Ali does not keep idle fish

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In order to solve the problem of urgent seller traffic, Xianyu needs to let go of his obsession.

Author丨Yu SongyeEditor丨Monday

Source: New Entropy

“Your products on Xianyu don’t have traffic anymore?”

Since the beginning of this year, every once in a while, Chen Shuang has heard such sentiments from fellow sellers in Xianyu. She found that the exposure of Xianyu accounts of her peers is very low, with only a few hundred people exposed for dozens of products. users are even fewer. Compared with this time in previous years, the average daily exposure of products can reach thousands or even tens of thousands.

Chen Shuang wanted to ask Xianyu professional sellers, what happened to Xianyu traffic?

In this regard, some industry insiders said that in the process of Xianyu’s instrumentalization, although the low threshold allowed Xianyu to obtain as many users and traffic as possible, it also caused many problems, such as the frequently exposed gray transaction chaos, etc. And so on, and every time Xianyu finds a problem, it constantly rectifies, adjusts the rules and expands the prohibited vocabulary database, but it is also restricting the natural flow of normal sellers.

Along the way, Xianyu has been qualified as Ali’s tool person, from C2C, C2B2C to today’s C2X model (X represents a variety of transaction paths). Over time, Xianyu has positioned itself in the Ali system. The product matrix is ​​becoming more and more clear: externally, Xianyu is a role that carries second-hand and idle goods; internally, Xianyu has become a “blood transfusion” tool that is secondary to profit and the most important for diversion, for Taobao, Tmall, etc. Ali-based products deliver traffic.

But now, as the vanguard of Ali community products, Xianyu has begun to become bloated. It not only introduced the Xianyu coin operation mechanism to raise the threshold for sellers to operate, but also developed a variety of content sections to expect more users to stay and more exposure for sellers. But these measures, in turn, have brought new troubles to Xianyu.

Ali does not raise “Xianyu”, Xianyu must solve the problem of urgent seller traffic and retain users.

01

Xianyu seller, traffic is in a hurry

Chen Shuang has been playing Xianyu for six years, and has sold hundreds of items on Xianyu. According to her observation, after every big promotion such as 618 and Double 11, there will be a wave of commodity explosions on Xianyu. It can be said that Xianyu is a barometer of Taobao and Tmall’s transaction volume, and it is also a “regret medicine” for consumers.

In the past, Xianyu users have found that their exposure has dropped sharply, mostly due to Xianyu’s rectification. For example, during the 315 this year, Xianyu was exposed by the media that there were chaos in the sale of second-hand intimate clothes and erotic transactions through secret words. At that time, a large number of users felt that the traffic of Xianyu fell off a cliff. Every time Xianyu rectified prohibited products or modified the rules of the platform, it would affect the exposure of some products.

Xianyu mainly reviews, blocks and removes goods by continuously classifying words and codes related to prohibited goods into prohibited words. Most of the code words are ordinary words. If these ordinary words are continuously included in the forbidden word bank, the exposure of normal products will inevitably be affected. For example, there are pornographic services that set the code word as “love blind box”. When Xianyu adds this code word to the forbidden vocabulary, the entry “Country Love Series Blind Box” containing this word cannot be retrieved, and related products are naturally not available. exposure.

A seller asked the official customer service of Xianyu about the fact that the words derived from banned words were also blocked. The other party responded: “Xianyu is a fuzzy search, but it does not mean that the full name cannot be found. There are more cases of fuzzy search. If it is a risk If there is a product, the system may not be able to find it.”

The answer from Xianyu customer service shows that the prohibited word mechanism has indeed affected Xianyu’s search results and product exposure. Many products are difficult to find through accurate search, which in turn causes sellers’ traffic to be in a hurry.

