The core goal of the Alipay Small Program in 2019 is to improve the operational capabilities of the business.
Alibaba, 4 months ago, the Alipay small program technical team took over the “Ant Jinfu CEO Special Award” from Ant Financial CEO Jing Xiandong, which is considered to have been obtained for some time in the past. Appreciation of the results.
Today, the number of small programs is 1 million+, the monthly users are 500 million+, and the 7-day retention rate is 40%… This is the transcript of the first anniversary of the Alipay program. In successively opened Taobao, Tmall, UC, Gaode, nails, hungry, Tmall Elf and other Ali applications, today’s Alipay applet has evolved into Ali applet .
But for the small program team, this is just the beginning. In addition to the WeChat small program, Baidu’s small programs and headline small programs have all been launched in the past year, joining the small program’s arms race.
Inside, after completing the initial low-level technology construction, the core goal of Alipay’s small program in 2019 is to improve the operational capabilities of the merchants; externally, Alipay’s small program will be connected to Sina Weibo, officially from the station to the station. Also, look for new flow replenishment.
Enter deep water area
In August 2017, Alipay’s small program began public beta, and it officially went on line one year later. By September of this year, it has officially passed the year.
In the past year, Alipay’s small program has been opened up with various applications such as Taobao, Tmall, UC, Gaode, Nail, Hungry, and Tmall Elf in the Ali system. In the internal ecological process of Ali, the Alipay applet performed particularly well in the sinking market.
At present, in the list of Alipay applets, the first and fifth rankings are the “daily must grab” and “one tao sell” applets operated by the team of the media and the Ali mother team. According to Guan Zhong, in the past year, Alipay’s small program has brought 100 million new users to Taobao (but the proportion from the sinking market has not been disclosed). Up to now, the number of users of Alipay APP has reached 1 billion, and the number of users nationwide has exceeded 850 million.
Mastering such a huge traffic portal, how can we better focus on “services”? The answer given by Guan Zhong is to output to the B terminal.
After a year of development, the B-side merchants on the Alipay line program have now exceeded 80 million, and the number of small programs has exceeded 1 million. However, the small program team found that many merchants, despite having a small program, but still have no way to operate, so “improving the operational capabilities of the business” became the core goal of the small program in 2019.
For this Alipay, the corresponding solutions are given on both sides of the product and operation.
The product has launched a light member. Said to be a member, it is actually a special member marketing tool. By combining the characteristics of sesame credit and flower buds, “light member” allows consumers to become members without pre-payment of any fees, first enjoy preferential benefits, and then settle membership fees after expiration. The core feature is that you can enjoy the first payment. The reason why it is “light” is because configuration can be online, and has no underlying background, and more is a change in member marketing.
Relatively speaking, this membership model can form a kind of peer protection for both B and C: Help B to promote revenue and stimulate C consumption. For merchants, you can quickly stimulate repeat customers and pull back purchases.
In Guan Zhong’s view, the current Alipay applet focuses on combining centralized and decentralized traffic, opening traffic channels and portals, and building more service scenarios and capabilities. The light membership model is, to some extent, a decentralized traffic distribution that encourages merchants to build their own private domain traffic pools.
Although centralized traffic distribution is still the current dominant practice of Alipay applet, encouraging third-party applets to attract aggregated traffic itself is increasingly being valued by Alipay. This gameplay is more evident in the marketing side.
In order to improve the self-operating ability of the merchants, the Alipay program and the developer “committed” the “traffic-to-gambling” agreement on the same day: the merchants get 1UV for themselves, and the Alipay applet can give 3000PV exposure.
At present, the business UV is still more to obtain offline, and Alipay’s PV is more from the flow of Alipay and Ali e-commerce ecosystem. However, this traffic will be specifically allocated to those categories of merchants, and how the allocated traffic will serve the merchants more efficiently. It is still unknown.
As Guan Zhong said, “The main battlefield of the small program must be offline. Combining offline and online is what we have to do.” After the online mature, the Alipay applet is now beginning to explore the line. Next, drive into the deep water area.
From inside the station to outside the station
After opening up with the Ali system, the Alipay applet slowly extended its tentacles to the station.
At the first anniversary of the September 17th, Alipay’s small program announced that it will fully interoperate on Sina Weibo’s three levels of scenarios, products and platforms. For Alipay, this is the first time to open the location of the applet to an external service provider.
