This article is from WeChat official account:Shangyinshe (ID: shangyinshecj) , author: Qi Ma, a branch, the original title: “Why people only product will be less and less? “, the title picture comes from: Visual China
In the past few days, whether the Gucci belt sold by Vipshop is genuine has become the focus of public opinion.
Some consumers bought a Gucci belt for 2549 yuan through the Vipshop platform and found that the size was not correct, so they turned to the product for identification and sold it. The subsequent result is that the belt is not genuine.
Subsequently, Vipshop responded that “this batch of GUCCI belts were purchased directly overseas by Vipshop, and the purchase link is clear, reliable, and legally compliant to ensure authenticity.”
A real product or a fake product, the incident fell into Rashomon. At present, the brand involved Gucci has not yet responded. However, Gucci does not have the Vipshop platform in its purchase channels in China, and Vipshop claims to purchase through cross-border e-commerce.
Although the event has not yet been finalized, Vipshop seems to have been turbulent in recent years. On the Black Cat Complaint Platform, there were as many as 13,500 complaints about Vipshop, and there were hundreds of complaints about Vipshop’s suspected sales of fakes.
Previously, in February, Vipshop was fined 3 million yuan due to an unfair competition investigation. In March, its stock price encountered a black swan, and its market value shrank by more than 10 billion US dollars in a few days.
In addition, although Vipshop’s revenue has been rising in recent years, its growth rate has fallen to a single digit of 9.58%. In 2015, this figure was 73.82%. In the entire B2C retail market, its proportion has dropped from 3.3% in 2015 to 2.5%.
In contrast to this, in recent years, Vipshop on the screen has been extremely active, and its marketing advertisements have turned on the domineering mode, as if it has it everywhere.
According to rough statistics, in 2020 alone, Vipshop has implanted about 10 variety shows and 19 TV series.
It seems that Vipshop has sea water on one side and flame on the other. What situation has it fallen into?
The most intuitive feeling is that in recent years, Chinese e-commerce giantsThe coexistence of the kings, the smoke of gunpowder, and the frequent new gameplays, but Vipshop, the main “special sale”, seems to have only this card from the beginning to the end.
To analyze the current situation of Vipshop, you must first clarify these two issues:
First, the mainstream was not optimistic about the Vipshop model. What is the real underlying framework for its success?
Secondly, since the establishment of Vipshop more than ten years ago, the e-commerce arena has not only integrated e-commerce giants such as Ali and JD.com, but also continuously launched Jumei, Fanke, Yihaodian, Letao.com, etc. The hegemon of the vertical field, many vertical e-commerce companies continue to shrink or disappear, but why is Vipshop still alive?
After clarifying these two issues, let’s look at the past five years. What factors have changed and risen to push Vipshop into a predicament? Where is the breakthrough?
1. The real underlying framework for the rise of Vipshop
If you study enterprise development, you will find that the key to small companies is to seize an opportunity; the key to medium-sized companies is to have a group of relatively strong executives; the key to large companies is to have correct processes and Values.
Like the rise of all companies, Vipshop’s initial success was due to seizing an opportunity in an outlet.
However, most people didn’t think it was an opportunity at the time.
What Vipshop will do is the apparel vertical e-commerce. From the very beginning, it has spotted an ever-present pain point in the apparel industry: inventory issues.
Inventory issues are important in any industry, but in the apparel industry, it is important enough to determine the life or death of a company. A general rule in the industry is “to see who can make money is to see whose inventory is cleaner”.
The reason is that clothing is the most trending industry. Although basic clothing has a fixed style, a long life cycle, and better production forecasts, profits are also low. Moreover, it is impossible for a clothing brand to become bigger and stronger. In the production of basic styles, at least half of them must be trendy and popular styles. The advantage is that the gross profit is high, but the disadvantage is that the forecast accuracy is low, and it is easy to pass away. Once this type of clothing becomes inventory, it will depreciate day by day and become an embezzlement The black hole of profit.
