Bigger opportunities always go with better word of mouth.Text丨Qi Jielun
Source | Heike Finance
2022 is drawing to a close. Looking back at the past year, many far-reaching stories in the field of China’s technology and Internet have happened or are happening. The generalized e-commerce industry, as one of the important branches, is directly related to the national economy and people’s livelihood due to its strong penetration and sense of value. Its current changes and future directions are particularly worth looking at at this point.
The Central Economic Work Conference held in mid-December gave a clear and resounding tone to private enterprises and the digital economy respectively. Various e-commerce platforms standing at the intersection of private enterprises and the digital economy and various business entities active on these platforms may contribute to the country’s efforts to expand domestic demand and improve the quality of life of urban and rural residents. Greater power.
According to the national economic operation data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on December 15, from January to November 2022, the total retail sales of social consumer goods will be 39919 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 0.1%, and the national online retail sales will be 12458.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.2%; The online retail sales of physical goods were 10,809.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.4%, accounting for 27.1% of the total retail sales of social consumer goods. In the same period, the online retail sales of physical goods, food, clothing, and household goods increased by 15.1% and 3.4% year-on-year respectively. , 6.1%.
At the moment when the Internet is close to popularization and the traffic is further hitting the ceiling, the more considerable incremental space and richer innovation possibilities of domestic e-commerce are likely to come from the intensive cultivation of the stock, and the more extreme consumer experience has become the competition of competitors in the same dimension. focus.
From the beginning of the year to the end of the year, from daily operations to 618, Double 11, Double 12, New Year’s Day and other high-profile promotions, JD.com, Ali, Pinduoduo, Douyin, Kuaishou and other leading camps in the industry and various leading merchants settled in them, In terms of strategy, we are more active in digging into user pain points, upgrading our capability system, and highlighting our ability to serve target users accurately and efficiently. In the long run, customer service is undoubtedly a card with more significance than cost reduction and efficiency increase. The question is, how can this card be played to overwhelm the opponent’s voice.
01
barbaric growth away
As far as the current industry structure is concerned, whether it is a relatively mature comprehensive e-commerce company such as JD.com, Ali, and Pinduoduo, or a rapidly rising live broadcast e-commerce company such as Douyin and Kuaishou, these leading platforms are based on their respective strengths and differentiated approaches. The follow-up and improvement of consumer shopping experience has been ongoing. It is obvious that the era of e-commerce’s barbaric growth has gone, and the era of better understanding of consumers, more stable performance and more professional and refined has arrived.
It must be mentioned here that the scale of domestic Internet users has infinitely approached the upper limit since the epidemic and the online shopping behavior on this basis is almost ubiquitous. To be precise, thanks to the national-level reach and coverage achieved by smartphones and mobile Internet after more than 10 years of expansion, as well as the improvement and resilience of supporting infrastructure such as superimposed payment and logistics, online shopping has now crossed mountains, rivers, lakes and seas, and is based on consumption equality. The appearance has become an indispensable source of lifestyle and social conversation resources for ordinary people all over the country.
According to the 50th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China released by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of June 2022, the number of domestic Internet users is 1.051 billion, and the Internet penetration rate is 74.4%. 99.6%; in the same period, there were 841 million online shoppers, accounting for 80.0% of the total Internet users.
Restricted by many specific factors such as age and education level, there is not much room for domestic netizens to continue to explore in the short term, and existing netizens generally have a deep understanding of online shopping, and they have a higher understanding of platforms and businesses. Look forward to shopping around and voting with your feet is the norm. Therefore, the supply side that is deeply cultivating the stock needs to capture the core concerns of the target users more keenly and act decisively in order to retain and introduce users with a better reputation in the industry.
From the growth trajectory of Pinduoduo, it is not difficult to see the practical significance of improving user experience.
Pinduoduo, which was launched in September 2015, has played the role of a disruptor of China’s e-commerce industry for a long time. Although JD.com, Alibaba and other established e-commerce giants have continuously taken various containment measures to deal with it in recent years, they have not It didn’t stop its triumphant progress.
