How long will pyramid scheme-style e-commerce continue to wreak havoc in WeChat Moments?

Sometimes we think that everything will be fine if we have traffic, but we never expected that traffic is not everything. Tencent has been eyeing e-commerce for a long time. When it launched Paipai, it announced that it would never charge fees and used various portals under Tencent to import traffic. At that time, there was public opinion that QQ's pop-up window was enough to support Tencent's e-commerce plan. Thinking about it now, it is still ridiculous. For the e-commerce industry, traffic is of course important, but it also tells us that pure traffic lacks a complete shopping ecosystem and most of its traffic is ineffective.

However, Tencent did not seem to fully learn the lesson of Paipai's failure, and instead placed its bets on the mobile hit WeChat. As a result, Tencent continued to follow the old path of QQ with WeChat as the core this year, blindly pursuing the stimulation of traffic users, and also trying to use traffic and so-called massive users to kidnap users and its partners. In essence, it is also following the old path of Paipai with QQ as the core in the PC era, that is, mistakenly taking social traffic as the master key to enter the e-commerce market.

I dare not comment on whether social users and data are really the ultimate trick to enter the e-commerce market, but we must see that the most effective way for users to place orders is a reasonable shopping scenario. A simple social model may bring some e-commerce conversions, but we must also admit that more traffic is actually ineffective, that is, it is difficult for users to be motivated to make shopping impulses under the social model. Unless there is a complete shopping ecosystem composed of factors such as order sharing, price comparison, a large number of products, and a credit system. In addition, WeChat e-commerce that simply imports traffic is basically not very promising. This is also why we have hardly seen any companies or successful cases that have made great achievements in WeChat e-commerce for so long. WeChat e-commerce is still more dominated by the facial mask micro-businesses circulating in the circle of friends.

But even the WeChat merchants with a little hope have become the hardest hit by counterfeit goods due to the lack of platform supervision and credit system. Recently, there are reports that the WeChat merchants, from the place of origin to the receipts to the busy delivery scenes, are all self-written, directed and performed by the store owners. Various GPS conversion tools are used to make up world tours, and staged photos are widely circulated in WeChat Moments, all of which are using the trust relationship between people to do business. WeChat Moments + WeChat Group, which spreads point, line and surface step by step, actually has many similarities with traditional pyramid schemes. It has also been revealed that it has been favored by pyramid scheme companies and has become a pyramid scheme tool for superiors and subordinates to share profits according to volume. Business without supervision is disorderly, and will eventually even damage the cornerstone of WeChat's acquaintance social interaction. This is certainly not what Tencent wants to see, but Tencent's failure in Paipai may be repeated on WeChat. The world is so cruel.

The main reason why Tencent is so anxious to promote WeChat e-commerce is that Tencent is eager to monetize its social traffic. After all, it is not in line with business rules to have such a large number of social users but fail to monetize. We must see Tencent's failures over the years, such as group buying, Paipai, Weibo, and Pengyou.com... The "Damn Tencent" that many entrepreneurs worried about back then is not that scary. Massive social networking is naturally Tencent's biggest advantage, but the overly strong sociality also makes it difficult to divert users' attention from social networking to other areas. This is also the reason why Tencent's products QQ and WeChat are becoming more and more important in the continuous revision, but users are still just staying at the social level.

Even though it has encountered setbacks everywhere, it is foreseeable that Tencent will not stop exploring the e-commerce field. It actually has only one competitor to face: Alibaba.

At this time last year, the public opinion was mostly reserved about Alibaba, and there were doubts about whether Alibaba could complete the adjustment of its mobile strategy. However, this year's Double Eleven and the data of Taobao Mobile and Alipay all show that Alibaba's layout on the mobile side has basically been completed. Alibaba has basically passed the initial anxiety period of mobileization, and the next step is to change from seizing the market to defending the market. Last year, it might have made sense to discuss whether Tencent could threaten Alibaba, but now such a discussion is almost meaningless.

You know, users go to Taobao and Tmall for shopping, so Alibaba doesn’t need to be as secretive about marketing as other brands. Because of this, Alibaba’s traffic to shopping conversion rate is very high. Currently, Alibaba’s mobile monthly active users are 217 million. These 217 million users are on Alibaba not for social networking or news, but for shopping.

This is also the main reason why Alibaba is able to activate and convert user traffic into shopping.

In addition, Alibaba's credit system, horizontal and vertical comparisons between products, and optimized logistics and other channels have formed a healthy and complete e-commerce ecosystem. In particular, the establishment of a merchant credit system has achieved a mutually binding and visible behavioral norm between buyers and sellers, and credit evaluation has become an important indicator for users to choose merchants. Users' choice of merchants is no longer based solely on the platform's recommendations, but also on the merchant's evaluation and horizontal and vertical comparisons.

On the contrary, the horizontal and vertical comparison of WeChat service account e-commerce and the establishment of a merchant credit system are both long-standing problems, and there is no better solution. WeChat e-commerce is essentially a small and micro site e-commerce. WeChat is responsible for providing users and traffic imports, but it is difficult for users to stimulate shopping impulses in an imperfect ecosystem.

In fact, if Tencent is not in a hurry and does not put too much hope on WeChat to let it grow naturally, maybe WeChat can really make a difference in mobile e-commerce. But now WeChat has been given too many missions and responsibilities by Tencent, so WeChat has no choice but to follow the old path of QQ, that is, to put the entire Tencent strategy into WeChat as the core. So, we see WeChat doing social networking, e-commerce, local life services, financial management, e-commerce portals, games... Even some products are services that other products under Tencent already have, but they are still given to WeChat, which is popular. Lack of ecological establishment and only pursuing large and comprehensive products are Tencent's old problems.

Such a good concept as WeChat e-commerce will sooner or later die due to this old problem.

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.