Since Xianyu officials do not explicitly inform users that prohibited words or other platform rules have been triggered, many sellers have fallen into a situation where the product has no exposure or low exposure, but they do not know where the problem lies. However, on the other hand, prohibited goods continue to reappear in Xianyu through new code words. Even recently, some media have discovered that through new code words, they can find links to Xianyu selling original clothes, pornographic resources, pornographic services and prohibited powders.

Prohibited transactions through code words have become an absolute pain point for Xianyu. With the continuous updating of code words and the continuous expansion of the prohibited vocabulary, it is destined to accidentally hurt more and more products and aggravate the traffic dilemma of sellers.

02

Professional sellers are also sad

Professional sellers choose Xianyu mainly because Xianyu’s operating costs and traffic costs are lower than Taobao.

For many professional sellers, they already have a clear understanding of the prohibited word mechanism, and have the time, energy, and resources to constantly try and make mistakes in order to break through the traffic dilemma.

A trendy game that Xu Wei recently put on the shelves triggered a prohibited word, making it difficult to get exposure. So, Xu Wei searched for relevant tutorials on the Internet, and tried to use the method shared by professional sellers to attract traffic.

“That is, a popular product of the same category needs to be listed, and the price is set lower than the market price, and then many people will ask, and the exposure of this product will also be high. But because it is falsely listed, you cannot sell this product. It will continue to be exposed. Because some buyers are accustomed to browsing the seller’s homepage, driven by this popular product, the products I have listed on the shelves with no exposure and low exposure can also be discovered and purchased by potential buyers.” Xu Wei said.

After trying this method for only a week, Xu Wei’s product with no exposure was sold. “This method is not absolutely effective, because some senior buyers also know that fuzzy search can search for products that are wrongly blocked. Also, I think this method is very unethical, because many people sincerely ask to buy, but I don’t have this It can be sold, and it wastes a lot of people’s energy.”

In order to break through the traffic dilemma, professional sellers will also operate Taobao-like store group gameplay, upload multiple links, etc. to gain more exposure. It can effectively avoid the constraints of Xianyu on professional sellers. “As long as you use multiple devices and different people’s mobile phone cards to open an account, Xianyu will not determine that you have more than one account.” A professional seller of Xianyu told New Entropy.

But not all professional sellers can be like a duck to water. Many professional sellers feel that Xianyu is trying to make unified constraints and management of professional sellers.

“In 2020, Xianyu blocked my Xianyu account, and then the customer service clearly told me that Xianyu does not support bulk sales of products, and suggested that I switch to Taobao to open a store.” said Liu Lei, a professional seller of Xianyu.

Falsely listing popular products, creating store groups, and listing multiple links can break through traffic restrictions to a certain extent, but they also increase the review burden of Xianyu. In order to maintain the community ecology and ensure that Taobao’s own basic market is not lost, Xianyu once cracked down on professional sellers in an attempt to divert professional sellers to Taobao, but this approach had little effect.

Later, Xianyu launched Xianyu Pro, Xianyu Youpin, and Yuxiaopu successively to facilitate unified management and traffic delivery for professional sellers, but the number of professional sellers captured is also very limited.

“Doing Xianyu is because it saves money and is convenient. Xianyu Youpin needs to provide a business license, pay a deposit and service fees, and there are few open categories, which are only suitable for a small number of merchants.” A professional seller of Xianyu who is an overseas purchasing agent said.

Yuxiaopu is a new seller service opened by Xianyu after Xianyu gradually closed Xianyu Pro in June 2022. However, many sellers who have opened Yuxiaopu said that their accounts had tens of thousands of exposures before they were opened. After the exposure became lower, some sellers even dropped to dozens or hundreds of exposures.

“It should be because Yuxiaopu has a platform endorsement, and the review is stricter, so if the seller accidentally uses the prohibited expressions, it will affect the exposure. In the previous Xianyu Pro, there were also many players whose traffic was not as good as before.” One person The seller who opened Yuxiaopu analyzed.

In short, professional sellers regard Xianyu as a traffic depression, but if they enter Xianyu Youpin and Yuxiaopu, there is a risk of worse traffic. Professional sellers would rather continue to fight alone.

