"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" (reporter, Shanghai Huang Xinyi) is another year of "Double 11", as the annual consumption carnival of the entire Chinese e-commerce industry, Double 11 is ushering in the 13th year. In the past 13 years, the Internet ecology has undergone tremendous changes. From the traditional offline transaction to the online transaction, the domestic e-commerce explosion has been achieved, and then the traditional platform e-commerce has evolved into a live streaming mode.
While sales continue to reach new highs, e-commerce is also facing the bottleneck of peaking traffic and slowing growth from rapid growth. A number of industry insiders told the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that the current e-commerce industry is generally in traffic anxiety. The lack of traffic growth on public domain platforms and the sharp decline in the demographic dividend have brought the entire industry into a traffic dilemma, and new ways of playing such as private domain operations are still in the early stages of exploration, and the difficulty in draining new streams is also increasing.
Traffic peaks under how to change the e-commerce format
"In the past fourteen or five years, the growth of the e-commerce industry has been very rapid. But since 2019, e-commerce merchants have very clearly felt the decline in the growth rate of this industry, and there has been a downward trend from traffic to the supply chain. Jia Penglei, president of Ebang Power and founder of the Horseshoe Society, pointed out.
"On the one hand, it is because the coverage rate of netizens has reached nearly 80%, and basically all of them can access the Internet. On the other hand, the per capita internet time of netizens has not increased much from 2018 to 2021. In addition, from the perspective of online retail sales, in 2020, the national e-commerce transaction volume reached 37 trillion yuan, accounting for about 30% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in the whole society, and this proportion has been very high. ”
Jia Penglei analyzed that this means that in the process of combining the e-commerce industry with the real economy, the era of high growth brought by the natural foundation has ended, and the future needs to be improved at both ends of experience and efficiency, which is likely to bring new growth.
"The first thing to focus on is digitalization, it is difficult to explore a new category and brand with business intuition and human flesh market research, and introducing more data is the only way in the information age." The second is branding. In the past, it was possible to sell goods in China, and there was no need to do branding, but now, just having products and no brands cannot achieve sustained growth. ”
Zhang Xiuzheng, vice president of Huawei China and president of HUAWEI CLOUD China, believes that if e-commerce wants to further grow, it is not enough to rely on manpower alone, only through more data and algorithms. "Based on the big data recommendation model, it stimulates the potential demand of consumers more accurately, improves the comprehensive customer acquisition ability, optimizes the cost efficiency of customer acquisition, and realizes the refined operation of traffic."
Pan Helin, executive dean and professor of the Digital Economy Research Institute of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, told the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that e-commerce still has growth potential, mainly reflected in the transformation of business forms.
"The current e-commerce platform can evolve from commodity sales to service sales, from online sales to service ecology, from platform sales to comprehensive solutions, and the current e-commerce business can be expanded, such as offline vehicle maintenance and repair, home cleaning, online vocational education, various platform members, etc., as well as the continuous inclusion of offline physical industries, such as smart Internet of Things home and other consumer goods." E-commerce platforms have a broader extension, and business types will become more and more abundant. ”
Internet analyst Zhang Jingke believes that "in the post-epidemic era, the current consumption upgrade and consumption downgrade are parallel, and the reputation and quality of goods in the future will be more attractive to consumers than simply playing the promotional game of price increase and price reduction." Of course, in the long run, after the global consumer market changes in the future, low-carbon and carbon-reducing commodities also have a lot of room for development. ”
For the current hot live e-commerce, Zhong Hao, CTO of Mengyu Group, believes that the decentralization of e-commerce is the trend of the times, and only by adapting to this trend can we get better development.
