Traffic War: How do I operate e-commerce on JD.com (Part 1)

Beijing has been sunny in recent days, and people's mood has also improved. 2016 has passed its peak and is gradually fading away. 2017 has arrived with 12 months of sincerity, the beautiful Spring Festival is about to bloom with fireworks, and the wonderful things in life are still brilliant. Here, I would like to wish all my friends a happy new year in advance! I hope this article can make you feel something, that would be a great thing!

After working for a few years, I have gained deeper and deeper experience. No matter whether it is the small or big things you have done, any job you do, any effort you make, and any interest you love will bring you a lot. Every bit of precipitation, hard work, and dedication in the past will be of help in greater or lesser degrees in your future life/career. In the future, you will definitely thank yourself for working so hard now! Because the achievements you have made now are all derived from your hard work in the past!

The multi-dimensional operation of e-commerce

E-commerce operation itself has many aspects, category operation/ marketing operation /channel operation...each part is crucial! But no matter which part of the work, the final result is the same, and it all depends on: traffic. Without traffic, products will not be favored by users; without traffic, even on Double 11, there will be no current global record... Every online and offline enterprise, even every department, from business to R&D, is racking their brains and working hard to improve user experience and thereby enhance two core indicators: traffic, and ROI of traffic!

In the previous article, I mentioned that the e-commerce war is also a traffic war in some ways. This is reflected in two aspects:

① Even the best wine needs a bush

In the current stage of fragmented information acquisition on the mobile Internet , even the best wine will not be appreciated if it is not well known. No matter how good a product is, if no one browses it and there is no traffic, it is not easy to generate good conversion quality and effect. If it can be supported by large-scale traffic, it is bound to be able to quickly grow into a thin-profile, traffic-level product.

I was in charge of 11 categories at the time. If we could use the traffic scale we encountered in 2016 to shape the scale of the 11 categories in 2015, both sales and GMV would have made history. So many stores on Tmall are desperately spending money to buy traffic, and major brands are working hard to secure their own traffic sources in search engines...and the word "word of mouth" can only generate value under special conditions and special backgrounds.

② Large-scale traffic distribution

The above considerations are about how to acquire and introduce large-scale traffic. On the other hand, if traffic can be guaranteed and you are given one million or ten million traffic, how would you use it? How to use it well? How to use it effectively? Make sure that not a drop of water is leaked, and all the water is irrigated to the fields, so that everything can be used to its full potential and people can be put to their best use?

Traffic is always limited, and no matter which brand it is, it is difficult to achieve long-term rapid growth. Therefore, effectively utilizing current traffic and distributing it well are the keys to traffic operations!

IKEA's "Liushang Qushui" is similar to e-commerce traffic and retail customer traffic

In the opening preface of "Creating JD.com", the first masterpiece that tells the complete development process and strategy of JD.com, Mr. Liu personally wrote the preface and succinctly explained the essence of e-commerce: returning to the essence of retail! "Therefore, the attributes of e-commerce traffic and retail customer traffic are similar, and the quality and efficiency of traffic are basically the same. Everyone likes to buy cheap and good goods, and small profits but quick turnover. As for high-end luxury goods, both online and offline are high-end.

In terms of traffic, IKEA has set a good example:

From the picture, we can see a perfect "Flowing Wine Cups and Curved Water" diagram. Customers enter from one entrance and exit from another entrance. The flow of customers in the entire mall is relatively even. From entrance to exit, the layout of the entire mall is very harmonious! A model of complete scenario-based operation + traffic distribution.

DNA characteristics of e-commerce traffic

On the one hand, e-commerce traffic is similar to offline customer traffic. On the other hand, through Internet+, e-commerce has its own unique characteristics:

① Curve of volatility and traffic behavior

Perhaps everyone who operates an e-commerce business has encountered two situations: Sometimes, you have prepared everything, but the only thing missing is conversion and sales; after analyzing all the traffic portraits and all the product information, you find that there is nothing wrong, but there is just no good result, leaving you confused and at a loss. Sometimes, you find that you haven’t done anything, but your sales are still good. Sometimes, you run an event and the effect is good, but the next time you do it, it doesn’t work, and the operation quality and efficiency are very average, far worse than the last time...

