E-Commerce Industry Continues To Standardize Taobao

On December 6 last year, Ali announced the organizational restructuring, and Dai Shan was in charge of China's digital commerce sector. At the full moon, her first big change took place.

On January 6, Dai Shan issued an internal letter announcing the new organizational structure of the original Taobao tmall business. The new framework will "comprehensively focus on user experience and customer value, eliminate inertia thinking and encourage mechanism innovation".

"E-commerce online" summarized this change, and the most concerned adjustments are as follows:

1. The original Taobao and tmall business groups are integrated into three centers: user operation and development center, industrial operation and development center, platform strategy and operation center, respectively facing consumers, merchants and platforms, and being responsible for the responsibilities of blowing snow, Xuande and Sihan, and reporting to Daishan;

2. An e-commerce platform, one hand is people, the other is goods, respectively for users and industries to establish operation and development center. The establishment of platform strategy and operation center is to help businesses do business better by providing rules and operation products from the perspective of platform.

3. Daofang is responsible for the live broadcast, and Qiancheng is responsible for the ecology of shopping and other contents, and directly reports to Dai Shan. Taobao content orientation remains the same, the importance of live broadcast and browsing has increased again.

　　 BC gets through and forms Taobao

Taobao and tmall, the core businesses of Alibaba e-commerce, are fully integrated in the background. After this round of adjustment, Taobao will form a unified platform mechanism. This is also the most drastic adjustment of the organizational structure.

Some people evaluate the adjustment as "deja vu", saying that Taobao experienced an important change of "one dismantling three" in 2011. At that time, Taobao was divided into three companies: Taobao, Taobao Mall (renamed tmall in 2012) and Yitao. The reason was that there was no dispute within Ali about whether the future belonged to B2C or C2C. There is no consensus on judgment, so the three spin off companies, each representing the anticipation of the three future, separately test the water.

Zeng Ming, then the chief of staff of Ali, told the media that "at that time, I also made it very clear to the three companies. You should follow your own understanding of the future and go all out to forge ahead. It's OK to compete with each other. Your goal is to kill each other." There are always those who find the right direction to run faster than others. However, the cost is huge energy and organization in the process, and it is difficult to reasonably allocate the internal resources of the group.

　　 If Taobao "one split three" is regarded as the beginning of several business horse racing, now the merger is more like the end of the horse racing era after the two major businesses have run through and entered the mature period. In fact, Taobao tmall needs to make changes in various stages of its business.

At the Ali investors' conference in December last year, Xu Hong, deputy CFO of Ali group, divided Ali's various businesses into three different development stages: sowing, growth and profitability. Taobao and tmall, which are in the mature profit stage, need to consider the innovation of efficiency and efficiency.

　　 Ali's business is divided into sowing

　　 Three stages of development: growth and profitability

Internally, this means a more unified management posture: as e-commerce platforms, tmall and Taobao need to attract more merchants and goods to enter to ensure abundant supply, and also sell goods to more consumers through various display methods. After the unified closing up, there are goods and people in one hand, which means that Taobao and tmall will probably exchange operation methodology, rules, flow and tools in the future, so as to realize greater efficiency internally.

Externally, this means that Taobao e-commerce companies want to unify resources, use their fingers and fight together to participate in the battle of the whole e-commerce economy, instead of unnecessary loss in the internal ecology of Taobao and tmall.

　　 Avoid making wheels repeatedly

Among the three newly established centers, the user operation and development center is the best understood. Its main responsibility is to develop and operate business tools such as member products (88vip, money saving monthly card, red envelope card voucher), user growth and store products to optimize the consumer experience.

We are more concerned about the industrial operation and development center, This is also the most core business in Alibaba's digital business sector.

Taobao app for consumers is equipped with Taobao and tmall. It has two different platform mechanisms, and also has its own industry operation sophomore. For example, the major first-class categories under tmall, such as clothing, sports, outdoor, fast consumer, etc., correspond to different sophomores, and Taobao also has its own classification.

Taobao mainly focuses on small and medium-sized businesses, providing diversified long tail commodity supply, while tmall mainly focuses on brand businesses. But their "industry operations" are almost the same thing: Identify the nature of the industry and consolidate / improve their online penetration.

For example, the clothing industry, which has an online penetration rate of over 40%, has become a model of successful "Internet access". The problem in front of e-commerce platforms and clothing businesses is how to solve the relationship between supply and demand - forecasting the next popular to expand sales, forecasting sales to reduce inventory; However, due to the long decision-making cycle, many roles such as designers and workers are involved in the home decoration industry, and the online penetration rate is only 5.4%. In order to make the industry go up, e-commerce platforms mostly use technologies such as 3D model rooms to make up for the lack of online experience, or cooperate with local businesses to pull online consumers offline.

The logic of doing business is different, but in the same industry, the business essence of brand merchants and third-party dealers is similar. The methodology obtained from industry experience is universal, so it is unnecessary for Taobao and tmall to build wheels repeatedly. Taobao merchants can also copy the business methodology verified by tmall.

In September last year, tmall announced that it had become a D2c platform. At the same time, it also launched a set of "enterprise management methodology", proposing the concept of "two wheel drive": one wheel is consumer life cycle value management (clvm), the other is product life cycle value management (plvm). It is equivalent to that tmall has sorted out the consumption journey of one billion consumers, and has also grasped the life cycle of brands from product research and development to the processing of tail goods, helping businesses in different industries to understand the laws of people and goods.

