That familiar Taobao is back

36 Krypton

2024-05-13 10:28Posted on the official account of Beijing 36Kr

Taobao is "Taobao" from 21 years of experience.

"I firmly believe that the biggest beneficiary of a real, great, outstanding e-commerce website should be the user, and the biggest builder should also be the user !!"

In an old post posted by Jack Ma on the Taojianghu forum 20 years ago, these three exclamation points were very eye-catching.

May 10 is Taobao's 21st anniversary. As part of the event, the "Taojianghu" forum, which had been in the dust for more than a decade, was relaunched, and engineers resumed Jack Ma's posts from 20 years ago from the background.

Jack Ma's old post echoes Taobao's current strategy. In February this year, Wu Yongming, chairman of Taotian Group, said on the earnings call: "Returning users is the core of our strategy. We will invest more in the core user experience to enhance the shopping experience for our customers. ”

Before and after this statement, Taotian Group has a series of new actions to optimize user rights, services, and experience, including free shipping in Xinjiang, 88VIP rights and interests upgrade, and this year's Tmall 618 has also canceled pre-sale for the first time, and the full-cycle spot sale is open.

On his 21st birthday, Taobao chose to give users free orders to celebrate his birthday.

Since May 6, Taobao has launched a free order answering activity, issuing discounts at a rate of three rounds a day, and millions of orders have been waived within a few days. As long as participants answer the questions correctly, they can grab a two- to three-digit free order.

"Send money" directly to users, so that Taobao free orders have received widespread attention, dominating the hot searches on major platforms for five consecutive days, with a total number of participants exceeding 100 million. A large number of participants posted free orders on social media, and a topic related to Zhen Huan's biography triggered the "Zhen Xue Discussion", which stayed on Weibo hot search for a whole day.

On the day of the anniversary celebration on May 10, the free order for answering questions became a scratch card lottery, and Taobao randomly waived a historical order for the winning user. In this round, the maximum amount of free orders reached 9999 yuan, and some people have posted screenshots of 7918 yuan jewelry and 3069 yuan mobile phones being exempted.

Weibo's "Warm Moment" bot received submissions, and the cat milk tubes that some users fed kittens were also exempted. The kitten, named "Happy", took over from her deceased grandmother and continued to stay with the author.

The author wrote in the comment area: I hope that with this good luck, I will be with Happy (Kitten) for a little longer.

The free order gameplay is not new, but Taobao has no routines, simple and direct activities, but it is really out of the circle.

"User first" has boosted Taobao more directly, and has received positive feedback on both the user side and the market side. On April 17, Hua Chuang Securities released a research report saying that in March 2024, Taobao Tmall GMV increased by 14% year-on-year. Questmobile data also shows that in the same month, Taobao topped the domestic e-commerce list with 928 million monthly active users.

Taobao is "Taobao" from 21 years of experience, driving business growth with users first.

01. Comprehensively focus on user experience

In addition to free orders, Taobao's birthday gift to itself also has a web version upgrade.

It has been seven years since the last major webpage overhaul. Taobao's website manager is resurrecting on the "Taojianghu" forum, which released a letter to Taobao users, saying that to this day, nearly 10 million users still use taobao.com to visit Taobao and Tmall every day. Since February, the team has intensively launched more than 60 functions, solved some long-standing problems in the PC version, and the Taojianghu Forum has also been launched simultaneously.

Kongwu also said that Taojianghu is recruiting "Taobao think tanks" from all over the world, and the opinions of the think tanks "will affect our future operation plans and each product iteration." The post garnered more than 570 followers in one day.

After the opening of the forum, one of the words that appeared most frequently in the public page was "Ye Qing Hui" (Ye's youth is back).

Taobao is also making users feel more and more "Ye Qinghui" in terms of shopping experience. In May last year, Ma Yun proposed at an internal meeting that he wanted to return to Taobao, return to users, and return to the Internet, and it was not only Taobao web version that urgently needed to be "returned", but also all aspects of the entire Taobao e-commerce experience and service.

Since the second half of last year, Taobao Tmall has made a number of adjustments around the shopping experience, including the launch of the use first, pay later and refund only functions, the introduction of the automatic compensation mechanism for delayed delivery "late compensation", the restriction of ultra-long pre-sales in the apparel industry, and the regulation of false delivery and logistics stagnation.

Since the beginning of this year, Taobao and Tmall have considered improving the consumer experience in more detail. The first is the addition of a new store labeling system, and stores that provide good service will receive official "marking" certification.

The new tabs include "Refund Rejection Rate", "Platform Help Rate", "Return Shipping Insurance", as well as logistics-related "Trajectory Exception Rate", "Promised Timeliness", "Door-to-door Delivery", etc., all of which are indicators that users are very concerned about. In addition to the user's direct attention, the potential impact of the good service tag is even greater, and the platform will tilt the traffic to the merchants who get these tags.

