8 Taobao trends predicted for 2021

This year, I didn’t spend much energy on the Taobao affiliate business, and I didn’t even participate too much in the Double 11 event, but I still participated in two apps that included Taobao affiliate business.

One of the apps achieved over 10,000 downloads without any promotion, product recommendation, material circle, or multi-level commission mechanism. The commission generated every day is quite considerable, which can be regarded as an attempt at a new model.

Although I have not been deeply involved in Taobao Affiliate this year, I have always been optimistic about this direction, so I still have some observations and thoughts of my own.

As the new year approaches, I would like to share some of my simple thoughts with you and talk about my predictions for Taobao business in 2021 as a mostly outsider. It is for reference only.

1. Steady and rising

Although this year's epidemic has had some impact on domestic e-commerce transactions, both the transaction volume and the commission of the Taobao team have declined.

But in the long run, the impact of the epidemic is still short-lived.

More importantly, this epidemic has unexpectedly brought about two changes.

First, it directly popularized and promoted the online shopping habits of middle-aged and elderly people and urban and rural residents.

They may not deliberately go to Taobao to buy, but when they are watching Douyin, Kuaishou, and Video Accounts, they just buy the products recommended by the bloggers.

Secondly, it has spawned many people looking for part-time jobs online. That’s why many money-making training camps, Taobao affiliate training camps, and short video money-making training camps have become popular this year. It’s because many people have been affected by the epidemic, their work and income have become uncertain, and they have started looking for side jobs.

Therefore, if we look at next year and the year after, I think the transaction volume of e-commerce will reach a new peak again, in addition to the increase brought by the sinking market.

I think there is also the cross-border e-commerce part. The village chief called 2020 the year of cross-border e-commerce layout.

Another thing is the overall size of Taobao practitioners. I think it has only increased and not decreased, at least in the past two years.

The ceiling of Taobao Affiliates is far from being reached. It is only a matter of time before the commission increases from 30 billion, 50 billion to 70 billion or even higher.

2. The growth rate of Taobao agent apps has slowed down

To answer the question at the beginning again, if you are still making Taobao apps or agent apps now, it is not impossible, but it is really too difficult.

Don’t use apps like Fudai and Jumi as examples. Think about it, how many companies have managed to make it to the top 10 in less than a year?

The vast majority of Taobao agent apps are cannon fodder, and the rapid rise of lucky bags has many prerequisites.

Think carefully about the Taobao circle this year. Whether it is Haosheng, Fenxiang, Huasheng, Miyuan, etc., how much voice do they have?

Is there anyone who still sends you Taobao agent app download pictures one-on-one?

I received advertising messages from Taobao agents only twice this year, once on June 18 and once on Double 11, because everyone was sending out red envelopes to lock in commissions.

Why is the growth rate of Taoke agent app slowing down? There are three reasons:

a. Most people regard Taoke app as a tool to make money, so there are very few transactions when recommending products as an agent.

b. The desire to make money is shattered. Most of the newbies who work as Taobao agents cannot earn as much money as the lower-level agent team.

This year, firstly, the supervision of multi-level distribution policies has reduced everyone's profits, and secondly, the online shopping consumption of its agents has decreased.

c. Poaching Taobao agents is not as easy as recruiting Wechat business teams. If you want to recruit a Wechat business team, for them it is just a change of product promotion and an additional money-making project.

However, it is quite difficult for Taoke agent app to poach agents from other platforms, except that it is exceptionally good in products, commissions, functions and operations.

In fact, the top agent app platforms are all similar, and the products consumed by end users are still those on Taobao.

Therefore, if there is no problem with the platform, agents will not find a reason to switch to a new platform.

This naturally increases the difficulty of Taobao affiliate fission.

If you just want to make some money as a Taobao affiliate, I think Taobao affiliate can fully meet this requirement.

But if you still want to start from scratch and make tens of billions or even set it as a listing goal, then give up this idea as soon as possible.

Even platforms like Fanli.com and Save Money Express, which claim to have over 100 million users, only have a limited business scale.

