JD.com’s private traffic strategy: Jingxi + WeChat + couriers

"People are there, goods are there" e-commerce platforms generally have merchants supplying goods as long as there is transaction traffic. After all, this is not an era of goods shortage. Almost all products are facing the problem of slow sales. In other words, the goods that seem to be "shortage" are also manufactured and marketed.

Where to find people has become the first priority of e-commerce platforms.

Honestly speaking, after eleven years of Double 11, there are still many new users waiting to be developed. The bottleneck will only become smaller and smaller. In the next few years, we can still highlight the concept of "sinking market", but after a few years, there will be nothing to say.

The next step is to get a user to repurchase more, which is divided into two parts: getting a user to buy a product multiple times and a user to buy multiple things on the platform. These users are the users that the e-commerce platform does not need to spend money to divert, and are also called the " private domain traffic " of the e-commerce platform. How to hoard, repeatedly stimulate and convert these users has become the most core task of the next e-commerce platform operation.

01 Differences in attracting new customers and promoting activation among Alibaba, Pinduoduo, and JD.com

I used to think that Alibaba's e-commerce platform was a centralized platform, but recently I discovered that Alibaba has actually long passed the stage of relying entirely on search keywords on the e-commerce platform to guide orders.

As a pure platform that does not operate its own business, Alibaba actually puts the overall activity of the platform's merchants first. Under this model, Alibaba encourages merchants to "attract fans" themselves, allowing merchants to actively @ users, send them coupons, and send text messages to encourage them to make transactions.

Young people seem to be less interested in brands, perhaps because there are too many things to choose from. They prefer to listen to KOLs and internet celebrities they recognize.

Since the internet celebrity economy became popular in 2015, Taobao Mobile has increased its traffic allocation to content communities and encouraged online shop owners to personally appear on the platform to sell goods. After 2016, Taobao Live was launched, and the conversion rate is faster and the interactivity is much stronger than TV shopping. After almost 4 years, the top internet celebrities on Taobao, such as Zhang Dayi, Li Jiaqi, and Wei Ya, are basically traffic-type internet celebrities with high appearance, many styles and preferential prices for female consumers. On the day of Double 11, there were internet celebrities in 100,000 live broadcast rooms calling on their fans to collect coupons and start buying them at 0:00.

Of course, in addition to using the internet celebrity economy as a way to hoard private domain traffic, Alibaba’s other main means is to use the Alipay mini program. I have introduced this in detail in my previous article. If you are interested, you can read "The King of Cards and Coupons".

Let's talk about Pinduoduo again. From the perspective of user acquisition efficiency alone, Pinduoduo users only need to share the Pinduoduo link and ask their friends to "help cut the price" to attract new users. The prices of daily necessities that are close to family expenses in Pinduoduo are so low that you will doubt life. In the Pinduoduo app, strangers can form a group of two to speed up the transaction rate. Pinduoduo does not need Double 11 because every minute and every second is a promotion.

Users who are not greedy for bargains are actually not the target users of e-commerce platforms. Those who never look at prices and only recognize brands occupy the main stream of e-commerce consumption. For example, if you are a fan of Huawei, Apple, and Xiaomi and are after the products of these companies, you will actually go directly to their official website or mall to place an order. There is no need to buy on Taobao or JD.com. The prices may not change generally. If there are changes, it is usually because the platform gives subsidies. For example, this time Pinduoduo is spending money on subsidies to accumulate word of mouth.

Most people look at the price and shopping scenario, so the situation where Pinduoduo was not favored by the mainstream media circle developed particularly rapidly.

Before this year's Double 11, Pinduoduo's mid-year report showed that Pinduoduo had 483 million active buyers, with an average consumption of 1,468 yuan per person. In an internal speech on Pinduoduo's fourth anniversary, Huang Zheng revealed that Pinduoduo's actual payment GMV had exceeded that of JD.com.

JD’s way of generating traffic is neither based on the huge number of real wallet users in mobile payment as an entry point like Alibaba, nor does it develop internet celebrity economy in the community atmosphere.

JD.com has not done a good job of converting WeChat shopping traffic into its own private traffic. Although JD.com shopping links can be freely shared and forwarded on WeChat, JD.com's mainstream consumer group is mainly 3C consumers and generally looks at brands. This has caused JD.com to give up the opportunity to promote the fast-moving consumer goods market and reach users in the WeChat ecosystem to micro-business agents.

