| Cattle farming
Editor| Zhao Yanqiu
Just after the zero point of Double 11, major e-commerce platforms rushed to release data: Tmall's cumulative transaction volume from November 1 to 11 was 372.3 billion yuan, and JD.com's transaction volume broke 200 billion yuan within 9 minutes. And Baidu, although it stepped into e-commerce for the fourth time, seems to have passed a deserted double 11.
In the Baidu App shopping channel, a small number of brands have double 11 low-price special sessions, and the main promotion is still Xiaodu hardware products. And many consumers who heard that Baidu is going to do e-commerce and want to "make a profit" have not even found a shopping entrance.
Rushing online before double 11, Baidu undoubtedly wants to eat a wave of traffic dividends. But the hidden entrance, low-key communication and long-tail live broadcast make Baidu have little sense of existence in front of Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi. Baidu undoubtedly wants to run the business first, and then say that functions such as commodity search are also improving, but the low-key style of behavior is placed in the era when traffic is king, which still makes people sweat for Baidu.
Why has Baidu e-commerce repeatedly lost battles?
Baidu's entry into e-commerce has been brewing since last year. In August 2019, Baidu announced that it would invest $30 million in the e-commerce sector for "water sellers" youzan, who provide online store opening, marketing and customer management. By investing in praise, Baidu can improve the closed loop of e-commerce services in the app. In December last year, Baidu Intelligent Mini Program cooperated with SF and Debon to improve logistics services. In May this year, Baidu's investment in Youzan was completed, and the live stream of "Treasure Hubei" was launched on the same day.
On May 15, in the context of the popularity of live e-commerce, Robin Li also went live to bring goods, and told 9.27 million people watching online: "In the future, someone is willing to come to Baidu App to bring goods. On the day of 618, Baidu live e-commerce single GMV (total turnover) once exceeded 10 million yuan.
At present, Baidu e-commerce is based on Baidu App as the traffic entrance, and the "degree store" connects all links.
Baidu told AI Finance: "The launch of the shopping channel is to provide a centralized entrance, further aggregate Baidu's e-commerce resources, and cultivate the new habit of 'search + shopping' of users." The shopping channel yudu small store provides merchants with complete e-commerce basic capabilities and marketing gameplay, while Baidu mobile ecology can provide multiple types of diversion and content planting. ”
Baidu does expect to gather previously dispersed e-commerce resources. Baidu said that the e-commerce capabilities or e-commerce resources scattered in various business lines in the Baidu mobile ecosystem will be gathered and activated to empower the shopping channel.
Why does Baidu have to do e-commerce? It's a cliché: because in China, e-commerce and search engines seem incompatible. In September 2008, Taobao announced that baidu crawlers were completely blocked, and Baidu could not search any Taobao information since then. A few days later, Baidu's first e-commerce platform "Yes" was launched.
Since then, in e-commerce apps such as Taobao, the distribution of goods and advertising revenue have been controlled by themselves. They have built their own search engines in the App, and Baidu, a search platform, can only divert traffic to the home page of e-commerce. Therefore, Baidu's advertising revenue has been cut off by the e-commerce platform. In stark contrast, in the United States, Amazon does not block Google's search sources, retail is Google's largest source of advertising revenue, and Amazon is also Google's largest advertiser.
Zhuang Shuai, founder of Bailian Consulting, told AI Finance and Economics: "Baidu AI monetization is far away, and the biggest revenue module at present is advertising. But Baidu's advertising has been declining, because the integration of e-commerce itself has emerged, and the proportion of advertisements on Taobao, Tencent, Kuaishou and Douyin is very high. "As the three major monetization models, e-commerce, advertising and games are all integrated, and e-commerce and advertising have been fully integrated."
According to public data, Baidu's share of advertising revenue has dropped from 82% two years ago to 63%, which also includes the credit for iQiyi's continued advertising growth. The message that Baidu wants to sell iQiyi circulates on social media.
In addition to e-commerce advertising, another piece of Baidu's hungry cake is industrial services. Zhuang Shuai said, "There is more room for e-commerce to imagine profit growth, such as payment, logistics and supply chain finance, such as WeChat's payment and supply chain finance, JD logistics and supply chain finance, Ali's Cainiao and Ant Financial." ”
And Baidu can connect the two ways of scenes and "degree small full" payment, O2O is not successful, and e-commerce can no longer drop the chain. At present, in the shopping channel of Baidu App, Baidu's own payment methods include Du Xiaoman Payment and Baidu FlashPay.
How to do it: woo small businesses and bring goods live
Another key question for Baidu is: What does e-commerce do?
AI Finance and Economics found on the Baidu App shopping channel half a month ago that most of the waterfall information flow is long-tail products and agricultural products, and the live broadcast section is also dominated by agricultural products, which is very "fast hand wind". In an era when head merchants are often required to "choose one of the two", Baidu e-commerce seems to have given up competing for head merchants and chosen to attract small businesses. These small merchants access Baidu through the degree shop system. However, during the Double 11 period, AI Finance and Economics found that the style of Baidu App shopping channels has changed, and the categories and brands have increased.