Then there is the free shipping in Xinjiang launched on March 16. Xinjiang is a vast and sparsely populated region, equivalent to Shanghai's population scattered across 15 Zhejiang provinces, and Taobao continues to cope with this distribution problem and carry out logistics construction. In September last year, Taobao Shentong Xi'an transshipment warehouse completed the upgrade, the site capacity was expanded by 85%, and the "special transportation" logo was launched on Double 11, and the original high freight of 20 or 30 yuan was reduced to 5.5 yuan.

In March this year, Taobao Xinjiang free shipping channel was launched, and the special products were completely free shipping. On April 17, Taobao once again announced that it would speed up the transfer of Xi'an container warehouse, without backlog, and the goods would be sent on the same day, and the packages would be delivered to consumers after arriving in Xinjiang.

The most recent move is the 88VIP benefit upgrade. At the Tmall Toptalk meeting in March this year, 88VIP revealed that the number of rights and interests cooperation brands will increase from 4,000 to 10,000; In April, unlimited returns include shipping, with a single upper limit of 25 yuan; At the beginning of May, 88 VIP points, which could only be exchanged for physical objects, could be exchanged for cash red envelopes.

More than 30 million 88VIPs are loyal high-level users of Taobao and Tmall, and this group of people is mainly concentrated in high-tier cities.

By giving priority to the transformation of free shipping and 88VIP, Taobao released a clear signal: in the social context of consumption stratification, it does not intend to give up serving any user, whether it is from the municipality directly under the central government or the northwest.

Even the rules of the big promotion follow the opinions of users, which is extremely simplified.

On May 6, Tmall announced that 618 would cancel the pre-sale this year, and the first wave of direct sales would start at 8 p.m. on May 20. The participation process of merchants is also simpler than in previous years, there is no longer a merchant registration link, and products that meet the requirements can be registered directly.

Putting large and small actions together, users already have a stronger comprehensive perception of the purchase experience.

Media person Chen Jiying wrote that during her renovation of the house in March this year, the construction team selected offline smashed the gas pipeline, causing water leakage in the whole house, and the cabinet door could not be opened, but the decoration service purchased by Taobao was smooth sailing. Looking at the "buyer show", the Taobao custom furniture selected is three or four percent cheaper than offline, without any additions, and even two plates are given for free.

Chen Jiying also experienced the recently launched "Late Delivery Compensation" service. A lamp she purchased was not delivered for several days, and after clicking "Expediting Delivery", the 88VIP special line customer service took the initiative to apologize and offered to pay 19.9 yuan in cash.

At that time, she was not 88VIP, and after learning about "unlimited returns and free shipping", she made a special one.

Chen Jiying sighed: "Taobao, which reshaped the shopping experience of Chinese people 20 years ago, is back. ”

02. Direct return on user experience

A better shopping experience is a kind of "return" for Taobao. Platforms are regaining their "user experience genes" in order to regain momentum commercially.

At the earnings call in February this year, Wu Yongming said: "Taotian Group adheres to the positioning of 'almighty Taobao', and under the consumption grading system, it will provide a shopping experience of good goods, good prices and good services for different consumer groups, so that it will definitely be able to gain the trust of users and return to the growth track." ”

Judging from the data, Taobao, which has embarked on this track, has also "returned" in terms of commercial performance.

In addition to GMV, the report of Hua Chuang Securities also pointed out that in terms of the average time spent by active users on the platform, compared with the general negative growth of short video platforms, Taobao increased by 25% year-on-year.

What's more valuable is that compared with the sharp decline in the unit price of other e-commerce platforms, Taobao's unit price increased by 8.4% year-on-year in the first quarter.

Due to the influx of a large number of low-price supplies, the unit price of e-commerce customers on the whole network has been declining overall. In January ~ February 2024, the average unit price of parcels on the whole network was 78.3 yuan/piece, a decrease of 28 yuan/piece from the same period last year.

And Taobao's low-price supply is undoubtedly richer than last year. Taobao's 10 billion subsidies are rising rapidly, and from the beginning of this year to the end of April, the sales of 10 billion subsidies increased by 792%. After the success of the "N yuan N pieces" game, the low-price channel Tao Factory not only launched merchant commission incentives this year, but also started to make fresh ingredients and set up production operation centers in 23 cities across the country.

Last month, "Jiuxianwang Lafeige" premiered on Taobao, with sales exceeding 100 million in 3 hours, and one game reached one-fifth of the total amount of goods last year.

The most successful sale of Lafeige is Wuliangye, and there are also a lot of high-end foreign wines. An article on the official account of "Liquor Industry" pointed out that in the past month, the average transaction price of the top ten liquor products on Douyin has just exceeded 40 yuan, compared with only 10~20 yuan in the past.

Lafeige can sell wine from a few hundred yuan on Taobao Live, because Taobao users dare to believe that he sells real wine.

