It is estimated that you and me who have watched "National Treasure" on CCTV, "I repaired cultural relics in the Forbidden City" on the video site, and many middle-class people have never thought that Wenwan has become a popular business.
Li Ming (pseudonym), who once worked for Wenwan e-commerce platform Weipaitang, revealed to Blue Shark that since January 2020, Weipaitang’s GMV (total transaction amount) has doubled over the same period last year.
The Weipaitang training PPT obtained by Blue Shark in stock shows that the GMV of Weipaitang in 2019 was 43 billion yuan, which is equivalent to 14.3 billion yuan in GMV in the first four months. According to this calculation, in the first four months of 2020, Wei Paidang’s GMV was 28.6 billion yuan, nearly 5 billion more than Wei Paidang’s 24 billion GMV in 2018, and it was 12 billion yuan in 2017. 2 times more.
Lin Zhiming, the founder of Weipaitang, is known for his low-key nature. He hardly accepts media interviews and does not want to invest in institutional investments. Only Tencent used traffic to exchange 1.88% of its shares in 2016, and Detong Capital invested in the PreA round, accounting for 13% of the shares.
He is so low-key, but recently he has repeatedly mobilized internally:
In 2003, SARS-Chinese learned to shop online, and Alibaba took the opportunity to become an e-commerce empire. Due to the epidemic, traditional cultural and entertainment consumption channels-tourism distribution centers, cultural and entertainment centers, clubs, and jewelry stores, etc., could hardly be opened in the first quarter, and could only be transferred online. Weipaitang must seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
For this reason, when many companies are laying off employees and cutting salaries, the number of employees in Weipaitang has expanded from more than 400 at the end of 2019 to more than 700 now.
Seeing the opportunity, Wei Paitang is not the only one to expand against the trend.
In April 2020, Wenwan e-commerce platform Wanwu Dezhi, which has just passed its one-year birthday, received a Series B investment led by Source Code Capital. Tang Jinshang, the founder of Plaything Dezhi, was once the head of the business side of Weipaitang. He left his job at the end of 2018 and started his business. Within one year, he received investment from Xianfeng Evergreen, Zhenge, GGV and other first-line capital. The first anniversary GMV reached 2 billion yuan and the number of employees exceeded. 300 people, and are still desperately expanding, GMV is expected to reach 10 billion yuan in 2020.
It was also April that Tiantian Jianbao, which was founded at about the same time as Wanwu Dezhi, announced that it had received tens of millions of US dollars in the B2 round of investment from Yuanjing Capital, Huaying Capital, and SIG and other co-investors. Tiantian Jianbao also has more than 300 employees and a monthly transaction volume of 100 million yuan.
If you count Fosun and SIG (Hainer Asia), which have previously invested in their owners (CCTV host Zhao Pu joined in 2016), IDG, Bertelsmann, Qiming, etc., which have invested in Supreme Treasures (to Zhuang’s Wenwan e-commerce trading platform), are first-line All funds entered the Wenwan e-commerce track.
Blue Shark has noted that most of the founders and senior management teams of Dezhi and Tiantian Jianbao, the fastest rising in 2019, are from Internet companies such as Alibaba and JD.com.
So much money and the influx of such excellent talents means that the 2 trillion yuan gold mine in the cultural and entertainment market is being accelerated by the Internet. And what has accelerated the mining speed unprecedentedly is the live broadcast.
The large-scale application of live broadcast in the field of Wenwan e-commerce is in 2019. Li Min (pseudonym), former executive of Qicai Yunnan (a high-end jade brand), told Blue Shark that Blue Shark is in stock, and that Qicai Yunnan relies on offline franchise stores. One of the well-known jade distribution centers), a group of merchants who sell jade live on various platforms have made a fortune.
Li Ming also said that in order to enter the TOP40 categories such as Weipaitang jade, the annual transaction volume of the merchants must be 40 million-50 million yuan, and the higher one has exceeded 100 million yuan.
Platforms that master the lifeblood of live streaming, such as Taobao Live, Kuaishou, and Douyin, have regarded Wenwan as one of the most important categories. According to Taobao Live Insiders, in 2019, Taobao Live has the fastest growth rate in the genre play category (super beauty, clothing), and GMV is expected to reach 30 billion yuan in 2020.
The jade jewelry channel brand told Zhuang founder Chen Tiping that Blue Shark is in stock. At the end of 2019, Su Hua, the founder of Kuaishou, paid a special visit to the source market of jade.
Kuaishou obviously attaches great importance to this category. The list of shareholders of Tiantian Jianbao mentioned above has ByteDance, and ByteDance is the parent company of Douyin. Douyin is probably also intensively laying out this big track.
Once upon a time, in the eyes of the Chinese people, Wenwan was a high-end, niche world that needed to spend 100,000 yuan or 1 million yuan to buy good things. The huge profits made the cultural and game industry fakes and crooks proliferate.
How did Wenwan suddenly become a huge business? Can it incubate several companies with hundreds of billions of GMV and tens of billions of dollars in valuation? Please listen to Blue Shark's availability.
One, niche business
In 2010, Tang Jinshang was admitted to Xi'an Jiaotong University to study art and design. He once wanted to be an artist. It is a pity that he came from the rural area of Pei County, Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province. He only temporarily embraced the art of Buddhism in high school for the college entrance examination.
Upon entering the university, I found that my artistic background was very different from that of my classmates. He turned to be interested in Wenwan-related businesses. Since his sophomore year, he often visited the Wenwan Market in Xi'an. As the ancient capital of the thirteen dynasties, Xi'an is a treasure place for literary and play lovers.
After strolling and chatting, he found that cultural and entertainment transactions were concentrated in tourist centers, cultural and entertainment cities, and high-end clubs. The promotion methods were even more limited to drinking tea and gatherings, which were passed on by word of mouth.
