What’s Worth Buying APP Product Analysis

With the emergence of new industry trends such as live e-commerce and short video sales, the traffic of traditional shopping guide websites has declined. The " What's Worth Buying " APP is a shopping guide platform mainly for male users. It is known as the "first domestic e-commerce shopping guide". How useful is it?

On July 15, 2019, "What's Worth Buying" (abbreviated as "Worth Buying"), which was founded nine years ago, was officially listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange's Growth Enterprise Market and was called "the first domestic e-commerce shopping guide stock."

This company, which has been through the PC era, is still on track for growth, but its growth rate is slowing down year by year.

In addition, due to the emergence of new industry trends such as live e-commerce and short video sales, traditional website shopping guide traffic has been divided, and the growth prospects of Zhiyoumai are uncertain.

This article aims to further explore how much value Zhiyoumai has for users by conducting a product analysis on the Zhiyoumai APP.

1. Background

Device used: Huawei mate20pro, domestic WIFI network, full Chinese interface

Experience time: 2021.06.07-2021.06.10

Trial version: V10.1.1

Download method: Huawei App Market APK package

Account status: Registered user, only used price comparison and search functions

Purpose of analysis: To understand the pros and cons of the current version of the What’s Worth Buying app and find directions for iterative optimization of the product.

This time, we will focus on experience analysis from the aspects of interactive experience, page UI, business process, and functional architecture.

2. Industry Analysis

1. Industry status

Source: iiMedia Data Center

Source: iiMedia Data Center, CNNIC

According to the data provided by iMedia Research and CNNIC, we can see that in the past five years, the shopping guide e-commerce industry has grown significantly in terms of both user scale and penetration rate, which is accompanied by the continued growth of China's e-commerce industry.

In particular, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic further catalyzed the development of online shopping habits among users, and the proportion of online shopping users in the total Internet users has reached 79.1%.

Behind a large number of online shopping behaviors, there must be many complex platform online shopping rules and online shopping discounts. Therefore, the e-commerce shopping guide industry and the e-commerce industry that can help users reduce shopping decision costs and save shopping funds have shared the growth.

2. Industry Prospects

According to forecasts from several third-party data agencies, the scale of China's e-commerce industry will continue to expand in the next five years.

However, the huge subsidies from traditional e-commerce platforms and the launch of low-price sub-brands such as Taobao Special Edition and Jingxi have also diverted many price-sensitive users, limiting the growth of users of shopping guide platforms.

Secondly, the content nature of the e-commerce platform itself also restricts the further development of the shopping guide platform.

In addition, other content platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou, etc. have formed a mature grass-planting mechanism and have penetrated into the minds of users, making it difficult for many shopping guide platforms to make breakthroughs in content layout.

The future growth of the industry scale will be mainly supported by three factors: the increase in average order value, the increase in shopping frequency and the increase in repurchase rate.

With the continuous integration of content and e-commerce, and the trend of e-commerce contentization, content scenarioization, video format, intelligent distribution, and universal creation, the market share and users of traditional shelf e-commerce will gradually be eroded by emerging interest-based e-commerce (interest-based e-commerce: goods find people, and goods actively stimulate people's shopping needs).

In the shopping scenarios of interest-based e-commerce, users are more likely to show the characteristics of impulse buying. When they are impressed by the content, they will place an order immediately, eliminating the rational decision-making process of comparing prices from three stores.

This feature is well positioned to simultaneously realize the three major growth factors of the e-commerce industry in the future.

Kuaishou and Douyin, the leading players in interest e-commerce, have both realized the commercial closed loop of e-commerce, transforming from traffic diversion platforms into e-commerce platforms that can both promote and remove products.

The change in user consumption patterns has determined that the e-commerce industry chain will undergo major changes. It is also destined that the growth of the e-commerce shopping guide industry, which reduces the cost of users' rational consumption decisions and provides preferential treatment, will be limited. The growth space for both user scale and industry scale has declined compared to the forecast before 2018.

3. User Analysis

1. User needs

Source: iiMedia Data Center

With the continuous development of the e-commerce industry, virtual shelves are not restricted by physical space, product information continues to increase, and the massive amount of products leads to inefficiency in consumers' discovery and finding of products. This is also reflected in the data.

According to iMedia Research, one of the reasons why almost every consumer uses shopping guide platforms is that the platforms can help them reduce the decision-making (time) cost of shopping. The specific costs are divided into two types:

1. Time cost of price comparison (reduced by centralized preferential information, accounting for 60.65%)
2. Selection time cost (reduced by recommended content, accounting for 39.35%)

The second reason is that the platform can help reduce consumer costs through rebates or cash back, discounts, and coupons.