It should be said that Pinduoduo was the first to launch based on the huge traffic pool of Tencent’s WeChat in the early stage. AI technology has changed the logic of the search box from “people looking for goods” to “goods looking for people” in the intelligent recommendation mode. These breakthroughs have effectively ignited the enthusiasm of a large number of consumers in the sinking direction, and the explosion speed is astonishing.
But the maturity of any platform cannot avoid some necessary stages, and the difference here is nothing more than the length of time. Pinduoduo, which has more than 800 million annual active users, once suffered a lot from copycat labels, but now the bombardment is much less, and its source is platform governance and ecological breeding based on user experience.
This is just as Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng said in a letter to shareholders in April 2019. Although Pinduoduo looks tall, it is still just Yao Ming who is in elementary school and needs adequate nutrition and proper exercise.
02
Underlying service competition
User experience involves many dimensions, and in the field of e-commerce, it actually points to a service system covering a series of links from pre-sales to after-sales. Platforms and merchants should pay special attention to any sub-business that intersects with users. They are the key for all parties to stabilize their market positions and make further successes. From this, it is not difficult for us to understand that many leading e-commerce organizations in China will emphasize and increase their emphasis on user experience in 2022.
JD.com founder Liu Qiangdong launched a new round of management storm within the company on November 20, which is highly related to user experience.
According to a later report, Liu Qiangdong named and criticized Jingdong retail executives, believing that they deviated from the core of the business strategy, namely cost, efficiency, and experience. At the same time, he further refined the experience into three aspects: product, price, and service. Any work not related to this is invalid.
Liu Qiangdong combined his experience of personally doing customer service to reply to customer messages in the early days of his business, saying that JD.com should always put user experience first, and JD Retail must return to user experience and low-price mentality. It must do everything possible to reduce prices and service by improving supply chain efficiency. Bring it up; he believes that low price is 1, quality and service are two 0s, and if the low price advantage is lost, all other so-called competitive advantages will return to 0.
Ali also attaches great importance to user experience.
Zhang Yong, chairman and CEO of Ali Group, said on the Ali Customer Day on September 10 that the core behind Ali’s high-quality development is customer first, that is, creating value for customers. Satisfying customer experience is the lower limit, and exceeding customer experience is the upper limit. . The customers Zhang Yong refers to here include both C-end users and B-end various partners.
Dai Shan, president of Ali’s domestic digital business sector, has a clear understanding of the fierce competition in the domestic e-commerce industry. Over the past year, she has continued to promote related businesses to improve user experience. Take 2022 Tmall Double 11 as an example. According to Dai Shan, in order to optimize the user experience, the platform has made many technological upgrades, including multi-address ordering, shopping cart expansion, Pailitao, etc., and has also made changes in content and interaction. Many innovative attempts have been made.
Live broadcast e-commerce platforms such as Kuaishou and its top anchor organizations such as Xinxuan are no different from JD Ali in terms of enhancing user experience.
Kuaishou focuses on trusting e-commerce, and the whole platform advocates real people, real goods, and real prices. Xiao Gu, the person in charge of Kuaishou e-commerce, has repeatedly reiterated “don’t lie to the old iron”. Cheng Yixiao, the co-founder and CEO of Kuaishou, mentioned in the 2022 Q3 financial report conference call that Kuaishou will also improve user experience and LTV (life cycle value) through algorithms.
Like Luo Yonghao, who broke out on Douyin, and Li Jiaqi, who broke out on Taobao Live, each has a professional support company with thousands of people hidden behind the scenes, making friends and Mei ONE. In 2017, Xinxuan was established as the founder, which is both pioneering and representative among the top live broadcast e-commerce organizations in China.
Xinxuan, which has more than 600 million fans and 60 million total users, has done a lot of exploration in user experience optimization and has obtained quite good market feedback. Relevant explorations have been written into its “2022 Xinxuan Group Consumer Service Upgrade Annual Report” released on December 20, and market feedback can be seen from the sales record of Xin Youzhi’s live broadcast on the Kuaishou New Year’s Day on December 24: the live broadcast A total of more than 14 million orders have been delivered, including 160 million yuan in nuts and 313 million yuan in fresh food sales.
Xin Xuan mentioned in the above report that the agency has upgraded its consumer service system in terms of quality control, cost-effectiveness, logistics, and customer service, in order to provide consumers with a high-standard service experience, and hopes to use this as a guide for the industry to move towards Set an example by developing in a more inclusive, more transparent and warmer direction.