As a poor student, Tang often went to the Shuyuan Gate and Antique City in Xi'an, and sometimes he was able to find ancient coins from the Northern Song Dynasty and only needed 4 yuan each. The more Tang Yue understands, he realizes that Wenwan is a very non-standard market. “Which painter Gagosian (the world's top gallery) signs, and which painter's paintings can't wait to increase the price by 100 times."
The author once visited Songzhuang, the art distributing center in Beijing. In the introduction of art critic Chen Xiangpeng, you will learn that there are not only artists living in farmers’ houses, who are full of paintings and selling, but also built in the local area. The luxury villa is dedicated to hosting the art circle tycoons of the Rockefeller family.
Li Min told such a story to Blue Shark.
Colorful Yunnan is a jade jewelry brand owned by Kunming Nostar Enterprise (Group), a well-known private enterprise in Yunnan. Before 2013, there was only one tourist center store in Kunming, Yunnan, with a revenue of 2 billion yuan a year and a net profit of 30%.
Its main source is tourists brought by travel agencies, and commissions to travel agencies/guides/taxi drivers account for 50-70% of revenue each year. Note that this is the profit margin of the brand Jade.
If the non-genuine jade and cultural products are sold through the tourist center, it will be even more profitable.
Li Ming revealed to Blue Shark that the jade jewelry clubs in Beijing, Shanghai and other jade clubs operate routines. Jade jewelry bought from Ruili, Yunnan and other places are generally sold at a price increase of 10 times or 20 times.
"(The clubhouse) may not be able to sell the goods purchased at one time. The mark-up rate of the terminal store must be very high, and the rent and capital (occupation) cost of one year must be shared, 20%~30% of the unsold unsold goods Cost. There is a saying, "Do not open for a year, open for one year", not because the (club) wants to make such a high profit, but because the original channel structure and the form of commodity turnover must sell such a high premium. , Otherwise you will lose money." Li Ming said. Many clubs rely on high price increases and rising jade prices to maintain their operations, and the final profit is inventory.
Club business is often accompanied by gift consumption, and there are a lot of gray areas.
A friend who has been doing tea business in Maliandao for many years told the author that before the "Eight Regulations" of the central government was promulgated, low-key buyers entered a certain tea shop every day and spent several million yuan to buy good tea. Colorful Yunnan's store in Beijing is opened next to the gift market, which should also be a consideration for attracting customers.
In 2012, the central government promulgated the "Eight Regulations". After 2013, Yunnan will rectify the tourism market, and travel agencies will not be allowed to bring groups into stores for consumption, which will greatly affect the cultural and entertainment business in tourism centers and clubs.
Now, Colorful Yunnan is expanding by franchising. According to its public franchise conditions, it opens a 300-square-meter flagship store in ordinary capital cities with a minimum purchase amount of 5 million yuan, plus rent, labor, and working capital. You can't open a shop without a budget of 10 million yuan.
Li Min believes that it is like the expansion of Colorful Yunnan. First of all, the number of users reached by the store is limited. "Can Colorful Yunnan have 6,000 stores?" Secondly, jadeite is a non-standard and orphan product. To do business, you have to stock it. The goods are very expensive. Each store costs 5 million yuan- For the goods of 10 million yuan, 20 stores are the goods of 100 million to 200 million yuan. The assets are too heavy and it is destined not to be fast.
Opaque and non-standard, the situation of letting antique cities, tourist centers, clubs and other offline markets drive bad money out of good money is serious, "Why don’t everyone go to Panjiayuan? Ten people went, eight people thought they bought fakes, these eight Individuals will never come again. You can only do business for a small group of people." Tang Jinshang said.
Two, e-commerce pathfinder
E-commerce became popular in China after 2003. For more than ten years, has no one tried to make the cultural and gaming industry transparent and large-scale development through e-commerce? Of course there are.
In 2012, Chen Tiping, a native of Zhejiang, left the Guangxi regional marketing department of Wahaha where he had worked for 6 years, and started a business with a few brothers he met in Guangxi. One of them had a partner who studied jewelry appraisal at Guilin Institute of Technology. Chen Tiping wants to open online stores to sell jewelry through Tmall, Taobao, and JD.com.
He took down Taobao's data and found that the number of jewelry merchants is small, the customer unit price is high, and the transaction amount is low.
why? Chen Tiping repeatedly studied.
First of all, jade jewelry is a non-standard product among the non-standard products. In his words, it is called an "orphan product"-there is only one item for each item sold on Taobao. Taobao, which operates according to the logic of the explosion, cannot and does not want to go back to the jade jewelry store, because the traffic comes, only one purchase can be made, and the remaining traffic is wasted.
At that time, the more Taobao stores sold, the higher the level, and consumers judged the store’s trustworthiness based on the level. Because the products are more expensive, the owner of the jade jewelry online shop cannot upgrade the store level by selling low-priced small commodities or even brushing orders. The jade jewelry online shop sells products at a unit price of tens of thousands of yuan, but the grade is only a small star. How can consumers place an order?
Secondly, in the PC era, to open a good Taobao store, merchants need to use a camera to take pictures of the goods and upload them to the computer one by one, and then retouch the pictures in the computer and upload them to the store. Jade jewelry is an orphan product. Selling once, unlike clothing, which can sell thousands or hundreds of pieces, merchants are willing to invest more in the early stage.
"It's not because this category is niche, but because the underlying logic of the e-commerce platform did not match the cultural and entertainment industry at that time, which led to the reluctance of merchants to go online." Chen Tiping said that if the jade jewelry industry is to be e-commerce, there must be a different form.
