Observation on content products of e-commerce operation platform!

With the rise of short video platforms, the trend of users being attracted by the popularity of short video platforms and then switching to consumer platforms is becoming more and more obvious.

In recent years, e-commerce platforms are unwilling to be merely tools and have increased their content products, hoping that users can browse the platforms and complete the closed-loop transformation from planting grass to pulling grass on the platforms. Today we will briefly review the content products of various e-commerce platforms.

1. Taobao: [Browse] How far is it from Xiaohongshu?

Guanguang was spun off from Weitao. Let’s look at some of the problems of Weitao and extrapolate the situation that Guanguang is facing.

(Subscription and shopping on Taobao)

One of the shortcomings of Weitao that has been criticized is its low conversion rate. In fact, on e-commerce platforms, the conversion rate of content-guided products will be lower than the overall market, because browsing content already represents the user's unclear purchasing intention, and users with clear intentions often complete the purchase directly. An extended thought is, what are Taobao’s measurement indicators for browsing? Conversion rate? Improve user retention? User stay time and ARPU value?

The second shortcoming of Weitao is that the merchants’ private marketing and content are mixed together. Splitting it into subscription and browsing makes the product positioning clearer. Subscription is the merchants’ private marketing, and browsing is users’ sharing, which is more conducive to the establishment of user minds. This is the most obvious benefit of the current revision.

The third shortcoming of Weitao is the low quality of its content. Merchants’ marketing content is too simple, and the cobbled-together video live broadcasts and other content have a single style. Users’ subscription relationships are often formed under the guidance of merchants’ interests, and users’ willingness and interest are not strong. After the product is revised, can the content of the shopping be upgraded? What is the tone of the content? Can it be differentiated from Xiaohongshu?

When browsing community products of this type, it is very difficult to innovate product functions, and what users perceive most strongly is the content. The product functions of GuanGuan are very complete, but the content is obviously inferior to that of Xiaohongshu. If you randomly search for "hydrating facial mask" on the two platforms, you can intuitively feel that Xiaohongshu's content is richer and more consumer reference. Judging from the current situation, Guanguang has a basic product structure, but its content is far from Xiaohongshu.

(Left: Searching for hydrating facial masks on QQ, Right: Searching for hydrating facial masks on Xiaohongshu)

Guanguan’s product positioning is similar to Xiaohongshu, but how much market space is there? According to the latest data, Xiaohongshu has 130 million monthly active users, and Taobao has 750 million monthly active users. Based on a 5% penetration rate, Guanguang’s channel has 37.5 million daily active users, which is far behind Xiaohongshu. If we consider users' perception of the product, Xiaohongshu already has clear user awareness, while most of the users who browse the site are Taobao users who browse around casually after shopping. From the perspective of content production experts, Xiaohongshu has already formed a stable community atmosphere, and Guanguang, as a latecomer, can use subsidies to attract experts. If the atmosphere is not formed in the early stage of the community, premature commercialization will damage the community atmosphere. There is still a long way to go to retain experts.

Every product is influenced by the company’s genes and the resources around it. When shopping on Taobao, you will always face comparisons with the conversion rate and GMV of other business lines. Even though Alibaba is a company with strategic execution capabilities, it can only ensure that the time window for shopping is longer. Looking at the advantageous resources that GuanGuan has, such as MCN, stores and influencers, these do not provide much direct help for the in-depth construction of community content. On the contrary, they may affect the sedimentation of content because of the overly high expectations of commercialization of these content producers.

Compared with Xiaohongshu, Guanguang is undoubtedly a follower product. The story of giants increasing their investment in independent tracks, hoping to catch up with or even surpass the pioneers, is played out every day in the Internet world. Those who come late but arrive first are often in the expansion stage of the market, with unmet incremental market demand (such as Meituan Waimai versus Ele.me, Qunar versus Ctrip). At the same time, they are required to avoid making mistakes and catch up more efficiently.

Whether Guanguang can catch up with or surpass Xiaohongshu remains to be seen.

2. JD.com: [Discovery] Changed its shell, looks like a mixture of merchant marketing and UGC

I haven’t visited JD.com for a long time, and suddenly I saw that JD.com’s [Discover] channel has been revamped. The direction of the revision seems to be the same sharing community as Guanguang, and there are also 5 tribes equivalent to user circles.

(Recommendations, tribes, and topics found on JD.com)

It is found that the recommended content is still mainly based on the original experts and store content, interspersed with users' recommendations and product reviews. The content of experts is basically videos, and the content of grass-roots shows is pictures and texts. Topics and tribes have activities to guide users to post. Currently, the quality of content posted by users is uneven, there is little interaction, and it is not displayed in the recommendations.

Looking at the three pages in the picture above, the recommended merchants and experts are incompatible with the users' UGC content. The theme of the topic on the right is [Show off the chicest Chinese fashion combinations], but the content in the topic is users' post-purchase orders, and the content quality is seriously insufficient.