When the ROI of the whole network is getting lower and lower, Taobao has regained some long-term tactics in business, such as the richness of product power and product matrix, such as focusing on the precipitation of users and brand equity, and such as the platform's support for merchants.

In March this year, the Taobao content e-commerce festival announced that it would add 10 billion cash and 100 billion traffic to invest in content e-commerce, support more vertical talents, and store broadcasts of merchants that rose on Double 11 last year.

Tmall Toptalk also announced that the scale of resources related to new products will be increased by 3 times this year, and more than 10 billion traffic resources will be added, focusing on creating 5,000 "super new products". Tmall will also upgrade the "Treasure New Brand Plan" and "Super Brand Day" to support 100 new brands with more than 100 million yuan.

In April, Taobao's famous business tool "Business Advisor" was free.

Alimama released a more accurate "site-wide promotion", and in the internal testing stage, the speed of some merchants increased by 301.92%, and the GMV increased by 2.97 times.

03. It's just a repetition

Taobao's success in the past two decades has always been the label of "making it easy to do business in the world". In fact, Taobao's emphasis on user experience is also its successful experience that cannot be ignored.

In 2003, Taobao's first testable buyer was named Jiao Zhenzhong, who bought a high-end second-hand camera.

Xiao Jiao, a college student at the time, planned to take the train to buy it in a foreign store at first, until he accidentally discovered Taobao. The man who sold the camera was named Cui Weiping, and he was in Japan at the time. Jiao Zhenzhong communicated with Taobao customer service for two full hours before he had trust this seller he had never met.

After placing the order, the more Jiao Zhenzhong thought about it, the more wrong it became, and he called to ask for a refund. In the end, the staff promised that "if something goes wrong, I will compensate you with my salary", and he made up his mind to sit back and wait for the receipt.

It is hard for people today to realize that just 21 years ago, "buy without seeing" was so incredible to Chinese.

Taobao was founded on May 10, 2003, and only 68 million people on the mainland have access to the Internet, and many households don't even have enough bandwidth to load high-definition product maps.

Ma Yun said in a post the following year: "In the next 2~3 years...... Online shopping will become a big part of life" and "making money online will definitely be the trend of tomorrow", which seemed like a fantasy at the time.

However, by 2007, Taobao's transaction volume reached 43.3 billion, ranking second in the country's comprehensive stores, second only to Bailian Group.

In order to solve the trust problem, Taobao has launched Alipay with transaction guarantee function, and has also established a credit rating and evaluation system on stores and products, so that consumers have the right to freely make good and bad reviews.

Later, mobile photography became popular, and the "buyer show" was born. To this day, there are still many ancient buyer memes circulating on the Internet, breaking the information asymmetry in the shopping process.

In 2008, the newly established Taobao Mall (later Tmall) creatively launched the "7-day no reason to return and exchange service", and merchants can choose whether to participate or not.

At that time, most shopping malls in China did not support unjustified returns, and public opinion was in an uproar.

Facts have proved that as more and more merchants begin to support "7-day no reason to return and exchange", this right has gradually become the norm. The Measures for the Administration of Online Transactions, issued in 2014, clarified it into law and made it a right of all e-commerce consumers.

Taobao's series of model innovations in those years laid the foundation for today's Chinese e-commerce. For itself, these experiences are also a bonanza worth "searching for".

Now, Taobao wants to rediscover that while vigorously building "good services" and making high purchase frequency, it will strengthen the commodity supply advantages of "universal Taobao", improve the operating efficiency of merchants, and pursue good prices on the basis of good goods, so as to return to the track of healthy growth.

This is a new challenge in Taobao's history, but the essence of doing e-commerce is no different from 20 years ago. A great e-commerce website should always be built by users and benefit users. Following this unchanged strategy, Taobao chose the 510 free order activity to directly "send money", the 618 promotion to cancel the pre-sale, and took a series of actions to improve the service and purchase experience.

On April 10, Jack Ma wrote in an internal letter from Alibaba: "I believe that e-commerce in three years will definitely not be the hottest e-commerce today...... It's not about who to catch up with today, it's about how tomorrow's e-commerce should improve the consumer experience...... The era of AI has just arrived, and it's just the beginning, so it's time for us!"

Taobao and Tmall released a new AI tool for merchants in November last year, which allows merchants to use AI to open stores with one click, and complete the creation of new stores and the sale of products in 5 minutes. Taobao also said that from 2024, it will release ten smart tools and services to all merchants, including AI scene maps, AI retouching, etc.

Kongwu, the webmaster of Taobao on the web, is also responsible for MR (mixed reality) application development. In April this year, Taobao has launched the beta version of Vision Pro, and selected products can be projected into the real environment in 3D. Nothing has been revealed, and Taobao in this MR world will soon open up full trading functions.

New trends are emerging, just as Jack Ma foresaw online shopping in 2004, and China's e-commerce market in the coming years is just as imaginative. Taobao Tmall, which "returns to users", still has a long way to go.

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