From 2012 to 2015, Chen Tiping worked hard to explore. He made a tool product-360 Jewelry Guardian, and also made a community called Love Jewelry.
Chen Tiping has sold water and beverages in Wahaha for 6 years, and mistakenly believes that all commodity channel structures are tiered according to manufacturers, distributors, secondary distributors, and terminals. After he entered the jade jewelry industry, he didn't consciously look for it. Where is the jade manufacturer? Where is the dealer?
"After three years of work, I found that the upstream of the cultural and entertainment industry is a spider-web-like collaborative structure. I am a small workshop. As long as I have a piece of good material in my hand, no matter how big the boss, I can only buy it from me. On the contrary, Whenever you have a piece of good material, I will ask you to buy it," Chen Tiping said. This is the largest tuition fee he paid.
In 2014, Chen Tiping also tried the B2C model: go to the source of jadeite to buy out the source, build a warehouse by yourself, and sell it to consumers online. "That's a dead end. The sales rate is too low, and I expect it to be sold out 100%, basically not Possibly, there will be tails. The ones that sell well will soon be sold, and the ones that are not easy to sell are still kept." Chen Tiping told Blue Shark that they are in stock.
In 2013, Yidian China and Taobao auction held a special exhibition for the Fu Baoshi family. Many works were sold at 30-70 times the estimated price, which made a particularly good start.
Art China, led by Poly auction boss Zhao Xu, backed by offline auction houses such as Poly Auction, actually possessed the basis of the later mainstream cultural and gaming e-commerce transaction form-static graphic auctions. Unfortunately, they did not notice the text. Quiet changes have taken place in the e-commerce market.
In the Spring Festival of 2014, Tencent popularized mobile payment through WeChat red envelopes overnight. In 2015, the penetration rate of smart phones in China has been very high, and the number of new smart phones shipped in China reached 434 million that year.
"It turns out that people who buy Wenwan are 35-45 years old. In the PC era, they don't use computers. WeChat has made them popular." Chen Tiping said, this is the premise that merchants can sell Wenwan in Moments later. In addition, after the popularization of smart phones, Wenwan merchants can directly use their phones to take pictures of goods and send them to Moments, which greatly improves efficiency.
WeChat Moments became a paradise for WeChat business from 2014 to 2015 because of the integration of products, payment, and users. "Artifacts for children" Lan Baishuang, pretty ten-year-old, Sibu... They sing on your side in the circle of friends, I will appear on the stage. The micro-business layered distribution, stocking, brainwashing, and violent screens reached their peak in 2014. Weishang’s play style has inspired many people, including Weipaitang, which went online in 2015.
Another important change is that after Toutiao received US$100 million in financing in 2014, information flow has become the mainstream form of the entire Chinese online media. At the end of 2014, Toutiao launched information flow advertising, which means that businesses can get through advertising. Relatively accurate user groups based on interests and hobbies.
"Why can't vertical e-commerce be done before 2015, because they are no different from comprehensive e-commerce platforms in terms of customer acquisition methods." Chen Tiping concluded that the information flow era has the opportunity to acquire personalized users and also have the opportunity to incubate a batch of vertical e-commerce platform.
Three, two routes
In 2015, Weipaitang and Duizhuang respectively verified the possibility of Wenwan e-commerce through two routes. Weipaitang took the path of collecting merchants in WeChat Moments. What is exploring for Zhuang is the channel brand model.
Jiejie, the owner of Suzhou Wenwan merchant handed down boutique, believes that Wenwan is still a business in the circle of acquaintances and hobbies. Jiejie is added as a WeChat friend to people attracted by various methods (posting, advertising, friend introduction, word of mouth). In 2015, he began to post pictures and play texts in Moments, a typical paragraph of text + a bunch of pictures mode.
"In the beginning, we post less, but wechat business was still very popular. People were more disgusted with advertising everywhere in the circle of friends, and later everyone accepted it." Jiejie also has an offline store, but the store is where friends stop and drink tea. I rarely do business, "Sometimes face-to-face communication is not as good as typing on the Internet (comfortable), at least it will reduce the sense of embarrassment."
Jiejie posted in the Moments of Friends, such as Nanhong, Green Pine, and Beeswax. If the buyer likes it, he will ask him for the price alone. If the price is not high, he will directly pay for the transaction online. If the price is too high and the buyer is not at ease, they will go to third-party trading platforms such as Taobao to ensure that the goods are not satisfied and can be refunded.
"In the beginning, there were quite a lot of people who were deceived when buying direct money in Moments. Later, with the entry of honestly operated physical stores, direct money became the mainstream." Jiejie told Blue Shark that there is stock and Moments sells Wenwan more than offline. The requirements for integrity are stricter. Once there are fakes or disputes, customers will post to reveal or appeal in Moments, Baidu Tieba, etc. This will alert more people and create an atmosphere where everyone shouts and beats. Selling fakes does not last long in the circle of friends.
In addition to selling Wenwan in the Moments of Friends, merchants also pull new and old players into the WeChat group, and use pictures and texts in the group to conduct auctions of Wenwan products from time to time.
Lin Zhiming and his entrepreneurial partners Jin Mingliang (COO) and Xu Feng (CTO) are all from web games. Lin Zaiwenwan has a
Some friends also use Moments and WeChat groups to sell Wenwan. Lin believes that there should be a chance to provide these Wenwan merchants with a set of micro-business tools. At that time, not only Weipaitang, but also Pocket Shopping, Youzan, and Weimeng were developing tools for WeChat stores based on the WeChat ecosystem.
