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Author | Chen Pingan
Source: Bohu Finance
The same is to buy the iPhone 14, some people are posting new phones in the circle of friends, and some people are calling the police to chase the escaped money.
A few days ago, according to a number of media reports, the WeChat applet “Easy Liangou Online Mall” pre-sold Apple mobile phones at a low price, but ran away after receiving a large amount of money from the order. The number of victims has reached 300, including ordinary people. There are also scalpers, involving an amount of more than 7 million yuan.
(Source: Network)This matter has quickly fermented on social networks. Some people think that they are only fooled because they are cheap, while others think that most of the fools are scalpers and deserve what they deserve.
Regardless of the motive for being deceived, Bohu Finance believes that the real core of this incident is that the e-commerce industry is quite mature, where is the supervision of the platform?
Online shopping “Assassin”
Although for most people, online shopping mostly chooses mature platforms such as Taobao, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, but small program e-commerce is not a rare thing.
Huang Zheng once said, “All e-commerce companies should do small programs.”
On the one hand, light-weight, low-cost e-commerce mini-programs are almost perfect money-making tools due to the characteristics of “no installation, easy access, use up, and no need to uninstall”.
On the other hand, the WeChat platform parasitized by Mini Programs and its own private domain attributes can effectively reduce transaction costs. Many new users of Mini Programs choose to place orders out of trust.
Pinduoduo has achieved 300 million active users of Pinduoduo in less than a year by virtue of the small program dividend, and completed its growth among the giants.
The number of Mini Programs with transactions in 2021 will increase by 28% year-on-year. According to Guohai Securities data, e-commerce local life mini-programs MAU accounted for 43.19%, and the future of mini-program ecology is more consumer content.
However, for those who shop on the applet, this is the beginning of being deceived.
“We placed orders on the applet because we believed in Tencent.” An Yiliangou rights defender said that dozens of victims around him bought mobile phones on Yiliangou.
In the “Fun Digital Youpin” rights protection incident reported by the Beijing News in June this year, the victim, Mr. Zhao, also saw a group of friends in a second-hand store exchange WeChat group sending a message saying that he bought a mobile phone through this small program. , which is cheaper than JD.com and Pinduoduo, so I placed an order, but the customer service call was not available the next day, and the applet has also been suspended due to suspected fraud.
According to a report from the Red Star Capital Bureau, a consumer saw a shoe in the Douyin live broadcast room and was about to buy it. At the suggestion of the anchor, he chose to place an order through the WeChat applet “Southern Factory”.
After the goods arrived, he found that the shoes did not fit, so he prepared to return them. Unexpectedly, although the customer service promised well, the payment has not been refunded. When he logged into the same Douyin live broadcast room again after a while, he found a page prompt: The Mini Program has been suspended due to suspected fraud.
Not only WeChat, but Alipay also has this kind of situation.
(Source: Network)Searching for Mini Programs on a complaint platform, there are more than 30,000 complaints about Mini Programs.
From “Fun Digital Youpin” to Yiliangou, the small program platform has sealed these online shopping “assassins”, but it is difficult to protect the rights and interests of consumers.
The hidden dangers of small program e-commerce
For merchants on leading e-commerce platforms, breach of contract is a costly affair.
On the one hand, if the merchants of the public domain platform want to achieve a certain scale, they need long-term maintenance and investment, and the cost of running away is very high.
On the other hand, Taobao’s third-party payment mechanism and associated logistics information mechanism allow merchants to receive payment only after the user confirms the receipt of the goods. At the same time, Taobao will manage according to the merchant’s credit rating. Merchants with good reputation can withdraw money in advance, but also Because reputation is accumulated over a long period of time, the possibility of running away is very low.
In addition, the platform is also strengthening supervision in this regard.
But this is not the case with mini-program e-commerce platforms.
While the e-commerce industry has entered a growth bottleneck and live streaming e-commerce is regarded as the only depression, last year, the self-operated GMV of small program physical goods merchants still maintained a 100% growth, and many vertical fields maintained a high growth trend.
Behind this growth is the easing of supervision.
According to a report by Caijing Eleven, many people in the e-commerce industry have mentioned that in order to attract more merchants, the mini-program e-commerce platform will lower some requirements.
For example, only a business license is required to open “business self-operated”. According to Bohu Finance, to develop e-commerce-related mini-programs, WeChat mini-programs will be divided according to commodities, industries, etc., and require relevant business qualifications. However, 25 categories including pet videos and 3C digital only require relevant business licenses.
For another example, “the payment can go to the merchant without confirmation from the consumer”. According to the Observer.com report, Weimeng, which is responsible for building a platform for merchants through small programs, “does not accept any funds”. After the customer pays, the funds will be directly transferred to the company’s corporate account.
Weimeng only charges the account-related setup and annual fees, and charges by function.
(Source: Network)This relaxation of access threshold and transaction supervision will undoubtedly lead to a reduction in the cost of default and an increase in transaction risk, resulting in the occurrence of merchants running away incidents similar to Yiliangou.
It is worth mentioning that the micro-shops, which are also under the WeChat e-commerce ecosystem, not only set up a prominent “service guarantee” section, but also detailed the contents of items such as “transaction fund guarantee” and “violation of compensation”.
In terms of supervision, there is still a lot that Mini Programs can do.
A new battlefield for the giants
It needs to be acknowledged that Mini Programs are playing an increasingly important role.
According to the “White Paper on the Internet Development of Small Programs in the First Half of 2022” released by Aladdin, the number of small programs on the whole network platform in the first half of this year exceeded 7.5 million+, compared with 7 million+ six months ago. Relying on the WeChat applet of WeChat, the daily active users have exceeded 500 million.
According to Aurora Big Data statistics, the number of APPs installed per capita in Q1 in 2022 will be 66. Comparing the data of the past few quarters horizontally, this number is almost stagnant, and the essence behind the phenomenon is that the number of people reached by the APP is approaching the upper limit.
(Source: Network)At this time, Mini Programs have shown a savage growth ability. According to the “2021 Mini Program User Growth White Paper”, from December 2019 to February of the following year, DAU increased by 37%, and the number of Mini Programs increased by 19%. Most of the traffic throughout the year was acquired by new gameplay. Various industries entered the game through new tools such as “live broadcast + private domain traffic + small programs”, involving more than 300 industries, far more than the industries reached by apps.
Habits such as using mini-programs to take taxis, order takeaways, and sell vegetables are becoming smoother. Through mini-programs, independent apps can more easily expand and extend the ecosystem. And its features that it does not need to download, open up the ecosystem, and do not need to jump out can shorten the efficiency of commercialization to a considerable extent.
In other words, Mini Programs have the potential to become the new growth curve that giants are looking for.
Therefore, we can see that the actions of giants this year are closely related to small programs. For example, this year, Douyin held the “Douyin Open Platform Developer Conference”, announcing that it will use mini programs as a carrier to form an open cooperation platform. The cooperation with Ele.me and iQIYI announced by Douyin not long ago was realized through the small program as the carrier.
With the advancement of the platform’s ecological construction, some barbaric acts that have grown secretly in the past will definitely be corrected, such as the positioning and version numbers of IAA casual games, and the supervision of e-commerce platforms. However, how long it takes to solve the problem depends on the platform’s own wishes.
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