One day in September 2022, SHOPLINE customer manager Weilong was suddenly called to the office by HR.
The following news made his head “explode”. He was laid off and was leaving the company before the end of the day.
HR handed Veyron a dismissal agreement, reminding him that if he didn’t sign and leave, he wouldn’t be able to get any compensation.
Seeing that Weilong didn’t respond, HR told him directly that the company has a legal department, and even if he didn’t sign, there was still a way to find a reason to fire him through “means”.
Hearing this, Veyron felt chilling.
For the result of being cut, Veyron felt relieved after a moment of shock. “Anyway, the company has lost sight of the prospect.”
It was not only Veyron that was affected by the disaster, the sound of layoffs was soon spread in the company, and every employee has been trembling since then, walking on thin ice.
Crazy layoffs, bleak turnover, the Chinese version of Shopify collectively shrank
This is not the first time SHOPLINE has laid off employees.
Beginning in May 2022, orders for mass layoffs have been issued.
However, SHOPLINE decided to keep this order secret, and all departments are strictly prohibited from notifying subordinates.
Weilong and some laid-off employees went to their boss angrily: “Why didn’t you tell me about the layoffs in advance? I’ve been with you for so long, don’t you think I’m a brother?”
The leader could only helplessly say: “According to the company’s rules and regulations, we cannot disclose layoff orders to anyone, and subordinates are no exception.”
The moment he left the office building, Weilong looked up at the sky with mixed feelings.
SHOPLINE’s layoffs are widespread.
For example, as of October this year, SHOPLINE Business School was abolished as a whole, the person in charge, Yang Hao, resigned, and employees transferred and resigned.
The entire sales department of SHOPLINE has been cut from the original 80 people to only 20 people. However, the previous two sales management recruits have been expanded into five, and they are dedicated to writing PPTs for senior management.
Behind the big layoffs is the company’s dismal performance and revenue.
Leifeng.com learned that in the first half of this year, SHOPLINE’s monthly turnover on PayPal was only about 1 million US dollars, and with other channels such as credit cards, it was estimated to be two to three million US dollars. Even if it is calculated on the basis of 3 million US dollars, a commission of one point is not enough to support a team of hundreds of people.
The capital market also smells the crisis.
SHOPLINE’s latest round of financing of 180 million US dollars has not been made public. The reason is that the money was paid out of its own pocket by its parent company, Huanju Group, and there is no outside capital willing to take over the offer.
While SHOPLINE broke its arms to survive, its biggest competitor, Shopkeeper, was also struggling.
Shopkeeper’s turnover on PayPal is similar to that of SHOPLINE, and this year also experienced a wave of layoffs, at least 40% of the business staff were cut off.
Although Shopkeeper temporarily has the US$150 million Series C financing led by Softbank, it is difficult to obtain new financing.
This financing has caused a lot of controversy in the industry.
At present, Softbank China’s investment department has withdrawn from China, leaving only the post-investment department. The fuse of the incident was the shopkeeper’s case.
A person familiar with the matter revealed to Leifeng.com that the group even directly fired the investment team in charge of Shopsmith. The remaining post-investment department does not have any hope for the profitability of Shopsmith.
Looking back at the history of Internet development in China, “Copy to China” used to be a tried and tested path to success. Once a company is labeled as “China’s XX”, it will immediately be favored by capital, and its valuation will soar instantly.
SHOPLINE and shopkeepers also used to call themselves “China’s Shopify”, trying to replicate the success of their predecessors. However, after receiving huge financing, the business of these domestic overseas SaaS website building platforms has stagnated or even declined sharply.
Their collective collapse may not be accidental. In the current global economic integration and highly symmetrical information, the successful model of “Copy to China” has failed.
The new generation of entrepreneurs must come up with real technological innovations in order to gain a firm foothold in the competitive jungle of the new era. Blindly indulging in the path dependence of the past will inevitably be left behind by the wheel of history, and will eventually end in dismal. (Here is a preview, Leifeng.com will launch the topic of “outdoor power supply going to sea and rivers and lakes”. Welcome everyone to break the news! Please add the author’s WeChat ydinitialheart.)
