What problem can Taobao solve by shopping?
Editor’s note: This article from the micro-channel public number “letter list” (ID: wujicaijing) , of: Tan Xiao Han.
Taobao has recently taken a crucial step away from the “super consumer media” goal proposed by Zhang Yong in 2016.
On November 30th, mobile phone Taobao started a new version test. The “Micro Amoy” function originally in the first-level tab entry was upgraded to “Subscription”, and the position was transferred to the left side of the original page “Recommendation” on the homepage.
In addition to location changes, it is different from Weitao marketing and content both. Subscriptions only focus on marketing operations such as Shangxin and merchant live broadcasts. As for the business content to the operating position, it remains in the “Follow” column of “Wang Guan” that replaces the old version of Weitao. This change is to make businesses’ private domain operations more targeted, but more importantly, it separates Taobao’s marketing field from the content field.
The biggest change in this revision of Taobao is the integration of the original content of Taobao and the launch of a centralized content platform “Wang Guan”. The content first comes from the expert buyer show that was previously scattered on the product page, and the other is Taobao is encouraging content creators, ordinary users and businesses to produce original content.
“From the location of shopping, we can see how much we value content.” Ping Chou, head of product and content ecology of Tao Department, said that shopping is the first time that Taobao has placed a centralized platform in this location. The content field will be the most important content center of Taobao for a long time to come.
The logic of Taobao’s revision is similar to that of WeChat.
In recent months, WeChat has opened many traffic portals for video accounts, and input a steady stream of traffic to them, transforming social traffic and content traffic in the graphic era into video traffic, so as to instill a short video in WeChat. The goal of the giant is that the mature video account can feed back the WeChat ecosystem.
From this point of view, Taobao’s launch of “Wangguan” and WeChat’s launch of video accounts are both aimed at accelerating the flow of super apps. At present, Taobao uses the first-level entry and the second-level page to convey traffic to the shopping, but the shopping obviously carries the expectation of Taobao: when users form the mind of consuming content-based products in Taobao, shopping can become an internal traffic pool , Feed back the Taobao ecology.
Taobao has been in content for a long time. In 2016, Zhang Yong proposed to let Taobao goodsRaise the rack up to another level. It is the content that is newly put on the shelf.
The background at the time was that Taobao had completely completed its transformation from the PC era to wireless. Zhang Yong pointed out that communityization, contentization, and localization are the three strategic directions for Taobao in the future; clarify content producers and product production The relationship between consumers, spreading products based on content, and finally completing product transactions, is an important link in the strategy of communityization and contentization.
As a result, Taobao started the evolution process from the universal commodity market to the super consumer media.
As of September this year, the mobile MAU of Alibaba China’s retail market has reached 881 million, and the natural growth of MAU left for Taoties is obviously close to peaking (as of June 2020, the number of Chinese Internet users is 940 million). But the number of Amoy sellers is still growing steadily, which means that if there is no new source of traffic, the price of organic traffic will rise.
In the past two years, merchants have not only used the traffic from Tao internal, but also diverted the traffic from outside Tao internal to Tao internal to complete transaction conversion. If Taobao can create a product that can realize self-hematopoiesis and precipitate flow, it can shorten the diversion path and greatly alleviate the flow source problem faced by businesses.
How to expand the traffic pool when the monthly active growth space is limited? Increasing the user’s use time and increasing the frequency of users’ open to increase daily activity are the most effective ways.
At the end of September, Taobao began to test a new version. The important change is to move “Guess you like” to the first screen of Taobao. Pingchou told the Alphabet List that after the revision, the click-through rate of users on the homepage has increased by 20%, and the time spent by users has also increased by 20%.
Guess your favorite content and video is to improve business conversion efficiency and generate shopping needs—open Taobao—be attracted by guessed content and continue to browse content—adding products to the shopping cart/complete purchase is a typical user path.
But if users can develop the habit of browsing Taobao when they generate content demand, the mind of “visiting Taobao” will go further, and will be planted by community content until the transaction is completed, Taobao’s traffic pool will be doubled , This is the mission that Guangguan undertakes. Of course, there is still a long way to go before the ultimate goal of super consumer media.
