Interpretation of the replacement and upgrading of game rules in the e-commerce industry from the perspectives of technology, traffic, marketing, supply chain, and business model.

Editor’s note: This article is from Tencent deep network, author Sun Hongchao ,Edit Fan Xiaodong.

Targeting:

  • 1 With the rise of new models of traditional brands, big manufacturers, big channels and social e-commerce, the marketing-oriented Amoy brand has gradually faded out. But regardless of success or failure, Amoy brand will become one of the most important signs in the history of Chinese brand development.

  • 2 Behind the new retail, Internet penetration growth has slowed further, online traffic and user ceilings have emerged, and channel convergence has become a major trend that cannot be missed.

  • 3 The second generation of e-commerce is coming, new users, new brands and even new production methods will eventually help upgrade “Chinese products” into “Chinese brands.”

Alibaba, Pinto, JD, and even Chinese traditional brand manufacturers are entering the best e-commerce era together. Tencent’s “Deep Network” will launch the “Second E-Commerce Prosperity” series of reports, from the perspective of technology, traffic, marketing, supply chain, business model, etc., to understand the replacement and upgrade of the game rules of the e-commerce industry.

In 2016, Alibaba announced the establishment of “Assisting Business Listing Office”, which is intended to support the rushing brands of Alibaba commercials to accelerate their landing in the capital market.

This unique institution in Chinese business history originated from the joint names of 10 Amoy brands such as three squirrels and Handu Yishe. In the communication with Alibaba, they hope that Alibaba can help the merchants to prepare relevant information before listing, and take the lead to help these brands of e-commerce companies, communicate with the Securities and Futures Commission, exchanges, assist brokers to complete interviews and data due diligence Investigate and establish communication channels with other e-commerce companies that are listed or will be listed soon.

There are data showing that at the time, nearly 100 Amoy brand or Amoy brand related companies filed a listing application, and the total market valuation exceeded 100 billion yuan.

In the 20-year history of China’s e-commerce, “Amoy Brand” plays an important role as well as well-known e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba, JD.com, Dangdang and Jieduo. These ants and ants are thriving on the spring breeze of the development of China’s e-commerce industry, struggling to fight in the ignorant blue ocean, and seize the fleeting opportunity to stand out. At the same time, emerging Amoy brands are also backing the platform, the original Amoy brand has brought Taobao an invaluable brand.Guarantee.

A senior Taobao seller, Hao Si, told Deepnet that “important brands at that time regarded e-commerce channels as ‘sewage’, while Amoy brands made consumers realize that e-commerce platforms are also mature. Brand.”

The platform side and the entrepreneurs accomplish each other and are as beautiful as a fairy tale.

But this kind of beauty will finally pass. As traditional brands, big manufacturers, and big channel operators begin to realize the power of e-commerce channels, players who actively embrace the e-commerce platform and have deeper roots will occupy the central position of the e-commerce stage. .

Before the emerging businesses such as cloud computing generate revenue, the core profit of e-commerce giant Alibaba has always come from the advertising marketing model based on traffic distribution: small and medium-sized sellers on Taobao attract active consumption in a multi-functional and spontaneous mode. The flow of the person, the big brand on Tmall is responsible for buying high-quality traffic with high prices.

If Alibaba is regarded as a sales channel for traffic, then the supplier is a small seller of Taobao, and the consumer is a big seller in Tmall, Taobao or even a good deal. The profit is naturally owned by the channel.

After many years, the Amoy brand finally fell asleep with Alibaba from the lips and teeth. In the main battlefield where the two sides have joined hands, the number of Taobao brands that occupy the top of the list and even enter the list is getting less and less. Instead, they are traditional brands such as Uniqlo, Bosideng, Peacebird and Olay.

“There is money, naturally there is traffic inclination, there is traffic flow naturally there is sales.” Hao Si further said to “Deep Net”, since the first double eleven sold out, I realized that Alibaba has become In the world of big players, “the window of opportunity for grassroots entrepreneurship is very short. If you miss it, you have to wait for a long time.”

