Such changes show that Alibaba has finally figured out the two most important things: "What exactly is the Alipay Wallet APP for" and "How to use so much traffic." The update of Alipay Wallet APP 9.0 brought huge update downloads, but also overwhelming complaints on social media. In everyone's eyes, Alipay Wallet has significantly changed its golden icon to the blue color exclusive to Ant Financial Group. In addition, it has directly transformed into "Dianping + WeChat". Some people even made a joke pointing out that Alipay Wallet "copied" Tencent WeChat and forwarded it crazily in the circle of friends - "Even the details of the pictures sent are the same as WeChat." But this seems to be interpreted as the purpose that Alipay 9.0 update hopes to achieve. Everyone knows about the two major new changes in Alipay. Open the Alipay Wallet 9.0 app, under the four tabs, the newly added "Merchants" and "Friends" are indeed eye-catching. It can be said without hesitation that Alipay has directly copied "Dianping" and "WeChat". This simple and crude way conveys to everyone the strategic changes implied by Alipay Wallet 9.0, and the two major highlights it brings are indeed intriguing. Highlights & Risks 1: Alipay becomes a traffic center for offline merchants VS Taodiandian team’s ability to promote offline business The "Merchants" Tab directly copies Dianping.com. This change shows that Alibaba has finally figured out the two most important things: "What exactly is the Alipay Wallet APP for" and "How to use so much traffic." Since 2013, Alibaba has been using various means to drive the crazy growth of the installation volume of the Alipay Wallet APP, but its original intention still comes from "occupying the mobile entrance at all costs." As for what the occupation will be used for, the Alipay APP did not have a clear idea before version 9.0. The success of Yu'ebao can be said to have given users a reason to open the Alipay APP, but the stickiness is still not strong. Users can do exactly the same things on PC and mobile. During this experiment, Alipay tried two routes. One was to create a "service window" based on the idea of WeChat public accounts, hoping that users would be attracted by the services of a large number of merchants. However, the actual effect is not good. Firstly, the services provided by merchants are not much different from the WeChat service account function. Secondly, this function itself is based on the merchant marketing perspective, and users do not really need the "Merchant Service Window" function. Another approach is that Alipay followed the idea of Yu'ebao and created more financial management applications such as "Entertainment Bao", "Zhaocai Bao", "My Security", etc., and put them in the "Wealth" tab, attempting to replicate the miracle of single-point explosion of financial products and transform the Alipay APP into a financial management tool with stronger user stickiness. But this attempt was also proved to be better than the worst, but not as good as the best. Financial management functions are themselves low-frequency applications, and only a small number of users at the top of the pyramid can use them for a long time. Ordinary users have no more demands other than stable financial management functions. Both explorations encountered setbacks, which was extremely painful for Ant Financial. Alipay Wallet had a top-level number of installed users and huge traffic, but it had poor user usage scenarios and low stickiness, and it did not become a truly high-frequency APP. It is an inevitable choice for Alipay for the newly introduced "merchants" to directly copy "Dianping". It also shows that Alibaba has finally figured out that Alipay's main job is still "payment", and its most important task at this stage is to "quickly seize offline payment based on O2O". Alibaba has been continuously expanding the payment scenarios of Alipay. On the online PC side, Alipay is truly a standout. But offline, it is still in a fierce competition with WeChat. For Alibaba, O2O is the only way to ensure stability in the next decade. For Alipay, the goal is the same. But Alibaba was a latecomer and concentrated its efforts on shutting down Koubei.com in the early years, and concentrated its efforts on promoting online transactions through the Taobao platform. As a result, Alipay rose rapidly and dominated the market. In recent years, people have been slow to realize that the entrance to offline businesses has already been firmly controlled by up-and-coming companies such as Meituan and Dianping. For Jack Ma, offline transactions based on O2O mean a larger market size and more payment scenarios. If they are taken over by WeChat Pay, it will almost be a disaster for Ant Financial. But how can merchants honestly connect to Alipay? The answer is still to control the traffic entrance of the merchant. Alibaba's big move this year is to penetrate into offline businesses, as can be seen from the vigorous promotion of apps such as "Taodiandian" and "Miaojie". Unfortunately, these businesses are just starting out. Compared with long-established companies such as Meituan, Dianping, and Ele.me, it is impossible for them to achieve disruptive results in the short term in terms of user awareness or usage habits. In a word, without C-end traffic, consumers don’t know you at all, and merchants won’t receive more orders from you. However, the Alipay Wallet APP has a huge installed base and daily active users (DAU), making it a natural traffic entrance. Offline consumption and payment is another payment scenario that Alipay must seize. In this case, Alipay directly transformed the "Merchant" Tab into "Taodiandian", which is a win-win situation for both parties. From then on, Taodiandian obtained a traffic entrance comparable to that of