Therefore, we can understand the intention of setting up the industrial operation and development center——

　　 It is a popularization of industry management methodology It integrates the industry operation of Taobao and tmall, and moves from industry operation to industrial operation, providing consumers and commodity operation capabilities in the whole life cycle for small and medium-sized businesses. For home decoration and food, a customer experience evaluation team will be established under each vertical industry, with customer satisfaction as the yardstick of industry operation level;

　　 It's an attempt to extend the antennae further upstream: The center integrates more than ten major industries of Taobao and tmall, including territorial / industrial belt business, juhuasuan / 10 billion subsidy / daily special sale, etc; In the past year, Taobao tmall's strategy in the development of the industry has, on the one hand, consolidated its high penetration and high market share in the fields of clothing and consumer electronics. The most important thing in the future is to promote the penetration of fresh food, tourism, health, home furnishings and other categories; At the same time, extending to the upstream of the industry, tmall new product R & D Center (TMIC), rhinoceros intelligent manufacturing and other new businesses are helping businesses upgrade their supply side.

　　 Small and medium businesses that can not be ignored

The newly established platform strategy center is a department that provides solutions and services for businesses and industries. Specifically, the center will be responsible for the design of platform mechanism and rules. Through Qianniu and other business operation tools, marketing tools, search and other products, the center will help businesses improve their insight into medium and long-term consumption trends and their ability to quickly respond to consumption feedback.

Wang Mingqiang (Sihan), the person in charge of platform strategy center, was the general manager of all ball express under Dai Shan when she was in charge of B-series business. As early as 2015, Sihan was the person in charge of Taobao industry and the person in charge of search and recommendation products. He made it clear that Taobao should take the path of characteristic merchants and characteristic markets, explore the ability and characteristics of various types of Taobao sellers, and match characteristic consumers with distinctive shops and commodities through search and recommendation.

In addition, a team specially responsible for the growth of small and medium-sized businesses has been set up in the platform strategy center. This is good news for small and medium-sized businesses.

Businesses familiar with the business tools of tmall and Taobao may find that, since last year, the business tools previously exclusively for tmall merchants have also begun to be opened to Taobao merchants, such as the first single gift money for new customers and Wanxiang stage, known as "smart drivers". In addition, Taobao also launched more than 30 business initiatives, most of which are aimed at small and medium-sized businesses to support and help. Recently, Taobao has launched a new inclusive plan for small and medium-sized businesses, which is expected to cover 1 million businesses.

As a result of these measures, the number of Taobao stores that have sold more than one million in the past year has increased by 150000. A large number of new original brands and stores have continued to appear in new businesses. Among them, there are original brands created by post-95 designers, and new women's wear brands with shop sales exceeding 100 million after six months.

In the past, Taobao and tmall had their own e-commerce days: tmall was the main position of 618 and Shuang 11, and Shuang 12 belonged to Taobao. The venues of the two business groups were "completely different", and there were differences in the amount of full reduction between "30 minus 200" and "25 less than 199". "E-commerce online" conjectures that after the integration of the two, Taobao merchants will also have the opportunity to appear in the exclusive venue of tmall merchants, and gain the opportunity to compete on the same platform with their own characteristics.

　　 Content is more important

Since Taobao became content-based in 2015, it has experienced several stages of exploration. Nowadays, in its content and entertainment interactive strategy, live broadcast, short video and small games are in place to make Taobao more interesting, better to visit and richer.

Shopping and Taobao live broadcasting are not only the "infrastructure" built when Taobao content exploration is carried out, but also an important part of this strategy. Qiancheng, which is in charge of shopping, and Daofang, who is in charge of Taobao's live broadcast, report directly to Dai Shan after this adjustment, which means that Ali pays more attention to these two content businesses.

Taobao live broadcast has been a very important user transaction scene on the platform. In the past year, the number of users watching Taobao live portal and independent app "Diantao" increased by more than 60 million. On the whole, the viewing time of online users on Taobao and Diantao increased by 50%, and the transaction volume also increased by 40%. At the same time, the ARPU of consumers in live broadcast also increased by 30%.

For businesses, an independent Diantao app is more capable of undertaking private domain operation than taonei live broadcast portal. From the beginning of last year to before double 11, the traffic increased 3-4 times, and the proportion of traffic was almost the same as that of Taobao live broadcast entrance in Taobao. At present, the proportion of self broadcast Gmv in Taobao has reached 60%.

From the "subscription" upgrade to browse, now occupy the home page bottom column tab important position. It has been online for more than a year, with more than 250 million users browsing monthly live, surpassing the one hundred million monthly life officially disclosed by xiaohongshu in March last year and the 160 million monthly living activity released by the third-party platform in August last year.

As the only centralized content field in Taobao app, shopping is an important part of Taobao's short video layout, and has gone out of the road of differentiation with tremolo and fast hand, emphasizing the content supply of scene. The short videos in shopping and those in the information flow on Taobao's home page perform their respective duties: the former focuses on exposure and powder absorption, which is more suitable for maintaining customer group relationship, creating personage and brand tonality, and interacting with different users; The latter has a clear goal and is suitable for customers, stores and transactions.

Several key persons in charge of Alibaba have repeatedly mentioned the importance of customer (consumer and business) experience on many occasions in the past year.

This big change brought by Dai Shan, the 11th employee of Ali, is also around this point. She attaches great importance to the customer experience and hopes that the business and products she is responsible for can be liked by more consumers.

Before becoming the business president of B2B business group in 2017, Dai Shan was also the chief customer service officer of Ali group. Her data team has established several evaluation models of shopping behavior, such as consumer credit rating. Since then, it has become the reference basis for Taobao tmall's quick refund, quick return, and fast rights maintenance services, which is to improve the shopping experience of consumers, It also enables businesses to identify the "malicious bad evaluators" and other groups according to the consumer behavior model, so as to protect their own rights and interests.

After taking over Taobao, Daisan's axis is still customer experience.