It is said that human needs are the most difficult to understand because of information asymmetry, fragmented information acquisition, regional differences, etc., which lead to this disordered fluctuation characteristic, just like a mathematical curve. Therefore, e-commerce operation is a long-term job, not a one-time job. Just like big data analysis , only when there are more data samples can we find the most stable and core reference value! It is most helpful for traffic distribution.

② Boundless Product Form

On January 9, WeChat Mini Programs were released. As the flagship of WeChat , they brought greater room for imagination. Many users joked that "we can uninstall the APP now" [ Here, I want to sigh for Baidu Light Apps. It does the same thing, and is several years ahead of Mini Programs . What a pity... ]; and before that, H5 was born with Web APP and Native APP in the mobile Internet era, and it iterated and fissioned rapidly, and created many amazing traffic-attracting effects, such as NeuroCat and 1024 Games ... It has made great contributions to the innovation of mobile Internet!

In the era of mobile Internet, product form determines the trend of traffic. APP has a closed loop due to its uniqueness. However, with the development of WeChat mini-programs, Moments sharing, browser Web compatibility, H5, and the widespread use of big data and open platform API interfaces, traffic no longer has such obvious boundaries.

For example, at the end of September 2016, JD.com and Toutiao jointly launched the Jingtiao Plan, which mainly covers three aspects: First, JD.com opened a first-level shopping portal "JD.com Special Sale" on Toutiao; second, precise advertising based on Toutiao's big data capabilities; third, the two parties will jointly carry out e-commerce cooperation based on interest reading, and help more Toutiao accounts realize their value through shopping guides, commission sharing and other models.

③ Ecosystem and funnel model

Traffic is extensive, but at the e-commerce level, users are very sensitive to traffic due to their unique shopping genes. Getting users to spend real money to shop is completely different from the Internet's usual free logic, so not all traffic is effective, and not all traffic is strongly correlated; in other words, the traffic introduced from news media may increase exponentially, but it must go through the funnel screening of the "e-commerce shopping golden process", and the traffic that can eventually complete this process and complete order conversion will be largely attenuated!

Therefore, the traffic of JD.com, Tmall, Xiaomi.com, and Suning all have their own obvious user portraits and user characteristics. Similarly, the user groups of Meilishuo and Mogujie platforms are obviously different from the e-commerce user groups of JD Travel, Mafengwo, Ctrip Travel, and Qunar .

I remember that during an event in the first half of 2016, our main shopping venue introduced several times the traffic growth at a certain stage. The traffic on that day was as high as one million, but the conversion rate was extremely low and did not grow exponentially. Its traffic quality and efficiency were not synchronized. 60% of the traffic came from extrapolation, and a large part of the traffic was invalid.

④ Mobile shopping: Fragmentation

Every time I go to and from get off work, on the subway or bus, I always see people looking down at their phones, holding their phones tightly and nervously browsing one content after another. The rapid development of smart phones, 4G, and mobile Internet has greatly changed the space and time of users' shopping, resulting in changes in shopping platform preferences, traffic peaks, online time, browsing frequency, average order value, etc. The following figure shows that mobile devices accounted for 83.62% of Tmall's Double 11 in 2016. The characteristics of mobile devices are well-known "fragmentation", fragmented access, fragmented time, fragmented duration...

⑤ Hitting the ceiling · Stock market

After more than five years of rapid development of mobile Internet and the popularization of core infrastructure such as China's information infrastructure, Broadband China, 4G, and smart phones, today, both PC Internet and mobile Internet users have basically reached their ceiling, and the growth of mobile Internet has slowed down significantly. The user base is limited, and the user's time is also clearly limited. In 24 hours a day, less than one-fifth of the time can be spent on shopping.

We will move from an incremental market to a stock market. On the other hand, with the rapid development and deepening of mobile Internet, fragmented time and fragmented traffic are also increasing, splitting PC traffic into various fragmented traffic. Moreover, mobile Internet itself has become the largest entrance to traffic, making PC a low-traffic platform for the "old and helpless".

More importantly, the traffic has long been divided up by major giants, with 80% of the entrance traffic controlled by 20% of the platforms, and the traffic dividend is negligible. As the Chinese have said since ancient times: Everything will turn into the opposite when it reaches its extreme. After hitting the ceiling, it will fall back and then stabilize!

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

The author of this article @赵飞谭 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!