Taobao Mobile, and overtook its competitors such as Meituan and Dianping. The Alipay Wallet APP finally started with breaking through offline payments to realize its own traffic monetization and retain users. Users can open their Alipay wallet and pay for offline purchases directly. Compared with similar services, the convenience is just as good. But the only risk is whether the Taodiandian team has stronger control over offline merchants than Meituan and Dianping, given the traffic. Both Wang Xing of Meituan and Zhang Tao of Dianping have stated on many occasions in public that O2O itself is a very deep business that competes on offline competitiveness. The addition of online traffic entrances to Alipay Wallet will have a certain appeal to merchants that Alibaba wants to attract, but all offline merchants are facing the problem of offline service capabilities. If there are better conditions, it is not ruled out that merchants will naturally swing between several platforms. The traffic brought to merchants by Meituan and Dianping is already considerable, and adding more traffic is just icing on the cake. Moreover, it is unknown whether the traffic of Alipay Wallet is of higher quality than that of Meituan and Dianping. Coupled with the strong sales control capabilities previously demonstrated by Meituan, Dianping and others, as well as the good cooperative relationships with merchants over many years, it is probably not something that can be immediately suppressed by a simple online traffic advantage. In this regard, Alipay has provided the ammunition, but what ultimately determines victory or defeat is still the Taodiandian team's ability to market on the ground. Highlights & risks 2: Alipay's C2C payment scenarios VS WeChat's strong C2C stickiness The Alipay Wallet APP added a "Friends" tab, which was directly accused by users of plagiarizing WeChat. But the deeper change behind this is that in addition to the picture and text location information that WeChat has, the Alipay Wallet APP has added more detailed payment functions such as collection, IOUs, card coupons, merchants, movie coupons, insurance, and phone recharge. Prior to this, the Alipay Wallet APP focused on C2B payment scenarios. The logic is obvious. Regardless of the transaction amount or the number of transactions, merchants are Alipay's largest and most stable user group. Controlling merchants is equivalent to controlling users. Starting with WeChat red envelopes , C2C payment scenarios were suddenly discovered. Accompanied by scenarios such as holiday greetings, New Year's greetings, and group red envelope distribution, C2C payments suddenly generated a huge word-of-mouth effect and imagination space overnight. Alipay Wallet itself was not lagging behind. During the Spring Festival in 2015, it used red envelope products as a starting point and launched a vigorous competition with WeChat. But in the end, WeChat still won by a narrow margin thanks to its lightweight and simple functions and the rapid explosion of the Spring Festival Gala in a short period of time. The beginning of this battle truly opened up the Alipay Wallet APP's imagination about C2C payment scenarios. Alipay started out based on e-commerce guaranteed transactions, solving transaction needs in scenarios where both parties "don't meet each other and don't trust each other." In real offline transactions, short, flat and fast convenient payment is the mainstream scenario. When it comes to demands such as sending red envelopes, cash is a good entry point, but when it comes down to it, it is actually too direct in terms of the user's psychological experience. In Alipay’s own product logic, C2C transactions are more based on trust interactions and need to be matched with more and richer payment methods. For a larger number of merchants, Taobao’s online transactions only require them to open a store to verify their qualifications as a merchant. However, in many offline physical scenarios, the merchant may not be a B that can actually be registered in the Alipay merchant system, but in fact, a C-category Alipay account is enough for him to complete all transaction processes. It is natural that Alipay Wallet provides richer and more friendly C2C payment methods. At the same time, the risk is the next response of WeChat, the "victim of plagiarism". For Alipay, providing more C2C payment methods is probably like "castration of oneself before practicing magic". The addition of the chat function means that Alipay hopes that users will transfer the social scene part of IM to the Alipay wallet and complete payments in this scenario. To be fair, the idea of Alipay Wallet can be said to be bold and careful, but on the other hand, it also has a whimsical element. From any point of view, WeChat has more advantages than Alipay in the mobile C2C scenario. For users, socializing on WeChat is a need and a habit. Any payment behavior that occurs in this scenario is natural. WeChat naturally has a strong stickiness to users. However, C2C payment in Alipay is actually an extension of offline scenarios, and chatting and socializing with strangers in it just sounds very awkward. Of course, the deepest question is, will we still chat and socialize with acquaintances on Alipay? But WeChat is so easy to use, will users really put the cart before the horse for the sake of payment scenarios? It is said that Alipay Wallet 9.0 is a copy of WeChat, but if Tencent really refines and improves the C2C payment function, given its user stickiness, it is not an exaggeration to say that Alipay is helping WeChat as a product manager . Of course, the premise of all these assumptions is that users really have a high degree of acceptance of such rich payment functions between C2C. |
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