The tools of Weipaitang are as close as possible to the usage habits of the merchant’s Moments for selling goods: on the specific lot page, the upper left corner is the head of the shop owner, followed by a large paragraph of text. It is just that the Moments copywriting is labelled-including category, Size/specification, quantity, material, pattern, details, etc. Finally, the picture is similar to the circle of friends, using the Jiugongge style, which can be embedded in short videos. Even the onlookers, like, share and other buttons behind the main copy are very close to the WeChat Moments.
Youzan and Weimob are targeting standard products, so there is no auction, and they are all one-stop prices. Most of Wenwan's products are not priced uniformly, and buyers need to bargain with sellers. Weipaitang has designed a static graphic auction process. Online auctions are not new. Taobao auctions have been online for a long time. In 2013, online art auctions were held with Artdian China.
Weipaitang has also prepared a set of distribution tools for merchants to make the distribution fission of merchants in stock.
Li Ming told Blue Shark that there is a product in the backstage of Weipaitang, which is called Product Library. Each consignor can set up a product library, and distributors can directly publish the consignor’s product information to their own stores with one click. This is equivalent to a WeChat account that sends pictures to lower-level agents, and the agent distributes them again. WeiPaiTang Realized distribution fission through the product library.
Distributors are auctioned out at a price higher than the owner's supply price, and the price difference in between is the profit. After the distributor sells a product, Weipaitang will automatically settle the settlement for the owner, and the order information will also be directly sent to the owner, who arranges the delivery.
In this way, many literary and game enthusiasts and users can become sellers. Weipaitang encourages shippers and distributors to send the link of Weipaitang to the circle of friends to attract traffic.
In response to the problem of fake goods in Wenwan, in order to let consumers buy at ease, Weipaitang imitated Taobao and introduced a guarantee mechanism-no reason to return, free shipping, consumer protection, etc. (specific gameplay, detailed below). In this way, consumers can complete transactions directly in Weipaitang instead of using third-party platforms such as Taobao.
Weipaitang's tools are fully functional, and each merchant only charges 1,500 yuan/year for certification fees and 3-5% transaction commissions, which are quite popular among merchants. From 2015 to 2016, for more than two years, Lin Zhiming did not even develop an independent APP. He only relied on a tool and a small team of more than 20 people, which attracted 20,000 merchants and GMV reached several billion yuan.
In the second half of 2016, Tang Jinshang joined Weipaitang as the VP-level business person in charge.
At that time, Tang was already a tried and tested e-commerce veteran. In 2014, after graduating from university, Tang was selected as Jingdong Guan trainee. He was ordered by Jingdong founder Liu Qiangdong and Jingdong executives, and he was rotated in the warehouse, distribution, customer, procurement, and sales departments of Jingdong, and was finally assigned to the innovative business department of Jingdong Daojia.
What Jingdong Daojia grabbed was Wumart and other supermarkets' fresh department stores just needed business, but it only requested that the delivery speed be increased from one day to one hour. Tang was sent to build a local station in Hangzhou. He received a salary of tens of thousands of yuan but did the job of a supermarket employee with a monthly salary of 2,000 yuan-picking goods in the supermarket. This is a red sea.
"I can't wait for a subsidy of 2 million yuan a month to cultivate user habits. I only need to sell Red Bull from 6 yuan to 4 yuan, 20,000 orders a day, what is this?" 2016 Jingdong Daojia merged with Dada Tang left Jingdong to go to Ali, and met Lin Zhiming in the process. When Tang decided to go to Weipaitang, everyone around him said he was stupid.
But Tang knows that there are too few opportunities for young people on the fresh food e-commerce track, so it is better to do something that he likes. Moreover, "In Wenwan e-commerce, I am a high-dimensional player and a low-dimensional player." Tang's joining really gave Weipaitang brings a mature e-commerce game.
According to Li Ming, Tang also took the lead in Weipaitang to allow more cultural and play businesses to come in. He created business cases, established a model, and conducted training on businesses through WeChat groups online and Wenwan City offline.
"It must be admitted that only when a large number of merchants settle in, the user traffic of Weipaitang will have a relatively large increase, and the quality will be synchronized." Li Ming said that in the early stage of the business, they must contribute their private domain traffic to the platform. Weipaitang took advantage of the trend to introduce user incentives (red envelopes) and grading mechanisms to deposit traffic in Weipaitang.
Li Ming said that in more than two years, Tang led the team to train 70,000 merchants in total. By the second half of 2018, Weipaitang's merchants had expanded to 200,000. GMV rose to 12 billion yuan in 2017 and 24 billion yuan in 2018.
It was another way to Zhuang, and it passed.
In 2015, Chen Tiping moved Dui Zhuang as a whole to Guangzhou, hoping to be closer to Pingzhou, the source of jade. Chen had already negotiated a financing in 2015. As a result of the stock market crash in the second half of the year, investors finally decided not to invest. Chen didn't give up. He worked as an e-commerce consultant for a company in Shanghai, working part-time to make money to support the team. He firmly believes that the new model can run out.
The supply side of jade jewelry has two characteristics. In Chen Tiping's words, it is called "highly scattered and highly concentrated".
1. Unable to standardize production, there are a huge number of small workshops, studios, wholesalers, stall owners, jade carvers, etc. upstream.
2. Due to the limitation of raw materials, these scattered studios and workshops will be concentrated in several jade and jade distribution centers.
Chen believes that if the upstream is a monopolistic large factory, there is no value in being a platform. Chen persuaded these source merchants to upload the goods to the counterparty, instead of reselling them through centralized purchases, and there is no concept of shop or brand, only goods. Then the dealers will be launched in Toutiao and other channels to bring them accurate buyers and earn 10-30% commissions on the dealers. Chen believes that through direct sourcing from the source, providing good products with high cost performance can capture users.