GMV soared, valuation soared, and independent websites set off the myth of “creating wealth”
In November 2020, an institution engaged in independent station training received a registration call.
The person who signed up was a middle-aged man in his 50s. He explained in substandard Mandarin that he had never done e-commerce and did not understand English, but he saw the advertisement of the training institution saying that “the students do not need any foundation, Orders can be issued in three days” and “learning package will be included”, so I also want to sign up to learn independent station operation.
This made the salesman who answered the phone a little dumbfounded and at a loss. Such a student definitely cannot be taught, but it seems a bit embarrassing to directly refuse…
This true story, which looks a bit like a joke, is enough to reflect the popularity of the independent station at that time.
In 2020, as SHEIN, which has just completed the E round of financing and has a valuation of more than 15 billion US dollars, has become the focus of media attention, coupled with the epidemic as a catalyst, independent stations have once again been pushed into the limelight.
Reviewing the history of China’s overseas expansion, most of the early representatives of China’s overseas expansion were independent website sellers.
For example, DX, which is listed on the Hong Kong stock market, Lantingjishi, which went public in the United States, cross-border communication, which has reached the largest scale in China’s overseas industry, and SHEIN, are all typical companies.
Since 2015, domestic sellers have gradually tried to use Shopify to build their own websites. Most of the business, however, has been tepid. Customized development around the Shopify ecosystem has become an industry demand.
Then, Nanchang, Jiangxi Province emerged the earliest in China and the only one in Asia-Pacific, a customized development team around the Shopify ecosystem. Fang Chenghong, the founder of Jiahong, decided to start the Shopify station group business after the COD business was blocked.
For this reason, Xu Shangquan, president of Jiahong Network, selected strong soldiers from the company to form a special team. Worried that the special operations team would be restricted by the original business logic, Xu Shangquan specially dispatched them to Nanchang, completely isolated from the Shenzhen base camp.
The special team sent by Xu Shangquan spent two months figuring out a set of Shopify+Facebook station group tactics for the European and American markets.
At the same time, Fang Chenghong and Xu Shangquan established Shenzhen Sailing Technology Co., Ltd. in August 2018, and officially launched XShoppy in January 2019.
In July 2020, XShoppy has served more than 20,000 independent website sellers, ranking first in China.
At least in 2020, going overseas to build a website is a good business.
From a global perspective, in the black swan event of the new crown epidemic in 2020, one of the biggest winners in the overseas circle is Shopify.
In 2020, Shopify will become the second largest e-commerce platform in North America after Amazon, with 1.75 million paying sellers, 119.6 billion US dollars in GMV, and more than 100 billion US dollars in market value.
With the increase in business and rapid expansion, Shopify in 2020 will still be a company with two to three thousand employees, and the number of employees will increase to 10,000 in 2022 before the wave of layoffs.
This year, Shopify also began to form a team in China.
However, many young people who go overseas have a very low degree of adaptation to Shopify.
Although Shopify’s product features and volume are far ahead, but because it is headquartered in Canada, the support and response to Chinese sellers is not timely. Once the seller’s website encounters a problem, contact Shopify’s official customer service, and it often takes a long time to get feedback. Shopify also does not provide differentiated services for different customer groups, and cannot meet the service needs of sellers in more segmented scenarios.
To put it bluntly, Shopify cannot meet all the needs of Chinese sellers who have zero code, basic website building, and are “spoiled” by Chinese e-commerce services.
Wouldn’t it be great if a “Chinese Shopify” appeared at this time?
In the eyes of most people, just as Tencent and Weibo achieved success by being “China’s OICQ” and “China’s Twitter”, the market for independent stations is large enough, and Shopify is not impeccable, so the Chinese version of Shopify will definitely have a lot to do .
So far, the concept of “China Shopify” has exploded rapidly in the investment circle.
Many investors even simply and rudely believe that even if Shopify cannot surpass Shopify, even if it only achieves one-tenth of its market value of 100 billion US dollars, it is still a company with a scale of 10 billion US dollars.
