Which cards did the “all-powerful” WeChat break?

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Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma's words " WeChat is a good card, but it was played badly " have refreshed people's views on WeChat to a certain extent. As a national application, WeChat is excellent, but can WeChat really change everything?

In the past 1-2 years, every time WeChat launched some new features, it would always arouse heated discussions in public opinion, and the most common one of these arguments was "WeChat is going to subvert someone again."

During the Spring Festival of 2014, with the launch of WeChat red envelopes, some public comments compared it to the Battle of Stalingrad between Tencent and Alibaba in the mobile payment battlefield, which would have a crucial impact on the future battle between the two sides; some believed that "WeChat red envelopes allowed WeChat to bind more than 100 million bank cards in one night, doing the work of Alipay in eight years in one night."

In WeChat 5.0, when Tencent added the function of scanning barcodes, books, CD covers, and street views to the "Scan" function, users can use this function to see businesses within a 200-meter radius of their current location, such as food, hotels, movie tickets, etc. At this time, some people immediately believed that the commercial value brought by the combination of "WeChat + Street View + Dianping" was immeasurable.

WeChat has also made a series of attempts in the field of e-commerce. Whether it was the launch of WeChat Stores or the integration of WeChat and JD.com, it was believed that it would greatly affect users' shopping habits on mobile terminals and even subvert Taobao.

This argument was inevitably repeated when WeChat Phonebook was launched. Since WeChat has indeed brought a great impact on the operators' SMS business, it is natural to think that WeChat Phonebook will subvert the operators' voice call business.

When WeChat's user stickiness and momentum in public opinion are so great, its competitors will naturally feel worried and even lose their footing. Laiwang, launched by Alibaba, is generally considered to be a deadly challenge to WeChat, but unfortunately, even though Alibaba poured a lot of resources into it and even required internal employees to attract 100 users to play Laiwang, Laiwang still failed.

For a moment, in the atmosphere created by everyone, WeChat gave people the feeling that it was the best. A single feature could subvert an industry, and even a powerful company like Alibaba could only retreat step by step.

But the fact is, although the transactions did not go through, some functions of Alipay Wallet are indeed not as convenient as WeChat Pay, and WeChat red envelopes are indeed fun and people have been playing with them, WeChat is not always the winner.

Take payment for example, WeChat did not do the work of Alipay in eight years overnight, because during the entire Spring Festival in 2014, the number of people using WeChat red envelopes was about 8 million; while during the same period, Alipay Wallet made more than 100 million payments, making it the world's largest mobile payment company. In terms of third-party access, Jumei Youpin connected to WeChat payment in 2013, but quietly closed it after more than two months of operation because the other party felt that there were not many repeat users.

In terms of e-commerce, Tmall's transaction volume during the Double 11 shopping festival this year was 57.1 billion yuan, of which wireless clients accounted for 42.6%. Obviously, WeChat's series of attempts in e-commerce have not overturned Alibaba. I have personally bought medicine twice on WeChat stores, and my experience is that both the richness of search results and the variety of medicines are actually very average.

As for the commercial value of scanning the street view, this is even slimmer, because apart from seeing someone try it out when this feature was first released, I never met anyone using this feature to scan the street when I went out to eat with friends. Many friends have indeed opened WeChat Phone Book, but after opening it, everyone still uses the phone to contact each other. Ma Huateng himself said that this is just a small product.

Therefore, although IM is a product with high user stickiness and can carry a lot of things, it does not mean that WeChat is the biggest disruptor in the eyes of critics. It also does not do many things well. Now, Jack Ma has come out of his " Pearl Harbor attack " mentality, but some media, Internet critics and analysts are still stuck in the inertia of "WeChat subverts everything" and cannot extricate themselves - at least when WeChat Phonebook was launched, there were still many such arguments. Whenever WeChat releases a new function, it habitually uses the subversion of so-and-so as an excuse.

The producers of this kind of argument will have to go through many wrong judgments before they realize that social traffic is not universal and that WeChat also has many functions that no one uses.

Original source: http://www.pingwest.com/wechat-is-not-a-panacea/