In 2008, when Vipshop was established, it was exactly when China’s clothing industry began to encounter “critical attacks”.
Before this, the major serversClothing brands continue to run wildly, using scale wars to expand sales and influence, keep franchising stores, more intermediate links, and slower and slower response from the supply chain. However, many companies are still boasting that they will launch thousands of clothing styles every year to meet the diverse needs of consumers.
This model is fashionable and smooth in the economy. Once it encounters an economic crisis and the demand declines, the accumulated trendy styles cannot be digested, and it becomes an unbearable burden for apparel companies.
The “inventory crisis” of apparel companies lasted until 2014, dragging down domestic brands such as Li Ning, Smith Barney, Semir, Xtep, and Peak that were in the limelight before. At that time, the total inventory of 42 listed apparel companies including them The amount is as high as 48.3 billion yuan. Some people joked that they would not be able to sell the inventory after three years of non-production.
Many companies have not emerged from the shadows until now, and the news that the US has sold its assets to “recover blood” a few days ago broke out.
Vipshop started from the point of helping many brands to clean up tails. At first, no one cared about this small company. Suppliers just regarded it as one of the channels for tailings. Peers and investors believed that It is just a “stock clearing sewer”, and there is no big name, and some are not even called a brand.
But they overlooked a problem, that is, “Which two ends will Vipshop connect?” We often talk about the “supply and demand connection” in business. Supply refers to technology and products; demand is customers and users; and Vipshop is a platform that connects both ends.
With the supply and platform, who is the demand? At that time, many people understood e-commerce as moving offline to online, but the online threshold was lower, and the connected users were the same as offline.
However, Vipshop uses a “big shift” thinking method, placing the demand side in third- and fourth-tier cities, counties, and even rural areas.
In this country with many mezzanine layers like sandwiches, the brands are Hermès, Armani, Gucci and Dior for the middle class and even the “high-class” people in first-tier cities;
For people in second- and third-tier cities, branding means 4-digit clothes with foreign language labels in big shopping malls, even if it is an authentic domestic brand;
For people in third- and fourth-tier cities, the brand is equivalent to Jeanswest and Metersbonwe.
At that time, many well-known brands did not have specialty stores in second- and third-tier cities, let alone fourth-tier cities and below. So, Vipshop’s brand sinking suddenly makes it lookNo brand has become a real “brand”.
Among all e-commerce platforms that involve “special sales”, Vipshop is the only company that does not have a so-called “Internet” background. The founders of the company, Shen Ya and Hong Xiaobo, are both “traditional Wenzhou businessmen” and they have never laughed at themselves. Understand “electricity”, only understand “business”.
The biggest characteristic of Wenzhou merchants is that they are good at refined business operations, which has played a great role in the development of Vipshop. In addition, Wenzhou merchants have another characteristic of unity. There are rumors that Vipshop just went public in 2012. At that time, the stock price had “bleeded”, but then it went up unexpectedly from a trough. It was because Shen Ya saw that the stock had not been improving for a long time, so he reluctantly made a call to friends in the Wen business circle, hoping that they would help. .
After this call, Vipshop’s stock price reversed.
Although I don’t know the truth or not, at least it can explain why Vipshop was not short of funds at the beginning and was able to open up its hands and feet to promote a unique “special sale” model.
Close to the subject, after having a brand, Shen Ya’s next two cards form the bottom frame of Vipshop: brand + special + flash sale.
First of all, use the brand to attract consumers’ attention. Then play the special price card, and use price, the most sensitive selling point of the retail industry, to stimulate users’ desire to buy.
When people find that the original price of the goods is only a few hundred yuan on the website, the temptation of “good quality and low price” will make them patronize Vipshop again and again.
At the same time as the special sale, the limited-time method was used to add fire to this desire. Every day at 10 o’clock in the morning, Vipshop will introduce new products, and the 5-day special sale period of goods has begun.