The practitioners of a generation of operating companies told Deepnet that the Amoy brand is best at optimizing online marketing, such as buying keywords at a low price or making early judgments about trends.

But in the new era, “First of all, some large brands have high consumer awareness and own official flagship stores. The role of keywords is greatly reduced. Secondly, e-commerce is weakening search, social e-commerce, etc. The emerging model is not the content that the Amoy brand that is used to the keyword model is good at. In the end, the Amoy brand often does not have its own production platform, and the marketing is the main one. Now the extremely low profit has no space for the Amoy brand to survive.”

Amoy brand CEO Yu Zhongwu once said: The 10 years of Amoy brand development is a decade of COPY. Imitation can achieve several hundred million from zero, but rely on imitation to achieve billions, billions Basically impossible. Tao Guo brand Nono women’s CEO Yang Guoliang also publicly stated that Amoy brand is not a real brand. If you can rush in the next 2-3 years, you can become a brand. If you can’t get through, you will still be a seller.

“Assisting the listing office of the merchants” may be the last gentleness that Alibaba can give to the Amoy brand, but unfortunately “the brand is ‘Amoy’ in the middle of the matter, and it is difficult to turn the capital into a dragon”: it is now listedThe Amoy brand is only Handu Yishe (delisted from the New Third Board), Yujiahui (deep GEM), Puppy Appliance (deep GEM), three squirrels (GEM), etc.; Inman, Split and In October, Mommy and others submitted their IPO application and voluntarily withdrew.

More Amoy brands have to face the dilemma of no grain (traffic flow) and no rescue (capital). The worse reality is that with more traditional brands, they will enter the e-commerce and social e-commerce. The rise of the model, the era of Amoy brands can create a brand through a few explosions has long passed.

Nietzsche once said: Fighting with the dragon for too long, he has become a dragon. Some of the Amoy brands who have been fighting with traditional brands for more than a decade have become “dragons” (traditional brands), some are still groping, and others are dead. But regardless of success or failure, Amoy brand will become one of the most important signs in the history of Chinese brand development.

As the brand of Taobao, which focuses on marketing and channels, gradually fades out, the new generation of domestic brands is gradually becoming the mainstream. For these new brands, there are a number of e-commerce platforms that respect the brand’s own original ability, such as Alibaba, Pindai and JD. There are also retail solution solutions represented by Tencent, Zanzan and Weimeng.

In the past two decades, Chinese companies have been the typical representatives of the world’s foundries. Everyone knows that Apple has little knowledge of Foxconn. Just as everyone knows the Amoy brand, few people know the foundry behind it. However, with the advent of the second generation of e-commerce, new users, new brands and even new production methods will eventually help upgrade “Chinese products” into “Chinese brands.”

After the Amoy, the cat is down.

Alibaba has tried to downplay the “Amoy” color of “Amoy Brand”: Although a lot of Amoy brands are born in Taobao of C2C mode, in the official description of Alibaba, Amoy brand is still defined as Taobao Mall. (Tmall) launched a new brand concept based on Internet e-commerce. After Taobao Mall changed its name to Tmall, on June 1, 2012, the Amoy brand was officially renamed Tmall Original (a total of 121 companies obtained the title).

But the outside world still used to call it “Amoy brand.”

In May 2003, Taobao was officially launched. Initially, Taobao only traded online around some idle items, but more and more offline stores realized that Taobao is an excellent channel for entrepreneurship.

The founder of Handu Yishe, Zhao Yingguang, is a typical representative of the founder of the Amoy brand. He has been a representative of the state-owned enterprises in Korea and has experienced an important process from the start to maturity of Korean e-commerce. In 2007, Zhao Yingguang registered his own menswear brand and registered the children’s wear brand in December.

In March 2008, Zhao Yingguang officially resigned and started business. Handu Yishe opened in Jinan, positioning Hanfeng fast fashion brand. At this time, the main business model of Handu Yishe is Korea purchasing, first selling goods on Taobao, and some people will place orders on the Korean website after placing an order. A year later, Handu Yishe began to cooperate with Chinese factories.The production, delivery and other processes are all handled by the factory, and Handu Clothes House is only responsible for retail channels.

