What direction is Taobao's transformation towards? Taobao: Taobao's move towards entertain

 

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Article | Value Planet Returns to Editor | Tang Fei's 2020 Home Page Comprehensive Information Flowin the futureTaobao has recently welcomedthreeThe biggest since the beginning of the yearoneSecond revision - the new version will be fully launched through the "Night Taobao" entrance. Users can access it through the entrance located in the upper right corner of the Taobao homepage,oneKey switch to enteroneA 24-hour "lifestyle and entertainment version" of Taobao.

Night Taobao places greater emphasis on lifestyle and entertainment, providing more interactive games, entertainment content, and activity gameplay. For example, it offers activities such as live jumping, intense egg games, short video check-in, targeted flash sales for summer, and hosts taking users to eat at popular night markets in Beijing, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Wuhan, and other places. It also promotes the sale of night food and summer economy flash sales through a content-based approach.

according toIn addition, there will be exciting live broadcasts such as movie premieres, classic TV dramas, village super finals, and live houses in the future

Image source: The launch of "Night Taobao" on Taobao is also seen by the outside world as a transformation of Taobao and Tmall1Taobao CEO Dai Shan once stated that Taobao is positioned as1My little selfPeople come and goSorryInteresting neighborhoods will gather millions of merchants, hundreds of millions of creators, and various service providers in the next five years, promoting the "ecological prosperity" of Taobao.

thatWhy?Taobao wants to make1Is the shopping app full of 'focused entertainment content'? What kind of anxiety does Taobao have behind its efforts? Can Taobao, which has been focusing on e-commerce for many years, play the card of entertainment well? The fast way to increase user retention and occupy user time through pan entertainment is to use it. Although there are various forms of pan entertainment apps on the market, the targeted user segments also vary.

But fundamentally, pan entertainment apps actually meet the needs of current usersTaking the gaming industry as an example, although the forms of games have become increasingly complex in recent years, the diversified and multi-level spiritual needs include:1From formal rewards to compound rewards, and now to multi-level three-dimensional rewards, the essence of the game is nothing more than completing first1The process of obtaining rewards for a predetermined goal has not changed from beginning to end.

But the reason why the gaming industry has been able to develop for many years is actually to satisfy its needs1Partially satisfying players' spiritual needs in the gameThe worldThe spirit of maximizing satisfaction, such as the common "ranking race" in games, not only meets the social attribute needs of users, but also satisfies the sense of achievement, joy, pride, and decompression brought by users achieving their goals. This is alsoWhy?The reason why games can easily become addictive is due to their nature.

The same situation also occurs in the field of short videos. The reason why short video platforms emphasize the diversification of platform content is essentially to use these diversified contents to satisfy users' curiosity, pursuit of happiness, relaxation and other spirits at the same timeThe existence of private messaging function meets the spiritual needs of users for social interaction, as stated by philosophy professor Yuan Guiren in his book "The Philosophy of Man"1The book points out that 'human spiritual needs are like the human body needs vitamins'1A life without consciousness, reason, will, and other spiritual activities is lackingtiredThe life of human animals.

Spiritual needs are1My little selfThe desires and needs at the spiritual level are different from material needs and are of a higher level1Planting needs is also the essential characteristic that distinguishes humans from animals and makes them human1That is to say, for users, spiritual needs are actually the combination of essential spiritual needs. Pan entertainment apps use various methods to meet user needs, which also gives pan entertainment apps the following characteristics.

，1The demand for entertainment apps among users is relatively large, and the potential user demand is huge. According to data.ai data, in the top 20 subcategories of applications worldwide in 2022, the number of entertainment/OTT purchases and user support are significantDouble Quantity1

Image source: data.ai High demand naturally lays the foundation for user fission in pan entertainment apps. For example, Threads, known as a simplified version of Twitter, registered over 30 million users within 24 hours of its launch, and the number of users exceeded in just 5 days1Billion, this1The speed even surpassed the popular Chat GPT in the first half of this year.

Image source: Twitter, Meta 2. Compared to other types of apps, Pan Entertainment app users have a longer usage time and considerable daily activity data1According to data related to Xiangyue Fox, from Q3 2021 to Q3 2022, although there have been fluctuations in the usage time of short videos1It has the highest proportion of usage time among users.

Image source: Moon Fox APP separately1In terms of aspects, combined with last year3According to the latest apps launched by major companies in the quarter, they rank first1The community dating app Ka Ka and the second ranked mobile game "Realm Slayer" are both pan entertainment apps.

