qin Hao: because the protagonist's wife is pregnant, the husband and wife want to change a larger three-bedroom apartment for the family, and choose a favorite community, but there is no desired three-bedroom house for sale in the community on the public real estate trading platform, and even if there is, it is easy to be cut off by others. The heroine's colleague reminded that there is a "fish pond" function on a second-hand platform, which is equivalent to the community's own second-hand market. So the protagonist actively buys idle goods in the fish pond of the target community, and mixes into the community to pick up the goods, and the owner is close to even adding WeChat, and when picking up the goods, he asks at the door of the owner's house: "Do you sell your house?"
Although this plot is more about portraying the protagonist's opportunistic tricks and does not cause any substantial harm to both parties to the transaction, if the protagonist can quickly gain the trust of the owners of the target community, then other people with ulterior motives can too. The key point of this is that in places where the platform cannot supervise, the potential safety hazards caused by the "unequal purpose" of the buyer and seller are not equal, one party thinks that this is just an idle goods transaction, and the other party wants more.
Although it is not explicitly stated in the TV series, judging from the mobile phone interface and the function of "fish pond" shown in the picture, the second-hand platform used by the protagonist here is Xianyu.
Previously, "Zhuanzhuan" and "Love Recycling", which were both positioned as "second-hand", have long been using online apps and offline stations to recycle, and these two platforms have the main vertical recycling category, that is, electronic products, with higher prices and more accurate target users.
Regardless of whether there is an offline store or not, the transaction model is mainly C2B2C, and the platform acts as a "middleman" to reach the seller to recycle the old mobile phone and repair it, and then send it to the new buyer, this process can allow the platform to have a strong regulatory ability, just like the second-hand platform of Dewu 95 points, there is no information found to show that it has an offline store or station, but it also needs to be sent by the seller to the platform after quality inspection and evaluation before listing for sale.
As a comprehensive second-hand platform with the highest market share, Xianyu has a C2C model, and sellers do not need to ship goods to the platform for quality inspection, and the potential safety hazards are a little greater than those of the above-mentioned platforms. At this time, the offline community store exists as the physical version of Xianyu, and the risk management and control ability for the community scene will be higher, which is equivalent to the same as "Zhuanzhuan", "Love Recycling" and "95 points", Xianyu has also added a strong "B" role among individual buyers and sellers.
From a risk-averse point of view, such a change is clearly a positive.
The New Position speculates that for idle goods in offline community stores, whether buyers purchase in person or buyers purchase on the relevant community store modules that may appear on the Xianyu APP, buyers and sellers can complete transactions without touching each other, while service products such as the above-mentioned "running errands, walking dogs, and shoveling excrement" may also be completed under the supervision of the store, which greatly reduces the personal safety risks of both parties to the transaction.
Incremental or flash
The increase in C2C transactions in community scenarios should not be underestimated.
Judging from the popularity of offline markets and stalls in recent years, consumers' minds about C2C offline transactions have also changed, and "personal handicrafts" and "vintage clothes" have gradually become the focus of offline market consumers. In the beginning, offline markets were often opened near large shopping and supermarket hubs, and with the development of market culture, many communities themselves will organize community neighborhood markets.
It's just that the market has no fixed stores and has not existed for a long time, so the market still hasn't fully explored the potential of the offline near-field C2C trading market. At present, the degree of digitalization of the marketplace is low, and it is difficult to realize the full-link management of pre-sales and after-sales transactions for buyers and sellers. As a result, the current market is more of a cultural act.
Therefore, while Xianyu aims at the increase of offline community transaction scenarios, offline community transactions also need the transaction convenience and security brought by Xianyu.
In addition, after a year of low prices on e-commerce platforms in 2023, more and more users have also poured into Xianyu. After all, the consumption mentality of the two concepts of "low price" and "idle second-hand" is very similar, one of them is growing vigorously, and the other will also be on the rise.
In November 2023, Xianyu was upgraded to a first-class business within Taotian Group. The predecessor of Xianyu was Taobao second-hand channel, and it was operated independently in 2014, and it is the third trillion-level platform of Ali after Taobao and Tmall. In the past, Xianyu upgraded its strategic positioning in the interior, and then Xianyu opened its first offline community store, so it seems that Xianyu may be about to usher in a golden period of development.
Of course, the above is only an interpretation based on the layout thinking of Internet manufacturers, and it cannot be ruled out that Xianyu's attempt is also like a market, but it pays attention to its cultural and symbolic meaning.
According to the photos of the interior of the circulating store released by Xianyu, the decoration style is very "Little Red Book Market stall owner" style. The concepts of "environmental protection", "recycling" and "sustainability" have gradually developed into a trendy culture on today's social networks, and in 2023, there will be no shortage of markets with themes such as environmental protection and recycling, and Xiaohongshu is the key promotion channel for these markets.
From this point of view, returning to the name of the Xianyu offline community store itself, "Circular Store", may also be a "Little Red Book-style" offline flash mob, or a long-standing neighborhood cultural space. After all, the development of community neighborhood market culture is now in full swing.
But in any case, opening the first offline store is of great significance to Xianyu. This prestigious "seafood market" will also be more worthy of market expectations because of the physical bearing.
*The title picture and the accompanying pictures in the article are from the Internet.