Production | Tiger Sniff Business Group
Author | Li Ling
On March 10th, at the Alipay Partner Conference, Hu Xiaoming, CEO of Ant Financial, announced that Alipay was upgraded to an open platform for digital living. The opening will focus on the digitalization of the service industry. Hu Xiaoming’s goal is, “In the next three years, work with 50,000 service providers to help 40 million service industry businesses complete digital upgrades.”
In order to maximize the service provider ’s demand for distribution efficiency, this time Alipay is revising and upgrading, and the product logic will change from “people looking for services” to “service looking for people”.
Unexpectedly, 63,000 viewers flooded into the live broadcast room of the pure business strategy speech. Nearly 20,000 were companies participating in the “cloud participation” through live broadcast, and there were nearly 100 Alipay cooperation. Fang sent users with corporate logos to “visit the scene”. Compared with the expansion of the Alipay Mini Program Summit in 2019 due to the large number of people, the heat is not reduced.
“It ’s not enough just to help businesses move their stores online. The key is to open up our ability to accumulate more than a decade.” Hu Xiaoming said that according to the needs of the merchant, the entire Alibaba business operating system will be acquired by customers, Resources such as operation, logistics, applets, member management, payment finance, and geographical location recommendation are all open.
Aside from the digital nature of Alipay, the above-mentioned resources based on Alipay will be opened to merchants. It can be understood that Alipay will open up the resources of the entire platform to Alibaba service providers to “oxygenate”. If some of the government services that pay daily fees are eliminated, Alipay’s “new infrastructure” in the service industry this time will undoubtedly be the “heart booster” for Ali’s local life.
Alibaba’s local life is dominated by hungry and word-of-mouth, but its market share has declined in recent years. Now Ali has transplanted local life services to a better development soil-Alipay.
Why Alipay?
A widely accepted fact is that Alipay is no longer a payment platform. With payment as its core function, Alipay has become the closest tool to money, so users have a strong consumption mind. And the tools such as money collecting code, Internet of things equipment, code scanning and ordering, shop system, card coupons, flowers and flowers form a strongly connected upstream and downstream consumption system.
For local living service providers, this is undoubtedly the best growing environment.
From September 2019, Alipay Mini Program was upgraded to Ali XiaoProcedure, to this time the full opening of the digitalization of the service industry, Ali restarted the battle for the local life market.
If you choose to relocate your local life at this time, except that 80% of China ’s service industry has not been digitized and the market to be developed is broader, the bigger reason is that the epidemic has caused small and medium-sized businesses and self-employed businesses to stagnate, and Alipay-related epidemics The measures will not only help to regain merchants, but also increase user stickiness.
Take Meicai.com, a provider of B-end food sources, as an example. During the epidemic, it quickly opened the consumer market for households and individuals with the help of Alipay channels.
The Alipay applet opened by Meicai Mall during the epidemic period. Through the exposure of Alipay’s centralized traffic portal, it has gained more than 800,000 new users a week, and the order coverage has expanded to 80 cities across the country. The average daily active users are more than 100,000. Both the purchase and retention rates are over 40%.
Under the epidemic, the onlineization of living services has become a consensus, and the promotion of digitalization of the service industry has become a top priority. Hu Xiaoming revealed that “Alipay will exert unprecedented ecological openness. After the App upgrade is completed, the Alipay homepage platform traffic will be fully open to the outside world.”
Tiger has previously reported that the total number of self-employed households in the country in 2018 was approximately 97.764 million. Under the impact of the epidemic, only Hubei Province, the number of individual merchants fell by 60%, and the transaction volume fell by 70%. In the context of the current economic recovery, what is the most important concern for members of the small business system is how to resume work? What can I use to resume work?
At this moment, no matter to small merchants or large service providers, the dividends brought by the upgrade of such a large-scale technology platform is undoubtedly the best “force”. Founder and CEO Liu Chuanjun said frankly, “Alibaba’s ability to open up the platform is a great advantage for us service providers.”
In order to strengthen the life service nature of products, Alipay has embedded convenience services such as “take-away home”, “fruit and vegetable supermarket” and “medicine” on the homepage. Alipay’s mini-programs and life numbers have also been upgraded to 3.0: Open the global operating system to merchants, and open the public domain capabilities, public domain traffic, and business scenarios controlled by the homepage platform to merchants and service providers.
For comprehensive opening up, there are two specific measures. One is to highlight living services in the application center display booths, and the number of display booths has increased from 9 to 14. The second is to launch a living service area to provide intelligent algorithms and classified entry.
The entire revision focuses on the service industry: while increasing the exposure of service providers, it also allows users to place their life service needs ahead of other services such as payment and shopping.
This is self-evident for local life business.