As a result, a large number of local SaaS website building platforms that compete with Shopify, such as Shoplazza, SHOPLINE, Shoptago, Ueeshop, XShoppy, and ShopYY, emerged in the market for a while. You can’t even tell who is who just by the name. Later, Youzan, Weimob, and Dunhuang.com also entered the cross-border SaaS site building track one after another, making the fierce competition even more confusing.
With the crowd of platforms, the employees of Shopify, which holds a big brand, are also highly sought after, and they receive recruitment requests from friends or headhunters every now and then.
It’s not hard to understand why the website building business is so hot.
The mobile Internet has brought traffic fragmentation; the rise of social media has created new traffic dividends; avoiding the “ant moving” development under supervision; payments such as PayPal have made sellers have a higher turnover rate of funds… …
Under the model of “Money Rolling Money”, many big sellers have achieved a GMV of hundreds of millions or even billions of RMB in just two or three years. The story of an ordinary independent station operator who likes to mention the BMW X6 after working for one year is also widely circulated in the industry.
Since the starting threshold is not high, many front-line operators who have figured out the way and made their first pot of gold will soon choose to start their own businesses.
Under the interaction of multiple forces, driven and incubated by big sellers, many Chinese overseas sellers are anxious and desperate for “China Shopify” to make themselves rich overnight.
Among all the SaaS website building platforms that claim to be the “Chinese version of Shopify”, the most typical ones are Dianjiang and SHOPLINE.
Among them, the founding team of Dianjiang has a deep background. The founder Li Junfeng was the former head of Baidu’s international business line, and has profound experience in overseas product research and development, product operation, traffic marketing, and commercial realization.
Since 2018, Dianjiang has received 6 rounds of financing in a row, and in January this year, it received a US$150 million Series C financing led by SoftBank Vision II Fund. Before this round of financing, Dianjiang firmly occupied the No. 1 position in GMV of the local SaaS website building platform until it was surpassed by SHOPLINE in the first quarter of this year.
Founded in 2013, SHOPLINE is a company in Hong Kong, China. It was the first to enter the Southeast Asian market, so it was once mistaken by many Chinese sellers as a Southeast Asian company. After SHOPLINE landed in mainland China in 2019, it quickly achieved good results. In 2020, with the help of Guangxin Capital, it was acquired by Li Xueling’s Huanju Group at a price of 20 million US dollars.
SHOPLINE’s 1.0 system is only applicable to the Southeast Asian market, and cannot run through the payment link of the European and American markets. For this reason, after the completion of the acquisition, Huanju Group invested more than 70 million yuan to rebuild a 2.0 system, and it officially ran through in August last year.
However, these two leading companies, which are very bright in the circle, have gone from capital enthusiasm to substantial layoffs and bleak turnover in just one year.
Shopkeeper and SHOPLINE seem to be drifting away from the dream of “Chinese version of Shopify”.
In just a few months, what happened inside the two companies, or did the seeds of the crisis have been planted long ago, and it is only at this moment that it breaks out of the ground?
Breaking away from the market, acting extravagantly, and drifting away from the original intention
When it comes to Li Junfeng, the founder of Dianjiang, there are different opinions in the industry.
In addition to praising his keen business sense, unique industry perspective, and deep understanding of products, what also attracted attention was his little insight into the market.
The shopkeeper business is becoming less and less down-to-earth.
From a product point of view, Shopsmith’s technology is very strong, which is related to the strong engineer background of its founder. However, what the industry criticizes is that shopkeepers seem to understand business logic.
The root of the problem is that the executives headed by Li Junfeng do not do market research at all.
Shenzhen Science and Technology Park is a distribution center for overseas service providers, gathering many leading enterprises in the industry. The bosses of these enterprises must get together to talk about business every once in a while.
However, in the past few years, Li Junfeng rarely took the initiative to communicate with everyone, and rarely appeared in front of the industry. This move is justifiable, and what is even more frightening is that the founders of the shopkeeper management market rarely step out of the office to do research.
In some people’s memories, Li Junfeng and the shopkeeper did not seem to be like this from the beginning.
“Pencil Road” once recorded such a detail: Once Li Junfeng and his partner drove to a factory in the suburbs to discuss business. I ran back to the car in the rain, and took a photo to tease in the group, “Now I’m going to meet the next client. I’m thinking about what to do with my clothes.”
