With this revision, Alipay has changed its thinking to increase the frequency of user use-from a tool to a life service platform

Editor’s note: This article comes from Interface news .

Author | Xiaoxiao Chen Xiao Fang

Edit | Wen Qi Qi

Alipay has changed.

At the Alipay Partner Conference on March 10th, Alipay announced that it would upgrade from a financial payment platform to an open platform for digital living. Under the new positioning, Alipay changed its slogan from “Pay with Alipay” to “Living well, Alipay.”

The homepage of Alipay will also be revised. Specifically, it will increase the number of new home delivery services such as home delivery, fruit and vegetable commerce and super medicine, and the number of display booths from the current 9 to 14. At the same time, the Life Service Zone was launched, providing intelligent algorithms and classified entrances, with the aim of improving the efficiency of merchant service distribution. After Alipay completes the revision, the homepage platform traffic will be fully opened to the outside world, giving more exposure opportunities for third-party services.

These changes all point to “living services”, and Alipay is further strengthening its image as a living platform.

Ant Financial CEO Hu Xiaoming announced at the conference that Alipay will be the world’s largest open platform for digital life. In the next three years, it is necessary to create an open platform for Alipay digital life, focus on the digitization of the service industry, and cooperate with 50,000 service providers to help 40 million service providers complete digital upgrades.

From tools to platforms

At the 2020 Alipay Partner Conference, Alipay released a series of support policies for small and micro businesses, including increasing the popularity of small and micro businesses, and interest-free loans. Rural businesses can also enjoy interest-free loans.

Alibaba ’s support policy has a clear intention of attracting small and micro businesses. According to the observations of interface journalists, small and micro businesses are more willing to use WeChat QR codes to receive payments, especially in sinking markets.

The competition between WeChat Pay and Alipay has been going on for several years. As a latecomer, the market share of WeChat Pay has risen rapidly. According to Analysys data from Analysys, in 2015, Alipay accounted for 68.4% of China’s third-party mobile payment market, and WeChat payment was only 20.6%. But by the second quarter of 2016, Alipay’s market share had fallen to 55.4%, and WeChat Pay had grown to 32.1%.

Compared with WeChat Pay, one of the disadvantages of Alipay is that many users only use it as a payment tool, and the opening frequency and use time are not high. As a national application, WeChat has an advantage in both daily users and duration. In many scenarios, users are more accustomed to using WeChat payment.

Alipay has been working hard to improve the frequency and duration of user opening. In 2016, AlipayLaunched the social function “Life Circle”, and tried to increase the user’s use time through the relationship chain like WeChat. However, in the “Life Circle” function, the content of the rubbing balls in some circles has caused user disputes and has also been ordered to deal with it. Alipay also subsequently brought the feature offline after being questioned.

Since then, Alipay has launched ant forest, ant manor and other public welfare activities, as well as a series of mini-games, in an attempt to increase the frequency and duration of user opening through games. Although these small games can achieve Alipay to a certain extent, its positioning as a payment tool on the user side has not changed. However, the characteristics of low frequency cannot be avoided when it is used as a payment tool.

With this revision, Alipay has changed its thinking to increase the frequency of user use-from a tool to a life service platform, linking offline merchants to establish more life service scenarios, provide users with more services, and use services to pull How often mobile payments are used.

After the revision, the entrance of the mini program will become more obvious. While increasing the frequency of user use, the weight of merchant services will also be higher. Earlier, Alipay’s applet played a less obvious role in living service transactions because its entrance was relatively hidden.

The new version of Alipay will add an entry on the homepage to cover all aspects of life services such as clothing, food, accommodation, and transportation, and will be presented in the form of a small program. For B-end merchants, the centralized traffic that Alipay can provide will give more exposure to merchants.

Although Alipay has changed a lot after the revision, its intention to compete with WeChat for frequency of use has not changed.

The time has come

At the Alipay conference, Hu Xiaoming, CEO of Ant Financial Services, said, “It is not a whim to build an open platform for digital life in Alipay. We have been preparing for this for a long time.” According to Insight, the new version of Alipay planning has been prepared 18 months, originally scheduled to be released a few months later, this time ahead of time, precisely because of the outbreak.

Ant Financial CEO Hu Xiaoming said at the press conference that the biggest change brought by the epidemic is the acceleration of the offline economy’s onlineization. “We have observed that various applications based on the Internet ecology, including community management, medical and health services, and living support, especially local living services with geographical location as the core, have grown very fast, and a number of rapidly rising New Internet applications. “

This year, affected by the epidemic, users stayed at home, but the offline economy suffered a heavy blow, and the demand for online consumption increased significantly. Merchants urgently need online traffic to drive transactions, and users can only choose to place orders online, which makes Alipay’s life services a good promotion opportunity.