The short sale cycle will not affect the supplier’s other channels or regular-priced products. From the user’s point of view, there is also a sense of urgency to “rush to buy”, and users must complete the order within half an hour after placing an order on the website Make the payment, otherwise the order will be automatically cancelled.
This platform model with the nature of “hungry marketing” also gives consumers more psychological space in brand choice.
After all, being cheap is a kind of “available but not possible” thing. Even if there is no brand of your choice, other brands are making special offers. It is also a rare opportunity to “picking up cheap”. Therefore, even if the volume of Vipshop’s products cannot be Compared with the comprehensive platform, it also supports the customer return rate.
It’s not surprising to see such a “three axe” now, but it was the first of Vipshop ten years ago.
Such a clear and clear positioning, coupled with a unique and effective model, aroused strong enthusiasm for special sales. Less than a year after the launch, the number of users reached 200,000, and suppliers began to find themselves. come.
2012 was the year when many apparel brands in China faced the greatest inventory pressure. The desire of apparel companies to destock was strongly related to the business model of Vipshop, which boosted Vipshop’s performance and net revenue increased by 204.7% year-on-year. , Reaching 692 million US dollars, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
2. Why are most vertical e-commerce companies dead?
In 2012, when Vipshop was advancing by leaps and bounds, Suning.com, Gome, Tmall.com, JD.com, Dangdang, etc. were launching various price-cutting activities to start an e-commerce price war.
Seeing the achievements of Vipshop, all the e-commerce companies in the fight were relieved and realized that “cleaning up tails” is a good business.
This is the case. In 2012, half of China’s clothing sales came from tailed goods. In 2014, China’s clothing category alone had a market of nearly 400 billion tails.
Amoy e-commerce companies have a particularly deep understanding in this regard.
After the great success of Double Eleven in 2012, many brands reserved a large amount of inventory for Double Eleven in 2013. The Double Eleven that year also achieved almost double the effect, but many merchants were not happy because they prepared The goods were not completely sold, and some even 70% were not sold. This way, the payment cannot be returned, which has a great impact on profits.
The merchants had no choice but to take the Vipshop to deal with it. Not only was the price low, but it also gave Vipshop a commission of about 27%, which directly pushed up the stock price of Vipshop.
As a result, Taoist e-commerce companies have also launched a series of flash sale channels, such as daily specials, Taobao and so on.
Other e-commerce companies have also launched their own special sales channels, such as Dangdang’s “Weipinhui”, JD’s “Red”, Vancl’s brand sale, and Yihaodian’s famous product sale.
2013 China’s online shopping limited-time sale market share (data source: iResearch)
It can be said that the special sale at the beginning of the track gathered almost all the e-commerce strong players at that time. Among them, Taobao, JD, and Dangdang are all integrated e-commerce, while Jumei Youpin, Vanke, and No. 1 The store and Vipshop belong to the same vertical e-commerce.
Let’s look again now that Jumei has been struggling. Vanke has been silent for many years. Yihaodian was acquired by JD.com in 2016. They are no longer aura, and they have almost emerged from the same generation of Letao.com and Vipshop. A large number of vertical e-commerce companies such as Weimian, Jiapin, Zunku, Redbaby, Chuji, etc. have long since disappeared, and even their names have been remembered.
Therefore, many people lament that “vertical e-commerce is dead.”
However, Vipshop, which is also a vertical e-commerce company, has survived until now. Five years ago, it even achieved the position of e-commerce second only to Tmall and JD.com. It can be regarded as the leader of e-commerce. Now, Although he was overwhelmed by Ali, Jingdong, and Pinduoduo, he was not completely crushed to death. It was still a battle.
Why can Vipshop survive until now?
The first thing that needs to be clear is that compared to integrated e-commerce, vertical e-commerce can quickly cut into a field, but the shortcomings are also very obvious:
First, from the perspective of model, vertical e-commerce basically relies on 20% of categories to obtain 80% of turnover;
The second is that compared with comprehensive e-commerce, user traffic acquisition costs are high.
