Ali 618 canceled the pre-sale and restarted the Taobao web version

Late LatePost

2024-05-06 16:31Posted on the official account of Beijing LatePost

Ali is trying not to pursue a single number in the short term.

Text丨Zhu Yingli Guan Yiwen

Editor丨Guan Yiwen Huang Junjie

On May 6, the Taotian Group Promotion Project Team announced the adjustment of the rules of the 2024 618 Promotion at the merchant conference, and the most important change is the cancellation of the pre-sale - direct sales at 8 p.m. on May 20, with full price protection.

Taobao and Tmall have been doing pre-sales for 10 years, and this mechanism that was originally made to facilitate merchants to stock up in advance and reduce logistics pressure has become very long. By "618" in 2022, users will first see the discount notice to add the product to the shopping cart, wait for 5 days to pay the deposit, and then wait for 5 days to pay the balance before the merchant will ship the goods. It can take up to 10 days from the time you fancy an item to the time it is shipped.

Lengthening the consumption process will inevitably damage the user experience, and it is true that a large number of users complain about the pre-sale mechanism every year, but it is difficult for a platform to make up its mind to abandon such a mechanism, because pre-sales can concentrate a large number of transactions in a single day and bring beautiful promotional figures. It is difficult for a company to give up such numbers, so although the promotion growth rate of "618" and "Double 11" for many years has been much higher than the annual turnover growth of the platform, the pre-sale has not stopped.

After re-clarifying that Alibaba's "first customer" is a user, pre-sale is the first major adjustment visible to users.

Another tweak is that Taobao's PC web page has become easier to use again. In the past, users were required to do "security verification" to log in to Taobao on their computers, and it was recommended that users take out their mobile phones and scan the code to log in. This is also a common practice among China's major e-commerce platforms, requiring users to switch to mobile apps. After a successful login, the user will not be able to use the full functionality of the platform on the computer.

In 2024, Taobao will set up a small, fully established team to be responsible for the optimization and upgrade of the PC side. A new version is re-launched today, with functions such as live streaming, product supply and app synchronization, and the shopping cart can also display the price of the coupon just like on the mobile phone. In the past few weeks, Taobao's webpage has undergone some changes, including the fact that it is no longer necessary to log in again every day. But that's just the starting point, and there are still a lot of UX issues that haven't been addressed.

Nearly 400 million people open Taobao every day, the vast majority of them shop on their mobile phones, and only more than 10 million people insist on shopping on their computers. For many years, these people's experiences were selectively ignored because the platform could guide users to mobile consumption, making the daily activity of mobile Taobao a few percentage points longer.

From pursuing a single large number to giving up short-term data and respecting user choice, this is a new change for Alibaba. But to cope with the new competitive environment, it still needs a lot of change.

618 canceled the pre-sale, involving 5%-10% of the big promotion revenue

E-commerce platforms are good at different ways to motivate consumers to place orders. Taobao and JD.com have both created shopping festivals large and small, using promotions and full discounts to attract users, Pinduoduo's killer feature is extremely low prices, and they do everything they can to cut down the ordering process, such as removing the shopping cart and using now and paying later, while Douyin creates a limited-time and low-price atmosphere in the live broadcast room.

In early April, after a kick off (usually a kick-off meeting before the start of a project), Taotian Group set up a 618 promotion project team to investigate and discuss whether to "cancel the pre-sale". A Taotian employee said that the issue had been "debated internally for a long time", with the overwhelming majority of voices supporting it.

Industry operation staff generally support that after the cancellation of pre-sale, they can sell normally every day during the big promotion, without letting consumers wait and lose to other platforms without pre-sale mode, and the user product team also supports, they believe that it is a more reasonable choice for users to place orders throughout the process.

Another reason for the majority of the project team's support is that in the 618 promotion, the proportion of products with pre-sale mentality is not high, and a Taotian employee believes that pre-sales mainly promote a small number of goods, artificially creating a sense of scarcity in the era when supply is not scarce, and it is difficult to win users.

"Cancel the pre-sale" is expected, but it is still a game of interests for some business departments, such as Taobao Live.

It is not difficult to understand that in the past, many pre-sale products were sold through live streaming, especially in categories such as beauty and skin care and makeup. According to Mojing market intelligence data, in the 2023 Tmall 618 pre-sale, the top three industries in terms of pre-sales are beauty and skin care, makeup and beauty equipment, of which the pre-sale sales of beauty and skin care will be 6.22 billion yuan, nearly 10 times the sales of beauty equipment in the third place.

In the live broadcast room of the big anchor, hundreds of links to popular products will be gathered on the first day of pre-sale, and the participating brands and anchors themselves will focus their marketing budgets on this day, and finally jointly create the effect of "selling out". A former employee of Taobao Live said that the pre-sale of the Double 11 promotion in 2022 is the main force, and the pre-sale turnover of big anchors accounts for more than 50% of the total turnover.

We learned that the turnover during the 618 pre-sale last year accounted for about 5%-10% of the entire promotion, and the cancellation of the pre-sale means that Taotian actively sacrificed some short-term income for the convenience of users, but in the long run, a better shopping experience for users may stimulate more consumption.

The 618 promotion "canceled the pre-sale" was finally made by Wu Yongming, CEO of Taotian Group. However, we understand that while canceling the pre-sale, Taotian will still conduct a small-scale pre-sale in the live broadcast room.

JD.com has also canceled the 618 presale. In 2023, JD.com has canceled the pre-sale and directly used spot for promotion.