Because of the pure Taobao affiliate's idea, going public is simply not feasible, so they have to keep adding content to the app, but I don't think this is a solution.

3. Taobao agents are popular in social media

There are still many people who want to be Taobao agent apps this year, and most of them got this idea after seeing others being very successful.

But those who are actually working in this industry have given up on this idea.

Since you want to make money through the agency model, the first problem you face is how to get started, and the second is how much commission to set?

If the commission is set the same or too low, no one will play. If the commission is set too high, there will be no money to be made.

In fact, if the labor costs are taken into account, the top brands now do not make any money.

Because currently the vast majority of agency platforms retain commissions between 8-15%. As long as the team size exceeds 100 people, after deducting the agency share, the pure commission of one or two million per month can only be said to barely maintain the operating costs.

Therefore, this year many individual Taobao agents have begun to turn to Taobao agent groups that provide targeted promotions, and pay more attention to community operations.

The benefits are obvious. The monthly revenue generated by a group of four to five hundred people is much greater than that of a Taobao agent with thousands of people, because the commission is more than doubled or tripled.

If you want to make some money, I personally prefer this method. You can make money by working harder and putting more thought into it.

The core lies in two points: one is the number of group fission, and the other is product selection.

If we can get more orders with super gift money, it will be more effective in maintaining the community.

4. Content Taobao takes a unique approach

This year, video Taobao merchants experienced an explosive growth period due to short videos and live broadcasts, but were later restricted by some platform policies and their path to wealth was cut off.

Of course, there is another content form of Taobao that is the most popular this year, and that is Zhihu Good Things.

There are many training courses on Zhihu Good Things on the market. Some people really make tens of thousands of dollars a month by relying on Zhihu Good Things, while others just rely on Zhihu Good Things to make a quick buck.

I think there is opportunity for Taobao affiliates that sell products through pictures, texts and videos.

Let me first talk about the downsides of this form:

First, it is easy to be maliciously complained by peers, facing the risk of post deletion and demotion.

Second, it is not easy to see results quickly, even if your product selection is good.

Third, the requirements for content are relatively high. Users are converted by content. Even if the team needs to expand, the requirements for personnel are relatively high, and the speed of scaling is relatively slow.

Let’s talk about the benefits of this model:

First, the platform allows this form of selling products. As long as the content itself does not violate any regulations, it can continue to exist and the content can continue to generate revenue.

Second, the higher the threshold requirements, the less competition there will be and the more opportunities to make money.

Third, you don’t need to think about what activities to do, just focus on writing good content.

Fourthly, by promoting content, you can also divert traffic to your own QQ group.

Previously, there was a team that relied on Zhihu to write soft articles and publish them, guiding QQ to convert orders.

Fifth, this model allows one article to be used for multiple purposes. In addition to Zhihu, you can see that platforms such as Baijiahao and Toutiao have similar functions.

Therefore, I personally believe that next year, there will be a small wave of Taobao affiliate teams based on content output, but of course, there will be more people who make money quietly.

5. Exploration of product paths

I just said that whether you are making a rebate app or an agent app, you will face the problem of the ceiling.

It is difficult for a platform that purely provides rebates to conduct other businesses based on its own resources because its scale is too small.

If you want to make a breakthrough, you have to start from scratch, and the key services cannot be the same.

The ceiling for Taobao agent apps is definitely 50 million users. Platforms that claim to have over 100 million users should know the real number.

So how can the platform’s agents make more money?

How to prevent the loss of agents on the platform?

Making micro-business products is the choice of most platforms at present. In fact, if we look back at the recent leading social e-commerce platforms, we can also notice this trend.

Either start a new project or make micro-business brand products, which may be hair care and anti-hair loss products, beauty products, or health care products.

Of course, personally I prefer the path of product development. After all, the ceiling for product development is much higher than that of the Taobao agent platform.

It may be difficult to achieve a transaction volume of over 10 billion, but even if you make a product worth 10 billion, the profit will be considerable.

I personally think that if the current platform truly wants to become a consumer brand, it will go further.