There are many areas in the product functions that need to be optimized. As shown in the figure below, there is a [Browse] page embedded in the discovery page. The functional structure is similar to the recommendation page, and it is more like the homepage of the UGC community. The content in the follow tab is the same as the original discovery, directly displaying the live broadcasts of the followed stores and the products recommended by the stores. Marketing activities have already begun to be displayed in the tribe even though the content and user attention are not high. Therefore, attention has maintained its previous positioning as merchant marketing, recommendations are still mainly based on merchant and expert content, and the tribe is the base of UGC.

(Activities in the Browsing, Following, and Tribes found on JD.com)

What exactly is JD.com’s positioning? The original store marketing content has not changed, but it has been replaced with a community shell, and a circle of user interaction has been added. The content posted by stores, agency experts, and users are mixed together, making people feel that the positioning of this product is not clear . What user needs does it solve? Is it that the product planning is not clear, or that the company's decision is not clear?

3. Kaola/Dangdang: Vertical e-commerce content communities need clear positioning

The advantages and disadvantages of vertical e-commerce as a content community are obvious. The advantage is that the categories are vertical enough and the user base is highly concentrated. The disadvantage is that the platform traffic will be relatively small, and there may not be enough user base to support community development.

When the platform is not large enough, the resources the company can invest in the content community will be very limited.

(Kaola's interest community, Dangdang's Dangdu)

Koala’s discovery area is called [Interest Community], and its UI has a distinctive style. One of the characteristics of a mature community is its unique style and interaction, which is in line with the former NetEase style.

The discovery section of Dangdang.com is called [Dangdu], and judging from the content, it seems that it is trying to create an interest community centered on books.

Currently, the contents of Kaola and Dangdang have no obvious characteristics, and the amount of interaction is also very low. The e-commerce grass-planting community is already dominated by many competitors. There is Douban before the book community, and major social entertainment platforms also have book-related content. Without differentiated positioning and strong operations, it is too difficult for vertical e-commerce content communities to make achievements.

4. Pinduoduo/Tmall/Suning/NetEase Yanxuan: Several forms of e-commerce content shopping guide conversion

It is found that tabs often carry the role of content shopping guide conversion in e-commerce, from the earliest official production of pictures and texts, to short videos in recent years, and then to some special shopping guide channels. The path from NetEase Yanxuan -> Suning -> Tmall -> Pinduoduo is just the right place to observe the evolution process of content shopping guide.

NetEase Yanxuan’s discovery position is called [Worth Buying], which brings together various Yanxuan internal shopping guide channels, users’ product reviews, official special recommendations, new product unboxing reviews, and free shipping for 9.9. This is the most traditional discovery positioning, bringing together officially produced shopping guide content, mainly in the form of pictures and texts, to meet the purchasing intentions of users with unclear intentions, and complement the main purchasing process.

With the rise of short videos, the content produced by e-commerce platforms began to focus on videos, mainly by officially supported influencers and stores. Suning’s Discovery tab is positioned in this way. Compared with the traditional shopping guide format, the content has become short videos and supports user attention.

(NetEase Yanxuan’s Worth Buying, Suning’s Discovery)

Shopping guides with pictures, texts and short videos often have no distinctive content, which makes them lack of appeal, and the conversion rate of shopping guides is often questioned. New directions of experimentation include shopping guide communities such as Taobao’s Guanguang, Tmall’s distribution of user reviews, and Pinduoduo’s Pinxiaoquan’s shopping and content distribution based on social relationships.

Tmall's reviews are content aggregation based on users' comments on products. The results of searches within the channel are product rankings based on user reviews. It also displays other users' comments on individual products and guides users to participate in competitions between products.

User product reviews are the most valuable UGC resources on e-commerce platforms, and many product managers have conducted research on review content. The content of the reviews varies. For example, in the review about facial cleanser in the picture below, the user named [看什麼你傻狗] said, "It's very useful. After using it, several ex-girlfriends asked me to get back together with them." There is too little content like this. Regarding product reviews, it is easy for everyone to think of the comments on NetEase Cloud Music. I can only pay tribute to the operation of Cloud Music~

Pinduoduo's Pin Xiaoquan actually also has the effect of shopping guide conversion. Based on acquaintance relationships, it distributes users' shopping status, answers to questions, status and other content, thereby generating user stickiness and shopping guide conversion. Although many people around me despise Pin Xiaoquan, the attitudes of third-tier users and the huge space for social distribution of goods cannot be ignored. We may not agree with Pinduoduo's values, but its attempts in the e-commerce field have always been ahead of the times.

(Tmall Dianping, Pinduoduo’s Pinxiaoquan)

V. Conclusion

When e-commerce platforms develop content products, they need to clarify the following issues:

• What is the positioning of content products? Grass-growing communities or sales conversions;
• What are the unmet needs of users? Create a product differentiation path that users can perceive;
• How is content produced? The proportion distribution among officials, stores, experts and users, and the definition of high-quality content.

As a responsible product manager or product owner, never let your content products become useless...

Author: Zuoshousi

Source: E-commerce Product Notes