Talk about the merchant operation system (Meituan Dianping)

The establishment of an operating system involves many aspects, including products, markets, BI, etc., and in the entire operating system, the three parts of merchant growth stratification system, merchant growth task system, and rights and interests system are indispensable. In this article, the author breaks down and summarizes the strategies for building merchant operation systems and related cases. Let’s take a look.

Long time no see. I’ve been busy with projects and the cryptocurrency circle recently and haven’t shared anything for a long time. What I want to share with you this time is: the establishment of a merchant operation system.

Here is a framework for thinking:

1. What is the merchant operation system (WHY)?
2. How to build a merchant operation system (methodology)?
3. Merchant operation system case sharing (how to apply)?

1. What is the merchant operation system?

The so-called system refers to a whole formed by the mutual connection of a number of related things or ideas.

Based on this, the merchant operation system is definitely not just the merchant stratification in textbooks, but refers more to all work related to merchant operations.

Growth and rights are a mutually matching system. Growth requires achieving goals, and goals correspond to tasks. Completing tasks will earn you corresponding rights and interests. Therefore, a relatively complete merchant operation system includes: the merchant growth (layering) system, the merchant growth task system, and the corresponding rights and interests system.

1. The merchant growth system is linked to the direction of future merchant growth and optimization;
2. The task system is linked to the actions that merchants need to take to achieve growth;
3. The rights and interests system is linked to incentivizing merchants to grow in accordance with the guidance of the platform.

The three complement each other and none of them can be missing.

2. How to build a merchant operation system

As mentioned above, the merchant growth stratification system, merchant growth task system and rights and interests system are all indispensable.

Therefore, it can be seen that the merchant operation system is a complex system project, which involves multiple departments such as BI, products, marketing, finance, and legal affairs. The corresponding functions of the entire system include three operating system middle platforms, user side, merchant side, and delivery side.

• User side: It allows consumers to browse merchants and select products freely, and place orders, make payments, and provide evaluations online.
• Merchant side: allows merchants to manage stores and products online, including store opening, account reconciliation, order processing and other operations;
• Delivery side: It allows delivery users to complete operations related to order delivery, including order grabbing, task management, settlement and cash withdrawal, and other operational functions.

Here is a general guiding idea to share with you. Remember that the premise of any business strategy must be based on data and must be absolutely objective and rational.

Therefore, the overall idea of ​​building the entire system is: based on the overall data, build a reasonable model, then organize the task system, and finally match rights and interests.

Take Meituan and Dianping as examples

There are more than 3 million merchants on the entire platform. If you were given these 3 million merchants, how would you stratify them?

1 ) Build a user stratification model based on data

To complete this task, you will face two problems:

1. What is the basis for merchant stratification?
2. How to stratify merchants? How many layers?

①Basis for merchant stratification

If you were asked to classify 10 people, you could arrange them according to height, gender, age and weight. The reason there are so many solutions is that you can combine them based on subjective factors or obvious features.

But how do merchants divide it? It is nothing more than a fictitious business organization consisting of thousands of merchants of different categories and sizes.

Therefore, at this time you need to find a quantitative indicator and a data-based indicator to measure your business.

So what is this indicator? This indicator is definitely not a single indicator, but a result calculated by combining several factors and adding weights.

So, to summarize, the basis for merchant stratification is: it is composed of the most core factors that affect the merchant's performance, and combined with the different weight ratios of each factor, and finally calculates the merchant's performance in the platform rules . Finally, this performance is ultimately presented in data as the merchant’s platform growth score.

② How to stratify merchants? How many layers?

The growth score can be calculated as above.

The next question we will face is: how many layers should we divide it into and how should we divide it?

The stratification of merchants can be seen as a pyramid model. It can be roughly divided into three layers: top, middle and bottom; the user proportions of the three layers are generally: bottom 45%, middle 35%, and top 20%.

In actual business scenarios, in order to refine operations, the divisions are often more detailed. like:

1. The bottom merchants are further divided into: the bottom active merchants in a certain business field and the dormant merchants (such as those in arrears, terminated contracts, etc.);
2. The waist is generally not subdivided;
3. Top merchants will be divided into: top merchants, KA superiors, SVIP merchants, etc.

There is no uniform standard for merchant stratification, and the platform will make assessments and adjustments based on its own circumstances. However, the 80/20 rule must apply to top merchants. The top merchants who contribute 80% to the platform are definitely your key merchants.

2 ) How to design the merchant task system

After the merchant's pyramid hierarchical model is built, when the entire merchant model is implemented, it is more at the operational strategy level, and corresponding operational actions need to be taken for users at each level.

The presentation of these actions in front-end productization is the task system.

Take the Dianping merchant backend as an example, as shown in the figure:

3) How to build a merchant rights system

After the merchant stratification is done and the task system for merchant growth is sound, the next step is to drive this model to turn quickly, which requires the use of interest incentives. In the merchant operation system, interest incentives are often explicit and presented in the form of products at the foreground, and are often highlighted visually.

The design of the merchant rights and interests system follows one principle: the higher the level, the more rights and interests you can enjoy.

Continuing with the above-mentioned Dianping case, let’s see what rewards we can get after completing its tasks?

Merchants on Dianping need to complete tasks in four major areas: information richness, product richness, service capabilities, and platform contribution in order to improve their store management score. Improving the store management score can bring more free natural traffic to online stores, for example:

1. Gold merchants (month-end score ≥ 90): Gold logo + free advertising exposure resource position for 1 month;
2. Silver merchants (month-end score ≥80): Silver logo + 2 weeks of free advertising exposure resources;
3. Bronze merchants (score ≥70 at the end of the month): Bronze logo + 1 week of free advertising exposure resources.

3. Merchant operation system case sharing

Next, taking Alibaba DingTalk’s B-side user system as an example, we will share a complete merchant building system.

Let’s first look at the underlying logical framework of DingTalk’s user stratification.

1. First Step

Based on the four core factors of perfect organizational structure, enterprise information security, office communication efficiency, and mobile OA collaboration, each factor has a different weight, and finally the DingTalk index (quantifiable data) of each organization is calculated; with the DingTalk index as the main axis, it is divided into different organizational levels.

2. Step 2

Based on the stratification of the DingTalk Index, an operational strategy is formulated, which is specifically divided into two parts: product and operation.

1. Product: The front-end explicitly informs users of what needs to be done to improve the DingTalk index;
2. Operationally: push different operational strategies and marketing activities for different levels.

3. Step 3

The rights and interests system stimulates the improvement of the entire system. Organizations with different DingTalk indexes can enjoy different free functions, discounts on value-added services, offline activities, online training, etc.

In conclusion: No business operation system is perfect and requires constant adjustments during the operation process!

Author: Mr. Orange's work notes

Source: Mr. Ju's work notes