In this battle of local life, Ali is still adding ammunition.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Connect Insight” (ID: lxinsight), author: Zhong Wei, editor: Midnight.
Ali wants to build a “Little Red Book + Public Comment”.
According to Tech Planet report, recently, Alibaba launched a new product called “Eating Notes”. This product is a new work of Alibaba’s innovative business group. It is a food and grass product. The content format includes graphics, text, Short videos, etc. At present, this function is only open in Guangzhou area.
The core gameplay of Chihuo Note is to share the content of daily food, similar to Xiaohongshu. In addition, the restaurants under the sharing of food notes have been hyperlinked. Each restaurant has a detailed introduction and users can follow them. These functions are more like a condensed version of “Popular Comments”.
Screenshot of Food Notes App
Before this, Ali has been opening up the entrance to local life services-Ele.me fought a tens of billions of subsidies last year, and the major upgrade of Alipay has also been directed at the local life platform.
Food service is an important part of the local life. Taobao has previously launched “Taobao Foodie”, and Alipay has also opened or pre-installed food and entertainment scene entrances.
The difference between the newly launched Foodie Note is that it is no longer a function hidden in mainstream apps, but an independent app. Compared with content communities such as “Lying Ping” previously launched by Ali, Food Notes focuses on the gourmet section, pointing directly to local life and the hinterland of Meituan.
Unexpectedly, Chihuo Note is another content community product. This is also the direction that Ali has been working on. The most obvious is that Taobao has focused on product upgrades in recent years on content and community. Among them, the content ecology is built around “eating”, which is also Taobao maintaining user stickiness and maintaining user usage. It’s an important move for a long time, but the gains these changes have brought to Ali are also limited.
Ali once again made clear his ambitions for local life and content communities. What role does Chihuo Note play? Can you take on the heavy task?
Ali needs a grass planting platform of “Xiaohongshu Edition”
It is nothing new for Ali to end up making content, but it is a brand new attempt to build a grass-planting and commenting platform similar to Xiaohongshu and Dianping.
The interface of Food Notes is similar to Xiaohongshu. On the “discovery” page, bloggers mostly passShare your food experience with pictures and texts. Users can choose to follow the food they are interested in. There is also a topic bar at the top of the page to encourage users to participate in hot topics.
The community represented by Xiaohongshu emphasizes the charm of “planting grass”. It allows users who do not have clear shopping needs to quickly plant or even pull grass. At the same time, when a blogger or anchor endorses the product, users are also more likely to make purchase decisions.
However, compared to Xiaohongshu sharing daily life, Foodie Notes only focuses on the food field, which is more like a Xiaohongshu version of public comment. Food and catering is the most important part of local life services. What Foodie Notes wants to grab is the Meituan market.
In the food notes, the blogger can attach a store link when sending updates. This link contains information such as the location of the store, the number of people who “want to eat”, and the introduction of the dishes. Like Dianping’s favorites page, the stores followed by FoodNote users will also be displayed on the “Want to Eat List” page for later review or in-store experience.
Screenshot of Food Notes App
It is not the first time that Ali came up with the idea of ”grass community + local life service”. As early as 2016, Zhang Yong, CEO of Alibaba Group, officially proposed the three major directions of Taobao in the future at the annual seller conference, namely, communityization, contentization and local life.
Before that, Taobao had upgraded Taobao sale to a shopping guide website ITaobao, inviting senior shopping experts to settle in and share shopping experience, and also tested internal micro-taobao on the mobile Taobao. Looking back, this is like a The “Little Red Book” that focuses on product recommendations.
In recent years, “contentization” has always been the focus of Taobao’s product upgrades. Taobao has also launched Taobao Foodie. This channel dedicated to food brands was placed on the Taobao homepage. At that time, Taobao declared that it would focus on ” “Eat” creates a brand new content ecology.