Perhaps after receiving several large sums of financing in succession, the founder’s heart began to swell, and the shopkeeper gradually lost the spirit of hard work at the beginning of the business.
Different from the initial low-key and diligent, the marketing strategy of shopkeepers has become high-handed, sponsoring hundreds of thousands or millions of marketing activities at every turn. In the eyes of most people in the industry, these activities are completely ineffective and organized for the purpose of making money.
Shopsmith also spent a lot of money on Baidu advertisements.
Starting from the second half of 2021, in order to occupy the pit positions of keywords, the marketing staff of Shopify went to Shopify’s pits and pushed Shopify’s keywords to a few yuan per click. Shopify, who discovered the clue, immediately opened a complaint.
Such behavior has little effect on the shopkeeper.
The basic logic is that most of the users in the Shopify traffic pool only search for Shopify and will not switch due to website changes.
Infighting for power, cultural dross, mess inside the company
Like Shopkeeper, SHOPLINE has already suffered from the “big company disease” before becoming a big company.
In 2020, Huanju Group acquired SHOPLINE, and professional managers headed by Qiao Guanyuan began to take over the company. This became a key turning point in the development of SHOPLINE.
For the founders, the enterprise is based on hard work and dreams, but for professional managers, it is just a springboard for promotion and salary increase.
History has proved countless times that when professional managers replace founders as the highest command, the focus of enterprises often changes from long-term development to short-term stable status and paper achievements.
Qiao Guanyuan, general manager of SHOPLINE, is one of the most controversial executives.
Qiao Guanyuan once worked for Huawei and also has a real estate company background. After taking over SHOPLINE, Qiao Guanyuan’s first thought was not to sort out the company’s business, but to consolidate his position by eliminating dissidents and enlisting cronies.
Taking the establishment of the business school as an example, the team needed a leader, so CEO Li Ting recommended to Qiao Guanyuan Yang Hao, the general manager of the Hunan branch at that time.
Yang Hao has a strong professional ability and a gentle personality. He was originally the best candidate, but Li Ting’s recommendation was rejected by Qiao Guanyuan. There are rumors that this is because Yang Hao has close contacts with Li Ting and other founding teams, and Qiao Guanyuan is worried that they will pose a threat to him after they form a group.
Soon, Qiao Guanyuan recruited Liu Xiaochuan, who had worked for Cheetah, as the person in charge. However, in less than half a year, the business of the business school did not improve, and Qiao Guanyuan had to invite Liu Xiaochuan away under pressure. At this time, Li Ting recommended Yang Hao again, and Qiao Guanyuan reluctantly agreed.
But Yang Hao was quickly excluded by Qiao Guanyuan after he joined the job. In order to run Yang Hao away, Qiao Guanyuan did everything possible, finding any excuses he could find to criticize.
An obvious example is the manual of the business school. Qiao Guanyuan will ask why the cost is high, and why the friends in the salon can also get unwarranted charges.
Qiao Guanyuan is also very jealous of the relationship between Yang Hao and the company’s top management.
One day, Qiao Guanyuan found out that Yang Hao had given Li Ting the business school manual as a gift, and the two had a lot of interactions in WeChat Moments. Qiao Guanyuan was very angry when he learned about it. Furious, he directly said to Yang Hao: “You resign yourself, don’t let me see you when I come back.”
Yang Hao was very shocked after hearing this, and gradually lost any nostalgia for the team.
Until October this year, Qiao Guanyuan directly fired Yang Hao on the grounds of poor performance.
Except for PUA subordinates, Qiao Guanyuan likes the wine table culture very much, and the degree of madness is chilling. In the eyes of some internal employees, the wine table culture imposed on employees is a means for Qiao Guanyuan to test the loyalty of his subordinates.
In the company’s internal drinking bureau, Qiao Guanyuan asked his subordinates to drink more than himself. If Qiao Guanyuan drank a toast, his subordinates would have to drink at least two before giving up.
What’s even more frightening is that Qiao Guanyuan will order people to drink by name, the level of horror is jaw-dropping.
