Where is the digitalization of the retail industry? A veteran who has worked for 20 years has something to say.
文 | Yang Yafei
Since starting a localization project for Wal-Mart, Zeng Zhaozhi has plunged into the retail industry and has been in the industry for 20 years. In this process, the retail market has undergone several rounds of reshuffle integration, but Zeng Zhaozhi and the technology he founded, not only unaffected, but also emerged with the industry revolution, so far served 40w+ merchants, the number of trading days of the platform More than 6 million pens. Zeng Zhaozhi thinks that it is very simple, really finds the pain points of the merchants, and then solves it at a low cost.
The pain points of merchants obviously vary from time to time. “They sell a set of software for hundreds of thousands of dollars.” In 2007, the business system software of Shangchao was very hot. Zeng Zhaozhi discovered that the software on the market was expensive, which made many mid-waist businesses discouraged. And Kemai has been calculating the “great ability, low cost” Pratt & Whitney concept, so that the merchant system can be quickly productized. This finally led to the release of the product named “Yu Shang” in 2007. The business management system quickly became popular after it went on the market, becoming the industry’s “a trump card product”, so that now 12 years have passed. There are also many loyal fans.
The long-term success of the retail market is not easy. The industry revolution is full of waves, and every step is very cautious. Different from any previous period, in recent years, thanks to the booming development of mobile Internet, online and offline integration has become a consensus, and digital transformation is imminent. But for many retailers, a similar scene reappears. One is that they don’t know how digitalization should be carried out. The other is that they are ashamed of the bag and can’t make enough chips for the transformation and upgrading.
In an exclusive interview with the retail boss, Zeng Zhaozhi, founder and chairman of the company, said that more than 60% of the traditional mid-waist retailers that the company has touched in the past understand that digital construction is the trend, but Some lack capital, talent, and effective organization. In his view, on the occasion of the next challenging decade, retailers can fully grasp the development of new opportunities by fully leveraging the power of the industry and fully integrating into the industrial Internet ecosystem.
Retailing in the transformation and upgrading: The rise of China and Taiwan
The retail industry is in a critical period of transformation and upgrading. On the one hand, the mobile Internet infrastructure is becoming more and more perfect: based on mobile Internet scenarios such as WeChat payment and Alipay, fresh gameplay and scenes such as scan code payment, AR shopping, and LBS precision marketing are emerging one after another. The traditional retail era is opaque and confrontational. The status of the past has become a past tense, and the consumption experience has greatly improved. On the other hand, different online and offline retailers have entered the market, and they have come to the home and shop to the full-channel business, and the industry competition has entered a hot stage.
The current retail market is complex and varied, and the channels and experiences are extremely rich, giving consumers ample and flexible options.For some traditional retailers, the embarrassing side is that once the loyal users lost their knowledge for any reason.
This grim industry situation is, to some extent, compelling companies to undertake a full digital transformation. Zeng Zhaozhi believes that all the transformation and upgrading that the retail industry is doing now stems from the rapid changes of consumers. The most important feature is that consumers are online and young.
For businesses, this is not easy to achieve. The enterprise has accumulated internal systems such as POS, ERP, finance, and HR for many years, which are relatively closed and independent, and the system lacks connection with the external C-end. Even after serving domestic merchants for 20 years, Zeng Zhaozhi discovered that many systems are still under pure line and have not yet been connected with online scenes.
In Zeng Zhaozhi’s view, in the past era of consumer Internet, the main thing to do was the online work of consumers. But now it has stepped into the era of industrial Internet. The industrial Internet is changing the efficiency of the TOB, and let B and C be effectively connected. Among them, the central Taiwan will play a very important role.
The concept of China-Taiwan has sparked heated discussions in the industry in recent years. With the Internet giants such as Ali and Tencent as representatives, they have adjusted their organizational structure and built their respective capabilities in China.
The thinking of Zhongtai is reflected in the “big and medium-sized Taiwan, small front-end”, that is, the company needs a large “中台” team to provide technical support and standardize the output to each small team. Create a flexible and innovative environment to achieve efficient integration of internal resources.
One of the great benefits of the middle office is its relative flexibility. The digital transformation of enterprises must greatly transform existing IT architectures and business processes. In the middle, it can help enterprises to respond quickly to market changes on the basis of the background ERP and other systems, so as to fully realize the digital ecology of “fast iterative front-large platform-stable back-end”.
The construction of the central Taiwan is divided into two ways: self-built and cooperative third parties. For some head retailers, because of the relatively strong funds, there are certain technical teams, often choose to build their own capacity. For most middle waist merchants, due to lack of sufficient capital investment, effective organization and lack of excellent IT team, they often choose to cooperate with third parties.
For the difference between the two, Zeng Zhaozhi believes that the head retailer has achieved good results in the construction of China and Taiwan in recent years, but from the perspective of the entire industry, even the head retailers are generally labeled as “funded”. Labels are also facing the challenge of lack of talent. For most middle-waist businesses, the construction of China-Taiwan is relatively backward, and it is necessary to use the power of ecology to create a powerful energy.