After Dui Zhuang went online, he also sold goods through static auctions with pictures and text. Without promotion, the first wave of buyers were experts who were popularized by WeChat. They usually buy products in jade clubs such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. If a piece of jade is sold for 100,000 yuan in the club, they find the source to get the goods from the village, and after adding a reasonable gross profit, they sell 18,000 yuan, which still has a price difference of 4 times. . It is inevitable that people will not be thrilled.
Can you rest assured to take it for such a big bargain? Can you trust me to buy jade jewelry worth tens of thousands of yuan online? Buyers will of course be suspicious.
In order to dispel buyers' concerns about placing orders online, Chen Tiping hopes to persuade the source merchants of the cooperation to accept the policy of unreasonable return. Many businesses are unwilling, this is detrimental to them.
Traditional offline trading is one-handed money and one-handed goods, and returns and exchanges are not supported for any reason. Jade jewelry is an orphan product and expensive. The return and exchange (3 or 7 days) back and forth for a week or half a month has passed, which means that the product has lost sales opportunities during this time and also takes up a lot of money.
But Chen knows that if the goods cannot be returned and exchanged without reason, and no buyer dares to place an order online, the interests of the merchant will ultimately be damaged. The platform is even more difficult to start.
The process of persuasion is full of resistance. Chen Tiping first finds some merchants who are willing to cooperate and sells them. Other businesses see the benefits of cooperation, and slowly follow up. Some merchants with large sales volume returned a lot of goods, which caused financial pressure to help the villagers settle the payment in advance.
Slowly, some merchants began to accept 24-hour returns, and some merchants were willing to return goods for 3 days without reason. In 2017, Dui Zhuang launched a 7-day unreasonable return. However, Chen Tiping did not spoil buyers indefinitely. For example, some customized jadeites cannot be returned or exchanged.
In order to strengthen buyers' trust in Zhuang, Chen Tiping launched the first third-party appraisal guarantee in the industry in 2016. He introduced experts from the Guangdong Jewelry Appraisal Center to the warehouse of the opposite village. All the goods sold by the merchants must be appraised by the village before being sent to the buyer.
Because the goods are controlled by Zhuang Zhuang, Zhuang has the confidence to introduce the policy of "1 million yuan compensation for 1 fake" in 2017. In this way, third-party appraisal, 7-day no-reason return and exchange, and 1 million yuan (or more) compensation for fakes have become standard equipment in the Wenwan e-commerce industry. Each company can learn from each other, but they are similar.
After solving the trust problem, Chen Tiping put his focus on getting customers.
As a channel brand of jade jewelry, Dui Zhuang, like other Wenwan merchants, also uses WeChat account to promote it in Moments, add buyers as friends, and put them on WeChat groups for maintenance. But the biggest difference between Zhuang and other Wenwan merchants is that it fully captures the characteristics and dividends of customer acquisition in the information flow era.
Dui Zhuang is one of the first batch of commercial customers of Toutiao. In the early days, the cost of acquiring a trading client from Toutiao was about a few yuan (now nearly 1,000 yuan). Chen reinvested the money he earned from selling goods and developed on a rolling basis.
Chen believes that the most important thing is that today's Toutiao is particularly helpful for businesses to gain interest and non-rigid-need customers. Jade jewelry is a kind of hobby and non-rigid demand for the general public. Users will not think about actively searching for jade and jewelry.
Neither Baidu’s search engine nor Tencent’s LBS (geographical location) push advertisements can determine the interests of users. Only like Toutiao, can use the recommended content to determine the user's hobbies. In the process, user portraits were continuously painted and plumped, "After I have your portrait, I will push the advertisement to you, which is accurate."
Other Wenwan merchants and e-commerce platforms can also get customers through launching. The barrier to competition lies in who has a comprehensive and profound understanding of user portraits. "After users come in, they are converted to villagers. Only I have this data. The more I accumulate. Many, reverse can find such a user group more accurately.” Chen Tiping’s self-confidence comes from here.
Fourth, live broadcast broke out
No one expected that live broadcasting would change the cultural and gaming e-commerce industry so drastically.
Li Ming told Blue Shark that 70% of Weipaitang's transaction volume comes from live auctions, and only 30% of the static auctions on the basis of pictures and texts. Chen Tiping also said that live auction transactions accounted for 80% of the dealers. Up-and-coming stars playthings and treasures, Tiantian Jianbao, one piece... all directly used live broadcast to build their own business models and ushered in explosive growth.
What is the charm of live broadcasting?
Blue Shark has combined the views of all interviewees and summarized as follows:
First of all, the most direct impact of live broadcast is the efficiency of transactions.
Take Weipaitang as an example. In graphic auctions, merchants still need to take photos and upload pictures of goods with their mobile phones/cameras, generate shelves and then sell them. In the live broadcast room, as long as the host starts broadcasting, the goods can be sold when they are used, which further saves the time for goods to be put on the shelves.
In the form of graphic auctions, each store can only list 100 items a day, and the auction time for each item is 24 hours or 48 hours. With live auctions, one item is basically sold in two or three minutes. Compared with 24 hours, 3 minutes is a 480-fold increase in efficiency.
Secondly, live broadcast can highly restore products in real time.
Merchants use pictures to show that the products are not completely displayed, especially jade and jade, which have different colors in different light and different scenes. In the live camera, the products can be displayed 360 degrees without blind spots. "With the highlight, the experience is not inferior to the offline experience. Offline, the shipper will not show you so many good stones, but this possibility is fully available online." Hu Bin, founding partner of the Capital Capital, told Blue Shark is in stock.
(People in the industry reminded that Apple 6S is the most cost-effective mobile phone for live broadcasting, without color difference. Huawei mobile phones should be used with caution, because the color difference is large.)
Third, the live broadcast can realize the one-to-one interaction between the anchor and the buyer, and the buyer and the buyer, and the one-to-one bargaining, so that the buyer has more desire to bid and bid.