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In January 2016, Zhang Yong described Taobao’s dream progression path-hope from the earliest shopping, to shopping guide, to the community, to social interaction. Of course, the community and social networking in Zhang Yong’s vision are not to launch a new product, but to communityize Taobao and make it flourish.
At that time, Lao Xiao had foreseen that the key to Taobao’s prosperity lies in its “operations”. Compared with the short-term growth of natural traffic dividends, operations are more sustainable. Operation goes further than connection and delivery, which means that consumer journeys and business operations take place more and more deeply on Taobao.
This timeAt the meeting, Xiaoyaozi pointed out that the flow should be self-generating and operable. Not only should businesses be encouraged to operate private domain spaces, but also all business teams should be encouraged to create private domain spaces on wireless, to operate their own business traffic, and allow celebrities to operate their own account traffic. “Only in this way, such a small mobile phone screen can carry the expectations of our people in this big house.”
Three months later, at the Taobao Seller Conference, Zhang Yong announced the direction of Taobao’s contentization and communityization.
Taobao’s earliest content-based merchandise was Weitao launched in 2013. “If mobile Taobao is a shopping mall, it will become a Shopping Mall with Weitao. Consumers can not only buy things, but also go shopping, entertain, and pass the time.” This is the evaluation of Weitao.
Since then, Taobao’s attempts at content orientation can be roughly divided into two categories. One is graphic content. By the first half of 2018, Taobao has content types such as good goods, shopping, must-buy lists, Tao Toutiao, etc. The first category is video content. Taobao live broadcast is obviously the brightest product in Taobao’s content strategy. By the end of September this year, the 12-month GMV of Taobao live broadcast exceeded 350 billion yuan.
The most important change in Taobao in 2018 is that in the new August version, “Guess you like” rose to the second screen of Taobao homepage. At that time, this change seemed to be more biased towards the change in product distribution logic. Taobao has changed from early category operation refinement to product operation, from search recommendation to algorithm recommendation. In Double 11, Taobao’s personalized recommendation traffic exceeded the search belt Incoming traffic.
Two years later, the “Guess You Like” position moved up again. At the end of September this year, Taobao released a new version, and the top focus picture booth was changed to a vertical version, which was integrated with the information flow; “Guess you like” rose to the first screen, and a large number of videos, live broadcasts and other content were added.
Guess you like to move up the position, the click-through rate and user usage time increase by 20% means that Taobao traffic pool has been supplemented, but its problem is that it is too close to the product, far away from the content, and more inclined to marketing rather than content , Only to move closer to the super consumer media in form.
Weitao is also a similar problem. Pingchou said that Weitao operates both goods and mentality, and its purpose is not clear enough.
Because Weitao has strong marketing attributes, its content operation role is limited. This makes Taobao before the revision have two mixed marketing and content portals on the homepage. Compared with the operation conversion field, they are not focused enough; compared with the content field, their operational purpose is not pure enough.
The important logic of Taobao’s recent revision is to let the content belong to the content and let the conversion belong to the conversion. The clearer the mind of each field in the app, the clearer the business operations. “Taobao is now rich in media in all scenes: if you want to describe product functions and want to do marketing, you should go to the homepage and subscribe; if you want to cultivate other people’s trust level, shopping is an important position.” Pingchou said.
According to Ping Chou, the purpose of Taobao’s launch of shopping is to supplement easy letter. “In the past, we only provided merchandise operation and traffic operation capabilities for merchant operations. Now we have an additional layer of content operation, that is, the ability to build trust.”
In the past few years, Taobao has used search and recommendation algorithms to match people and goods between a large number of products and a large number of consumers, but the changes in e-commerce in recent years are that many users’ purchasing decisions are affected by trust between people , Including social recommendations from Moments and recommendations from anchors. “Interpersonal trust has become a medium, and the relationships it produces are stronger and more efficient than previous commercial relationships.”
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In July this year, Taobao is still preparing to integrate the content in Taobao App into a centralized content product. “This is a decision made long ago. We are not considering whether to do it or not, but how to do it as soon as possible. Better.” Pingchou said.
In the new version of Taobao, shopping is divided into left and right areas. Click on the “Shop” tab, and enter the “Recommendation” area on the right by default, which is the area where people, ordinary users, and businesses can share content. Information flow display, click on the content page to enter the single-column sliding mode. To publish content in the shopping, you can choose to add product links or without any links.
