As giants collectively enter the content e-commerce market, are companies like "Little Red Book" having an easy time?

Compared with new models such as live streaming e-commerce, social e-commerce, and customized e-commerce, traditional retail challengers Alibaba and JD.com seem to be becoming defenders of tradition.

Behind the prevalence of new models is the fierce competition for traffic monetization on e-commerce platforms, and emerging marketing models are constantly being explored by small and fast e-commerce companies.

Statistics show that in 2017, the scale of China's e-commerce market will exceed the combined size of the US, European and Japanese e-commerce markets. In order to gain a share of this huge market, in addition to "traditional" channel construction, high-priced advertising, shelf competition, etc., the industry is also paying more and more attention to content e-commerce, which is the main source of traffic and core value recognition.

Currently, the content-based e-commerce (shopping guide) platforms include Xiaohongshu, Pomelo, What’s Worth Buying, etc., and it is almost normal for e-commerce to enter the community and content. Taobao, JD.com, Jumei, Vipshop and other large and small e-commerce platforms are all salivating over the traffic brought by the content.

Multi-level monetization of media content

Since 2012, relying on the rapid development of the mobile era, new media and self-media have continued to emerge. In addition to traditional advertising revenue, e-commerce channel monetization has naturally become the best source of income for these media.

On September 22 this year, Toutiao's e-commerce business "Today's Specials" reached a cooperation with Youzan, a mobile shopping mall system provider, to promote products in a content-guided shopping mode. Youzan merchants can enter Toutiao accounts and publish content such as brands and products.

In the Toutiao client, users can click on the product picture in the headline article to directly enter the merchant’s Youzan store to place an order and make payment. WeChat Pay and Alipay payment are supported. Consumers can also check all their orders and logistics information in the Toutiao client.

According to Li Mengru, head of Today's Specials Business, Toutiao's e-commerce business began to be prepared around April 2014 and was officially launched in July. It is presented in a shopping guide mode, with products oriented to the Taobao system. Toutiao is also one of the Taobao customers with the highest cross-store settlement authority on Alimama's mobile terminal.

In addition, Toutiao will also open the function of inserting product links in articles in the near future. It currently supports the shelves of many e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, Youzan, and Weidian, expanding the content e-commerce model.

In addition to Toutiao, some self-media have also invested a lot in content e-commerce. In August this year, Youzan released a self-media e-commerce operation guide "Self-media Sales Are the Future". The report said that the commercialization path of self-media is pyramid-shaped: value-added monetization represented by paid reading, advertising monetization, and sales monetization. Among them, sales monetization is the most effective way to monetize and maximize value. It relies on the high-quality content and community interaction operated by the self-media itself to influence users' consumption decisions.

However, Na Xin, CEO of What’s Worth Buying, said that most current content entrepreneurs come from the media and do not have supply chain capabilities, so it is best not to try to sell goods too early: "Once you are involved in selling goods, it is not a short-term behavior. The chain is long and complicated. For a self-media or content entrepreneur, it is difficult to pay attention to every link in the chain."

E-commerce transformation 1: From people choosing goods to goods choosing people

Domestic e-commerce began to emerge among ordinary consumers in 2003, with Taobao and Eachnet as the typical example.

In the past 13 years, the essence of e-commerce is to solve the information asymmetry problem of users living in different cities. The categories have evolved from standardized large-scale goods to non-standardized long-tail goods. Consumers' demand for e-commerce platforms is large and comprehensive, cheap prices, and convenient delivery.

This was a typical era when people searched for products, so Taobao blocked Baidu from crawling.

At this time, the most common keywords for e-commerce marketing are: traffic, cost-effectiveness, hot product strategy, leading sales, and more than 10,000 positive reviews...

However, as brands' recognition of e-commerce channels increases, theoretically all products have the opportunity to be displayed together. At this time, price-performance and sales information become unprecedentedly important, because all factors that can be directly compared will be directly compared by consumers.

This leads to another problem: e-commerce platforms pay more attention to hot-selling products and sales volume, and pay less attention to some niche and sophisticated products that change lifestyles.

With the rise of the mobile era, e-commerce platforms have begun to find that it is convenient to buy things on mobile phones, but the mobile terminal is different from the traditional PC channel in terms of screen size, user browsing habits, etc.

At this time, content e-commerce that can accelerate users' decision-making path and screen out the best products came into being.

E-commerce transformation 2: Scenario-based shopping replaces pure purchase

In July this year, Taobao launched the Maker Festival, trying to create another "Double Eleven" with the hottest VR system. Behind the Maker Festival lies the e-commerce platforms' desire for scene sales.

The same bowl of noodles can be sold at a high price in the Forbidden City; the price of a cup of coffee in a high-end bookstore is different from that in an ordinary roadside shop. This is the power of the scene. Consumers are beginning to like not only the product itself, but the scene in which the product is located, the needs of similar consumers behind it, and the pursuit of emotional resonance with similar consumers.

Behind the scene purchase is the separation of consumers’ shopping behavior and purchasing behavior. In the era of material scarcity, shopping and purchasing basically happened at the same time. Consumers went to department stores and supermarkets to look for goods or went to JD.com and Taobao to search for goods.

In a scene-based purchasing environment, consumers are not in the mindset of "I want to shop", but instead use VR devices to create the effect of "shopping", or choose products subtly through scenes constructed through the text of self-media or the video of anchors.

Giants enter the market

At the beginning of this year, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma set three directions for Taobao: community, content and local life.

Late one night, Taobao's second floor quietly appeared. At 10 p.m., when you open Taobao on your mobile phone and scroll down, you can see a three-minute skit with food, stories, and a shopping list with links. This is considered a typical example of Taobao's contentization.

In early August this year, there was news that JD.com would launch a self-media platform similar to Toutiao - JD.com. As early as in JD.com's "3C Upgrade Plan", JD.com stated that it would add community elements to the platform e-commerce and move towards the ecological model of social e-commerce. The reason why JD.com established JD.com was based on its vision of future social e-commerce.

More e-commerce platforms are turning their attention to the content behind the live broadcast: On July 6, Tmall’s mobile app launched live broadcasting, and the “watch and buy” function supported by Alibaba Baichuan allowed users to directly place orders for products recommended by the anchor without exiting the live broadcast; during the “6.18” period, Suning tried out its own live broadcast method “Suning Celebrity Live Broadcast Room” for the first time, using internet celebrities to guide consumers to log in to the Suning.com mobile client on the live broadcast platform to start shopping.

JD.com senior vice president Xu Lei revealed that JD.com will also introduce live broadcasting in the near future. "In the era of mobile Internet, occupying user time is crucial." At the end of September this year, JD.com's live broadcasting was launched and placed in the first column of the Discovery Channel.

The fact that e-commerce giants have all invested in content should give a chill to content producers who enter the e-commerce industry with content. The experiences of previous e-commerce shopping guide websites should be a lesson for them.

At that time, 70% of the traffic in the e-commerce shopping guide industry was directed to Taobao, but then Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma announced several principles for e-commerce shopping guide and rebate websites at an internal meeting, saying that he would not support the continued growth of upstream shopping guide websites, and that Alibaba's traffic entrance should be grasslands rather than forests. From January 2013, the Taobao customer model of cash back for shopping on Taobao was no longer supported, and only non-cash methods such as returning points, returning physical goods, and returning coupons were supported.

At present, domestic independent content e-commerce platforms are also dependent on large e-commerce platforms. Perhaps when large e-commerce platforms build their own content areas, these independent content e-commerce platforms will have a hard time surviving.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.