New business era: Your users are not just shopping

Text/Sun Tong

The courier delivered a package, and Shen Chang thought for a long time before signing for it.

This is a motorcycle bag. Not long ago, when she was browsing Weibo, she saw an account she followed shared this product. She clicked on the page and found it good. In less than 2 minutes, she paid directly with Alipay.

But she had obviously forgotten that she had bought this thing. This would have been almost impossible a year or two ago, because her shopping method was to search for something on Taobao, compare prices, and after placing an order, she would always wait for the package to arrive.

Now, she finds that her desire to buy is instantly stimulated. With extremely convenient purchase scenarios and reduced shopping time costs, shopping has become a high-frequency habit. Whether she is waiting for a bus and looking at her phone, browsing Weibo in front of her computer, or even in WeChat, which she always opens, she can "buy" anytime and anywhere, just like yesterday in the subway, she just took out her phone, scanned the QR code, and got a bottle of Coke for 1 yuan.

Shopping is becoming smoother and simpler. Because there are no obstacles, people even ignore its form. This is the advent of a great era.

Shopping has changed

In mid-October, the details of Tmall's 2013 "Double 11" shopping carnival were released. Different from the previous activities such as "50% off, 100 million yuan red envelope distribution", Tmall's "Double 11" does have some new ways to play that are worth pondering.

First, this year's Tmall "Double 11" will break the boundaries between online and offline business, integrate 30,000 offline stores covering more than 1,000 cities and counties across the country, and fully connect with the online through the Tmall wireless client to create a common online and offline shopping experience for users.

Many traditional brands hope to integrate their physical stores, shopping malls and other traditional business forms. Take the cooperation between Intime and Tmall as an example: 35 offline physical stores of Intime will join the "Double 11" shopping carnival. Users can scan the code at Intime stores and pre-order products from Tmall Intime stores. After scanning the code, the products will be directly added to the Tmall shopping cart, and transactions can be completed on Tmall from midnight on "Double 11".

Second, Tmall has prepared 200 million yuan in red envelopes this year. Unlike previous years, this time the distribution will be socialized: users can share the red envelopes they grab with their friends, and when their friends get the shared red envelopes, their own red envelopes will also have a chance to be doubled.

Red envelope sharing can be done on both PC and mobile phones. Wang Yulei, vice president of Tmall, said that the user systems of Tmall and Sina Weibo have been fully connected, and the friendships between users on Sina Weibo will become the basis for the flow of red envelopes. The red envelope gameplay on mobile phones will connect people around you in real social relationships.

It is not without reason that Tmall is called a consumption vane. Judging from the above two changes alone, the implicit business trends are very accurate:

When you see a product you like in an offline store, you can scan the QR code and add it to the shopping cart on the e-commerce website. After payment, the product may be delivered before you even get home. This scenario has been imagined before, and the boundaries between online and offline will become increasingly blurred. With the potential of mobile Internet, Tmall's "Double 11" event has realized this.

The significance behind the action of "sending red envelopes" lies in Tmall's acquisition of the "relationship chain" and its efforts in social relationships. In the future of business, sharing and interaction will become the most basic unit of social relationships. In fact, Tmall does not care who the red envelopes are sent to, but who is around you. Once this group of people can be divided and classified by relationship and find your common points, future data analysis will be more accurate.

In fact, people have just become accustomed to switching from specific shopping places in the real world to e-commerce in the Internet world. If you still understand e-commerce as a behavior of moving business online, then you are really half a beat behind in understanding business and the Internet. This also means that in the face of a new round of changes, both merchants and users have to start exploring again.

For example, more and more people are starting to use mobile phones to enhance their experience of reality. The most common example is: while waiting for a red light, you can buy a movie ticket; on the subway, you can scan the code with your mobile phone to pay and get a bottle of Coke without taking out your wallet.

In 2011, mobile phones were just an auxiliary tool for PCs, and everyone's attention was still on the PC side. In 2012, with the popularization of 3G and iPhone, the explosive growth of mobile clients was undoubtedly the beginning of a drastic change.