With such a simple model, in 2010, Handu Clothes Co., Ltd. became the number one in Taobao apparel category, with more than 2 million members.

Besides Handu clothing, there are a large number of entrepreneurs who are using Taobao to start a business. He Qing, a senior seller who started to operate Taobao stores in 2006, told Deepnet that many entrepreneurs have gone through the following steps: “The first step is to try to sell some idle items in the home, such as trading very frequently in the college student group. The book; then began to understand whether there are some products around for sale on the Internet; finally, after cultivating a group of loyal buyers, go to the factory to customize and build a personal brand.”

This is a vibrant era, but those slow-moving big brands are not aware of the power of e-commerce and marketing, and Chinese retail brands are looking for new exports. Relevant data show that China’s net GDP growth in 2007 was 2,811.5 billion yuan, of which 70% of economic growth came from foreign demand.

This means that the rapid economic growth at that time did not feed back to the domestic retail industry. When the economic crisis broke out in 2008, some small-scale export-dependent brands faced a catastrophe. The most realistic scenario is that many clothes or purses produced in Chinese factories are sold to foreigners at 10 or even 100 times after being branded abroad.

As Handu Yishe did, Amoy brands helped some small brands (manufacturers, factories) to find sales channels, such as wheat bags, green boxes, seven grids, crackers, Yinman, etc. in many Taobao The seller stood out from the crowd and rose into the wind, becoming the big V of that era. With the continuous gathering of stores, Amoy brand has expanded from clothing to cosmetics, toys, food, home and other fields, and the product categories are becoming more and more abundant.

This is a virtuous cycle, the four parties (Amoy brand, small and medium-sized brands, Taobao, consumers) win-win era, some small and medium-sized brands and even white-brand manufacturers quickly use the brand effect of Amoy brand to sell goods and stand firm, Amoy brand They brought a very good flow to Taobao, and Taobao, who realized this, also took the Amoy brand. More importantly, the individual sellers filled with Taobao make the goods mixed, and even have a large number of fakes. Amoy brand is equivalent to helping Alibaba carry out an early selection of goods, which is also very helpful for Taobao’s own quality upgrade.

Before and after the establishment of Taobao Mall, the Amoy brand used the traffic dividend to grow in a geometric multiple, and it quickly became a myth. In 2009, the double eleven was a hit, and the Amoy brand, which played an important role in the first double eleven, became the most popular star in the e-commerce industry except the platform. The capital is moving: the wheat bag continues to receive $80 million in three rounds of investment, seven grids have invested more than 100 million yuan, Handu Clothes has received tens of millions of dollars in investment, and Green Box has received 140 million yuan in investment…

An investor told Deepnet that the panning at that timeThe cards are highly sought after by capital. “The main thing is to see that the returns are extremely fast and the profits are very high.”

Traffic like water capital like wind

In 2009, the first double eleventh eve.

Alibaba, which has just experienced the 2008 global economic crisis, is in a difficult position. Its core B2B business (then mainly small commodity foreign trade) has stagnated growth. Although the transaction is active, Taobao is still at a loss. The newly launched business “Taobao Mall” will target large enterprises and big brands. However, the Chinese retail industry at this time has not adapted to this emerging model, and investment is very difficult.

Fortunately, the Double Eleven still attracts many traditional companies that need to clean up their inventory. Li Ning entered Taobao Mall in 2008, and the official flagship store soon became the sales champion of all its stores. In April 2009, Uniqlo entered Taobao Mall. In November, the monthly sales of Uniqlo’s official flagship store exceeded 10 million yuan. This is a figure that has been unimaginable for Japanese leisure brands that have been working in China for seven years. Also joined are well-known brands such as Lenovo and Jack Jones.

When the second double eleven arrived, the marketing activities of Taobao Mall have evolved into the most important activities of the entire Alibaba Group. In that year, Taobao Mall’s single-day sales reached 936 million, more than 20,000 yuan per second transaction volume, a total of 181 stores over one million. The top two stores were Boyang Home Textiles and Jack Jones’ flagship store, both of which sold more than 20 million.