The online trading scene created by the live broadcast has changed from a simple supermarket to a shopping mall to Disney, and the entire trading atmosphere has changed.
Wenwan is a typical non-standard and hobby consumption. Consumers have to interact with merchants for a long time, and they need to have a good understanding of the products and merchants before they buy a single order. The buying process involves bargaining. The live broadcast compresses this process with its real-time and interactive features.
The live broadcast can not only bring up the offline shopping scene, but also make many upgrades. For example, if a person buys something offline, he can only shop and buy by himself, and face the merchant himself. While buying things in the live broadcast room, 30 buyers lined up to help him.
Since live broadcast has so many benefits, it fits Wenwan e-commerce so well? Why did it become the mainstream of Wenwan e-commerce until 2019?
It's still a cognitive problem.
For quite a long time, most people believed that live broadcasting was linked to show venues and "Internet nightclubs". It was a gray profiteering business, and it seemed to have nothing to do with e-commerce. At most, some brands ask their spokespersons or Internet celebrities to live show. For a moment, it's more like a brand event.
In 2016, Tang Jinshang was still stealing teachers from Taobao. Next door was Taobao Live, an "organization of only one or two people." In 2016 and 2017, Taobao live broadcast did not exist. Taobao’s live-streaming sales of beauty and clothing have not improved much, not to mention selling orphan products such as Wenwan.
Chen Tiping should be one of the first entrepreneurs to try out live broadcast of Wenwan.
In May 2017, Chen went to Burma to watch jade. A client asked him to connect via WeChat video to help him see a stone. This allowed Chen to see the possibility of selling text and playing live.
After returning to China, Chen Rang technology embedded the link of Inke Live in the Duizhuang APP. After trying several live auctions, he found that the effect was particularly good. He made the technology based on the live plug-in of BAT, and developed the live broadcast section based on the characteristics of Wenwan Auction, which was launched in October 2017. However, the app rebuilt by Dui Zhuang according to the live broadcast logic was officially launched in July and August 2018.
The slow progress of Wenwan live broadcast is not only related to the lack of awareness of the founders of platforms such as Weipaitang, but also because it is not easy to do well in selling Wenwan live broadcast by merchants.
The live broadcast seems to have a low threshold. Any business who buys two lights and a mobile phone holder can start the broadcast. However, Li Ming told Blue Shark that it is in stock. To do a live broadcast of cultural games, you need the roles of anchor, director, store manager, etc. Team combat. The anchor is responsible for live sales of goods, the store manager is responsible for the control of goods and prices, and the director cooperates with buyers to interact with the anchor. In the picture-text auction, the business owner can do it himself, but it is simple.
Live streaming poses a great challenge to general wenwan merchants. If the merchant’s products/styles are not rich enough, the live broadcast room will quickly lose its freshness and it will be difficult to attract and retain buyers; if the merchant’s owner broadcasts it himself, it’s not that it can be talkative, or the face is not thick enough. In order to continue; if the business did not have enough iron powder, the live broadcast will face the embarrassment of no one, and it will soon die.
In the second half of 2018, Zhao Yuanyuan, who was in charge of Taobao live broadcast operations at the time, finally noticed the quietly rising literary and entertainment categories on Taobao live broadcast and went to inspect some places of origin. Zhao once drank with Chen Tiping, feeling that the literary and play category was completely grown by himself, and the platform did not give any support.
Chen Tiping, who experienced the thrill of live broadcast early, called out the slogan of the first year of Wenwan live broadcast in 2018. The most advanced exploration of Zhuang Live e-commerce is because its supply end is the origin-Ruili, Yunnan and Pingzhou, Guangdong, which are "scattered and concentrated" workshops and studios. Hu Bin told Blue Sharks that they are in stock and that in Pingzhou, all counties and villages do this.
"In the beginning, everyone did live broadcasts. Those who had the goods broadcasted them themselves, and the products they broadcasted sold. Gradually, there was a differentiation: the live broadcast was well done, and the ones who concentrated on the live broadcast stopped buying materials; those who made the goods stopped doing the live broadcast. "Chen Tiping refers to those who specialize in live broadcasts as live broadcast operators, and those who specialize in making goods call the owners of goods. Each shipper has hundreds of items in his hands, but it may be available this month, but will be out of stock next month
Up.
The live broadcast operator builds the live broadcast room in the place of origin, which can serve different and massive cargo owners, guarantee the richness and freshness of the goods in the live broadcast room, and the high cost-effectiveness of the goods. Such a live broadcast room is attractive to buyers.
A live broadcast operator in Zhuang correspondingly serves 200-500 shippers, and the entire platform has more than 200 live broadcast operators. Chen Tiping manages them like a major FMCG agent, assigns tasks to them, and regularly evaluates and optimizes them. According to Wenwan merchant Jiejie, Wenwan live broadcast was first started in Ruili, Yunnan.
Inke’s investment director Tang Huang told Blue Shark that Wenwan’s products have the characteristics of non-standard and high customer orders. “It requires trust and endorsement. The best solution is identification and live broadcasting. Communicate and interact with each other in China, and generate trust.” Tang Huang also observed that Taobao live broadcast was backed by Taobao's traffic. In 2018, the GMV reached 100 billion yuan, and a batch of anchors such as Wei Ya were created by factory or tailings.
To sum up, Wenwan e-commerce is accumulating. Wenwan e-commerce platforms such as Weipaitang and Duizhuang have previously introduced third-party appraisals, unreasonable returns, and 1 million compensation for fakes. It is important to use tools and information flow to pull existing Wenwan buyers online. Basic, but the matching of live broadcast (technical advancement) + place of origin + professional live broadcast operator is the key.