Compared with the large PC screen, the mobile phone screen has a narrow visual area. In a limited screen, the original aimless shopping in the mall and the search and browsing in front of the massive online product library have been fundamentally overturned. At the same time, the fragmented time characteristics of users on mobile phones are also very obvious, and the operations are shorter and more frequent. Based on this feature, merchants have changed their understanding of consumer preferences and needs.

For another example, when e-commerce was just starting out, price was undoubtedly the most direct and convenient means of educating and guiding users. Looking back at the growth logic of JD.com, it was known for its low prices and rapid expansion in the 3C field since its inception. In terms of competition, it can be said that JD.com at the time started the most subversive model and introduced many "first-time users." Today, when many people think of price wars, they have already assumed that it has become a pattern in the e-commerce industry.

In fact, in the PC era, the core strategies of major e-commerce companies were very similar, that is, using traffic leverage to leverage sellers and price leverage to leverage users. In the end, it depends on who has more advantageous resources to form a two-way match. But do users really need these products that are driven by price alone?

In fact, the change of e-commerce model is also based on the continuous stratification of users' shopping needs, saying goodbye to extensive forms and shifting to more subtle experiences. Just like the period of rapid rise of shopping guide websites in the past two years, Meilishuo and Mogujie are typical representatives that meet people's personalized needs.

Whether it is Taobao, JD.com, or those group-buying and shopping guide websites, retail is actually a very independent branch of the Internet. Using Internet technology to do retail has indeed created a group of people in the past few years.

But the current idea should be from e-commerce to social-commerce - as the Internet has slowly changed from a tool to a lifestyle, the part that e-commerce companies are best at will inevitably face shrinking value, and will inevitably require new logic and methods to match.

Scene fragmentation

People's time is changing with the mobile Internet and social networks. When WeChat and Weibo become a daily lifestyle, you will find that users living in social networks have less and less overall time. It is now difficult for them to spare a full day for shopping.

The Internet has changed people's behavior and habits. In this process, the way people receive and generate information, as well as the total amount of information they obtain, have all been reconstructed. The explosion of mobile Internet has greatly weighted the dimension of shopping - people's shopping time and space have changed at the same time. This has also made the concepts of time, space and decision-making in a large shopping coordinate system completely different from the past.

In the future, shopping is no longer just a thing. New forms of shopping are already happening in increasingly scenario-based time and space. Imagine these scenarios:

In the Beijing subway, you can buy any beverage at a super low price at a self-service vending machine called "Youbao" without taking out your wallet. You just need to open WeChat, use WeChat payment, scan the product QR code, and the whole process takes only a few seconds.

While browsing Weibo, you find that a bag recommended in the right-hand sidebar is exactly the style you want, or a seller in the account you follow recommends a product that you have never seen before and finds interesting. At this time, you quickly browse and place an order, completing the purchase in 3 minutes.

On WeChat, you were pulled into an "I Love Kitchen" group by a group of friends who love cooking. When everyone was discussing which oven had better baking effects and which seasoning tasted better, you found yourself "group buying" them with everyone in the face of all the professional advice without even asking the price.

"In the past, when people talked about situational shopping, they thought it was about making the shopping scene loving and emotional. In fact, it is not like that. The creation of this scene is to allow the products that can be reached by shopping to appear in various scenarios." said Xu Da, head of Alilang.

In other words, shopping was a scene in itself before, and users needed to complete the purchase in an environment. With the emergence of tools such as Weibo and WeChat, shopping is not only a scene in itself, but also an element of other scenes.

Shopping has changed from being price-oriented to being scenario-oriented. These scenario changes have driven and altered users’ fragmented decision-making.

What is the essence behind the fragmentation of scenes? It is to make shopping happen on demand, from creating scenes, purchasing desire, to completing payment, the whole chain is seamlessly connected, without any obstacles, and even makes you forget that "shopping" happened.

Since the development of e-commerce, shopping has undergone multi-level changes in time and space. From shopping in the street to online shopping; from sitting in front of the computer to placing orders on the phone; from having a specific shopping time to having the desire to buy anytime and anywhere, shopping will become more and more like an on-demand state. All factors matching shopping have become a background function of free switching and smooth scheduling.