Therefore, the core needs of users are to compare product prices, obtain discounts, and obtain high-quality content about product consumption.

2. User Composition

Based on user type, users on the What’s Worth Buying APP can currently be divided into content consumers (main user body) and content producers.

Some of the content producers are also content consumers who are ordinary users, and some are official editors of Zhiyoumai and operators of merchants.

Judging from the age and gender distribution of users, What’s Worth Buying is still a product mainly for male users.

In addition, the proportion of male users has increased significantly compared with the monitoring proportion of Tallking Data Mobile Observatory in 2018 (2018: males accounted for 57.22%), and the age is concentrated between 20-40 years old (accounting for more than 90% in total).

The top 10 provinces, cities and districts with the highest share of users are also economically developed regions in China and areas severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Affected by the epidemic and economic income levels, online shopping demand in these regions is relatively strong, and naturally the demand for products that are worth buying will be stronger than in other regions.

However, overall, the regional distribution is more consistent compared to 2018.

4. Data Performance

Source: Zhezhimai Group's prospectus and annual financial report

The MAU of What’s Worth Buying in 2020 increased by 80.63% compared with the MAU in 2016, and has maintained continuous growth in the past five years, but the growth rate fell significantly in 2017. The growth rate in the past three years has been relatively stable, maintaining at around 12%, showing a trend of weak growth.

Source: Zhezhimai Group's prospectus and annual financial report

The community content on What’s Worth Buying is mainly about discount information. The amount of content has continued to grow for five consecutive years, but the growth rate has dropped sharply since 2019.

This is mainly because of the bug-type low prices that were exposed in the early days. After the e-commerce platform strengthened the protection of merchants and continuously monitored data such as discount information and store traffic, the number of bug-type low prices that appeared did not increase as much as before, and the growth rate of community content also declined accordingly.

Source: Zhezhimai Group's prospectus and annual financial report

The content of the ZhiyouBuy community can be divided into the following types:

• UGC (User Generated Content)
• PGC (Professionally Produced Content)
• BGC (Business Generated Content)
• MGC (Machine Generated Content)

However, UGC has always been the main source of content for the community, accounting for more than 70% of the total content, and it rose to 81.72% in 2020. The decline in 2018 was due to the large increase in MGC at that time and the rise in its share. Later, the share of MGC decreased and remained in a relatively fixed range.

5. Product Positioning

Versions 10.0.1 and later are positioned by the Zhiyoumai Group as a Wiki-style consumer content community based on the underlying structure of the "Consumer Encyclopedia" community , with the goal of achieving "more diverse content" and "more accurate recommendations" at the same time, helping consumers from all walks of life to buy "worth buying" products. The positioning of Zhiyoumai as a "shopping guide platform" will be weakened.

6. User Feedback

Source: Cicada Master Statistics

Whether it is the channel distribution of the overall download volume or the daily download volume statistics from January 1 to June 8 this year, we can see that the download volume of Huawei App Market far exceeds that of other app markets, firmly occupying the first place, followed by Xiaomi App Market, vivo App Market and OPPO App Market.

Therefore, the following article selects user feedback from the top four application markets for statistical analysis.

Source: Cicada Master statistics (rating data source: Huawei, Xiaomi, vivo mobile app market)

Except for Huawei App Store (launched on April 2), other app stores all released the new version 10.0.1 on March 25. A total of 333 reviews were collected from that day to June 8, of which negative reviews accounted for 78.08%, of which one-star bad reviews accounted for 73.27%.

The negative feedback from users is also concentrated in the following three aspects:

1. UI
2. Information Display
3. content

From the specific comments, we can see that those who participated in the star rating are old users who are not very adaptable to the new version. However, the feedback is all about the homepage. We can speculate two possible reasons:

1. Users of the What’s Worth Buying app basically only use the homepage, so other pages are not affected much.
2. Other pages have little or no changes after the revision and still conform to user habits.

It can also be seen from the daily download trend in the above figure that the peak user download volume of Huawei App Market is significantly lower after the revision than before the revision, which should be closely related to the user's lack of adaptation.

The download volumes of other app stores have always been relatively small, and the peak values ​​have remained basically stable, which means that perhaps for new users in most channels, the new version does not show any obvious shortcomings.

However, from the previous user growth data, we have discovered that user growth is weak. Compared with attracting new users, it is more important to activate existing users, retain old users and improve retention rate.

Therefore, these problems reported by old users must be taken seriously.

User feedback issues, collected from application market review details

7. Product Structure

At the end of March this year, the 10.0 version of the "What's Worth Buying" App made upgrades and adjustments to the homepage, good prices, encyclopedia, community and other channels.