For the subordinates whose names are called, the boys need to go around the table to drink clockwise, and then counterclockwise again; the same is true for the girls, but they drink less than the boys.
Because this kind of rims drink white wine, it will cause great physical damage to employees, and gradually some employees with average drinking capacity will be marginalized.
So far, Qiao Guanyuan’s subordinates are all wine masters. Everyone is comparing who can drink more, and who can beat the horse loudly, and Qiao Guanyuan will tilt the resources to whom.
As a result, the whole company is filled with a kind of false prosperity that whitewashes the peace.
Going back to the previous article, SHOPLINE still has 5 sales managers. The main purpose of keeping these people is to write reports to deal with investors. The content of the report is packaged according to the needs of the executives.
The current situation is caused not only by the industry, but also by the company’s system.
In order to serve KPIs, the goal of many executives has changed from company and business development to personal promotion.
For example, the general SaaS department of SHOPLINE has only one large team. However, in order to prove to the superior that “it is time to expand”, Qiao Guanyuan asked the department to be dismantled into four business departments, one dedicated to KA customers, one dedicated to agency operations, and one in Guangzhou The team to do toB, and the most primitive general SaaS department.
There are many similar examples, because only in this way can you prove to your superiors that you can be promoted.
The current situation of SHOPLINE is caused by the disorderly expansion, the loss of the best business, and the continuous accumulation of trial and error costs.
The products are backward and the turnover is falsely high, and the “Chinese version of Shopify” is a false fire
The dilemma of shopkeepers and SHOPLINE seems to be the result of poor internal management, but the deeper reason may be that the “Chinese version of Shopify” was a false proposition from the beginning.
At the time of the Internet boom, companies such as Tencent, Sina, and Baidu achieved great success through the “Copy to China” model. At that time, the domestic market was relatively closed. Based on the in-depth understanding of local users, it was easy for Chinese Internet companies to provide better product experience and overtake in a straight line.
The difference of SaaS for building a website overseas is that it not only serves local merchants, but also connects overseas consumers. Chinese companies may understand the needs of local merchants better, but their understanding of overseas consumers is far inferior to global companies like Shopify. Under the offset of the two phases, local website building SaaS companies are not inherently dominant.
Moreover, Shopify, which has a first-mover advantage, has formed its own ecology. A large number of developers are developing various plug-ins for Shopify to meet the long-tail needs of merchants. Rich plug-ins can attract more merchants to use, and the influx of merchants has created more lucrative returns for developers, so Shopify has gradually formed its own flywheel effect.
However, SHOPLINE and shopkeepers must use subsidies to attract developers and service providers to enter the market, which is not a long-term solution after all.
When asked the question “Who would use China’s independent website SaaS”, Li Junfeng, CEO of Dianjiang, once said that as long as any seller uses Dianjiang’s website building system, he is guaranteed to make money back within half a year.
However, many people in the industry believe that Li Junfeng’s attitude of guaranteeing the bottom line to the seller is essentially denying the value of overseas SaaS.
At that time, there were several representative cases on Dianjiang’s official website. Some of the sellers used Shopify or WordPress to build their websites. The subtext was “Sellers don’t necessarily have to use Dianjiang”.
Shopkeeper has built a strong agent operation team to allow sellers to use its products. From the perspective of industry insiders, this means that the core competitiveness of Dianjiang has become the ability of agent operation rather than SaaS products.
In the case of product failure, the domestic website building SaaS platform can only absorb a large number of merchants eliminated by Shopify to create false prosperity in exchange for capital transfusion.
Shopify mainly serves big brands like Lululemon in foreign countries, and also focuses on DTC strategies in China, only looking for brand owners to cooperate with. Although some big sellers have hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, Shopify believes that they are unstable and have the risk of violations, so they are unwilling to expand.
However, this kind of customers has become the “favorite” of the domestic website building SaaS platform. The platform only needs to expand a few big sellers of the same size, and the turnover can reach a considerable scale.
In 2020, XShoppy, a website building SaaS platform born out of Zhanqun Dashao, once tried to use the network of founder Fang Chenghong to win over several top sellers to increase their turnover and obtain financing.
