Recently, Tsai Chongxin made a rare voice and said something meaningful. He said that "Ali is lagging behind, forgetting who the real customer is, the consumer who uses the app, but Ali is not giving them the best experience", and said that to some extent, Ali smashed his own foot. While Ali admitted his mistakes, he also made positive improvements.
For example, consumers are very concerned about door-to-door delivery, in the past, Ali spent a lot of money to integrate three links and one reach, and also sent express delivery to the post station. However, the needs of each consumer are different, and now Ali has proposed to increase the proportion of door-to-door delivery in order to meet the needs of more consumers, such as Tmall Supermarket is still engaged in half-day delivery, and services such as compensation if you don't come to your door.
In fact, Alibaba's changes also reflect the overall trend of the current e-commerce industry. In the past, various platforms were staking their ground, one-sidedly emphasizing volume and scale. Nowadays, e-commerce competition has entered the stock era, and everyone needs to pursue people-oriented and pay more attention to user experience, so as to retain more old users.
Take Ali's old rival JD.com, for example, not long ago, it issued a financial report, and the first sentence of the opening sentence was "comprehensively focusing on cost, efficiency and experience, and entering a benign growth channel". In the financial report, JD.com mentioned a series of service optimization measures at length, firmly putting user experience first.
For example, Jingdong launched its self-operated "refund without return" service 10 years ago to extend to third-party goods, and at the same time upgraded the "free door-to-door return" service, as long as the goods with the logo, regardless of weight, size and quantity, the return and exchange are JD brother's door-to-door service.
In addition to Ali JD.com, Vipshop, another first-tier e-commerce platform, although the volume and scale are not as good as the former, but the determination to serve consumers well is not small at all. And precisely because of its small size and scale, Vipshop has formed a "small but beautiful" advantage in its services.
Just like other platforms are still trying to increase the proportion of door-to-door delivery, Vipshop has long pulled SF Express to achieve door-to-door delivery. Including the door-to-door return and exchange service that Jingdong has only recently engaged, Vipshop and SF Express have also insisted on it for many years, and many mothers like to use Vipshop, just because it is convenient to return and exchange, and they can really complete online shopping without leaving home.
Or other platforms use AI customer service on a large scale to replace real people, but Vipshop insists on real customer service, and the cost is increased several times. At present, it has a professional customer service team of more than 1,000 people, and the rate of solving customer problems within 24 hours has reached more than 97%.
In order to ensure the quality of high-value goods, Vipshop has also reached a strategic cooperation with China Central Inspection and Inspection Corporation since last year, and the two sides will deepen cooperation in quality inspection, traceability, quality certification and other aspects, which is not only a supplement and upgrade of the original quality inspection system, but also to better provide consumers with high-quality goods and services.
In short, both Ali JD.com and Vipshop know that users are the key to the high-quality development of the platform. This also confirms that today's e-commerce transactions are returning to their essence, and buyers are in control of choice and initiative.