Image source: Moon Fox APP The entertainment gene was applied to the e-commerce field, which also led Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, to briefly summarize the Pinduoduo model as "Disney+Costco", that is, in the early years of entertainment+shopping, in addition to its core function of shopping, Pinduoduo also includes modules such as daily cash collection, 1 point lottery, free bargaining, and Duoduo orchard.

The two core gameplay of Pinduoduo Entertainment are the "free bargaining" activity and the "red envelope" activity with the help of friends, encouraging users to send links to their relatives, friends, and even various WeChat group chats. With these "additional functions", Pinduoduo1The rise of the road, until todaytakeTaobao, JD.com3Divide the world; The entire app presents an amusement park1Such an atmosphere.

Image source: Two core gameplay of Pinduoduo: "Bargain for Free" to get the activity, friends to help with the "Red Envelope" activity, encouraging users to send links to friends and family, and even various WeChat group chats1The launch of the 'buy and play' relationship chain has also made earlier years more competitiveCompared to JD.com and Taobao, Duoduo relies on advertising to acquire users at a lower cost and has a faster growth in user numbers.

Source: Bloomberg, Shen Wanhongyuan has studied that up to now, entertainment+shopping is still the focus of Pinduoduo. In recent years, common games such as millionaires, landlords, and Xiaoxiaole have also been introduced into Pinduoduo APP. For example, compared with platforms such as Tiktok and Taobao, Pinduoduo can be said to be a platform that has developed late in the field of live broadcast e-commerce for domestic e-commerce platforms.

Since the beginning of this year, Pinduoduo has been promoting live streaming to address its shortcomings in the field of live streaming e-commercedo businessWe have developed on a large scale and launched multiple operational support activities related to live streaming sales, including the New Superstar Plan, the Hundred Production Plan, service provider policies, category days, live streaming promotions, etc. At the same time, the live streaming category has expanded from clothing and food to the entire category.

Image source: Pinduo has many businesses in the background. In fact, with the current Internet traffic disappearingAgainst the backdrop of enterprises pursuing cost reduction and efficiency improvement, the boundary between e-commerce and entertainment is gradually blurred and scattered1On the other hand, the entertainment platform urgently needs to introduce e-commerce to generate revenue for the platform. For example, Station B, which started with anime culture, has started to explore e-commerce since 2017do businessSince then, the platform has also formed an e-commerce model of live streaming sales and official self operated member purchases.

Douyu and Huya, which focus on game live streaming, have also successively opened live streaming sales functions1On the one hand, e-commerce platforms also need to "contentization" to retain users. At this year's 618 conference, Dai Shan bluntly stated that Taobao will promote comprehensive contentization with far more investment than before this year. The platform has not yet reached the bottleneck stage of user duration, and there is room for growth in both DAU and user duration.

As Dai Shan said, with the current e-commerce entering stock competition, using entertainment content to improve platform daily activity is the driving force behind various e-commerce platformsdo businessTop priority for development: Taobao's external challenges: shrinking differentiation of e-commerce platforms, user return to offline trendObviously, although e-commerce shopping has become a trend, I want toNo,According to Wind data, the year-on-year growth rate of online sales of physical goods such as food, clothing, and daily necessities has been increasing, despite efforts to improve daily life1It's slowing down.

The reason behind the slowdown in growth rate is that online shopping is cheaper than offline shopping, which attracted consumers to shop online before1This is a major factor, but with the increasing cost of traffic in major e-commerce platforms in recent years, these costs are ultimately transmitted to the selling price1Some merchants, in order to hedge their promotion costs, can only sell their productsNo,Cutting off markups also gives online price advantagesNo,Discontinued and downplayed, consumers are gradually returning to offline due to cost-effectiveness considerations.

Source: Wind, in addition to consumers, has previously grown up relying on Tiktok, Xiaohongshu, Zhihu grass planting+live broadcast with goods1Various new consumer brands are also opening intensive offline stores, such as Perfect Diary and Huaxizi in the beauty industry, and Jiaonei in the clothing industry ubras、MAIA ACTIVE， Snack collarWang Xiaolu from Yu, as well as Babycare, which has opened 100 stores nationwide and entered over 30000 supermarket channels, and so on.

Obviously, if more and more consumers and merchants return to offline in the future, the impact on e-commerce platforms can be imagined as better survival. In the first half of this year, major e-commerce platforms1From the perspective of 'attack', the transition between 'attack' and 'defense' is due to the current situationtributaryThe overlap of users on e-commerce platforms is increasing,.

Targeting other core areas of e-commerce, it is often the focus of various e-commerce platforms this year1As a result, it has become common for people to compete with each other. For example, low prices are used by Pinduoduo to achieve user retention and improve performanceDeeds and deedsHowever, since the beginning of this year, JD.com has successively launched channels such as "Billion Subsidy" and "Low Price Flash Sale", while Taobao has launched interfaces such as "Daily Special Sale" and "Homepage mainly featuring a large number of low-priced products",.