It is unspoken in the industry that SaaS products themselves can easily falsify data. Many people in the industry even believe that this is a business model that is very suitable for listing.
According to the conspiracy theory, SaaS companies will even arrange and deploy cooperative sellers on their own, but the relationship between sellers and SaaS manufacturers will not be reflected in the equity relationship.
There are many ways to flush the water high.
For example, the KA business team of SHOPLINE secretly recruited nearly 200 sellers from the shopkeeper, and even when reporting to the higher level, the KA team deliberately packaged it as “these are the achievements dug from the shopkeeper”.
In addition, SHOPLINE’s logistics business is actually a “secondary dealer” business. SHOPLINE cooperates with more than a dozen logistics service providers. In fact, it only earns a little difference in the price. By the way, it packs the partner’s flow and puts it on SHOPLINE’s account.
In the final analysis, “everything” can be packaged for investors to see.
Blocked in batches, scurrying away, sellers in the site group are like a hot potato
This “perfect” business hidden in the dark will one day be exposed to the sun.
In 2020, Shopify blocked a large number of sellers involved in violations, counterfeiting, infringement and other issues.
Because PayPal adopts the “T+0” settlement mode, after the order is completed and the deposit is deducted, the merchant can receive the payment immediately, while the user needs to wait for the logistics to arrive before verifying the authenticity of the goods. As a result, many sellers took advantage of this window to sell fake goods and send out empty packages to make quick money.
Even if the store is blocked, the seller can build another website and repeat the operation. For borderline sellers, the cost of default is extremely low.
Moreover, distribution-type sellers who focus on the “explosive product” model often select products by placing a large number of advertisements to test traffic. This means that they will not open the mold in advance, but use the materials of existing products on the market to place advertisements, which also brings serious infringement and wrong goods.
After these sellers were blocked by Shopify, they quickly ran to XShoppy, which brought extremely high traffic to XShoppy. From February to the end of April 2020, new users of XShoppy surged by 67%, and the total number of stores and annual GMV both ranked first among local SaaS platforms.
In the blink of an eye, at the end of 2020, Facebook also blocked XShoppy.
As a result, sellers who use XShoppy to build a website cannot open a new advertising account on Facebook, which directly cuts off the largest source of traffic for sellers.
Although XShoppy strongly denied being blocked by Facebook, it also announced that it would no longer accept new seller registrations in the short term.
The incident caused a huge shock in the industry.
The blocked website group sellers are like sharks in the ocean, searching for the bloody smell of the new platform.
Seeing this scene, the shopkeeper immediately had a discussion inside.
The industry is well aware that this is a group of “ticking time bombs” doing side-by-side business, but each seller brings at least 8,000 yuan in revenue, why give up?
Immediately, Shopkeeper formulated a new strategy: crazily robbing sellers whose stores were closed by Shopify and XShoppy.
It is rumored that Shopkeeper took over 60% of the blocked sellers on XShoppy.
As a result, it brought a huge GMV to shopkeepers in the short term, and also attracted the attention of capital and the entire industry, while also burying a huge safety hazard.
Due to the frequent occurrence of counterfeit sales, copyright infringement, and wrong goods, sellers in the website group are “shooting for another shot”, and consumers who have nowhere to complain can only vent their anger on Facebook, PayPal, etc.
Over time, Facebook and others will preconceive that IPs from China have security risks.
The current ecology is that the accounts of many formally operated Chinese sellers are often blocked by Facebook, PayPal, etc.
Seeing the problem, Shopkeeper has been working hard to attract brands and Amazon sellers to cooperate in an attempt to reverse the situation.
Today, SHOPLINE is eyeing the fat meat of Zhanqun sellers.
Although Qiao Guanyuan publicly stated that he “disdains to engage in website groups”, in fact, SHOPLINE, which lacks growth, also needs website group sellers to recharge their turnover.
Leifeng.com has learned that most of the group sellers blocked by PayPal this year are shopkeepers’ customers.
Seeing this situation, SHOPLINE quickly recruited around. In order to attract sellers to join, SHOPLINE will use the banner of “has a PayPal whitelist”, claiming that the company has an exclusive channel to help sellers find PayPal to appeal. It is usually difficult for sellers on other website building platforms to contact the official PayPal .