According to Tian Liying, vice president of Weibo, Alipay’s small program is displayed in three main places in Weibo: private letter, Weibo user home page and attention stream. It is reported that private letter sharing will be the earliest sharing scene, users can put Alipay applet private letters into Weibo’s individuals and communities..
The advertisements between the current Weibo information stream have begun to affect the user experience, and the cooperation between the two parties is relatively restrained from the current point of view. It is understood that only the big V who has been invited by the whitelist can open the Alipay applet.
The conditions for cooperating whitelists are more stringent. For example, they must have independent development capabilities and can provide services to users, such as cat’s eye, KFC, etc. In addition, even white-listed companies, users distribute the frequency in the stream every day. There are also restrictions, currently only one small program can be shared per hour…
The payment tool originated from the initial question of the “innate social genetic deficiency” Alipay applet, and finally found a new social flow with Weibo, which will solve the social fission ability to some extent. insufficient. Although compared to WeChat’s strong social attributes, Weibo’s most powerful place is content, but the user-friendliness of content is exactly what Alipay needs.
At the press conference of the day, Tian Liying said that the future of Alipay’s hot search list will be linked to or combined with Weibo’s hot search and associated with Alipay related services. The hot content of Weibo can also be displayed in small programs in several major portals such as Alipay Life and Urban Services.
For Weibo, the interoperability with the Alipay applet is equally significant. As we all know, Weibo’s revenue mainly depends on advertising and value-added services. Weibo’s 2018 financial report shows that its advertising and marketing revenue is 1.5 billion, accounting for 87.21% of net revenue.
Since the commercialization started in 2013, the number of network red and MCN institutions that have settled in Weibo has exceeded XX million. In 2018, the revenue of the red portal owner and content shopping guide of Weibo platform reached 254. Billion, e-commerce has become a boom.
But for a long time, Weibo has been unable to achieve a real closed loop of commodity trading on its own platform. In the past, users who planted grass on Weibo often needed to jump to Taobao or other channels to complete the purchase. For Weibo, some commissions were taken away by the e-commerce channel.
All this will be solved with the Alipay applet and Weibo interoperability. Guan Zhong revealed that Alipay’s small program will create its own self-operated small shopping mall for Weibo’s red-haired people, and users can complete the purchase directly in Weibo. From the point of view of commissions, Weibo’s income has increased in disguise, which is not a small stimulus for Weibo, which is increasingly weak in advertising marketing revenue growth.
The financial report shows that Weibo’s advertising revenue in the second quarter of this year was US$371 million, a slight increase of 0.2% year-on-year, and value-added service income was US$61.18 million, up 8% year-on-year, up from 24% in the previous quarter. Speed dropped by 16%.
However, to achieve this step, Weibo may still have to wait for a while. According to the timetable for cooperation between the two parties, the third quarter of 2019 will be the preparatory period, and will be introduced into Alipay’s small program in the form of targeted invitations; the fourth quarter of 2019 will be the internal testing period, government affairs, people’s livelihood, public welfare, campus, and smart retail applets. Can be settled; and the main focus of Weibo commercialization – commercial brands, government agencies and red agencies will gradually begin beta testing in Q1 in 2020.
Today, both the inventories and the incremental Alipay applet have gained strategic attention at the group level. In August last year, Jing Xiandong had a special exchange with small program developers. At that meeting, Jing Xiandong said: “At least for the next three years, Alipay’s small program must be one of our most important strategies.”
But now, the Alipay applet still faces a lot of opponents. The WeChat applet, which started earlier, has now gained a level of entry. The innate social attributes make the WeChat applet much stronger than Alipay in terms of fission.
At the early WeChat open class at the beginning of this year, Du Jiahui, assistant general manager of WeChat Open Platform Foundation Department, said that in 2018, WeChat applet provided users with more than 100 billion business and government services. By the end of 2018, small programs had been created. More than 500 billion yuan in commercial value. In order to find new high traffic, Baidu also launched a small program from last year and reached a cooperation agreement with hundreds of brand owners.
Another big challenge is that WeChat has not yet achieved an idealized offline scenario. Can Alipay’s small program that enters the deep waters of the line do it?