Tiktok offline1The store named 'Super Cheap Shop' is clearly targeting these actionsPinduoduo's previous focus was on the "low price tag", and these platforms also hope to seize the opportunity through price advantages1Some users who have a lot of words have set up "super value purchase" and "special price second kill" channels in Tiktok Mall

Image source: The same situation also occurs in the live streaming field. In addition to Pinduoduo gradually filling the gaps in live streaming e-commerce as mentioned above, Taobao is also building diversified live streaming rooms. For example, from TVB Hong Kong star dramas to variety shows "The Voice of China" and "This is Street Dance", from the hot eyed coconut tree live streaming room of the fierce man to the cold Apple live streaming room of hard technology, from interviewing the football king Messi to introducing Wang Baoqiang's latest movie "In the Eight Star Cage", Taobao live streaming can be said to have gathered all kinds of "immortals" and creatively organized activitiesNo,Cut off.

Under the mutual learning and imitation of e-commerce platforms, future e-commerce platforms will gradually rely on short video scenes, with live streaming e-commerce and shelf e-commerce simultaneously making efforts, and the differentiation between platforms will gradually be reducedNo,Just in terms of playing methods, there are also similar problems in the category. Although similar to the core category of JD.com, the supply chain capability of the platform is too tested by large logistics, and similar to the lack of supply chain capabilities of Tiktok and Pinduoduo, it is also temporarily unable to enter JD.com1Advantageous categories.

Source: Carrot Investment's "Attack"No,This is only reflected in the gameplay and also in the categories, but Taobao and Tmall have clothing, food, beauty and other advantageous categories, and the difficulty of their supply chain is much lower than that of Dajia Electronics, which also makesNo,Few e-commerce platforms have successively entered the core categories of Taobao. Taking the beauty industry as an example, the beauty industry1The main characteristics are high gross profit and heavy marketing.

Tiktok1I have been trying to cut into this "big cake". Previously, the new "bubble facial mask", "Haijie Ya" and other products of Beauty White Brand were "popular" in a short period of time. Taking Fuljia, which was just listed in June, as an example, according to the prospectus, Fuljia "medical sodium hyaluronate repair patch (white film)" was purchased in 2021The cost is 8.2 yuan/box, but the selling price on Tmall flagship store is as high as 126 yuan/box.

Even after deducting shipping costs, return and exchange costs, and promotion costs, Fuerjia's gross profit margin is still quite considerable

Source: Radish Investment According to the prospectus of Fuerjia, its sales expenses in 2022 were 390 million yuan, accounting for 22.06% of the current revenue; Among them, the promotional expenses amounted to 354 million yuan, and Fu Erjia's previous prospectus also emphasized that 46.7% of the funds raised after this listing will be invested in the construction of brand promotion projects.

The "multi gold" beauty industry naturally attracts other e-commerce platformsNo,I will miss this1In order to better serve beauty customers, Tiktok also1Although Tiktok's traffic recommendation mechanism+live broadcast e-commerce+grass growing e-commerce has been playing directly on the upgrade platform, it has previously exploded the new "bubble facial mask", beauty white brand "Haijie Ya" and other products in a short time.

But compared to Taobao and Tmall, FuPurchase rateNo,The relatively high refund rate is also the result of Tiktok E-commerce1The big problem is to solve this1Short board, Tiktok1In addition to Zhifa Power shelf e-commerce, Tiktok will try to make up its own cosmetics in Junedo business"美力心选"更名"抖音电商自营美妆"同时，近期抖音也先后上线"搜索诊断"功能，新增商机补品、站内外营销&种草和搜索广告，试图打造美妆行业消费全链路营销闭环。

Image source: From the perspective of "guarding", how to stabilize existing user retention and improve user experience is currently the focus of various e-commerce platforms1Take Tiktok as an example. It is a common routine for Tiktok to hold a single in the live broadcast room1Liu Qi, a Tiktok merchant, told us that the live broadcast "hold up the order" was to use operational means to increase the number of online people, while many people buckled the screen to interact, creating a very hot feeling in this live broadcast room.

Behind the practice of holding back orders, it is actually to quickly gain traffic, for example, by using holding back orders, one can make direct trafficThe longer the users stay in the broadcast room, the higher the number of online users in the broadcast room, and the better the foundation for increasing the transaction volume. But from the current point of view, the long-term hold up of orders is easy to make users tired of the Tiktok broadcast room. After all, the anchor has introduced1Product, delayed for a few minutesNo,Listing small yellow cars will make the entire transaction chain more lengthy and complex.

