Not for the present back, but to return to the blood
Editor’s note: This article from the micro-channel public number “to coffee Intelligence” (ID: laikazk), of: YH.
Xiao Jiang, who lives in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, has opened a shop on Salted Fish for a year and a half.
“In the beginning, I just wanted to be a side job, but I didn’t expect to slowly develop into a main business.” Xiao Jiang opened several English training schools in his hometown, and traveled to Europe with friends every year. I bought some of the porcelain with a long history in Europe and collected some by myself.
Later, by a particularly accidental opportunity, he put his collection on Xianyu, but he didn’t expect it to be sold out soon, and even a special domestic merchant contacted him, hoping that he could help find the source of goods. As a result, Xiao Jiang, who had no intention of inserting willows, began to deliberately try to sell some of the popular European famous porcelain Mason and Royal Copenhagen on Xianyu, and there were transactions almost every day.
From the beginning of one or two orders per day, to tens of thousands of water per day, Xiao Jiang’s porcelain shop had more than 2 million sales last year. “I found that there are many friends in China who like European porcelain, and Mason’s product line is very rich. There are both entry-level models of a few hundred yuan and collection-level products with a price of tens of thousands. Every time I meet a new customer, I will talk to them. Chatting is actually doing user research to find out what kind of products everyone likes now, so that I can look for them when I buy them, and I can get them quickly when they are targeted.”
Now Xiao Jiang has hundreds of transaction records, and he also has his own stable old customers. Occasionally, everyone can share the experience of collecting porcelain together. It feels very good.
Xiao Jiang’s customers don’t care if they are buying second-hand items. Many things are “old goods” (that is, they have been used and sold by others). First, the new price is relatively high. Second, many old goods have historical craftsmanship and design with the characteristics of the times, which are very rare in modern times.
The trading of second-hand goods is becoming a trend as young people’s consumption preferences change. The latest landmark event is that Xianyu, a second-hand trading platform owned by Alibaba, recently publicly announced that it expects that its transaction volume (GMV) will reach 500 billion yuan this year.
Young people who have grown up in an environment with extreme material richness have different views on second-hand items from the older generation. They believe that second-hand transactions are no longer the traditional model of selling old things in exchange for liquidity, but through some vertical or niche circle differentiation, so that sellers and buyers with different needs can quickly find each other and complete the transaction. . Especially with the help of Internet technology, second-hand trading completely breaks through the geographical and time constraints, and will have a profound impact on the trading mode of many markets.
01 Impulsive consumption, calmly “return blood”
“NoSeek back the capital, but ask for the blood. “
This sentence appears frequently on second-hand trading platforms. Faced with the repeated bombardment of various shopping subsidies and promotions from e-commerce, many young people cannot resist the temptation. Second-hand transactions provide a way to quickly “return blood”.
In the eyes of young consumers, second-hand transactions are sometimes synonymous with cost-effectiveness. Most of the daily consumption of some people is done on the second-hand trading platform, but the income of these people is not low. “In addition to buying books, I buy a lot of second-hand daily necessities,” Xiaofan is a product manager of a major Internet company, and others buy children’s toys and diapers for idle. He said that saving money is certainly one aspect, but it can help others deal with idleness and make our lives less carbon.
A brokerage report pointed out that in 2019, the size of my country’s idle market has reached 883.4 billion yuan, an increase of 19% year-on-year, and the market size will reach 10409 billion yuan in 2020. The huge demand for disposal of idle items has made second-hand e-commerce a new blue ocean in the field of e-commerce. Research institutes predict that the scale of second-hand e-commerce transactions in 2020 will reach 374.55 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 44%, and the number of users will reach 182 million.
Compared with the experience of mature developed countries, the development potential of the domestic second-hand trading market is still huge. Xianyu data shows that as of 2020, Xianyu users have reached 300 million and the majority are young users born in the 1990s.
From international experience, second-hand transactions are forming a trend. At the beginning of January this year, the American version of Poshmark, the American version of Xianyu, almost doubled on the day of its listing. Its announced active buyers were 6.2 million and active users were 31.7 million. Japan’s domestic second-hand trading market has already been scaled up and relatively mature, and consumers have continuous buying demand. According to public data, Japan’s domestic second-hand transaction market share exceeded 2 trillion yen (approximately 126 billion yuan) in 2018. According to Japan’s Recycle Communication Company’s forecast, excluding the second-hand car market, Japan’s second-hand transaction market share in 2025 will be Reached 3.25 trillion yen (approximately 204.8 billion yuan). Mercari, a Japanese second-hand e-commerce unicorn company, has grown rapidly since its establishment in 2013. In 2020, its GMV will reach 699.5 billion yen, or about 44.2 billion yuan.
02 The inevitable upgrade of consumption
Why does the trade of second-hand items arise? This seems to be an inevitable phenomenon of people’s continuous consumption upgrade. For example, in developed countries in Japan, there are a dazzling array of second-hand goods recycling shops all over the market, and flea markets selling used objects in European countries are a must-see for tourists.
In recent years, with the improvement of urbanization, many young people left their hometowns when they were in college, and after graduationStay in first- and second-tier cities to work and live. In addition, there are still many rural laborers entering the cities to seek more job opportunities. Under such a general background, the population flow will inevitably give rise to the demand for the disposal of idle goods.
In addition, some analysis pointed out that with the increase in housing prices in first- and second-tier cities, the cost of placing old things has become higher and higher. For example, in a residential area with an average price of 60,000/m in Beijing or Shanghai, it is obviously very uneconomical if the house cannot make the best use of the space. This makes many people in first-tier cities need to clean up regularly. Space, timely disposal of idle items.
In the Internet environment, it is easier for “small town youths” to learn fashion information and brand information and keep up with trends. In the past, many products that were not accessible in the local environment have opened the door for consumption by people in lower-tier cities through online shopping such as e-commerce. As young people who grow up in the Internet environment have more and more purchasing power , They will pay more attention to brand and quality, and will make choices under their own consumption power.
There is also a part of “pleasure” consumption out of hobbies. A major characteristic of generation Z consumption is that it no longer pays attention to practicality, but pays more attention to the pleasure brought by certain consumption behaviors. Take lipstick consumption as an example. Few people completely use up one lipstick before buying the next one. On the contrary, they repeatedly buy different colors of different brands. Lipstick has become a commodity that girls frequently repurchase on a daily basis. Then there are many products with similar properties to lipsticks, but they are only available on the second-hand market. For these enthusiasts, second-hand trading platforms have very high-frequency consumption scenarios. The antique trading market and coin trading in the traditional sense are very typical. The transactions of trendy toys, sneakers and second-hand luxury goods that have emerged in recent years also have the characteristics of “hobbies -> repeated shopping and comparison -> high-frequency trading”.