Especially for payment, the future Internet platforms and those super applications with huge users should all have payment capabilities. This is why WeChat launched WeChat Pay - this is not only a self-defense against the future pattern, but also a necessary way to solve the payment problem and make shopping more seamless and convenient.

Moreover, they already have sufficient capabilities to effectively solve the problem of connecting applications with mobile users’ needs and achieve ubiquitous full-scenario coverage. Even WeChat’s commercialization path has such a possibility: in the future, “keywords” can be embedded in WeChat and Moments, and clicks can directly convert to purchases.

You feel more and more clearly that shopping has become a destination, and all the paths are for "reaching". The change is that the path to the final action of shopping is more fragmented, and even when people around you are consciously or unconsciously triggering your purchase, shopping has become a crowdsourcing behavior in a certain scenario.

New relationships and relationship chains

In the minds of product managers, the shopping atmosphere can be divided into "cold environment" and "hot environment".

When you are browsing Weibo, you accidentally see a sidebar advertisement or an advertisement product from a certain account. You have no emotion and your desire to buy is zero. However, in WeChat Moments, a friend recommends a sports bracelet. Based on the natural trust relationship with "this friend" and the endorsement of common culture, you buy it without even looking at the price. At this time, your reception of product information is naturally positive. This is a typical "hot environment".

Taobao is a relatively cold environment because it is obviously a place to sell goods, just like when you go to a supermarket and see all the goods there; a hot environment is similar to when you go to a friend's house and see an interesting thing, the basis of your liking it is different from when you see it on the shelf in a supermarket.

Some cold environments will become hot environments as you browse around. Weibo covers a wide range, including friends and strangers, and can cover all cold environments to hot environments, reaching every level. It is a very low slope and a continuous upward slope. WeChat, on the other hand, is mainly in the hot environment. From a stranger to a WeChat friend, the relationship threshold is very high, presenting a step-by-step progressive state.

The driving force behind the hot and cold environments is the closeness of the relationship chain. Following the principle of progressive closeness, the top is the circle of people with the same interests, followed by WeChat, QQ, and then Weibo, which is more contagious.

When relationships and relationship chains are re-applied in new environments, they change the structure and mode of information dissemination and influence people's shopping decisions.

Weibo is a very good tool now, and WeChat may also be a good tool in the future. The key is how to use various tool features to reach users. In fact, WeChat itself does not provide scenarios, and all scenarios are created by itself. However, what makes many people afraid of WeChat is that it has many relationships and relationship chains based on specific purposes and scenarios.

The new shopping method has begun to inspire more sellers to think. On the one hand, they hope that the organization of the entire merchandise store will be more effective so that the user's selection path will become shorter; on the other hand, they are thinking about how to use others to influence users.

A more advanced perspective is the like-minded driving effect.

When users interact frequently, a group or a circle of friends emerges. There are many popular groups on Douban, Momo, and even Changba. For example, a group of people who like running set up a small group on WeChat to discuss topics about running equipment and skills every day. If someone recommends a sports bracelet in such a scenario, and if you buy 10 of them, you can get a 20% discount, will everyone buy it together? This scenario is actually very lifelike.

This scenario is different from group buying. Group buying is still a flat purchase decision driven by price, and the relationship between group buyers is very weak. However, the purchase behavior driven by like-minded people is because of social networks and more ways to share. People with the same interests are more likely to gather together, and behind it is "relationships and relationship chains" that connect them.

Make shopping less lonely, or let people around you help you make decisions and share the joy of shopping. This is why Alibaba strongly promotes the IM application "Laiwang".

For example, when you buy something with a group of friends in Laiwang, is it possible that Taobao or Tmall will push a product, not individually, but with a "buy 5 get 30% off" promotion? Same cost, same path, but more business opportunities. Laiwang has this trend, but the attributes are not strong enough at present.

When it comes to shopping, Internet companies represented by Alibaba and Tencent are creating two different paths: one is to promote purchases by establishing regional exchanges between people in an already constructed shopping atmosphere; the other is to try to sell some goods at the super traffic entrance in the communication field because there are more people and a network of relationships.