The two defects are also causal to each other: there are fewer vertical e-commerce products, consumers prefer to visit stores with rich categories, and more favor integrated e-commerce, which leads to the user base of vertical e-commerce Small, it can only rely on marketing and promotion to get more traffic. Once the marketing is not enough, the attractiveness decreases, and the cost of marketing is relatively high, and it is relatively high for the capital.
These are the biggest pain points of vertical e-commerce.
Those declining or dead vertical e-commerce companies have all had problems dealing with “category, flow and capital”.
The fundamental thing here is category. For these 20% categories, how should they maximize their energy?
The core is the supply chain, and Jumei and Fanke have lost ground in supply chain management.
Chen Ou founded Jumei Youpin, a beauty vertical e-commerce company, in 2010. It has too many similar labels with Vipshop: special sale, flash sale, vertical e-commerce, women.
VCs also regard Jumei Youpin as “Vipshop 2.0”, and it will be a matter of time for it to keep pace with Vipshop.
However, after Jumei went public in 2014, it continued to fall into the negative news of “fake goods”, “parallel imports” and “inferior quality”. The stock price fell all the way and finally delisted from the New York Stock Exchange last year. The business star was sniped.
The problem with Jumei lies in supply chain management, because the beauty industry is too special, and its particularity lies in the fact that offline channels are the main battlefield. This was the case when Jumei emerged. Nowadays, social e-commerce is so popular. , It’s still the same.
In 2019, L’Oréal’s online channel sales in China only accounted for 35%. However, Shanghai Jahwa, a long-established daily chemical company in China, was affected by the epidemic last year and offline channels were shut down for a long time. Channel sales accounted for less than half, and most of them came from offline.
Because beauty is a very high industry since the experience trial and emotional communication, it is not difficult to explain why online sales are so developed, and every time you enter the mall, you can still see various brands of beauty makeup The counter is full.
Five years ahead, the online channels of beauty makeup are not even worth mentioning. Perhaps the annual sales volume of a local brand provincial seller can equal the annual sales of Jumei.
So, for many cosmetics companies, Jumei’s sales channel is very late. Jumei can only sell second- and third-tier brands. Big names mainly sell through third-party sellers. The supply chain is lengthened. Once the audit fails to keep up, quality problems are prone to occur.
This is why Chen Ou made up his mind to cut off all third-party platform business lines in 2014 and focus on self-operated business.
For the same problem of dealing with 20% categories, Vancl chose to break through-since 2011, it has continued to expand its categories, from apparel to daily necessities, cosmetics, furniture and electrical appliances, etc., There are over ten thousand categories.
However, Vancl, which started from a single-point break in the apparel industry, took several years to integrate the industry. After expanding so many categories at once, one of the most direct consequences is the rapid increase in the cost of invisible integration.
At that time, some analysts believed that in Vancl’s backlog, there were many new categories. The reason is that Vancl lacked truly professional new category management personnel.
New products are not easy to sell, inventory costs increase, and reverse logistics costs (that is, return costs) increase. In order to sell, increase marketing To obtain traffic, advertising costs soared from 200 million yuan in 2009 to 1 billion in 2011, and the cost rose greatly, and eventually fell into a black hole.
Why can Amazon continue to expand its categories, but it can always run wild?
Because Amazon’s expansion of categories is very fine, such as high-priced supply chain talents, 28% of operating costs are invested in technology for digital supply chain, refined integration of logistics systems, etc., so that costs are continuously reduced, thereby The burden of expanding categories is compressed to the range that the company can bear.
In the past few years, Vipshop also expanded its product categories, but in the end it returned to special sales.
If there is a problem with the category, it will increase marketing investment to obtain traffic, then fall into a strange circle, and even be controlled by capital due to lack of funds.