Therefore, in June this year, Tiktok also began to introduce new regulations to combat the single holding behavior in the live broadcast room and maintain the live broadcast environment

Source: Tiktok merchant version Taobao's internal worries: It is urgent to improve daily life to stabilize the small and medium-sized merchant team. In addition to the above external problems, current Taobao is also facing internal worries. At the Alibaba internal meeting in June this year, Ma Yun proposed the future of Taobao Tmall3One development direction: return to Taobao, return to users and return to the Internet.

Behind the phrase 'returning to Taobao' here, it also means that Taobao must pay attention to small and medium-sized merchant teams, as they can bring in more users and traffic1aspect,The low price strategy will continue to be the main theme of competition and development among major e-commerce companies, but a large number of low-priced products can only be provided by small and medium-sized merchants because, after all, for1For some high-end products, there arewideThe price control power of Ge, acting as an e-commerce platform for buyers and sellers to match, has limited bargaining power over these big brand products, and they are also afraid that too low a price will affect the price stability of other channels.

another1In March of this year, a large number of small and medium-sized merchants settled on Taobao, bringing a large number of low-priced products, while also making Taobao's daily active users surpass Pinduoduo. According to Quest mobile data, in March of this year, the average daily active users of Taobao reached 377.9 million, 26.3 million more than the number of people using Pinduoduo. This is the first time since February 2022 that the average daily active users (DAU) of Taobao exceeded Pinduoduo.

But currently, the biggest problem that small and medium-sized businesses encounter in the actual operation of Taobao is still due to the relatively stable platform traffic and increased competitionThe increase in traffic costs caused by the drama, as well as the decline in orders and profits, comes from the e-commerce manager Zhu Yang of a food company in Henan Province. He told us that in previous years, the company had poor sales during the 618 shopping festivalNo,It can reach up to 1.5 million⑵Million, net profit can reach 200000⑵Between 50000.

But this year's 618 sales were only 1.3 million, and profits plummeted directly to around 150000. The reason for this is that,secondaryThe cost of traffic procurement has significantly increased, therefore, by leveraging pan entertainment content to increase Taobao's daily activity and expand more new users, this is alsoWhy?The reason why Taobao is focusing on entertainment content has become the key to whether Taobao can continue to deeply bind with merchants in the future.

The ideal may be beautiful, but the reality Taobao faces is very skinny. First of all, compared with Tiktok and other entertainment apps, Taobao emphasizes the transaction attribute, which has been nurtured in the minds of users in the short termwithinIt is difficult to change. Secondly, pan entertainment apps often emphasize entertainment firstHowever, 'entertainment first' often brings many negative impacts to the platform.

Previously, multiple entertainment apps have been investigated and even taken down for suspected violations. Taking Douyu as an example, in May of this year, Douyu was criticized for its platform's existence and vulgaritywideAs for ecological issues, the State Internet Information Office instructed Hubei Internet Information Office to send a working group to the Beta platform to carry out centralized rectification supervision for one month.

Affected by this, both Douyu and its market value have plummeted. Douyu's lessons are also reminding Taobao to strengthen the monitoring of content on the platform, coupled with the fact that content operations themselves are already in placeNo,This is what Taobao excels at, how to manage and use content well in the future, but the content itselfNo,This is the area that Taobao focuses on, which also puts higher demands on Taobao's internal management.

Source: Snowball. Finally, sponsoring large-scale variety shows or entertainment events is often a common option for entertainment apps in the entertainment industryAlthough the operational strategy can quickly gain attention, its cost is often relatively high. For example, Bilibili won the League of Legends global finals from S10 to S12 consecutively that year3The exclusive domestic live streaming copyright from 2020 to 2022 incurred a copyright fee of up to 800 million US dollars.

In the current era where Alibaba is pursuing cost reduction and efficiency improvement, is Taobao willing to invest heavily and can it obtain traffic as expected after investment? Overall, Taobao's self built content pool in the "Night Taobao" section has more entertainment attributes and contenttakeThere is a slight disconnect between sales, making it difficult to achieve entertainmenttakeThe integration of the two major shopping services, especially with the increasing homogenization of content, may affect user loyalty and even impact their shopping behavior and purchasing power on Taobao by rashly adding entertainment content.

Of course, whether Pan Entertainment can improve Taobao's daily activity still needs time to observe. But how toNo,Finding certainty in determination, how to actively seek change and improve oneselfThe risk resistance of the body will be the future development of major e-commerce platformsNo,Change the main melody.

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