Alipay vs. WeChat: Lessons for Operations

Following the Circles, Alipay has made another big move and officially launched the Alipay AR real-scene red envelopes, subverting the past new gameplay. I wonder how WeChat will respond? In the past, we played hide-and-seek to find people, and now we hide red envelopes and look for red envelopes, which is full of memories. The social determination of Alipay can be seen here, and it can also be seen from the fun picture function launched by Alipay later that it is trying hard to attract young people. There are massive cute pictures in the cloud, and you can fight with pictures anytime and anywhere without storing several GB of pictures on your computer. But the question is, why do users come here to fight with pictures? Please see below.

When the Qing Dynasty encountered the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Zeng Guofan was ordered to return to Hunan to organize militia to defend the country. At the beginning, he suffered a series of defeats. The only way to reply to the court was to prove myself by saying that I kept fighting after repeated failures. Why do we continue to persevere despite repeated failures? Because it’s a matter of life and death.

When WeChat Pay emerged as a dark horse, the alien Jack Ma realized that the time of survival of Alipay had come. In the past, Jack Ma had never taken Tencent's Tenpay seriously. When Tenpay changed its name and transformed into WeChat Pay, why did Jack Ma so uneasy?

Alipay’s success is due to Taobao, and WeChat Pay’s rise is due to WeChat’s more than 800 million monthly active social users. Taobao’s commodity transactions have driven the growth of Alipay, and WeChat red envelopes have driven WeChat Pay’s rapid progress. Payment products are tool -type products with a very homogeneous core nature. Their survival and development require a huge support to continuously supply active users. There is no doubt that WeChat has obvious advantages.

Of course, they can make their own decisions in their own territory, but when faced with payment scenarios outside of their territory, whether the user uses Alipay or WeChat Pay is the key to the battle, as payment behaviors are inherently homogeneous. When eating in a restaurant or shopping in a mall, as long as the payment can be completed, users will naturally use the one they are used to. If a product that I use every day can meet my needs, why should I go to another one to do something else?

Alipay’s attempt is to continuously encourage users to engage in behaviors and establish relationships within the platform. As long as users play on it, there is still a chance, thus avoiding the embarrassment that 90% of the fruit shops downstairs are using WeChat payment. Let’s take a look at how fun it is to play with Alipay.

The fastest attack is imitation

Since ancient times, scholars have all been thieves, and nowadays products are copied. The development of China's Internet has long been in a process of imitation + micro-innovation + localization. Group buying comes from abroad, Weibo comes from abroad, and when a model is proven successful, the fastest way to join the battlefield is to absorb the advantages of predecessors for your own use. The final success or failure depends on which side makes fewer mistakes and who can better adapt to the local environment. The reason why QQ defeated MSN has a lot to do with the fact that QQ attaches great importance to the usage habits of Chinese people.

There was Taobao first and then Paipai, there was Alipay first and then Tenpay. A few years later, the story reversed. There was WeChat Moments first and then Alipay Life Circle . In July and October 2015, Alipay carried out two version iterations, adding two first-level entrances, Merchants and Friends, and launching functions such as Life Circle and Community . Life Circle is positioned as sharing good products and good merchants, encouraging users to share good things with friends; the group payment mode was enabled to allow group payment for meal checkouts, and class groups make it more convenient to pay class fees.

This faces two problems:

1. In front of the circle of friends are friends, in front of the circle of life is life, but behind life you still need friends. Without friends, there is no life. Without the accumulation of relationships, users will have no motivation to post information about their daily lives. The circle of life can only be ideal, very full, but the reality is very skinny.
2. For a community to develop, it needs a clear positioning and vision. Checkout groups or class fee collection groups are essentially transactions. Without the need for transaction behavior, it is difficult for users to remember that Alipay has a community function. This type of community has no way to define a vision. Without a vision, the community cannot be active.

2016 Spring Festival Alipay lucky draw

In the past, a group of silly kids collected cards by eating instant noodles, but they could never get all the cards. Twenty years later, a group of adults collected lucky cards on Alipay, but they couldn’t get all the cards, and they still enjoyed it. Because these silly kids have grown up. The lucky draw activity made Alipay a hot topic among the nation, and undoubtedly achieved great success in brand exposure and word-of-mouth communication, but it did not allow Alipay to make much progress on the road of social networking.

Let’s take a look at the process of user participation:

1. The first behavior that needs to be produced: add 10 friends and obtain the original resource 3 lucky cards
2. The second behavior that needs to be produced: gifting and exchanging

The first behavior helps users build relationships, and the second behavior stimulates users to communicate, which is also a perfect growth based on the data. However, it cannot make Alipay advance much in social networking, because a huge incentive for users to produce these two behaviors is to share 200 million cash red envelopes equally. Data from the early stage of the activity showed that only a few hundred people collected all five blessings, which is equivalent to millions of cash for each person, and a group of whimsical people flocked to it.