This figure fully demonstrates the hidden energy of Chinese business. Domestic factories, brands, and small and medium-sized enterprises are beginning to realize the power of Chinese consumption from the power of Chinese manufacturing.

The opposite of the coin is that Amoy brands can no longer eat dividends because of information asymmetry. The crazy double eleven made the retail industry’s understanding of e-commerce begin to change. Previously, most retail companies’ e-commerce departments were often composed of company network management + sales staff + financial personnel. The simplest was only 3 to 5 people. The e-commerce department that started retail enterprises is often personally coached by the CEO or even the chairman.

A large number of traditional offline brands began to surge into Tmall. Alibaba’s overall flow resources were tilted towards big brands, and Amoy brands had to start to suffer from the double squeeze of traditional brands and traffic.

The good days created by Amoy brand are coming to an end.

2013 Double Eleven, Amoy brand changed its name to Tmall’s original second year, Tmall women’s traditional brand and Amoy brand sales in the top 10 each accounted for 5 seats; in 2014, women’s clothing Uniqlo is second only to Han Du The clothing store ranked second, the traditional brand in the men’s category has dominated the world; in 2015, Uniqlo reached the clothing category Grand Slam, the top five women’s clothing only Han Duyi, an Amoy brand, single store sales ranked in the top 20 In addition to Han Duyi, only Lin’s wood industry is the Amoy brand.

He Qing withdrew from Taobao during this period. In her opinion, Taobao has completely become the guide for Tmall. “The first few sellers of Taobao will receive double/p>

The data shows that Amoy brand needs to meet certain conditions after following the entry of Ali Group into the offline store: First, online sales are above 50 million; second, the brand is determined to take the O2O model; third, the actual price is not Less than 3 times the cost; fourth, the warehousing logistics system is perfect; fifth, the same price online and offline.

Alibaba’s big cake for the Amoy brand is three goals: First, there are 100 independent counters in a year experience store; Second, the real two legs walk, the same price of two lines O2O mode, a more stable brand route; third, enhance brand awareness and reputation, and obtain more viscous user resources and traffic.

Before this, some head Amoy brands have already gone offline, but the results are not good:

In 2011, Inman opened the first physical store in Guangzhou, adopting the strategy of direct operation and joining as a supplement. Once the store expanded to more than 30, but all of them were closed;

In 2015, Inman proposed the “Thousands of Cities” program, with the goal of opening 10,000 stores in 2020, once again opening the offline layout;

The cracker opened its first offline store in Beijing Zhuangsheng Sogo Department Store in 2012 and ended in failure;

One of the founders of the cracker, Tang Dafeng, has repeatedly said that the split will be under the line, and plans to invest more than 50 million yuan to open 15 offline stores.

Alibaba is not the first time to push the Amoy brand to the offline: In 2011, Tmall joined the home Amoy brand to launch the “Love Bee Tide” project, which included furniture, sofas, lighting, flooring, wooden doors. The whole category of household building materials, such as cabinets, consists of more than 600 model rooms and shelf display areas, covering an area of ​​50,000 square meters.

After only one year, the project was declared dead.

It seems that Alibaba’s attempt to push the Amoy brand to the offline has basically failed. For Amoy brand, the talents and costs required to operate a physical store under the opening line are completely different from those on the Internet.

Not to mention, although some commented that “in the past two years, as the value of physical stores has been repositioned, the valuation of a large number of offline physical stores has doubled. In the past, the burden of some people turned into wealth.”

But the trouble that once allowed e-commerce to quickly defeat physical stores still exists, that is, the cost of physical stores has always been high. Data from a chain of department stores show that in the third-tier cities in China, the annual rent of physical stores is close to 3,000 yuan per square meter per year, while the first-tier cities are more than 6,000 yuan, and some prime locations cost more.

According to the data provided by some traditional retail channels, the most attractive business models are catering, entertainment, early education, cinema, etc., and Uniqlo, MUJI, Apple specialty stores, famous watch stores, high-end luxury stores, etc. The most popular retail stores in Mao, Wanda and other commercial centers.

At present, Amoy brand is hard to appear on this list.