6. Taobao agent platform is no longer Taobao agent

The biggest problem with Taobao agent apps is homogeneity and lack of growth in the later stages. Naturally, they don’t want to just make one Taobao agent app.

I have said before that the idea is that many platforms will gradually move towards an industry-wide distribution model, involving all aspects of users' daily life such as food, clothing, housing, transportation, travel, entertainment and shopping.

You can imagine what is happening this year as you see various agency platforms pushing products like gas, movie tickets, and Meituan memberships.

On the other hand, many platforms have begun to operate their own live broadcasts and products, with the idea of ​​using Taobao, JD.com and other platforms as tools to stabilize traffic.

Ultimately, I still want to take the path of a comprehensive e-commerce platform, but I personally feel that this transformation is too difficult.

But in any case, diversifying business is an issue that Fenxiang, Haosheng and Huasheng must consider at present. Otherwise, maintaining agent stability, increasing valuations and pursuing listing are all fantasies.

Apart from the reasons of the ceiling, the most important thing is that the alliance does not agree. Relying solely on the agency model to have over 100 million users is the limit.

This year, Fenxiang has spent a lot of effort on live streaming, but the daily active users of live streaming are a major flaw, because users do not perceive any Taobao app as a platform for shopping.

7. The value of overseas Taobao agents remains to be explored

There is still a certain technical threshold for overseas Taobao agents. I talked to my former partner about this a few months ago.

The current method used by overseas Taobao agents is mainly to build independent websites, and there are two ways to do this.

One is to write articles for recommendations on Zhihu and Zhiyoumai, but this path also has relatively high requirements for content writing, especially in English.

My friend previously asked some people from Pakistan, India and other countries to write it, but both the communication cost and the financial cost were relatively high, and the progress was very slow.

When doing overseas content Taobao, it is not suitable to only produce a single content, but you still need to design multiple categories.

But if you ask someone to write it, it will be difficult to scale.

Another idea is to do rankings similar to domestic ones. Its core advantage lies in the ability of algorithms, crawlers, and SEO, and there is no need to write articles.

Just give users a reference recommendation when they search for a product.

For example, when users search for mops, we can directly tell them which are the top 10 mops sold on Amazon, and even provide specific information about mops for a certain usage scenario.

The advantage of this is that the maintenance cost is lower, and multiple independent station matrices can be established.

Since I don’t have a deep understanding of overseas Taobao agents, I am just giving a simple reminder here. Teams or individuals who have the conditions can study it carefully.

Another very important point is that the commission is not bad, but you need to pay attention to the rule adjustments of platforms such as Amazon.

8. Taobao Affiliate Training

When any industry develops to a certain stage, the demand for training will explode.

I talked to Lao Hu about Taobao affiliate training and community matters at the end of 2019. When Lao Hu was doing new business, he asked me if I would like to work with him again.

Later, Lao Hu also did some training, and the results were pretty good. He should be considered one of the most professional in the industry, and he soon launched his own community.

From a personal perspective, I think the Taobao affiliate training business has a bonus period.

It’s okay in the next two to three years, but if we put the time on four or five years, I think the overall scale will be much smaller.

Are courses on public account operation still popular nowadays? Too little.

But in the two years of 2021 and 2022, I think there will be more courses for Taobao affiliate training, such as Zhihu Good Products, rebate robot training, etc.

In addition, it is certain that the alliance will launch new features and new policies in 2021, but I personally don’t have too many illusions about the alliance’s new features.

Because I personally believe that in the short term, it is unlikely that there will be any explosive alliance products that will bring revolutionary changes to the Taobao industry.

But perhaps the improvement of individual policies or small functions can make Taobao's external link promotion more convenient.

I would also like to emphasize that Taobao Affiliate is always a traffic business. No matter whether you are doing brute force mass orders or refined operations, you must always solve the problem of new traffic.

Whether you are relying on writing articles on Zhihu to attract traffic, or creating Douyin wallpaper fans, Weibo fans, video account fans, or express fans, you must quickly measure the traffic cost and seize the opportunity to go all in.

Author: Shili Village

Source: Shili Village (shilipxl)