The number of friends on Alipay increased instantly, and many people also gave and exchanged lucky cards to each other through Alipay. All data showed significant growth, but Alipay’s social attempt still failed because the incentive disappeared after the event ended, and there was no second point to stimulate users to engage in social behavior. This at least gives us the following insights:

1. Activities are boosters and it is difficult to change the nature of a product. The essence of Alipay is a transaction tool and it is difficult to socialize it through an event.
2. The behavior of getting users to produce through the temptation of benefits is very watered down, and it is difficult for subsequent users to accept it. The operators of Alipay should have thought that the activities would generate a large number of user relationships, but when the activities were over, how to make good use of these relationships to continue to generate interactive behaviors? However, there was no follow-up. It is not worth speculating whether there is no good solution.
3. Operators should get used to "joining in the fun" and discover more fun things in life and experience them. Next time, you can also change 'collecting cards for eating instant noodles to collecting cards for Alipay'.

April Fool's Day Gift - In Place

The launch of the DaoZhi function proves the saying: You have to have ideals, just in case they come true! Alipay released version 9.9.3, turning an April Fool's joke into reality and launching an important function called "In Place". It is a location-based life service platform where users can issue various personalized demands and find people nearby who can provide services. This can also solve many temporary problems that arise in life. Take the sharing economy route and earn good compensation for your services.

Alipay has taken a step forward in building new financial social relationships.

The value of operations at this level is to inject new gameplay into the product, strengthen user relationships, and increase user activity. The difficulty of this is that operations require operators to abandon their inherent thinking logic about the product, think about problems at a higher dimension, and use their imagination to create a completely new model.

The circle is revitalized

The move by Alipay Circle was undoubtedly a great success. Although it had some flaws, it also made headlines across the country. The core appeal of Alipay's many attempts is how to make more than 400 million users active on the platform. This time, it is borrowing the support of circles. Circles have existed for a long time. They are weak-relationship communities of strangers with certain common labels. This type of community also includes Douban groups, which is also a common form of stratified operation for users when there are enough platform users. Circles is a non-instant social network that Alipay turned to after its attempt at instant communication and social networking did not achieve the desired results.

Weak relationship communities such as circles and groups have original sins, that is, vulgarity and appointments. This can be seen from the development of Douban groups. The transformation of Douban groups from a place for fresh and simple things to a holy place for appointments directly makes Douban no longer fresh and simple. Operations must always maintain respect for users at all times, especially when the user base is large enough, then what not to do is more important than what to do.

But why does this happen in a platform like Alipay, which has relatively high-end users? I guess there are two possibilities:

1. Data pressure

For a product with more than 400 million daily active users, whether a new gameplay can be recognized internally requires producing the expected data within a certain period of time, otherwise it is likely to die in the testing phase or not receive corresponding support. Circles are an old product form with relatively mature operating methods. Of course, there are fixed routines to achieve rapid data growth.

2. Inadequate control of tonality

The control of content by community products is very simple. It only needs to be reviewed before release. Operators can release the content they want to present according to the corresponding standards. Releasing pictures of beautiful women on a financial and credit-based platform is like suddenly replacing the security guards of a bank with beautiful women. It is more eye-catching but reduces the sense of security.

Of course, the development of any product cannot be smooth sailing. Momo was at the center of public opinion for a long time back then. After the storm, it was still Momo that many people liked. The emergence of circles undoubtedly gave Alipay more possibilities.

One of the core elements of circle operation is to introduce personnel to manage it, equip each circle with circle owners and administrators, find Wu Xiaobo to establish the book club circle, find maternal and child buyers to manage maternal and child related circles, and an open ecology will slowly take shape.

At the same time, it connects to third-party applications. For example, in order to meet the social needs of young people, it connects to the Expression Cloud and launches interesting pictures. On the one hand, it reflects an open mind, and on the other hand, it can enhance the user's social experience in expression. When the circle ecology gradually matures, integrating into e-commerce is also a good way to make profits. Will picture battles become popular on Alipay in the end? It depends on the subsequent operation. After all, leading in functionality does not mean leading in social networking.

Competition is by no means a zero-sum game . Sometimes you have to thank your opponents, because it is because of their existence that you become stronger. The battle between Alipay and WeChat Pay has just begun, and no one can predict the outcome, but China's mobile payment technology and application scenarios are already ahead of the world. As a spectator, I look forward to more exciting matches.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article is @熊猫大虾 and it is compiled and published by (青瓜传媒). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!