The shoe vertical e-commerce company LeTao.com, which was once prosperous for a while, was forced to transform after falling into a vicious circle and was forced to transform under the pressure of capital and profitability.
Letao founder Bi Sheng concluded by saying: If e-commerce cannot be profitable and get rid of capital constraints, then the so-called “vertical e-commerce” is a “scam.”
For more than three to ten years, why is Vipshop still alive and well?
In the years when China’s e-commerce was developing rapidly, the entire Internet industry was full of impetuous and radical, money-burning price wars, bombardment-style marketing, and assault-style expansion. However, Vipshop maintains a surprisingly calm attitude as an “Internet layman”, and intensively cultivates 20% of its categories, which is “one-acre three-dimensions”.
Unexpectedly, this became its standing for more than ten yearsThe most critical reason for the downfall.
In those years, Vipshop’s self-positioning is very clear. Shen Ya believes that if you want to survive under the squeeze of the integrated e-commerce giants, you must not do the same as them, but must be even more different. The characteristic is a weapon to build barriers.
His idea is simple and restrained: Continue to develop brands in clothing. The more clothing categories and the higher the cost-effectiveness, the greater the interest of consumers, and suppliers are more willing to come to Vipshop. This growth The flywheel will spin.
Vipshop’s virtuous circle (Source: Li Yang “Vipshop’s E-commerce Logic”)
Shen Ya is a traditional retailer and understands the importance of the supply chain very well. The key to a good supply chain is nothing more than three points: Control product quality from the source, improve the efficiency of the supply chain, and optimize the user experience.
Focusing on these points, Vipshop has focused on these few things, all of which reflect a shocking refinement ability.
One is to conduct a very strict qualification review on suppliers.
Unlike Jumei Youpin, Vipshop itself is mainly a second- and third-tier clothing brand. It is not difficult to establish contact with suppliers. The key is to ensure product quality. Therefore, it has set a very high entry threshold. The brand owner of Pinhui must be one of the famous/well-known brand manufacturer, authorized general agent, authorized general distributor, branch company, branch, etc.
In addition, detailed and specific quality standards have been formulated for each category of goods. And constantly inspect the supplier’s goods.
The second is to form a “buyer” team.
This is the biggest feature of Vipshop. Generally, Internet companies try to break down large teams intoSmall team operation. This small team that can be flexibly split and combined is conducive to adapting to the rapidly changing market environment, but Vipshop will have the largest proportion of the team in the Ministry of Commerce. There are more than 1,000 people in the Ministry of Commerce, and there is a buyer composed of more than 600 people. Hand team, now the number of buyer team has exceeded 1,000.
Many of these buyers come from traditional sales and fashion.
Although buyers are also responsible for product selection and procurement, they are not simple procurements. Procurement often only focuses on factors such as price, quality, and logistics. Buyers must also plan and operate from the perspective of the boss. Product.
For example, which material should I choose? How to display the design of these goods in the store? How many sku should be ordered for different sizes of cowhide and sheep leather bags? Are the goods at this price suitable for prospective customers?
This also determines that buyers need to deal with many departments.
The department where Vipshop buyers deal with (Source: Li Yang “Vipshop’s E-commerce Logic”)
Clothing is a non-standard product with a high degree of personalization. Buyers can pick out more fashionable products from the inventory, and human judgments are added to make the products more attractive.
The third is deep binding with suppliers.
The main purpose is to deeply embed suppliers in the industry chain of Vipshop through services and benefits. Vipshop has 4 simple benefits when persuading suppliers to “join in”:
1. Clean up inventory
2. Second packaging and marketing of the brand, and it’s free
3. Limited time limited sale mode
4. Short billing period, no mortgage
Cleaning up inventory is something that any special sales platform can provide, which is not surprising, but the other three items all hit the supplier’s pain points.