In order to solve the problems of logistics explosion of centralized shopping, in 2014, "Tmall Double 11" launched a pre-sale model for the first time, with a pre-sale period of up to 27 days. In the past ten years, pre-sales have gradually become a marketing tool, and it is one of the common ways to detonate demand in the live broadcast room.

An employee of Taotian industry said that some merchants will put the marketing and promotion expenses of the whole network in pre-sale, because there is no need to worry about inventory when selling in advance, and theoretically it can pull the demand to the extreme. And if the pre-sale amount is high, the follow-up spot promotion will also get more traffic on the platform.

After the pre-sale is canceled, these merchants also need to make adjustments - marketing cadence, stock quantity, scheduling with anchors, etc. However, the operation of a beauty brand said that they have not yet entered the preparation cycle of 618, and there are various promotional festivals in front, such as 510, Mother's Day, 520, etc.

Taobao Web has restarted, targeting more than 10 million users who shop on computers every day

Many people have become accustomed to using mobile phones to use the services provided by large domestic Internet companies, and the web terminal has become a very distant term. For a long time, large domestic Internet companies did not want users to use the web terminal, and they repeatedly guided users to transfer to apps in product design.

Pinduoduo, which was born in the era of mobile Internet, only has two main columns on its web version: "Wonderful Events (Limited Time Spike, 9.9 Sale)" and "Selected Topics", and the words "Download App Exclusive Offer" appear in many places to guide downloads;

Taobao, Jingdong's web version has a complete category and a variety of functional sections, which is also normal, they have been established for more than 20 years, in the first ten years, the web version is the main front, and there are still a large number of users who will browse their web version today.

In the past year, 100 million unique users have visited Taobao Web, and tens of millions of users use Taobao and Tmall every day taobao.com across all age groups, with about 30% of post-95s occurring, mainly college students, white-collar workers, and corporate office users.

The experience of so many Taobao web users is not taken seriously. In 2013, Taobao chose "All in Wireless" to fully develop the mobile terminal, and the web version has been close to the free-range state for more than ten years.

In recent years, Alibaba has vigorously supported Taote and live broadcast on the app side to acquire new users, while tens of millions of users who still use Taobao on PC are no longer taken seriously.

Logging in to Taobao once required a mobile phone to scan a QR code or SMS verification code - this can bring daily activity to the app, but it is not possible to log in because you can't see the price of the product, in the web version, many products can't be searched, and the shopping cart always shows the original price, and you can't see the price after the discount. There are just too many questions about the experience.

Starting in 2024, Alibaba has set up a small but complete team to optimize and upgrade Taobao PC.

We learned that Zhao Kun, the head of the PC team on Taobao, posted a post on Ali's intranet on May 6 "Why do we want to redo PC Taobao?", he said that in less than 2 months, the team has launched more than 60 requirements, large and small, and fixed countless bugs, "The only thing we are doing at present is to desperately make up for the experience lost in recent years." ”

Zhao Kun (nickname: empty nothing), the former head of the intelligent service division of Ali Damo Academy, is an old Ali person, he is one of the founding members of Ali's customer experience business group, and single-handedly created Ali's artificial intelligence customer service product "Xiaomi". Since joining Alibaba in 2009, he has created Taobao's first-generation data product, Data Cube, and co-founded Alibaba's big data platform.

These experience optimizations include, but are not limited to, allowing users to log in with their accounts and passwords, extending the login status to 7 days, browsing product details without logging in, optimizing products such as homepage search and shopping cart for the first time for large screens, the price of shopping carts after the first display of coupons, and automatic collection of discounts for product details.

Zhao Kun said that mobile phones, pads, notebooks, desktops, car computers, AR/VR/MR, etc. will become a variety of carriers for users to access the Internet, "as long as we are determined to serve all Chinese consumers, we should let users have the right and convenience to choose a variety of devices to access, and should not let users be tied to a terminal." ”

"Return to users", Ali has a lot to do

Alibaba's founder Jack Ma and CEO Wu Yongming have successively made it clear that "returning to users" is the core of Alibaba's strategy, and after the direction is determined, there is a lot of specific work left for tens of thousands of people to do.

Since the beginning of this year, Taobao has successively made some visible changes, including the launch of "refund only", free shipping in Xinjiang, and free shipping for 88VIP members.

It's also learning new things from its competitors. It has launched a "refund-only" policy, which is one of Pinduoduo's strongest user minds, cooperated with Cainiao Station to cover a wider range of home delivery services, which used to be JD.com's specialty, and vigorously supported short videos to increase the length of user stay, which is also what all Internet companies are doing.

Big sales are what the company's employees do best. Taobao Tmall's past sales have been driven by one promotion after another, one after another shopping festivals of various sizes, creating advertising space to the greatest extent, which can bring a steady stream of advertising revenue to Ali and obtain hundreds of billions of yuan in profits a year, which also leads to the fact that the goods that consumers brush are often not the cheapest.

How to make employees switch from the habit of business-centric operation to user-centric, how to make the organization switch from the habit of reporting first and leader first to customer first, and how to make the platform switch from habitually charging advertising fees to making profits for consumers, these all need to be balanced, and they are all problems.

At the beginning of 2024, Taotian Group's management said internally that their positioning for Taobao in the future is to "become a better version of themselves" and defend the number one position of shelf e-commerce. This is a comprehensive test for the 21-year-old Taobao.

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