The live-streaming of Wenwan has been out of the way for villagers and grassroots merchants, but Weipaitang still insists on static image and text auctions.
In November 2018, Tang Jinshang, who felt that he could make the business of cultural and gaming e-commerce even bigger, left Weipaitang and founded Plaything Dezhi, focusing on the self-operating and live broadcast mode of low-priced standard products of national style and good products. He got acquainted with Feng Yousheng, the founder of Inke, through his college classmates, and quickly obtained angel investment jointly invested by him and Xianfeng for a long time. After Inke's popularity in 2016, Feng has been incubating and investing in live broadcast+ projects.
Also in November 2018, the serial entrepreneur Yang Jun founded Tiantian Jianbao. In 2019, the product was launched. The appraisal and live broadcast were fully integrated, and the live broadcast Jianbao was launched:
Aiming at the literary and game enthusiasts' need for "authentication of authenticity and price estimation", hundreds of appraisal experts are hired to help fans and players remotely appraise treasures for free through live broadcasts. The process allows the crowd to watch. Live appraisal of treasures is highly enjoyable, and it quickly attracted viewers and users who have been popularized by TV and video programs such as "Yi Zhui Ting Yin", "National Treasure", and "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City".
Yang Junneng's launch of live appraisal is inspired by the offline appraisal mode of Weipaitang and Duizhuang; on the other hand, it is also related to his last entrepreneurial project.
"Pawnshops are customers who come over with a watch, and the appraiser will make an offer after appraisal. There are many appraisers under it, and it is very easy for Yang Jun to find a batch of appraisers.” Hu Bin said, as the B round leader of Tiantian Appraiser. The investment institutions have invested about 10 million US dollars in total. They are optimistic about the live appraisal model. "It’s a bit like Xiaohongshu’s planting grass. You can see how the experts identify other people’s stones after uploading them. Ice seed, waxy seed, or Fake... built a thicker user pool through content."
It is precisely because the live broadcast of Jianbao has greatly increased the user retention rate, Yang Jun dare to boldly tailor the content of Jianbao and put it on Douyin as an advertising material to accelerate customer acquisition. At that time, Tik Tok had less investment in the above game categories, and Tiantian Jianbao enjoyed a bonus period and harvested 10 million fans. Co-founder Yang Jun revealed that Tiantian Jianbao has 20 million new registered users in a year, and daily active users have reached the order of Weipaitang (about 2 million).
Yang Jun has also done beauty e-commerce projects before and is familiar with e-commerce operations. When working on the last project, he had a deep understanding of Wenwan’s supply chain. When doing e-commerce, he focused on live auctions of jewellery and jade rough stones. Go upstream.
Hu Bin concluded that Tiantian Jianbao first let users watch the live Jianbao, "After watching more and more, I feel that you can buy things for 1,000-2,000 yuan. After you really fall in love, you will get deeper and deeper. This process of formation It is the same as offline." Tiantian Jianbao's e-commerce business has been online for 9 months, and the monthly transaction volume has exceeded 100 million yuan.
Under the pressure of competition, Lin Zhiming, who insisted that "static auctions are the original intention of Weipaitang", began a small-scale live broadcast test at the end of 2018.
The live broadcast function was launched in early 2019, and the outbreak ushered in March and April. The live broadcast has enabled the powerful shippers in Weipaitang and the merchants of the origin to grow rapidly, and the transaction volume of distributors has dropped sharply. According to Li Ming, Tiantian Jianbao not only can drain traffic for free/low-cost, but also comes with sales, which made Lin Zhiming very nervous at one time, and once pushed the live broadcast function for defense.
When various platforms provide live broadcast capabilities and traffic, Wenwan merchants cross the sea and show their magical powers.
Huabao Media is the TOP business in the pearl category of Weipaitang. Huabao Media was established in 2013. Before 2015, it was mainly engaged in live entertainment, and later transformed to e-commerce live broadcast, focusing on cultural games such as agate and pearls. At present, Huabao Media has more than 80 full-time employees and 26 anchors. In April 2019, it began to use live broadcasts to sell texts in WeiPaitang. In October 2019, its monthly sales reached 3 million yuan.
The person in charge, Sansan, shared his “routines” of selling text and playing live broadcast at Weipaitang University:
1. Take out one or two low-priced products as hooks for each live broadcast to attract new users to place orders.
The system setting of Weipaitang is that as long as a new user places an order, he will automatically become a fan in the live broadcast room, and subsequent group and broadcast users will receive reminders. This is the most direct way to accumulate new fans. If the old user sends the hook product link to friends and relatives, after attracting the new user to make a deal, he can send him a low-priced product as a feedback.
2. According to the fan activity in the live broadcast room, spike products will be launched from time to time, such as a product priced at 198 yuan at a price of 108 yuan to give back to fans who have been watching the live broadcast in the live broadcast room.
3. Make good use of the red envelope function provided by Weipaitang to fission and absorb powder.
Red envelopes, only old users who share the live broadcast link and pull into new users are eligible to grab it. The red envelopes you grab can be used as coupons in other live broadcast rooms. Huabao Media broadcasts live 24 hours a day, and the 3rd and 3rd meeting requires operators to prepare 8-10 red envelopes, each of which is 50-100 yuan, every two hours.
4. When a buyer takes a product, how to make the buyer feel the atmosphere different from other live broadcast rooms.
The three-three method is to gather three or four staff members in the live broadcast room, clap and shout slogans together neatly and uniformly, "Congratulations to the boss XX for the price of XX yuan for a pearl stick. Congratulations to the boss for taking a good shot, and the boss is invincible ( applaud)".