In fact, JD.com’s cost of purchasing traffic from sources other than WeChat is the highest among the three companies, and the lack of an online ecological layout like Alibaba’s has become increasingly apparent year by year .

02 JD.com’s breakthrough is to focus on private traffic in WeChat

JD.com has always been the first-level entrance for shopping on WeChat. It did not feel a sense of crisis until it had to invest 800 million yuan to renew its contract after the five-year free use period. It adopted a two-pronged approach to acquire traffic from WeChat: one obvious approach is group buying, and the other is private domain traffic. In the final analysis, it is selling goods on WeChat, a platform that has high traffic acquisition costs.

Let’s first talk about the product “Jingxi”. JD officially launched the APP on September 19 this year, and promoted the “Jingxi” APP on the shopping cart page of the JD APP, allowing one user to install multiple JD APPs to achieve compound utilization of traffic. At the same time, purchases of goods in Jingxi can be settled directly in the JD APP, realizing the connection of data under the same account.

As soon as you open Jingxi's products, you will exclaim "It's so similar to Pinduoduo!" (In fact, it is a group-buying version of JD.com). During the Double 11 period, the first-level shopping entrance of WeChat, which previously linked to JD.com's H5 page, was changed to the "Jingxi" mini-program page. It seems that although JD.com and Pinduoduo belong to the same Tencent system, the competition between the two has become increasingly fierce.

Ever since Pinduoduo made the group buying model popular, group buying has become a standard feature of e-commerce platforms. In its Double 11 press release, JD.com emphasized that "nearly 40% of JD.com's new users come from Jingxi, demonstrating a strong ability to attract new users. Among Jingxi users, more than 70% come from 3-6 offline emerging markets." This proves that it is useless to talk about internal innovation at the top of your lungs in order to achieve good results; it is not as effective as copying your competitors at critical moments!

Anyway, JD.com is dealing with WeChat traffic. This year, it has increased its efforts to acquire private domain traffic. It has also drawn on the experience of users automatically performing "social fission" to attract new customers during group buying, and it appears to be more simple and crude. The following users demonstrate how JD.com does it in the form of a story. If you want to learn from it, you may just use it directly.

"First, make a fission poster, focusing on the "Free Suitcase" event, and scan the code to directly add the "JD Event Promoter" WeChat;

After adding WeChat, the WeChat account sends a voice message asking which district the user is from to see if there are still spots for free suitcases. After the user replies with the address, another voice message is sent to say that there are still spots in the area. The user is then guided to check Moments to select the style they like. Each style has a number, and the product is sponsored by Xiaomi. Some users who received free suitcases send a screenshot of their Moments to express their gratitude.

After the user replies with his or her favorite model, he or she will be guided to forward the poster directly to 80 to 200 friends. If the number of forwardings exceeds 150, an extra Xiaomi bracelet will be given, and a screenshot of the forwarding will be sent to the event promoter. "

This operation takes advantage of people's desire for free things and with JD.com's endorsement, it is easy to achieve traffic generation. The free suitcases are sponsored directly by the manufacturer and can be regarded as the cost of acquiring customers. Once users forward and participate in this activity, they will become JD.com (Jingxi)'s precise users.

Those who did not participate in sending posters in the WeChat group were all blocked and deleted, so a screening process was carried out. Participants in the event will be directly pulled into JD.com’s “Double Eleven In-App Purchase Coupon Group”, where coupons for various products released by Jingxi will be sent to the group via the personal WeChat account of the “JD Welfare Officer”.

This private domain traffic operation process has two characteristics: First, a single WeChat avatar, namely the JD logo and event name, is used uniformly to maintain reproducibility. Basically, all promoters can draw commissions from it individually; second, all reply words and information are exactly the same, and no individual expression is required, just for the purpose of copying.

Based on the same human nature, with the scale of JD.com's staff, it can create tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of personal WeChat accounts for JD.com event promoters, and build hundreds of thousands or millions of such internal group buying message sharing groups, all of which are distributed by operations, madly harvesting traffic in the WeChat ecosystem.

This is why Jingxi can contribute nearly 40% of JD.com's incremental users. The advantage of such a model is that even after Double 11, WeChat groups and WeChat friends will still remain in the personal WeChat accounts managed by JD.com. They are private domain traffic that JD.com can use for a long time in the future, thereby reducing traffic promotion expenses.