When content platforms are all doing e-commerce, it is not new for Ali to start content and communities. Betting on the content community once allowed Taobao to increase the user’s use time, but it can also be found that Taobao’s e-commerce attributes make it quite difficult for it to become a community.
Earlier, integrated e-commerce platforms such as Tmall and Koala started operating their own grass-growing communities, but so far, Ali has not been able to cultivate a successful grass-growing community.
For Ali, a small red book-like “Public Comment” with a grass-growing atmosphere and capable of weeding is needed, and Foodie Notes is responsible for this important task.
With the help of Ali ecology, Food Notes can quickly complete the closed loop from planting grass to weeding. Are you hungry? Word of mouth can fill in store information and provide consumption channels for it, and it will become closer to the life scene of Alipay and closer to the food field. Taobao can help it expand into more diversified areas.
According to Tech Planet report, Chihuo Note also created a new content system-Chihuo Video Number. Chihuo Video Number recruits creators from external platforms such as Douyin and Station B, and can provide traffic to high-quality content creators. And other support. At the same time, the management background of the video account of the food is Ali Big Fish, which can enrich the content of the notes of the food.
And Chihuo Note can solve the problems of user retention and traffic growth encountered by Alibaba. When the scale of conversion of content grass becomes larger and larger, it can also attract more and more users to consume and repurchase.
However, for Ali, there is no successful precedent for creating a content platform with no e-commerce attributes. This also means that the future fate of Chihuo Note is unpredictable.
Currently, the content of the blogger’s update on the foodie notes has yet to be enriched. When sharing the daily food content of growing grass, the foodie notes set a community threshold. Users can only get 70 points in the “foodie level test”. Certification. At the same time, Chihuo Note is currently only open to Guangzhou.
On the whole, Chihuo Note is still in its infancy, and whether this “introduction” can erupt is still unknown.
Ali continues to attack Meituan
Strengthening catering is an important step for Ali to cut into local life services.
In the past, Ele.me was acquired by Ali and integrated with the word-of-mouth business to become Ali’s local life company. Ali’s expansion in the local life field is in a very urgent state.
As Ele.me’s market share in the food delivery sector continues to decrease, its revenue in Q4 2020 will be 7.249 billion yuan, while Meituan’s related business revenue has reached triple digits during the same period.
Picture source trickCommercial Securities
On May 14, Zhang Yong stated at the earnings call that Ali will continue to vigorously build Ele.me as the entrance to local life services in the future. On the one hand, it will continue to convert Ali’s users in the consumer sector into more hungry users; on the other hand, it will continue to increase the cross-penetration of catering services and non-catering services to enhance users’ use of a variety of life services.
Where do users come from? Earlier, Ele.me has always been considered to be a single-soldier battle, while Meituan and Dianping are working together. Since the advantage of word-of-mouth is to help businesses carry out member precipitation and front-end traffic distribution, it is not as good as Dianping in terms of content and grass-rooting atmosphere, so it missed many users.
The launch of Alibaba’s Food Notes this time may also fill the gap left by word of mouth, reach a synergy with Ele.me, and further expand the catering market.
In addition, Ali’s layout in the catering field has also expanded from the C-side to the B-side in recent years. Alibaba has successively acquired Keruyun and “Don’t wait for delicious food”, adding more to all aspects of the catering B-end service, and forming an ecological closed loop between word of mouth and Ele.me.
Alibaba’s local life business has been integrating with Ali’s other resources at a rapid pace.
“Today, opening Alipay, Taobao, Word of Mouth, and Ele.me are the same, with a set of user systems and a set of trading systems. Only after opening up, we will enjoy the increase in users brought by Taobao and Ant Financial Space.” Wang Lei, CEO of Ali Local Life Services, once mentioned the status of Ali’s local life services after integration.
At the beginning of 2020, Alibaba announced Alipay’s “transformation plan”-upgrading to “digital life open platform”, from a tool-based App to a life service platform. In addition to the upgrade of Alipay, Ele.me also transformed from a food delivery platform to a life service platform that “solves all needs around users” in July 2020.