What Vipshop will do is consignment sales, but it does not just put the major brands on the platform and sell it. Instead, it uses its own shooting, planning and marketing team to carry out secondary packaging and promotion of them, and follow While the suppliers formed in-depth cooperation, they also promoted their own brands and supplier brands.
The limited time and limited sale is to avoid the offline price system of many brands from being impacted.
The last one is to make the supplier overjoyed. The payment cycle affects the supplier’s capital turnover. Even if the gross profit of a brand is very high, if the billing period is extended for a few months, it may be close to the cost, or even not earned. What is the money? At that time, many comprehensive e-commerce platforms were more or less in arrears. For example, at the end of 2012, the makeup brand Afu withdrew from Jingdong Mall because of the payment conflict.
With this combination, suppliers have to make Vipshop a very important choice, and even develop products suitable for the platform for Vipshop.
Fourth is self-built warehousing + logistics.
In 2007, Liu Qiangdong discovered that 70% of JD’s complaints came from logistics. At that time, the logistics company’s development model was inconsistent with e-commerce: the courier company settled with the courier, and the delivery was obligatory, and the receipt was It makes money, and e-commerce hopes that express delivery can better deliver goods to users.
Logistics made JD.coming in its throat, and Liu Qiangdong was able to reject the crowd. Under the pressure of JD’s capital chain was broken, he made the decision to build its own logistics.
Three years later, Shen Ya, who discovered the same problem, also decided to build its own logistics. This was a very money-consuming decision. As we all know, logistics is a heavy asset. Without 4 large logistics centers, it would be difficult to cover the national market, only warehouses. It will cost 2.4 billion yuan. Counting all types of secondary warehouses and distribution stations, it is impossible to establish a nationwide logistics system without 3 billion yuan.
Shen Ya reluctantly cut the meat, established Pinjun Logistics in 2013, and built five logistics centers a year later, ensuring the speed and quality of Vipshop’s logistics.
However, due to the high cost of logistics, Vipshop’s performance costs have also been pushed up. It has increased year by year from 2014 to 7.5 billion yuan in 2018, eroding the company’s profits. Pinhui terminated the operation of Pinjun Logistics and entrusted the delivery service to SF Express.
So, many people think that onlyPinhui failed in terms of logistics construction.
But it’s not true. Vipshop will do service after all. As a customer, the visible service from Vipshop is delivery. Under the logistics conditions around 2010, if you don’t have logistics, Vipshop will It may not last today.
When Vipshop was busy building logistics in 2010, a brand discount website called Baba BRAIN in Shanghai went bankrupt. This website is similar to the Vipshop model, but it does not have its own warehouse and can only be directly distributed by the brand. Brand owners complained that the website volume was too small, the delivery was not active, and the delivery time was long, which caused a surge in consumer refunds and eventually shut down.
The logistics system for special sales is different from other e-commerce companies. The sale cycle is short, and the inventory turnover rate is less than one week. If the delivery time is more than ten days, it means that the consumer has not received the goods they grabbed last time when they next snapped up. Who is willing to place an order at this time?
However, the order volume of Vipshop is not of an order of magnitude compared with that of JD.com, which is rich in categories. JD.com can grow JD.com into an independent enterprise worth US$40 billion, but Vipshop cannot support Pinjun’s independent operation. Under the conditions of mature development of domestic logistics companies, it is also a rational choice to choose to stop Pinjun Logistics.
Comparison of the number of orders between Jingdong and Vipshop (Source: Oriental Securities Research Institute)
It can only be said that Pinjun Logistics has completed its historical mission.
Of course, Vipshop still has a lot of sophisticated methods in marketing and customer retention, so I won’t talk about them one by one, but you will find that these are not difficult to replicate. Why can they become the moat of Vipshop? ?
We said that good results will be achieved after seeing, thinking, and doing everything. In that era when e-commerce companies are striving to become bigger and stronger, only Vipshop in the vertical e-commerce industry will implement this whole set of practices. After the trip, when other e-commerce companies come back to their senses, the best time has passed.