According to official data, since January 26 this year, 200,000 merchants have quickly entered the market through take-out and are hungry. According to Alipay data, during the epidemic, the average daily transaction value of the top ten grocery shopping programs of Alipay was nearly three times that before the epidemic.

In a special period, many new merchants choose to settle in Alipay. For example, Meicai, which previously focused on B-side services, spent 10 days in the branch.PayPal, and provide C-end shopping and delivery services. In the first week of the Alipay Mini Program launched on the Meicai Mall, DAU (single-day active users) exceeded 100,000, with more than 800,000 new users and orders covering more than 80 cities. Every day, there are more than 100,000 users growing, and the repurchase rate is as high as 40%.

The tea drink brand “Hi Tea” public relations director told the interface news that during the epidemic, Hi Tea opened a small program in Alipay and currently covers all stores. Previously, Xicha’s cooperation platform was only WeChat Mini Program and Meituan.

During the epidemic, Alipay’s small program partner, Maiyun Business, and Alipay urgently developed small programs for offline businesses and resumed production and operation through digital transformation. In February, Qimai Cloud Merchant helped 20,000 offline stores complete digital upgrades in Alipay. With the help of Qimai, the tea brand “Neixue’s Tea” began to vigorously develop the delivery business. In the past, takeaway channels only accounted for about 20% of sales. Now, in addition to contactless delivery, health and peace of mind cards, there is also online marketing to strengthen takeaway. system.

Applets and life services are just the means of Alipay. The ultimate purpose of Alipay is to connect merchants and consumers with more business scenarios to enhance the competitiveness of the platform. According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of the service industry in GDP in 2019 will reach 53.9%, but 80% of the service industry has not been digitized.

In this context, Alipay has ushered in the right time.

Local life service is a long-term battle

Alibaba has 1.2 billion users worldwide. The number of users is far greater than the word-of-mouth and hungry focus on life services. Therefore, after Alipay accesses more merchant services, it will also promote the growth of local life service transactions in the entire Ali department.

Ali has been in local life services for many years. In 2015, Alibaba and Ant Financial each invested 3 billion yuan to establish a word-of-mouth company. In April 2018, Ali acquired Hungry for 9.5 billion US dollars; in October of the same year, Hungry was merged with word of mouth to form Ali’s local life service company.

According to Trustdata big data, the penetration rate of China ’s takeaway market in 2019 is less than 15%, and the transaction value of the takeaway industry is still expanding. The local service market still has a lot of room for growth in the future.

Under the background that online traffic is gradually saturated, offline traffic entry has become a battleground for giants in the past two years. However, in the life service scene and other offline entrances, small giants such as Meituan have already stood up. In the second half of 2019, Meituan became profitable. After the stock price rose 9%, it became China’s third largest market capitalization Internet company. Only Ali and Tencent ranked ahead of it.

At the same time that the Internet’s demographic dividend is gradually decreasing, the burn-in subsidy model of takeaway platforms can no longer be sustained. The competitive method adopted by Ali is to continuously use his own resources to open up the internal ecology of the Ali system and try to bring new growth to the hungry and word of mouth. In September 2019, is word of mouth hungry? Successively announced strategic cooperation with Gaode and HemaAt the same time, Ali conducts diversion for the hungry through the joint members between the applications.

As C-side traffic and profits become more and more limited, preempting merchant resources has become the core of the competition between the two parties. On November 19, 2019, Alibaba’s local life service company released the “Local Living Business Operating System”, hoping to attract businesses with data ecological capabilities. In January 2019, Meituan Takeaway also said that it will invest 11 billion in 2019 to help merchants upgrade, and the service also focuses on digital operations.

Although Ali’s actions are frequent and strong, Meituan still has a leading position in the takeaway market. According to the financial reports of the two parties, Meituan’s catering delivery business revenue in the third quarter of 2019 was 15.6 billion yuan, and according to the third quarter results of Alibaba Group at the end of September, the quarterly revenue of local living services was 6.835 billion yuan.

According to QuestMobile data, as of December 31, 2019, the number of daily active users of Meituan has reached nearly 70 million; the number of hungry daily active users is 10.97 million, which is the third among the four major living service apps. Ranking, 13.17 million lower than the public comment. According to the “Digital Analysis of the Internet Catering and Food Delivery Industry” released by Analysys in September 2019, the domestic and foreign sales of Chinese and American groups accounted for 53% of the domestic and foreign selling market transactions, and the starred election was 43.9%.

The upgrade of Alipay to a digital living platform not only brings changes to itself, but also expands the number of B-side customers for Ali’s local life services, and further competes with Meituan.