Community, e-commerce, tools, which one is the future of the women's market?

Since the rise of the mobile era, consumer habits and catalyst habits have undergone earth-shaking changes. The female market has become increasingly valued as a new blue ocean, and a series of first-line star products have emerged. E-commerce , tools , media and other product forms are flooding major app stores , but community, an epoch-making product that represents the evolution of the Internet, is rarely seen.

In June this year, a mobile application called "Her Community" was launched. 60 days after its launch, it reached the first place in the lifestyle category list and the seventh place in the overall list. Behind her are many women's products, including Mayu, Dayima , Lamamabang, Meilishuo , and Mogujie.

The mobile female market is divided into three parts

The life-and-death battle of menstrual tools: Dayima, a tool with the selling point of recording women’s menstrual periods, has been strongly sought after by the market and users. A year later, Mayu, a tool of the same category and attributes, entered the market. Since 2014, the two sides have launched a war of words and competition in various dimensions. After a six-month war of words, the two sides completed a Series C financing and began to focus on building a community system. For apps that originated as tools, insufficient user retention time can easily affect the subsequent monetization of the system. However, for the two women's apps, it still takes some time to polish user habits from tools to communities. The good thing is that they still have a huge registration base. How to achieve good conversion will be a huge problem they face.

Women's e-commerce companies that have escaped from the cracks: Under the influence of Taobao, the women's online shopping market has developed by leaps and bounds, and has also created a number of traffic sites that link to Taobao through women's clothing shopping guides. Meilishuo and Mogujie can be said to be rivals of the time. Then, with the gradual increase in traffic and Taobao's "crisis awareness" at the time, Meilishuo and Mogujie were banned. However, both of them followed the development of mobile Internet , quickly launched their own mobile apps, and successfully switched to the C2C model of self-built shopping malls. During the transformation, the expert community that Mogujie once prided itself on was also closed and has yet to be reopened.

Two-level communities: mothers and babies on the left, and women on the right: Compared with the unified direction of tools and e-commerce, the community shows some differentiation in terms of population attributes. As an important UGC production and communication platform, the community has always been the focus of attention from the PC era to the mobile Internet era. Currently, it has formed two directions: communities for mothers and babies and communities for women. "La Ma Bang" and "Her Community" are two communities, one focusing on the maternal and child field and the other focusing on the vertical field of women. As a pure community oriented to female users , Her Community has natural advantages in attribute selection and content creation. Any female audience can find a space that belongs to her.

Judging from the development of mobile female apps, although pure PGC can become a hit, most of them are one-way operations. Although they can bring in considerable income through their own high-quality recommendations and prices, they often fail to accumulate core content. However, simple tools do not have very strong user stickiness. Once users stop using the tools, there is no strong UGC content to attract users to return, so tools are currently beginning to focus on the community direction. The advantage of the community form is that after users are identified in the early stage, the user base can be expanded through a continuous snowball model, and the user stickiness is very high. However, for later monetization, it still needs to rely on traffic output or e-commerce establishment. However, there is an additional possibility of being promoted to a platform.

The development path of e-commerce, community and tools

Meilishuo and Mogujie, which entered the market with the e-commerce model, are becoming more and more mature in the construction of e-commerce platforms. As pure e-commerce platforms, user stickiness and traffic will become the biggest constraints on their development. Meilishuo and Mogujie, unwilling to be lonely, have also begun to quietly sell men's clothing due to the attributes of their spokespersons. As both companies were originally positioned in the female market, their image has begun to blur. It is still unclear which one will have a better future, general apparel e-commerce or purely female e-commerce. However, in order to develop profitably, both will inevitably sacrifice their original natural female attributes, which may even be considered killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

However, Mayu and Dayima, which entered the market with the tool model, are different. After locking in a considerable market share in the form of tools, they began to develop UGC layout for users. Using women’s communities as the entry point within tools has always been the most correct decision in the UGC era. However, in people’s minds, whether they are tools or communities has become a relatively vague concept. The limitation of communication content has also become a bottleneck for the development of the community. After all, the two teams, who originally had no operational experience, wanted to build a community platform, and they still lacked a certain level of maturity.

As a community integrating communication and e-commerce that targets the maternal and infant vertical market, Lamamabang does not have a large user base like the other companies, but the precise vertical market is relatively easier to operate , and the current model that can be directly monetized is much better than the tools. "Her Community" is equivalent to finding a blue ocean in the red ocean of the women's market, because so far there is no mobile community application that is purely for all female users. Taking the community as the entry point more often means the gene of the entire platform. As a market with 600 million women, a social platform that allows women to communicate may be easier from a development perspective.

There is no doubt that the female market is currently divided into three parts. In the mobile Internet field where users are extremely focused, it is almost difficult for us to find an overloaded app that can support "everything", including WeChat. Even though its current development momentum is against the sky, its deterrent power on mobile phones is actually still comparable to Tencent's dominance of QQ on computers.

The future battle for the female market

Meilishuo and Mogujie have finally found a way out after being banned by Taobao. In times of crisis, they have retained their original users and actively transformed themselves into C2C shopping malls for women. Currently, they have begun to shift their focus to the men's market through the women's clothing market and are preparing to integrate a large-scale C2C clothing sales mall. However, the ceiling is the existence of Vipshop. How they build their brand and how differentiate it is will determine how much room they have for future development.

Mayu and Dayima, two menstrual tools that have entered the social media space through tools, will face a huge problem in the future: profitability. Although they have locked in a lot of vertical female users through menstrual tools, as user usage habits are established and user stickiness increases, traffic monetization will become possible. However, it is still unknown whether overlapping users will use two tools at the same time for records. So far, neither of them has a good way to monetize. The next step will depend on how the community of tool types develops.

As a contemporary product that has transitioned from the PC era to the mobile Internet, the community's UGC capabilities are unquestionable. Lamamabang and Her Community have made divisions for different groups of people, and Her Community is in the upstream classification pool, targeting all mobile female users. If her community can continue to increase the number of new users and retain them, she may have the greatest room for growth in the future and have a greater chance of moving towards a platform-level product.

The female market is a cake with great prospects. With the popularization of mobile Internet, more and more female users are joining the ocean of mobile Internet, which will make the growth potential of this market even greater. Who will grow into a platform-level product for the female market depends on who can truly meet women's basic needs and which is more important among shopping, communication, and record keeping.

APP Top Promotion (www.opp2.com) is the top mobile application promotion platform in China, focusing on mobile application promotion operation methods, experience and skills, channel ASO optimization ranking, and sharing App marketing dry goods . Welcome to follow the official WeChat public account : appganhuo

This article is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Reprinting this article must be approved by Top Promotion , and please attach the link to this article!