All values can be condensed into time. Vipshop will do relatively right things at the right time, and that’s all.
Four, Vipshop’s special sales model has come to an end?
The fourth quarter of 2020 is already the 33rd consecutive quarter of profitability for Vipshop, and net profit, number of active users, and total orders have all increased by more than 30%.
But through the gorgeous financial report, in the past five years, Vipshop’s hidden worries have always existed: the growth rate has been falling. Although Vipshop’s revenue has exceeded 100 billion in 2020, its growth rate has fallen to a single digit of 9.58%. In 2015, this figure was 73.82%.
At the same time, Vipshop’s share of the B2C retail market has dropped from 3.3% in 2015 to 2.5%.
In the past 5 years, what happened?
We said earlier that the performance of Vipshop is related to the inventory of apparel companies. Since 2012, after 3 to 4 years of adjustment, the destocking of branded apparel has come to an end. Take Li Ning as an example, in 2011 The channel inventory at the time was nearly 9 months, and it has been declining since 2014, and has stabilized at about 4.2 months in 2019, which is a normal level.
Li Ning channel inventory (month) (Source: Guosheng Securities Research Institute)
Not only that, since the outbreak of the last wave of inventory crisis, brand apparel companies have also learned to be smart and began to strengthen inventory control and increase technology investment. In 2015, it was reported that there were 43 listed companies in the textile and apparel industry. With a cost of over 100 million yuan, concepts such as “smart supply chain” and “flexible supply chain” have also been proposed by apparel companies
Generally speaking, the process of an industry’s solution to inventory problems is also the industry’s transition from chaos toThe process of great governance; the more mature the inventory management, the more mature the industry’s supply chain management.
This means that Vipshop’s advantage in bargaining with clothing brands has been reduced, and the stock dividends that helped its rise in the first place are about to bottom out.
In fact, the year-on-year growth rate of Vipshop’s monthly active users has also continued to slow down since 2016Q3, and for the first time in 2018Q1, user growth has stagnated, which directly led to its weak revenue growth.
Also around 2015, China’s mobile e-commerce reached a critical point, surpassing PC e-commerce. Just like e-commerce is not simply moving offline to online, mobile e-commerce is not simply moving e-commerce from PC to mobile phone. Kai-Fu Lee talked about the new mobile e-commerce at the 2016 “Mobile E-commerce Future Road” salon. Opportunities: content-oriented, scene-oriented and fan-oriented.
Contentization means that high-quality content has become the most powerful traffic generator, bringing consumption opportunities. Xiaohongshu, established in 2013, has become a representative of this aspect. With the help of content, sales reached 700 million in half a year. , Xiaohongshu also launched channels such as “Limited Time Purchase” and “Welfare Agency” for special sales.
Scenarioization is the ability to provide products or services that are very corresponding to consumers’ current scenario needs, or to have precise insights into consumers, and then make a segmentation, so that specific groups of people can be accurately operated. The core of O2O is sceneization.
Fanization means that users will pay more attention to the recommendations of opinion leaders and interact with them, which can also produce the effect of bringing goods. For example, Internet celebrities recommend clothing and beauty on social platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin. Wait.
These new gameplays caught Vipshop by surprise, and to a certain extent distracted Vipshop’s traffic.
What’s more, directly ride the huge wave of the mobile Internet to cut into the sale area. For example, Beibei.com, which was founded in 2014, also launched the “Limited Time Flash” and “Brand Clearance” channels. The products also include clothing and footwear. , Ai Inventory also played the banner of “cleaning up tails”, and further divided the traffic of Vipshop.
Of course, vertical e-commerce is still just a little trouble in the face of integrated e-commerce giants-Tmall Juhuan, JD.com, with its huge user base and capital advantages, easily play special deals.