5. When the lot was on the shelves for 2 minutes, and there was 1 minute left before the auction, the price did not meet expectations. Sansan raised the atmosphere in this way and stimulated the user to place an order: "Spend a little money, buy good goods, and it’s yours if you don’t buy it. Wrong, thousands of miles and rivers are always affectionate, can I just sell good products with gold medals, and the people who come are repeat customers, and the Great Wall will never fall. Wouldn't you just try again!"
6. Huabao Media often holds prize draws.
Users can check in in the live broadcast room, share the live broadcast link, and receive a free mussel every day for 100 consecutive days. Sansanguan This method is called lock powder. As long as users can come to the live broadcast room, there is a chance to make a deal. "Just like opening a casino, you are not afraid of guests winning money, but you are not afraid of guests not coming. As long as you can come, you will make money. As for losing money, it won't! If you give him a mussel in ten days, he only needs to spend one day."
7. In order to increase the stickiness of fans in the live broadcast room, Sansan requires that the live broadcast room cannot always sell goods all day long. Each live broadcast will spend 0.5-1 hour alone at the beginning or end of each live broadcast to establish feelings with the fans in the live broadcast room. The purpose is to allow him to come to the live broadcast room every day.
For live broadcast operators/merchants like Huabao Media, there are 40-50 companies in each category of Weipaitang. Weipaitang continuously summarizes its methods and promotes it to other businesses, stimulating other businesses to innovate live broadcast methods, forming a virtuous circle. There are 100,000 merchants on platforms such as Weipaitang, Dui Zhuang, Wanwu Dezhi, Tiantian Jianbao, Taobao Live, Kuaishou, and Douyin. It is they who have sold 100 billion yuan of GMV in the Wenwan e-commerce industry.
Five, the shadow of the giant
"Wenwan is a very large market, with hundreds of billions of teas and hundreds of billions of jadeites...Together, it is a trillion-level market (in the PPT provided by Wanwu Dezhi, it is 2 trillion yuan)." Yu Hong, a Dezhi investor and director of Jiyuan Capital, told Blue Shark that there is a stock. Tang Huang further explained that Weipaitang has verified the explosion of non-standard and high-profile single-text game traffic, "definitely not only in the WeChat ecosystem."
Chen Tiping said that Wenwan is China's popular culture. In the past two years, the national tide has risen. Wenwan buyers are expanding from the stock users over 35 to middle-class and young people. The capacity of this group is more than 360 million. Source Code Capital Sun Tong added that these are high-quality users who have not been repeatedly "washed" by e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Tmall.
All investment institutions hope to invest $1 billion or even $10 billion in companies in this wave, but they all have to answer a question: since now Wenwan e-commerce, live broadcast is the mainstream play, how can the vertical platform play well? Giants such as Taobao Live, Douyin, and Kuaishou? They have traffic, have brands, and can quickly integrate the origin supply side-it is said that the Kuaishou logo has been established in the Ruili market.
Each organization and the company it invests in gives different answers.
Chen Tiping said that many Wenwan trading platforms sell Wenwan products with low customer orders, with an average customer unit price of about 8,000 yuan. Dui Zhuang adheres to the brand route of emerald jewellery channels, and, while ensuring reasonable gross profit, through cooperation with platforms such as Douyin, it is used to attract customers.
Tang Jinshang felt, "The Internet must lower the threshold and serve more people in order to make the industry bigger and bigger."
In the first year of Wanwu Dezhi's establishment, Tang Xian brought up the previously accumulated merchants through live broadcast + fission tools to ensure that the transaction volume of the platform was quickly increased. In order to serve more people, Tang did two actions: 1. Tweeting the standardization of services in the play industry. He believes that the current appraisal of each company only gave material standards, but did not give service standards. "Unified service standards is equivalent to sorting out the entire supply side." 2. Self-built 6000 square meters warehouse, pushing national jade, purple sand, tea Wait, "With a price of less than 100 yuan, let everyone choose me as the first order to get started."
However, Li Ming believes that it is easy to fall into the trap of smashing money to grab the market: Wenwan is not just needed, and will not be repurchased. Users who spend money to buy will need 2-3 years to pay back, but the customer life cycle is difficult to reach 3 years. . Merchants who sell Wenwan products below 1,000 yuan basically do not make money, because the delivery cost from traffic to logistics, identification, and customer service is nearly 1,000 yuan for each transaction user.
Weipaitang recruited nearly 300 new employees in the first quarter of 2020, and the content team accounted for the majority. Their mission is to continuously attract new traffic from Douyin and Kuaishou platforms through short videos and other content. Of course, in the face of such a hot market, Weipaitang has also begun to increase its efforts to attract customers.
"Together, the online parts of this industry account for less than 10% of the entire Wenwan market, and there is an increase of 90%." Tang Jinshang said, Taobao, Douyin, Kuaishou, and even one (an independent Wenwan owned by YY) Live broadcast e-commerce platforms) to participate, which can quickly expand the market.
He is not worried about competition with the giants at all. "This is an industry with extremely high barriers to entry. The supply side is sufficiently dispersed. I don't think the big platform has much advantage. The logic of the big platform is the same as that of the small and medium platforms, and they must start from scratch. , And slowly match the supply with the demand side. On the contrary, vertical platforms can be more professional and more efficient. This industry also recognizes small circles."
Yu Hong concluded that in the competition between vertical platforms and giants, differentiation is very important. Services should be emphasized in product appraisal and service standard formulation, so that users can have a better experience. This is something the platform will not invest in in the short term.
Chen Yun, vice president of Qingliu Capital, as an investor in Tiantian Jianbao, he believes that with the rise of the cultural and entertainment category, the influx of large platforms and more and more players, the competition will be fierce in the future. Admirals have reached the same goal by different routes. The key to competition lies in the competition between supply chain and operation."