Picture source is hungry? WeChat public account
Whether it is Alipay or Hungry, there is a trend of “Meituanization”, which also makes the outside world believe that Ali’s local life business is moving from the center of the group to the center of the group as never before.
As Ali has launched local life services through multiple channels for many years, it has formed a trend of chasing down Meituan.
Hema Xiansheng’s fresh food distribution field is essentially a consumer’s three meals a day, which has moved Meituan’s cakes.
Meituan has launched the Meituan flash sale in recent years, focusing on the timely delivery of retail products, and Ali also launched the “Fresh Department Store”One hour up” Taoxian Da.
In the field of travel, Meituan Bicycles and Harrow Bicycles are catching up. In terms of wine travel, there are flying pigs restricting Meituan.
As Meituan expands to more businesses such as e-commerce, retail, etc. based on Meituan Waimai, Ali is also holding its ground, and through local life business, further improve the e-commerce and new retail system, and complete all-round restrictions on Meituan .
Can Meituan still be able to stand firm with the wolves waiting?
It is not surprising that Internet giants want to do local life business.
In Ali’s main business, Taobao contributes a lot of revenue to Ali. It has a large number of users, but it has also been questioned due to its excessive dependence on advertising revenue. If Ali can occupy the entrance of local life services, it can also feed back Taobao and enrich its revenue model.
In addition to Alibaba, Douyin has also formally established a local life service department with an online group purchase function. Attracting users through short video content, and then entering the local life field through live broadcasts, Douyin stores, etc., Douyin has an advantage in traffic conversion.
Baidu, Didi, WeChat and many other giants have been involved in local life service business. Behind the countless entrants, local life services are actually a mature business.
In terms of resources such as merchants and users, and in infrastructure such as intra-city distribution, Meituan has established barriers to competition.
Hungry? It seems difficult to catch up. Ele. Hungry previously launched a tens of billions of subsidies to compete for users in August 2020, but this local life war came to an end two months later.
QuestMobile released statistics in June 2020. The monthly active users of Meituan and Ele.me were 144.78 million and 76.61 million respectively. However, in October of the same year, Ele.me’s monthly active users surpassed Meituan Waimai. , This is also Ele.me. In the past two years, for the first time in the past two years, monthly active users are higher than Meituan Waimai on the App side.
But from the specific revenue level, according to Ali’s 2021 fiscal year financial report, the local life service income Q4 where Ele.me and Word of Mouth are located was 7.249 billion yuan, a far cry from Meituan’s 21.5 billion yuan in the same period. In addition, Meituan is also far ahead in terms of market share.
And this subsidy has undoubtedly aggravated the loss of Ele.me. Alibaba Group CFO Wu Wei once mentioned in a meeting of financial report executives that Ali’s larger loss-making business has basically narrowed across the board, and the biggest change is the local life where you are hungry and word of mouth.
Although Ele.me’s market share is declining, it is difficult for it to expand rapidly by burning money.
Meituan is not without crisis. Surrounded by wolves, Meituan needs to defend its market. Previously, due to commissions and advertising business, the behavior of squeezing merchants and delivery staff has also caused Meituan to suffer many questions.
However, overall, Meituan’s market share in the food delivery sector is still stable. When Ele.me burned money and caused losses, in Q2 and Q3 of 2020, Meituan Food Delivery’s operating profit was 1.253 billion yuan and 768 million yuan, respectively, maintaining profitability.
In addition, in the catering to B-end business, Meituan has a layout in all aspects of catering upstream and downstream, including supply chain, SaaS, digital marketing, and financial support. According to all-weather technology statistics, Meituan has invested in 11 related companies, which is at least twice that of Ali.
Currently, local life services are still in a stage where wolves are waiting for them. Even if Meituan has invested in it for many years, there is still huge room for digging. In the end, how many cakes can Ali grab, and can Meituan hold its ground and achieve sustained profitability?