It is worth mentioning that the previous rumors that Baidu wanted to acquire YY were also considered to have e-commerce considerations. In August this year, Li Xueling, chairman and CEO of Huanju Times, publicly stated: "(YY) live broadcast contribution accounted for the first, but in the next 3-5 years, I hope that e-commerce revenue is the majority." "If Baidu wants to make efforts to live e-commerce, it is bound to find a live broadcast platform to bring users, and YY is a choice, because the incremental traffic in the live broadcast field is not much."
Baidu believes that search and e-commerce have a natural coupling, which is also the reason why Baidu has repeatedly lost battles in e-commerce. Baidu regrets that it does not have its own account system, can not leave search traffic in its own system, two years ago began to invest heavily in mini programs, hoping to establish a closed-loop system from search to order. But for now that path still needs to be tried.
But a common criticism from the outside world is that it is too much to emphasize the traffic brought by search engines and ignore the ability of the back-end supply chain, after all, e-commerce has landed in China for nearly 20 years, and the battlefield has expanded from competing for merchants and consumers to deepening the supply chain capabilities of the industry.
In this regard, Zhuang Shuai believes that search is indeed one of the infrastructure of e-commerce, and the key is to combine its advantages with enterprises with supply chain advantages in the industry and find its own differentiated path. However, at present, in the already mature market of e-commerce, Baidu e-commerce does not seem to have explored its own distinct way of playing.
After three previous e-commerce failures, the strategy has been wavering
Before doing e-commerce this time, Baidu's e-commerce has experienced three major failures.
In October 2008, Baidu launched the C2C mall "Yes", with "Prince" Li Mingyuan in charge of Dayin and establishing a separate e-commerce division. This battle is quite large, because Baidu has been blocked from commodity links by Taobao in September, thus breaking with mainstream e-commerce publicly. But in March 2011, yes, it ended in dismal terms, closing the merchandise, shops and trading functions.
The biggest reason for the failure seems to be that Baidu did not make a big decision to invest resources. According to reports, Baidu's monthly promotion fee for "yes" is only a few thousand yuan, allowing Li Mingyuan to live like a year, with a market share of less than 1% in 3 years. Baidu's then CFO Li Xinzhe also said: Baidu's investment in C2C will not be too large. Pan Xin, co-owner of New Oriental Online at the time, revealed: "Baidu did not use the strength of the whole company to do it, nor did it have the determination to only win and not to lose. ”
Another root cause is the homogenization of competition. At that time, Taobao had occupied more than 90% of C2C, and Baidu simply adopted an "imitation strategy". But e-commerce was already in the transformation to B2C at that time, and in 2011, when there was a downline, B2C transaction volume accounted for 51% of the entire network, and Tmall accounted for 35.4% in Q1 2012. According to an analysis on social media, Baidu's e-commerce strategy lags behind Ali by an era.
Baidu's second attempt was with Rakuten in collaboration with Rakuten of Japan. Baidu provides entrance and traffic, and Lotte does business. However, according to public reports, the top level of Lekutian is almost all controlled by the Japanese side, but it does not understand the usage habits of Chinese users, and the traffic monetization is very unsuccessful. In April 2014, Lekutian also dismally rolled off the production line.
In September 2015, Baidu launched the platform "Baidu MALL", only cooperating with the brand side, hoping to serve the middle class as a high-end quality e-commerce. Baidu people said at the time: Baidu is very determined and may be the last attempt at e-commerce business. However, this time the e-commerce publicity was low-key, and the product quality could not be differentiated, and it was officially closed in 2017.
In addition to these three attempts, Baidu has also set up vertical e-commerce, such as health pharmacies, future stores (smart hardware), shopping guide business "Baidu micro-purchase", recommended business "Baidu is worth buying" and so on. The most sensational attempt is the "Teng Million" established in August 2014 in conjunction with Tencent and Wanda. At that time, the three parties announced that they planned to invest 20 billion yuan in 5 years to build the world's largest O2O e-commerce company.
Looking back at history so far, Baidu's hard injury in addition to strategic swing also lies in the failure to lay out the entire e-commerce link and put too much energy on front-end diversion. In 2012, Baidu had a "middle page strategy" that was used to provide services to others in the middle of search engines and traditional industries, rather than directly operating e-commerce platforms.
Later, When Wang Jianlin failed to reinvent the million, he also admitted: "(Others) any traffic import needs to spend money, we don't need to spend money, we have it ourselves." But how these traffic turned into money, these two people (Robin Li and Ma Huateng) listened to it and felt that there was a possibility, said yes, and got it. Wang Jianlin even said that he found himself to be the one who knew most about e-commerce (among the three).
According to this logic, Baidu App launched the shopping channel this time, at least it operates its own front-end platform, using its own system "Du Xiaodian" to provide e-commerce services for merchants, and Du Xiaoman is responsible for payment and supply chain finance. Baidu's online e-commerce live broadcast and possible acquisitions can also control the live broadcast battlefield in its hands. This is a relatively complete Baidu e-commerce puzzle, and the main suspense lies in how to find differentiation.
Zhuang Shuai told AI Finance and Economics: "The difficulty of Baidu's e-commerce is that it was too tossed before, and the number of failures and repetitions was too much. (Although Baidu controls traffic), no matter how it uses to build supply chain cooperation, it needs to be supported by social resources, especially brand merchants and third-party partners. Winning trust will be a big difficulty for Baidu this time. ”
This article is originally produced by AI Finance and Economics, an account of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, without permission, please do not reprint it on any channel or platform. Violators will be prosecuted.