After reading this, you may think that JD.com has completely put down its airs for the sake of traffic and has become so down-to-earth. In fact, it is more than that. About 80% of JD.com employees are self-employed couriers. Many users who frequently shop on JD.com are even familiar with these couriers, especially in the sinking markets, where each courier is responsible for the delivery in different areas.

JD.com is currently encouraging couriers to add users on WeChat and actively promote their own door-to-door delivery services . In fact, this is allowing couriers to do part-time work for SF Express, thereby adding an additional income channel. When all couriers add the users they serve to WeChat, it will also become a huge private traffic resource for JD.com itself.

Throughout the third quarter, more than 70% of JD.com’s new users came from lower-tier cities. How did it attract them? The author believes that it is basically achieved by relying on private domain traffic + group buying + JD Express and WeChat.

03 Is there a risk that JD.com’s private domain traffic will be taken care of by Zhang Xiaolong?

JD.com had a bad year this year, and its market value was overtaken by Pinduoduo. However, on this year's Double 11, JD.com rarely announced a Double 11 GMV data of 204.4 billion yuan, which was not much different from the GMV data of 268.4 billion yuan announced by Tmall. It can be said that they were on par.

I participated in Double 11 in many stores this year. As of the time of sending this article, I have signed for the express deliveries from Taobao, Suning, and Dangdang, while the treadmills operated by JD.com have not yet been shipped. It is obvious that the orders this year are overloaded.

The above-mentioned method of JD.com to generate private domain traffic can also be summarized as a new model for e-commerce to acquire and convert users - "B2K2C" , where B represents the JD.com platform and the merchants on the platform, K is KOC (promoter), and C is the consumer.

Brands provide preferential products and commission subsidies, JD.com is responsible for product selection, and promoters can be JD.com employees, couriers, external service personnel, shopping guides who work with merchants, natural persons, micro-businesses, etc. They push products to WeChat groups. After consumers complete the purchase in the mini program through the link, the promoters get commissions, JD.com gets commissions, and the merchants get profits.

During this year's Double 11, JD.com relied on Jingxi, which was officially supported by WeChat, and its own "down-to-earth" private domain traffic accumulation campaign, and made great contributions to the establishment of the platform, which was much more effective than advertising everywhere.

The "WeChat External Link Content Management Specifications", which are said to be the most stringent in history, came into effect on October 28, just in time for the Double 11 warm-up period; among them, inducing sharing, inducing attention, inducing downloads or misleading jumps, illegal group buying, etc. are strictly cracked down. Although Jingdong's private domain traffic practice, Jingxi Pingou, has obtained a semi-official status, the early stage of hoarding private domain traffic actually brushed against the induced sharing that the platform does not encourage.

In the decentralized ecosystem of WeChat, massive user resources serve as a continuous source of traffic. Perhaps JD.com has already made enough preparations in advance, or may still be expanding.

Conclusion

In the first half of last year, I had a view that "Pinduoduo's ceiling is Taobao, and JD.com's ceiling is Tmall." In this way, Pinduoduo's ceiling is higher than JD.com, and surpassing JD.com is just around the corner. At that time, many people thought it was a fantasy.

At present, JD.com’s ceiling is almost reaching Tmall, which means that JD.com has greater operating pressure to generate private domain traffic on WeChat, while the Taobao system can only sigh in despair over WeChat.

However, JD.com's business anxiety and crisis mainly come from the fact that its core advantages are being relatively weakened. On the one hand, in the 3C field, Tmall and Suning cooperate closely and are comparable to JD.com in the supply chain. Judging from the 10 billion yuan in subsidies spent by Pinduoduo this year, a lot of them went into the 3C sector.

On the other hand, in the logistics business, Cainiao Logistics has improved the previous pain points of Taobao online shopping logistics by integrating the data of various logistics companies and operating online store collection stations at the terminals; SF Express is also strengthening its cooperation with emerging logistics platforms on the distribution side, especially this year's Double 11, JD.com's logistics advantage does not seem to be very competitive.

Being able to sell goods is the key. This year, JD.com’s Double 11 and Q3 performance were largely achieved through private domain traffic. In the future, private domain traffic will also be the focus of competition for large e-commerce platforms such as JD.com!

Author: Li Xing

Source: Reliable Axing