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Text / Lingling
Source/Bohu Finance (ID:bohuFN)
Another vertical e-commerce player has fallen.
On July 1, the official website of Miya announced that it has decided to stop the Miya App service on September 10, 2022.
The announcement stated that before the platform is closed, consumer transaction orders will continue to be fulfilled; after the app is closed, the company will centrally delete and cancel the personal account of the collected user information, and stop collecting or using the information and data of consumers and settled merchants.
The announcement stated that the only thing that stopped the service was the Miya App. In the future, Miya will continue to serve users on the Miya WeChat Youzan applet, and Miya members can still enjoy the shopping experience.
As the head player of maternal and child e-commerce, why did Miya suddenly shut down?
has been beautiful
In 2011, Liu Nan, a full-time mother who graduated with a master’s degree in journalism from Peking University, devoted herself to researching maternal and infant products after the birth of her daughter and founded the Miya Taobao store, named “Miya Baby”. After that, Miya Baby achieved sales of more than 30 million in two years.
In February 2014, Miya Baby was officially transformed into a limited-time sales mall for imported mother and baby brands, and its official website was launched. On July 8, 2015, Miya Baby announced to change its name to “Miya”, and developed from mother-infant consumption to parent-child family consumption.
(Image source network)In 2015, Miya continued to expand its business and became an infant and child industry company, and developed four business segments: online retail, offline experience and franchise (Miya Paradise), its own brand (selected by rabbit head mothers) and baby Children’s industry investment.
During this period, Miya achieved many excellent results. Miya has been included in the list of Chinese unicorn companies for three consecutive years, with a valuation of tens of billions; according to the “2019 Hurun Global Unicorn List” released by Hurun Research Institute, Miya ranked 224th.
In the capital market, Miya has also become a darling. In December 2013, Miya ushered in the first round of financing. The investors were ZhenFund and Xianfeng Huaxing. In 2014, it received $20 million in financing led by Sequoia Capital and $60 million in Series C financing led by H Capital.
In 2015, it completed a $150 million Series D financing led by Baidu, which was the largest cash financing in the maternal and child industry at that time, including both online and offline.
Later, some industry observers reviewed this process and concluded that both the founders and investors are betting that it will become the next super shopping app such as Tmall, JD.com or Pinduoduo in the vertical field.
But obviously, they lost the bet.
The tuyere has passed, and the honey bud’s self-rescue is ineffective
The trend of maternal and infant e-commerce has passed. As one of the leading players in maternal and infant e-commerce, Miya is the first to bear the brunt.
According to the “2020 China Internet Maternal and Infant Market Research Report” released by Bida Consulting, in 2014, the growth rate of the maternal and infant e-commerce market scale reached 111.4%. Subsequently, from 2015 to 2020, the value decreased year by year, from 98.5%, 38.9%, 27.3%, and 17.2% to 8.6% in 2020.
At the end of 2016, some netizens said anonymously that Miya’s funds were very tight, and if they couldn’t raise any more money, something big would happen. Below, a Miya employee revealed that there was indeed a problem with the company’s capital chain.
Since then, Miya has tried to save herself by hematopoietic, but failed to save the situation. Even, some self-rescue measures made honey shoots sink deeper and deeper.
In September 2017, Miya launched the Miya plus membership service. In order to become a member, users must scan the QR code of the introducer to enter and purchase 399 yuan of goods. Among them, the “entry fee” for purchasing 399 yuan of goods, “pulling people’s heads” to get rewards and commissions, and the inviter can get “graded commissions” of the invitee’s sales profits, these behaviors are very consistent with the characteristics of pyramid schemes.
For this reason, Mi Ya is deeply suspected of pyramid schemes, and the blow to the brand is self-evident.
(Image source network)In addition, in order to save himself and find increments, in September 2020, Liu Nan officially entered the game to bring goods to live broadcast. The results are also not bad. It has been on the top of the Douyin daily delivery list for many times, and has frequently ranked first in the sales of mother and baby anchors.
Last year, Liu Nan said in an interview that Miya and Miya’s own brand Rabbit Mother had been split at the board level to become two completely independent companies, and Rabbit Mother had also started the road to an independent brand. . Liu Nan believes that this is equivalent to “secondary entrepreneurship” for her.
However, a former employee of Miya revealed, “Now there are not many people left in Miya, and many people have been ‘graduated’. Instead of continuing to spend money to maintain an app with few daily activities, it is better to just cut it down”, ” Now Liu Nan’s energy is not on Miya at all.”
It can be seen that the honey buds that cannot find a breakthrough have actually been “shelved”. The rabbit head mother is Liu Nan’s next main attack direction. In Liu Nan’s expectation, Rabbit Mother will become a respectable company in terms of formula ingredients and basic research, and she will become a mother and baby expert who “knows more about brands”.
Another vertical e-commerce is going to do its own brand.
Can’t escape the fate of vertical e-commerce
Miya is not the first to switch from vertical e-commerce to its own brand.
In 2011, Beibei.com was established, initially focusing on maternal and infant e-commerce. However, as development encountered bottlenecks, Beibei.com transformed into a social e-commerce business in 2017, and launched Beidian by adopting the “head-pulling” model of “social fission + distribution”. According to a report released by QuestMobile in 2019, the growth rate of active users in Beidian in 2018 was as high as 1837%, and the number of orders in a single quarter exceeded 100 million. Beidian was once regarded as an industry unicorn.
At the beginning of August last year, many media reported that Hangzhou Beibei Group suspected that its capital chain had broken, and its Beibei merchants were unable to settle their accounts in arrears for several months.
In the same year, founder Zhang Lianglun announced that Beidian will be All in Ximei in 2021. According to the official website of Beibei Group, Ximei is a brand co-creation platform focusing on women’s lifestyles. In other words, Beibei Group will start to promote its own brand.
In Bohu Finance’s view, the so-called “own brand” is just that the company is looking for another way out, and their common dilemma is: the original vertical e-commerce road has nowhere to go.
In the eyes of most industry insiders, vertical e-commerce has no future.
On the one hand, there is no traffic. Zhang Yi, CEO and chief analyst of iiMedia Research, believes, “Vertical e-commerce, integrated e-commerce, and Internet giants are definitely weak to grab traffic. Unless you rely on a large platform, it will be difficult to get out in a market full of giants.”
On the other hand, from the perspective of “basic conditions” such as supply chain and logistics, vertical e-commerce also has no advantages.
Analyst Cheng Yu believes that the significance of e-commerce is to save users’ transaction costs, but if this model actually increases users’ transaction costs, then vertical e-commerce is tantamount to violating the laws of the market, and ultimately increasing transaction costs for users will change. It has become its own sales expense, and naturally it can’t be done. For example, logistics costs, self-built logistics systems require high investment. If the transaction volume of the platform is limited, the cost will be very high. Whether it is self-operated or outsourced, the logistics cost will not come down, and it will eventually fall on the user.
Some people in the industry mentioned that for e-commerce platforms with insufficient traffic, it is not a good business model to help others sell goods, sell cheap goods, and earn meager commissions. Even if it is as powerful as JD.com, it mainly relies on self-support to make money.
The data shows that in 2019, in China’s e-commerce market share, Tao Department, JD.com and Pinduoduo accounted for more than 90%.
Falling vertical e-commerce one after another, they may gradually block the way of vertical e-commerce.
(Disclaimer: This article only represents the author’s point of view and does not represent the position of Sina.com.)
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