"Traditional e-commerce is centralized, which can be called search e-commerce. Buyers in Jingdong Taobao to search for things to buy, characterized by the goods do not move, people move, the goods have been placed there, constantly buy traffic. Now live e-commerce is decentralized, which can be called recommended e-commerce. People don't move, but they change into goods. The anchor keeps putting the selected explosive products and Net red goods in front of consumers to buy. Sellers have also changed from cargo owners to traffic owners, and most of the sellers in live e-commerce are anchors, they are not brand owners or cargo owners, and what they have is traffic, not goods. ”
Zhang Jingke pointed out that live e-commerce is not a new way of selling.
"In the early years, there was a lot of TV shopping in the form of pseudo-live broadcasts during the midnight hours. Although interaction and speech can boost customer purchases in a sense, the essence still depends on the quality and price competitiveness of goods, rather than relying solely on the talent of anchors to guide consumers' impulse purchases. ”
Can private domain traffic become the second growth curve of e-commerce?
A market source told the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter: "Many Taoist sellers now have traffic anxiety, traffic is becoming less, and orders are decreasing. Many sellers are trying douyin, kuaishou, and private domain traffic operations, hoping to create a second growth curve. ”
Yang Qing, secretary general of the Shanghai E-commerce Industry Association, said that in the face of the expansion of a large amount of marketing content every day, netizens have gradually formed their own psychological firewall. In order to obtain more traffic and seek more efficient conversion, e-commerce scenarios and models are also changing.
"From the content point of view, from the past graphic and text-based communication methods to the current short video, live broadcast-based way; from the regional point of view, in the past, the first- and second-tier cities expanded to the sinking market; from the perspective of traffic, public domain traffic mining has almost reached the top, and private domain traffic has begun to become the main way."
An industry insider told the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that the most common private domain operation is the so-called "small program + WeChat group" social e-commerce model, through the sharing of goods to buy friends can get the corresponding commission, the participation of the crowd includes part-time white-collar workers, mothers, students, full-time freelance workers and so on. "In terms of income, it is as little as a few hundred yuan per month, and it can reach tens of thousands of yuan if it is done well."
Yao Lingpeng, head of Tencent's private domain security, introduced that the private domain model in recent years is a variety of combination types, such as "store + mini program", "public number + community + micro", etc.
"Many emerging fashion brands can even do business through the 'public number + community shopping guide' planting grass, not necessarily by opening stores." Another way is to operate through the loyalty center points, when the reserve digital users are enough, how to increase the membership repurchase rate and so on. At present, the core proposition of the private domain model is how to put customers in their own hands, and operate and revitalize well, serve customers well, and directly connect with them. ”
Jia Penglei pointed out: "At present, the definition of private domain is not only WeChat groups, but also includes the crowd of Douyin and Kuaishou, as well as the newly launched business groups of Meituan and so on. ”
However, on the whole, whether private domain operations can become a new growth point for e-commerce still needs time to be considered. Zhao Xuejie, co-founder of Baiying Technology, said that more than 50% of enterprises are still in the first half of private domain operations, and are still in the new stage of drainage and pulling.
"Most of the enterprises are actually still in the new drainage period, start-up period and wait-and-see period of private domain operation, and only a very few enterprises are already in the bottleneck period of private domain business, or the period of growth exploration and transformation optimization." At present, 90% of the head brands are doing the thing of powdering, the average investment in powder is between 3 million and 10 million, and 90% of users can only become effective fans of ten brands at most. At present, the powdering pass rate of private domains is also decreasing year by year. In 2019, the industry's basic price pass rate is 20%-30%, by 2020, it will drop to 6-7%, and in 2021, it will fall to about 2%-3%, and the matter of drainage is becoming more and more important in the entire private domain operation process, and it is becoming more and more difficult. ”
After summarizing his own experience, Tie Pi, CEO of Yongpu Coffee, believes that the most important thing in private domain operation is communication with users.
"We are very concerned about communication with users, and spent a year to build more than thirty private domain groups, each of which is very active." We attract users not by rewarding, but by interests and hobbies. We often initiate co-creation activities, such as creating illustrations together, or recycling courier boxes to make some decorative things. ”