03

Traffic encroachment from Taobao

The urgent traffic of ordinary sellers and professional sellers is not only affected by the banned word mechanism. In recent years, Xianyu has continuously increased its efforts to divert traffic to Alibaba-based products such as Taobao and Tmall. As a result, the traffic that should have belonged to Xianyu products has been occupied by B-end products such as Taobao and Tmall.

According to the new entropy statistics, there are currently about 20%-25% of the links in the recommendation flow of the Xianyu homepage, which are the product links of Taobao stores/Tmall stores/Xianyu Youpin. Among the Taobao and Tmall products in Xianyu’s recommendation stream, most of them are products that users have not searched on Xianyu, but only on Taobao. This means that when users use Xianyu, they are forcibly jammed with smart recommendations from Taobao and Tmall, and users are induced to return to Taobao and Tmall.

This also means that the second-hand consumption environment that users should have has been greatly destroyed. When consumers want to find low-priced second-hand items, they are still forced to browse many regular-priced items.

As for Xianyu Youpin, although it is still an internal product of Xianyu, because it is a B-end product for professional sellers, its essence is no different from Taobao and Tmall.

In addition, the introduction of the Xianyu coin mechanism has also prompted Xianyu to further become a diversion tool for Ali-based products. On the Xianyucoin task page, users can get Xianyucoin rewards by clicking the jump links of Ali products such as Taobao, Tmall, Taote, Ele.me, Cainiao, etc.

Xianyu coins can be used to promote products, or to deduct cash to buy products. The gameplay is basically the same as the gold coins in Taobao ecology. The introduction of the Xianyu Coin mechanism has effectively diverted the flow of Ali products, but it has also raised the operating threshold for users.

It seems that Xianyu has become a drainage pool for Alibaba’s B-end e-commerce, which seems to be a doomed result.

The meaning of Xianyu’s existence was initially used as a “regret medicine” for consumers, which stimulated users to consume on Taobao and Tmall in the opposite direction. As more and more users are idle in Xianyu, the operating cost of Xianyu gradually increases, but it is difficult to make profits. As Wen Zhong, the former head of Xianyu, said in an interview with the media in 2020: “The Xianyu model is closer to money, but farther away from making money.”

For Ali, Xianyu is not only difficult to make a profit, but also has to be done. In this case, Xianyu is simply used as a semi-tool to divert the flow of Ali products led by Taobao and Tmall, so as to maximize the benefits of the entire Ali products.

But the bad thing is that short video live broadcast platforms are becoming Xianyu’s cross-border rivals. Second-hand luxury goods, Chaowan, Wenwan and other categories heavily invested by Xianyu Youpin all have live broadcast rooms on Douyin. Taking the trendy game category as an example, after the seller sends the blind box and other trendy games to the host’s live broadcast room, the host will help to auction and deliver the goods, and then the live broadcast room will charge a small commission. Due to the guarantee and endorsement of the live broadcast room, second-hand transactions are guaranteed to a certain extent.

This model has a direct impact on Xianyu Youpin, because Xianyu Youpin only supports B-side sellers to settle in, while the live broadcast room is more advantageous for all C-side sellers.

As the irreplaceability of Xianyu is not as good as before, the exposure lost by sellers still needs to be recovered by Xianyu.

04

Content is difficult to stabilize fish traffic

Regarding product review, although Xianyu has adopted three-level comprehensive identification measures of “keyword library + image library + manual review”, and is assisted by measures such as manual inspection and background review, as long as Xianyu does not raise the threshold for sellers and increase violations The punishment is severe, and the gray production will always appear in a more subtle form.

Xianyu does not dare to relax the audit mechanism, and can only increase the exposure and conversion of products through other means. Promoting communityization and contentization seems to be the correct path that Xianyu has long identified.