In the bottom navigation bar, the new version of the "What's Worth Buying" APP has five entrances: "Home", "Good Price", "Encyclopedia", "Community" and "My", among which "Encyclopedia" occupies the C position.

Note: To ensure clarity, it can only be expanded to the secondary functions, and the complete architecture diagram is placed in the mind map.

Click the link to view: https://gitmind.cn/app/doc/e221848944

8. Core Business Process

1. Process of obtaining discount

The first step of the process in Channel 2 is to set "Good Price" as the homepage after the APP is started. After the setting is successful, the process of Channel 2 can save one step.

2. Price comparison process

The process of Channel 1 is for users who enter the APP directly for the purpose of price comparison, while the process of Channel 2 is for users who develop the need to compare prices after using the APP for a certain period of time.

In addition, there are two types of price comparison: one is historical price comparison, and the other is horizontal comparison of prices in various shopping malls, but both types of price comparison are not necessarily achievable.

First, the links to Taobao products are invalid. Second, some products only have historical prices, while others have neither historical prices nor horizontal price comparisons.

9. Main Page Analysis

1. Home

The top navigation bar on the homepage has three fixed categories: "Recommendation", "Follow" and "Life". During the Xiaomi Mi Fan Festival, a temporary "Mi Fan Festival" entrance was added.

It is 618, and this time a new entrance “JD 618” has been temporarily added.

Home - Recommended - Live

Home - Recommended - Category Navigation

Home - Publish Content

2. Good price page

Good Price - Compare Prices and Find Coupons

Good Price - Cabbage Zone

3. Encyclopedia Page

4. Community Page

5. Rankings

6. Search Page

10. Analysis Conclusion

1. Product architecture and functions

The products under the current product architecture are neither like shopping guide tools nor like communities. They wander in between the two and do not appear to be tool-based communities or community-based tools.

Some important functions have deeper entrances, while some slightly redundant functions are repeated.

The two core demands of content consumption users, namely obtaining discounts and obtaining high-quality content for commodity consumption, are not well met. Relatively speaking, the demand for commodity price comparison is basically met.

To sum up, the current product architecture not only fails to further help users reduce decision-making costs, but instead increases the decision-making costs for some users.

2. Page Design

The current layout and display of the bottom tab are completely unable to reflect the product’s positioning as a “wiki-style consumer content community”.

The overall layout of many pages is also fragmented, lacking consistency, giving people a mixed experience.

3. Information display

It can be seen from the financial reports of Zhiyoumai Group in the past three years that Zhiyoumai’s business strategy is changing, and advertising revenue is gradually supporting revenue, which has greatly affected the information display within the APP.

Not only are ads in the feeds displayed frequently, but ads in the entire app are now displayed in every available space.

This approach greatly damages the user experience, and a significant decline in user experience may result in reduced user activity or even user loss, ultimately leading to a reduction in advertising revenue.

The proportion of advertising needs to be further balanced.

Next, let’s talk about the display of content and product information. The quality of the display method is not only related to the layout of the information display, but also to the characteristics of the main user groups. The current information display layout is inverted on the homepage and the community.

In the minds of many users, "What's Worth Buying" is an information aggregation tool or a shopping guide tool, and tool-type products also pursue the goal of being easy to use and efficient.

"What's Worth Buying" is a product mainly for male users. The shopping logic of male users is completely opposite to that of female users, which is the fast-thinking logic of linear shopping.

The product is currently positioned as a community, and the community pursues immersion and long-term use by users.

The product's goals are completely opposite to the main users' goals and the product usage logic.

As the entrance to the product and the most frequently used first-level page, the homepage should first meet the user's underlying needs and efficiently aggregate information.

The non-aligned double-column waterfall flow is more suitable for slow-paced communities, giving users a sense of freshness at all times, while the single-column card-style waterfall flow is more suitable for the homepage, revealing more information about a single product and reducing the user's jump cost. The users’ specific feelings are also described in detail in the user feedback, which is consistent with the conclusions.

11. Optimization Suggestions

1. The home page content area is changed back to a single-column waterfall flow.
2. The existing second-level columns in the community content area are downgraded to third-level columns, and two new second-level columns, sharing and strategy, are added. The sharing content area uses a double-column waterfall flow, but the image size is larger than the double-column size on the homepage to reveal more content. The content area of ​​the strategy column continues to use a single-column waterfall flow.
3. Re-define the positioning of several important pages and perform overall optimization of functions and pages.
4. Reduce the proportion and area of ​​advertising display to increase the recognition of homepage ads.

Author: Lin Xiaoxue

Source: Lin Xiaoxue