Ant Financial is Alibaba's main weapon against Tencent

I have always believed that the outside world has too many unrealistic hopes for WeChat, and at the same time mistakenly regards LaiWang as the main weapon against WeChat. Recently, Alibaba announced the establishment of Ant Financial Group, which is gradually building a mobile ecosystem including Alipay, Alipay Wallet, Yu'ebao, Zhaocaibao, Ant Micro Loan and MyBank, which is under construction, with cloud computing, big data technology and credit system as support. Only then did we gradually understand that in the O2O field and even the entire mobile e-commerce field, Ant Financial is Alibaba's main weapon against Tencent.

Payment entry versus social entry

The reason why we have high hopes for WeChat in e-commerce is due to its huge traffic, especially the hundreds of millions of traffic per day on WeChat Moments, which makes countless e-commerce practitioners jealous. But when we discuss WeChat traffic, we ignore whether its social traffic really has e-commerce genes.

For e-commerce companies, what they need is not only traffic itself, but also traffic with shopping genes. For users, WeChat plays more of a social tool. When WeChat users think of it, they first think of social communication rather than e-commerce. Because of this, countless businesses have used WeChat public platform to try to enter the field of mobile e-commerce, but most of them have failed. This is also the reason.

If we compare it with Taobao, the purpose of users going to Taobao is very clear, which is shopping. Therefore, the shopping conversion rate of the traffic coming from Taobao is very high. Having accurate e-commerce traffic may be the key to truly winning the mobile e-commerce market.

This time, Ant Financial chose payment as the main entry point for mobile e-commerce, and also tried to attract more traffic with shopping genes through payment. After all, all e-commerce will eventually end with payment. It is foreseeable that many merchants will choose to cooperate with Alipay and carry out in-depth cooperation in red envelopes and coupons, which also unveils a new situation of competition between Alipay and WeChat in mobile.

Seize offline channels

Although different companies have different understandings of O2O, one thing has become a recognized fact in the industry, that is, offline channels are the key to the entire O2O.

In fact, when I went to Qingdao this summer, I found that Alipay had cooperated with Youke, the largest convenience store in Qingdao. Consumers can pay directly through Alipay when shopping in the store. Alipay has also started to cooperate with convenience stores such as Haolinju in Beijing. Users only need to open the payment code at the checkout counter, and the merchant can scan the code directly to complete the entire payment process, which is convenient and simple. Through this payment method, Alipay is seizing offline merchant channels at the fastest speed. After all, compared with online resources, offline resources are extremely scarce. After seizing resources, it is possible to start a war in O2O.

WeChat Pay is not to be outdone and has also launched a "swipe card" function, also aimed at competing for offline channels. However, compared with Alipay, WeChat Wallet has many weaknesses. For example, although WeChat Wallet is bound to nearly 200 million bank cards, due to the immaturity of the entire WeChat e-commerce ecosystem, most users still use WeChat Wallet as a tool to grab red envelopes, and the proportion of shopping through WeChat is very small. In contrast, Alipay has become a must-have tool for online shoppers, and its years of operation have also enabled it to provide users with sufficient security. Because of this, Alipay's offline channel layout has enough chances of winning.

Offline channels are related to whether both parties can break through the existing situation in the field of mobile e-commerce. Only by establishing smooth relationships in offline channels can the future of mobile e-commerce have sufficient imagination.

E-commerce data versus social data

As I analyzed above, Alipay is an e-commerce ecosystem with payment as its entry point, while WeChat is an e-commerce ecosystem with social networking as its entry point. This also shows that both parties are inclined towards data in the mobile era.

For the e-commerce industry, social data such as user interests and hobbies are certainly important. Through these data, we can also analyze the user's interest map more clearly, so as to recommend the most suitable products to users. But we actually forget that user interests and hobbies are not equivalent to shopping tendencies to a large extent. For example, I usually like to read about rosewood furniture. It seems that I can judge that I may be a potential buyer of rosewood furniture only from my interest and hobbies data. However, if relevant product information is pushed to me, I believe it is basically useless, because I can't afford expensive rosewood furniture. This also tells us that in the era of mobile e-commerce, it is difficult to reflect the user's purchasing needs with simple interest data. Therefore, we need not only interest data but also shopping data.

The so-called shopping data refers to the browsing habits of users during the shopping process, as well as information such as the price and quality of the products sold. It is also an important indicator that can truly reflect whether a user is a potential customer of a product. Therefore, the author believes that in the field of e-commerce, we should not only make a big fuss about user interest data based on social media, but also adopt a strategy of starting from purchasing power, using purchasing data as the main entry point for e-commerce, and supplemented by social media data.

As a result, the superiority and inferiority of Alipay and WeChat in the field of mobile e-commerce are clearly revealed.

Through the above analysis, it is not difficult to conclude that Alipay will play an important role in Alibaba's full-scale attack on WeChat in the field of mobile e-commerce. For WeChat, the most important thing at present is not the market competition, but to strive to build a stable and healthy e-commerce ecosystem as soon as possible. With the ecosystem, everything else is possible, otherwise everything is an illusion.

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.