Whether it is WeChat, Weibo, Momo or Douban, consumers will find that there are also relationships between people in shopping, not just between buyers and sellers. The final intermediate state is a new balance between interpersonal relationships and commercialization. It is nothing more than trying this new balance from different angles.

In this environment of mobile Internet and social networks, decision-making is like air, becoming an omnipresent influence and driving force. In the process, everyone seems to be moving in the same direction from both ends of the matter.

Decision Dynamics

In fact, there are two clues behind the new shopping era: first, the liberation of space and time has brought subversive changes to shopping; second, people’s decisions are always inseparable from the information environment. When the total amount and flow rate of information acquisition have undergone tremendous changes, and more and more scenes are interspersed together, it is particularly important to make information more effective and to involve relationships to identify this information and influence decision-making.

In this new shopping environment, if e-commerce companies do not change, they will lose a business opportunity. At this time, what should e-commerce companies and Internet giants consider? How to look back and see what methods can satisfy users? How to achieve higher efficiency at a lower cost? These can drive users' decision-making behavior.

For example, how to build a smooth scene and relationship so that when users see the purchase information, they feel it is a service rather than viral harassment? There are several points to grasp:

1. Relationships create a warm environment. This is why Alibaba invested in Sina Weibo and UC, and why Jack Ma used almost brutal methods to vigorously promote the IM tool Laiwang. UC is a large interface that Alibaba can integrate and activate. In the future, the closeness of relationships and the nodes of the relationship chain will have a great impact on purchasing decisions. WeChat is accelerating on the path of commercialization, and Alibaba is bound to seize the last opportunity.

The same reasoning can also explain why Alipay quickly released the new Alipay Wallet 7.6 version after WeChat Pay was launched, adding new features such as emotional transfer, offline payment, and public service platform.

The logic behind these functions is that Alipay has begun to incorporate the concept of social interaction. Although it is difficult for a highly functional product like Alipay to create a relationship circle, it has already hoped to establish a relationship chain through emotional transfer and communication between money.

For example, fragmented purchasing methods mean that users only have a short time to access products. How can we reduce the tedious intermediate links and meet the rhythm of purchasing decisions?

2. Shorten the path to reach. One of the biggest changes in integrating shopping into the scene is that the organization of content and merchandise has completely changed. The browsing habits of a 90-degree PC screen and a 45-degree tilted mobile phone must be different. The same store, a set of product libraries, but the entire organization of the store cover is completely different in order to meet the different needs of users on PC and mobile terminals.

In fact, Tencent Vice President Zhang Xiaolong once released such a message on a certain occasion: cancel the shopping cart. Although the detailed approach is unknown, the message expressed by this idea is clear at a glance, shortening the purchase path, making shopping easier and more efficient, and ubiquitous.

3. Enter the user's timeline. This is a higher-level way to influence user decisions.

Whether the user actively searches for the product, arrives at the product accurately, and then completes the payment action; or is stimulated by the price discount and generates the purchase demand; or when chatting with a friend, he hears the other party share something and finds it very interesting and then makes a purchase. Shopping decisions are never a zero-or-one problem, but a multi-dimensional result.

But what is the most valuable thing for users? Time.

This is the only option. In the past, shopping was centered on space. Offline stores had the best shelves, and e-commerce platforms had the most prominent advertising space. However, unlike the traditional web page positions of traditional e-commerce, when the new shopping environment has opened up time and space, what should be occupied now is the timeline.

Everyone has only 24 hours a day. Apart from eating and sleeping, in today's fragmented mobile Internet environment, occupying a user's time means occupying the "most important position". When you enter a person's timeline, he can see you at any time when he opens the interface, which is the greatest value.

The theory and model of e-commerce is a process of continuous spiral rise. In different periods, it is more electronic or more business. In this process, satisfying hard needs is an opportunity for early development, while creating soft needs is an opportunity for latecomers.

The logic of information transmission and the changes in people's decision-making process are not offline things, but online things. In the future, whoever wants to stay in e-commerce for a long time or survive for a long time must think from the perspective of users instead of merchants. At this stage, all e-commerce companies need to study the big issue of how people make decisions and how to influence users' decisions.

(via Business Value)