According to Qiancheng, the person in charge of Taobao’s user product division, the recommendation mechanism of the recommendation stream is based on the content quality and the content relevance of the browsing user, such as whether the user is willing to interact with the content and browse the contentThen there will be actions such as likes and comments.
The left side is the area where users follow the content of the business/store operation, but unlike the “subscription” on the homepage, “follow” pays more attention to content rather than marketing conversion, and the location of “View the treasure mentioned by TA” is not conspicuous.
Because Taobao is naturally closer to the transaction, compared to other content platforms, the product links in Taobao content products are actually relatively easy to be accepted by users. This is the reason for the high conversion rate of Taobao live broadcast, which must be such a conversion rate advantage. It will also be reflected in content-based products.
At the same time, because shopping is born in Taobao, the conversion link is shorter and more efficient, and brands can directly see the conversion data of content traffic.
But similar to the hundreds of millions of DAU being poured out by the video account by the WeChat traffic, Wanwan is a product that grows inside Taobao. At this stage, Taobao is using the huge traffic from the first-level entrance and the second-level page for its diversion. , To cultivate the minds of users to consume content on Taobao, but Taobao’s expectation for shopping is to use traffic to inject new traffic to feed Taobao. In the future, shopping must be independentGo straight.
From the current situation, “Guess what you like” is helpful to Taobao users’ usage time. Whether shopping can contribute to Taobao in terms of duration, DAU and other data levels will take time to test.
This is not simple. A considerable number of users use Taobao in their minds for trading rather than entertainment. They planted grass in Little Red Book, watch the video content on Douyin, Kaishou, station B, how to cultivate the user’s mind of Taobao entertainment is the first hurdle that needs to be crossed when shopping.
The launch of the independent portal of Taobao can be counted as Taobao’s efforts to cultivate users’ minds on the consumer side, and the key to solving the problem is on the supply side, that is, allowing content creators, platform users, and merchants to provide high-quality content.
The essence of shopping is a centralized entrance upgraded from the past foreign shopping buyer show community. Its advantage is that it has a large amount of user evaluation content, but they still have a certain amount of high-quality sharing content defined by users in the content community. In the initial stage, a more effective way to replenish the inventory of high-quality content is to invite mature content creators.
This is also the reason why Taobao recently recruited content creators. Looking around the “Youguang Project” shows that the incentive plan is divided into 1 billion reward funds. The first batch of recruitment focuses on clothing, beauty, home, food, cute Pet, digital, Fashion play, eight fields of culture and creativity.
“Taobao now has a content editor in chief, which was not available before. This shows that we are working on content very seriously.” Pingchou said that in the end it is customer value that determines what you will do and serves the core demands of users. Later, it will inevitably bring consumer loyalty and cultivate a unique product mind.
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Taobao revisionNot only on the content side, whether it is the upward movement of the “Guess You Like” position at the end of September or the launch of this visit, Taobao hopes to optimize the user experience while expanding the traffic pool to reduce business traffic from the supply side. Cost, enhance the competitiveness of merchants’ value and commodity price power.
The other key to increasing the ROI of merchants on Taobao is conversion. This is the reason why Weitao has been upgraded to subscription and a follow-up stream is created in the shopping tab. Of course, the creators and ordinary users that users will follow in the future The content of will also appear in the follow stream.
“After Weitao is upgraded to subscription, it focuses more on the conversion efficiency of merchants and has a clearer timeline principle.” Qiancheng said that Taobao has reorganized the underlying relationship links of Taobao, and merchants and users have established relationships The position is the homepage subscription. For example, new merchants, merchant live broadcast previews, merchant fan membership rights operations will be displayed in this area.
After experiencing the alphabet list, I found that this location is equivalent to another traffic portal for Taobao live broadcast. After the merchant starts broadcasting, the content of the live broadcast room will be shown to store fans.
After the revision, Taobao provides merchants with a relatively complete private domain traffic operation position, which can be linked with previous merchant customer service, store, micro-details and detail pages.
Ping Chou said that in the past, Weitao had to click on the content and then jump to the product, but the subscription path was shorter. In addition, it is equivalent to giving businesses a centralized operation position, and the location is on the homepage. In the future, businesses will be more efficient in layered operations on fans.