Zhanqun sellers have indeed brought an increase to SHOPLINE’s GMV. Among the major business groups, only Zhanqun has achieved significant results.
However, as for the entire ecology, illegal sellers are engaged in a lucrative business. They are extremely crazy in advertising, which has virtually accelerated the depletion of traffic dividends on platforms such as Facebook.
In fact, this year’s independent station business is very difficult to do.
If the skin is not there, the hair will be lost. When the seller’s living conditions start to deteriorate, how can the SaaS website building platform as the service provider behind it be better? The entire industry ecology has fallen into a vicious circle.
Switching to payment and testing the waters to sell goods, can shopkeepers find a way out
After substantial layoffs, SHOPLINE and Shopkeeper are actively adjusting their strategies and looking for a new way out.
This year, Huanju Group sent Qiao Guanyuan back to Singapore, asking him to focus on developing the Southeast Asian market, and told him not to return to China if the business in Singapore was not done well. And Qiao Guanyuan’s direct troops will report to CEO Li Ting.
This change made Qiao Guanyuan very anxious. It was rumored that he secretly ran back to China in October this year, but there was no substantial change. At present, the leader of SHOPLINE’s domestic business is trained by Qiao Guanyuan, and Wang Yanli, who has the background of a sophomore in Alidian.
As for the shopkeeper, this year also plans to make efforts overseas, focusing on expanding the European and American markets.
Not long ago, Shopkeeper pulled a number of leading domestic customers to publicize the case, and publicized it domestically and abroad. However, the overseas version of Shopsmith needs to strengthen localization understanding.
In addition, Shopkeeper also plans to use the newly raised funds to engage in payment projects, but most people in the industry are not optimistic.
The core of the controversy is that Li Junfeng’s advantage lies in the advertising business. Payment needs to be connected with the banking system, and the technical requirements are much higher than those of advertising and e-commerce. Therefore, whether the shopkeeper and Li Junfeng, who have deviated from their core advantages, can bridge this gap will take time to test.
For “Chinese Shopify”, there may be two paths in the future:
One is to do in-depth brand agency operations.
At present, both Dianjiang and SHOPLINE are researching this direction to help big sellers develop a set of customized brand services, including top-level design, brand stories, etc. Moreover, the two companies have a certain service base, so it is not difficult to make this model impressive.
However, agency operations can only earn commissions and cannot support a huge cash flow, which does not seem to be the ultimate direction for shopkeepers and SHOPLINE.
The second is to secretly transform into a seller.
The shopkeeper also secretly exported the seller’s data for analysis before selling goods, and even packaged the complete data of the seller’s store directly to other sellers.
Not long ago, some sellers found that their products had been moved to the stores of other sellers who were also Dianjiang users. Even the page’s conversion code is verbatim, and even the error code is exactly the same.
The seller immediately questioned it publicly in the shopkeeper’s seller group and asked the shopkeeper to give an explanation. As a result, not only the shopkeeper chose to remain silent, but the seller who was caught for plagiarism was dismissed on the grounds that the turnover of more than 100 million yuan did not need to steal the data of small sellers.
The incident only caused controversy in the small circle, and soon returned to rationality, and its authenticity needs to be verified.
XShoppy has also been caught in a similar storm.
At that time, XShoppy specially built an independent station training institution to guide the platform. On the one hand, the training institution wants to use Jiahong’s reputation to recruit students, but on the other hand, it is worried that the merchants think that XShoppy is “both a player and a referee”, and they are vacillating between whether the training institution should be called “Jiahong College” or “XShoppy University”. Indefinitely, the signboard of the office changed three times in one week.
From this point of view, for the website building SaaS platform, how to avoid “being both a player and a referee” is an unavoidable controversy.
To sum up, both SHOPLINE and Dianjiang are facing huge challenges no matter in overseas expansion or business transformation.
Many people in the industry believe that the future prospects of the shopkeeper are quite worrying, and they don’t know whether the new financing of the shopkeeper can survive the next three to five years.
From this point of view, there is not much time left for “Chinese Shopify”.
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