The most unexpected thing was Pinduoduo, which was launched in 2015. It only took less than a year for the number of users to exceed 100 million. In 2017, when Ali and JD.com still focused on “consumption upgrades” , Pinduoduo began to pass group discounts,Secondary distribution, bargaining, invitation assistance, etc., have rapidly expanded its influence in the WeChat traffic system, and the cost of acquiring customers is extremely low.
Main e-commerce customer acquisition cost
The most notable feature of Pinduoduo’s products is their high cost performance. After excluding the premiums of brands, channels, and distribution, they can often sell products at low prices that exceed common sense.
Since then, Ali and JD.com also followed up quickly, offering tens of billions of subsidies one after another, making this “kings dispute” extremely fierce.
Vipshop’s advantages are being diminished and its living space is being squeezed, so it has made a counterattack—expanding categories, adding categories such as department stores, mothers and babies, and trying to bring new products by breaking the boundaries of sale increase.
However, other categories of goods do not seem to have the characteristics of multiple SKUs and high inventory of clothing items. Vipshop does not have an advantage compared with comprehensive e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD. The road to comprehensive e-commerce is also very long. Difficult to get through.
So in the middle of 2018, Vipshop will go round and round and return to the field of special sales, emphasizing “do what you are good at.”
When discussing core competitiveness, there is a very philosophical statement: The most difficult core competitiveness to replace is also your defect. Ability can be copied, but defect is difficult to imitate.
After the return of Vipshop, it launched discount sales channels such as “Vipshop Quick Grab” and “Last Snatch”, and launched an app called “Vipshop”, which is regarded as Vipshop. The continuation of the special sale model, that is, the use of “small B” groups such as purchasing agents, small and medium wholesalers, etc., to help brand owners solve unsold goods.
There is also the benchmarking of the US retail discount giant T.J.MAXX, opening offline stores on the basis of logistics, and embarking on the layout of new retail.
But theseIt seems that neither can fundamentally solve the plight of Vipshop.
Where is “Vipshop’s trouble”?
“The father of disruptive innovation” Christensen told us in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” that a well-managed and outstanding company may also fail, because once “disruptive technology” comes out, it will Subvert the original business model and have a fatal blow to the enterprise.
Nokia missed the smart phone, so it missed an era, the mobile phone overlord fell to the altar, and finally got in the grass and sold it.
When Nokia’s former CEO Joma Ollila announced at a press conference that he agreed to Microsoft’s acquisition, he said one last sentence: We did nothing wrong, but for some reason, we lost.
While you are still wondering how to make the carriage run the fastest, the appearance of steam engines and cars has completely changed the pattern of the entire game.
We said earlier that Vipshop will rise in the era when brand clothing is destocked. However, apparel companies have matured since then, the efficiency of the supply chain has improved, and the number of competitors for destocking and special sales has increased, making Vipshop. The business model has seen the ceiling.
Vipshop, which has “nothing big to tell”, not only has few extra points, but also has a crisis of trust due to unfair competition and fake goods, which causes points to be reduced.
Even if Vipshop can continue to maintain a state of inability to retreat, there will be models that will have a subversive impact on it, such as C2M, which allows factories to directly connect with consumers, eliminating brand owners, agents, and shopping malls. The intermediate channel link has greatly improved the brand’s inventory, and the product price has also been lower.
E-commerce giants are already laying out the C2M track. Ali launched the “Super Factory Project” and Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing; JD.com launched on the Jingxi platform, also targeting the inclusive market; Pinduoduo launched a “new brand” Alliance”, using the C2M model to co-brand to create explosive products.
Of course, C2M has higher requirements for technology, big data, artificial intelligence, etc. must be mature, and it will take time to truly develop, and it remains to be seen, but this is a trend.
Perhaps, Vipshop is also currently considering how to truly subvert itself and open up a new path from its own unique business path.
But this is a difficult problem. The most difficult reform in the world is to reform ourselves.
This article is from WeChat official account:Shangyinshe (ID: shangyinshecj) , author: hidden business community