Taking quality control as an example, nowadays Xinxuan has strict control over product quality. If a product wants to enter Xinxuan’s live broadcast room, it needs to pass qualification review, factory review, sample evaluation, point of sale card review, production follow-up, customer service, etc. To deal with six checkpoints, the agency increased the professional quality control team to more than 500 people.
03
open incremental space
Consumption, investment, and export are the troika driving China’s national economic growth. According to the data from the Ministry of Commerce, the National Bureau of Statistics and other departments, consumption has generally stabilized as the “top horse” in the troika in the past 10 years. The evolution of experience is expected to open up a new sky for the best entrants in the e-commerce industry in the era of deep cultivation of stock, which may in turn inject new momentum into China’s consumption and economic growth.
What needs to be pointed out is that although existing users continue to put forward higher requirements for shopping experience, their consumption power is also rising with the development of social economy to varying degrees, including the two important groups of the new middle class and generation Z. .
According to Haike Finance, the new middle class generally refers to people aged between 25 and 40, living in third-tier cities and above in China, with an online consumption ability of 1,000 yuan and above, and a high willingness to consume online; Generation Z It mostly refers to the post-95s and post-00s groups. As the aborigines of the Internet, this group has gradually become the backbone of social development, and its potential for high online consumption is quite large.
According to data from QuestMobile, a research organization, as of July 2022, the proportion of the new domestic middle-class population in the entire network has climbed to 13.7%, and the number of users has reached 163 million, a year-on-year increase of 15.6%. The scale has reached 342 million, and users with an online spending ability of more than 2,000 yuan accounted for 30.8%, a year-on-year increase of 2.7%.
It is of course far from enough to meet the needs of the new middle class and Generation Z with relatively high spending power. In the current market environment that tends to be rational and even conservative, how to iterate the service level for all existing users in an all-round way and stimulate their vigorous consumption Desire, to create a sense of gain beyond expectations, is a difficult problem that top e-commerce platforms and top merchants are urgently solving.
In this regard, live broadcast e-commerce has shown advantages such as being more flexible, intuitive, and efficient than comprehensive e-commerce, and it still has a broad space for in-depth exploration in terms of market size, so it should be given more attention.
According to data from the research organization iiMedia Consulting, the market size of China’s live broadcast e-commerce industry has reached 1,201.2 billion yuan in 2021, and is expected to reach 2,137.3 billion yuan by 2025.
For the healthy and orderly development of the live broadcast e-commerce business, in addition to the power of platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Taobao Live, the management capabilities of the top anchors on these platforms, such as Luo Yonghao, Xin Youzhi, Li Jiaqi and their teams, are also crucial. And the user experience is always its soul. A user service system with a better experience is not only a winning chip for competition between platforms, but also a long-term weapon for different anchor camps to win more users and orders.
Let’s still take Xinxuan mentioned above as an example. In January 2022, the agency has adjusted its customer service management team to a user experience center. While providing users with 7×24 online services, it has also opened an The group’s green service channel is its so-called warm service, and it makes full use of six channels including Kuaishou store, exclusive store, and hotline; in addition to upgrading the user service system through the whole link, the organization participates in anchor training and industry standard formulation And other aspects are also at the forefront, which is of great benefit to the sustainability of the team’s professional combat capabilities and the trust of all parties.
According to official announcements, in September 2021, Xinxuan and the Guangdong Marketing Association issued three standards: “Live E-commerce Product Selection and Delivery Management Specifications”, “Live E-commerce Marketing Service Specifications”, and “Live E-commerce After-sales Service Specifications”. It marks the official landing of Guangdong’s first live broadcast e-commerce industry group standard; in 2022, the organization will participate in the formulation of 4 industry standards and establish 48 internal standards.
The domestic e-commerce industry has gradually drifted away from barbarism and extensiveness. All kinds of commercial organizations are looking for increments in the deep plowing of the stock, and exploring the possibility of innovation in the polishing of the user service system. At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, the old and the new alternate, and the e-commerce game has come to the deep water area. No one knows for sure what the variables will be in 2023, but greater opportunities always come with better word of mouth.
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