In 2019, Xianyu launched Xianyu Player. The essence is to create a community KOL, promote community building, increase community activity, and indirectly bring exposure and conversion to users. In 2020, the will play section will be launched, giving Xianyu players a more intensive display space.

In the later stage, the player section was gradually enriched into three tab columns: circle, square, and popular. Among them, the circle is an upgraded version of the fish pond that was closed due to rectification before, inheriting all the labels of the fish pond. New Entropy observed that, compared to fish ponds, in today’s circles, the order of posts is not presented according to the time flow, but according to the popularity, and high-quality posts will be pushed to the front row. In this way, it solves the stubborn problem that users in the fish pond can see the links of the products released immediately, but the platform has no time to review the products in question.

The square is the graphic content section that displays the posts in the circle in a centralized manner, which is no different from the product form of Xiaohongshu. However, popular posts are mostly published by Yuxiaopu sellers and Xianyu players. In other words, the traffic distribution of circles and squares is moving closer to professional sellers and KOLs, showing a trend of centralization. In this way, the playable section, which was born to enhance user stickiness and solve the user traffic dilemma, has a very limited effect on traffic redistribution.

The popular column is a short video recommendation stream, but most of the videos are entertainment, celebrity, sports and other content, and have little correlation with the attributes of idle trading communities. New Entropy found that the vast majority of short video publishers are pure content creators, and their homepages do not have any sales or transaction records. Obviously, these entertainment-oriented short video creators are the creators that Xianyu officially invited to settle in.

Regarding Xianyu’s official action of setting up a short video recommendation stream and introducing short video creators, product manager Super Huang analyzed the new entropy: “It feels that the content team is still driven by KPIs, and more irrelevant content is introduced to prolong the user’s stay. If users are both selling and posting, the supply will not be enough, because there are not so many standard creators among the users.”

But in the first ten days of August, Xianyu suddenly revamped the playable section on a large scale, cutting off the popular column (short video recommendation stream), and integrating the short video content into the graphic content, which was merged into the recommendation column, and the original circle column was changed to the discovery column. This major change shows that Xianyu has found that the play section has tried to use short videos, graphics and texts in parallel in the past to promote conversion. The path effect is limited. The Xianyu community needs to decentralize traffic, that is, to follow Xiaohongshu.

In fact, as Xianyu’s traffic has dried up, many users are diverting traffic to their Xianyu accounts through Xiaohongshu, but this also poses a threat to Xianyu. At present, Xiaohongshu is also actively expanding the resources of C-end merchants. If it targets the idle trading market in the future, it is bound to have a huge impact on Xianyu. The second-hand luxury goods and trendy games that Xianyu attaches great importance to are also the most discussed categories of Xiaohongshu.

What’s more, the content productivity of Xiaohongshu is beyond the reach of Xianyu. New Entropy found that many professional sellers of Xianyu, the content published in the forum of playing games are all transferred from Xiaohongshu bloggers, and the transferred posts will get higher likes in the game, which will help sellers to attract traffic, Rising powder.

However, for community building, transferring content from other sites and introducing short video content that is irrelevant to community attributes are not the right path to build a sustainable and healthy community. If Xianyu wants to solve the problem of urgent seller traffic, it needs to let go of the obsession of wanting to swallow as much of the C-end market as possible.

In 2020, Wen Zhong, the former head of Xianyu, said: “The current Xianyu is indeed very similar to Taobao before the launch of the shopping cart. Because Taobao before 2005 was based on community-based C2C transactions. But based on today, we hope Xianyu For the C2C part, it is not for efficiency, but to allow more people to participate at a low threshold.” Obviously, Xianyu’s mission also includes undertaking the residual traffic after Taobao’s transformation.

But it turns out that the lowest possible threshold will only lead to the long-term erosion of Xianyu by gray production, and also push more ordinary sellers into the black hole of traffic.

(Chen Shuang, Xu Wei and Liu Lei are all pseudonyms in the text)

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