Lin Bin: Xiaomi's Four Principles for Becoming a "Hot-selling E-commerce Company"

A few days ago, I attended an economic forum in Chengdu and gave everyone a brief introduction to the growth status of Xiaomi.com.

Xiaomi is now recognized as a "phenomenal company". It ranked first in China and top five in the world within five years of its establishment. As the e-commerce operation department of Xiaomi, Xiaomi.com has also grown rapidly along with the company as a whole. It is now the third largest e-commerce platform in China and a leading platform in the vertical field of consumer electronics. In the past few years, it has won a lot of championship titles on Tmall Double Eleven. This year, 2.12 million mobile phones were sold in 12 hours during the Mi Fan Festival, breaking the Guinness World Record.

Occasionally, some friends in the industry ask me, "How did Xiaomi.com grow so fast? How did you do marketing?" Although Xiaomi's marketing is good, the success of Xiaomi.com is not mainly based on marketing.

Xiaomi's e-commerce business has a core focus - the blockbuster strategy.

What is a hot-selling product? The definition in Baidu Encyclopedia is: "A hot-selling product refers to a product that is in short supply and has a high sales volume. It is usually referred to as a product that sells a lot and is very popular." We believe that only by being focused enough and striving for excellence, and creating a product that makes users scream, can it be considered a true hot-selling product.

Where do hot products come from? Xiaomi.com believes that there are two basic points: products and services.

Products are the skeleton, ensuring the body is straight and has strong support, providing the most fundamental competitiveness; services are the blood, allowing the products we develop to become truly "living products", making close friends with users, maintaining a sense of warmth and soft and sensitive touch in the interaction, sensing user needs and feedback, and keeping the company's R&D and operations in a healthy cycle.

Therefore, our approach is to first insist on making good products at all costs. This is what we have been emphasizing for the past five years, using the best components, choosing the best supply chain and foundry partners, and making products to the extreme at all costs.

The Xiaomi Mi 4, which we released in July last year, was the first to challenge the technology of stainless steel frames. It takes 40 processes and 193 steps to process a piece of steel plate into the stainless steel frame of the Xiaomi Mi 4. The manufacturing process is very complicated. In order to make this frame, Foxconn invested more than 1 billion yuan in purchasing CNC and other precision equipment. Until the beginning of 2015, the processing cost of a single frame was still as high as 398 yuan. The Xiaomi Mi Note was our first challenge to the process technology of 2.5D and 3D glass. In order to process 3D glass that meets the requirements, our suppliers also invested hundreds of millions of yuan in equipment. At the beginning, the yield rate was only 24%, and all the defective product costs and equipment costs were allocated to each qualified piece of 3D glass. The research and development and optimization of the entire Xiaomi Mi Note and the Xiaomi Mi Note top version took a year and a half and cost hundreds of millions of yuan.

At the same time, we have also made many unprecedented innovative attempts in terms of service. We have always insisted on making friends with users and providing users with services like friends and relatives. Our service system team has done a lot of things that surprised me. For example, on the eve of the sale of our Xiaomi Note top-end version on May 12, many enthusiastic Mi fans came to our Xiaomi stores across the country and started queuing up all night in advance. Queuing is too boring, how to spend the long night? Staying up late is too hard, what should they do when they are hungry or tired? Our service system partners in various places have come up with many unique ideas, such as colleagues in Xiaomi stores in various places leading everyone to play games while queuing and taking selfies together; colleagues in Xiaomi stores in Beijing temporarily transferred the camp beds prepared for overtime colleagues during last year's Double Eleven period to users who stayed up late. Everyone talked together in the Xiaomi store hall, which was a fantasy night for many Mi fans. The next morning, our colleagues provided users with carefully prepared breakfast. Chengdu Mijia classmates baked exquisite Mi Rabbit biscuits and distributed them to Mi fans in line, and looked forward to the moment of sale with everyone. All these little things are what we would do only when treating our relatives and friends. At Xiaomi, we do them every day.

As the most important part of the service system, the quality level of Xiaomi logistics is also very high. During the Double Eleven last year, we shipped 940,000 orders in one day. This year's Mi Fan Festival, we started placing orders at 10 a.m., and the first order was delivered to Shanghai at 11:27 and Beijing at 11:34. Netizens described Xiaomi's logistics as "insanely fast", which is understandable.

Based on these two basic points, we have summarized the four basic principles of popular e-commerce: few items, high quality, massive volume, and long cycle.

These four aspects are closely linked and none of them can be missing. We only produce high-quality products, insisting on high performance and high cost performance, so that users can get the world's top performance configuration at the best price at that time, and ensure that the performance is still excellent after 18 months of use. For example, the Xiaomi 2 series released in 2012 is still sufficient for daily use and has a very smooth experience. With such a long-term sales cycle that is so popular with users, it is not surprising that there are massive shipments. For example, the Xiaomi 2 series mentioned above has sold a total of 17.4 million units by the end of last year.

In addition to mobile phones, we have the same strategy for every category. Xiaomi TV has only one size for two years (Xiaomi TV 1 is 48 inches, Xiaomi TV 2 is 49 inches) until two months ago when 55 inches and 40 inches were launched. Xiaomi power bank only had 10400mAh at the beginning, and it was upgraded to 5200mAh a few months later. Xiaomi wristband still has only one SKU, Xiaomi air purifier has one SKU, Xiaomi power strip has one SKU, Xiaomi weight scale has one SKU, and each of these products is a boutique product made with huge R&D expenses. For example, for a product as simple as a power strip, we also invested 20 million in R&D expenses, which took more than a year to customize almost every component and develop a boutique. Therefore, on April 9, the Mi Fan Festival, we were able to sell 247,000 Xiaomi power strips in 5 minutes, 400,000 mobile power banks, 330,000 Xiaomi headphones, 200,000 bracelets in 12 hours, and 2.12 million mobile phones that broke the Guinness World Record.

As we all know, e-commerce is a traffic business. Many e-commerce companies (especially vertical e-commerce companies) have been purchasing traffic at huge costs and converting traffic on this basis. In recent years, competition in the industry has been extremely fierce. Many companies have fallen into a vicious cycle of losing money while having to continue to increase traffic purchases. In fact, traffic costs have been rising. This kind of simple traffic-selling e-commerce cycle is often just drinking poison to quench thirst.

Different from them, Xiaomi.com is a typical combination of product-driven and user-driven e-commerce. It has never relied on the external purchase of traffic. The strong appeal of popular products, close connection with users and high-frequency interaction not only solve the problem of traffic source, but also are our way of user operation.

In the final analysis, Xiaomi.com's "hot-selling e-commerce" comes from the drive of Xiaomi's overall innovative business model. Xiaomi.com is willing to cooperate with all companies including those outside the Xiaomi hardware ecosystem, under the premise of insisting on making good products at all costs, insisting on family and friends-like service, and the four principles of few models, high-quality, massive, and long-term. We hope to gather the world's best consumer electronics hot products here. It can make users feel more assured and worry-free-as long as the category is available on Xiaomi.com, there is no need to think too much, no need to compare everywhere, and you can take it home directly-because what is here must be the best and most cost-effective boutique.

This is an era of abundant material supply and increasing user sovereignty. Consumer demand will continue to increase: good quality, good taste, and good price are all essential. This puts higher demands on e-commerce operators: only those with broad vision, strong bones, flesh and blood, and both moral integrity and talent are good e-commerce operators.

Xiaomi.com is determined to become the most popular "e-commerce platform for hot products".

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.