In addition, word-of-mouth APP topped the free list of Apple APP Store on The day of Double 12, which shows the charm of discount. Since 2015, Alipay has been promoting word-of-mouth double 12 activities every year. From the rewards for opening stores in the initial promotion to various coupons, Alipay has made a great contribution to the growth of word-of-mouth. So, how is koubei planning to take advantage of “the first year of new retail” to promote the local life service ecosystem?
Use new retail to empower merchants and elevate themselves at the same time
From the annual push of Alipay to the establishment of an independent APP in September 2017, the benefits of word-of-mouth to build a new retail ecosystem of Ali are mainly as follows.
For merchants, on the one hand, the new retail mode of word-of-mouth through online and offline combined transportation can help merchants activate offline traffic and improve the operation efficiency of offline physical stores. According to insiders, online traffic accounts for less than 10% of the O2O industry, and more than 90% is offline traffic. Therefore, how to make good use of the 90% offline traffic becomes the key, while general merchants lack the online and offline traffic diversion ability. Therefore, word-of-mouth can effectively channel the flow through online discounts with the help of Alipay and independent APPS, so that some consumers can use the store services, and the visibility of merchants can be improved.
In addition, analysys data show that in the first half of 2017, the in-store scenario became the main consumption scenario of O2O local life service with a transaction scale of 346.88 billion yuan, which shows that the offline market has a broad prospect. When in-store service becomes a kind of demand, good online service will naturally radiate to merchants lacking in offline traffic and reasonably distribute to store users.
On the other hand, relying on the powerful data storage and analysis capabilities of Alipay and Ant Financial, word-of-mouth can help stores conduct data analysis and carry out precise marketing. At present, koubei takes advantage of its platform to guide the flow from the three levels of traffic, content and membership for offline supermarkets and restaurants. It not only provides marketing advice for merchants, but also last year, Koubei CEO Fan Chi said that merchants can enter the platform and the flow fee will be free for three years. This is a good news for businesses. In addition, the user data brought by Double 12 can also point out the direction for stores to implement precise marketing.
For example, Yonghui Supermarket gives customers a second consumption coupon through the word-of-mouth platform, which not only increases the unit price of customers, but also has a significant effect on the cancellation of coupons in the store. Therefore, through the online empowerment of word-of-mouth, merchants can operate in different layers according to the characteristics of consumers and push different commodity discounts to attract users to consume.
As far as users are concerned, thanks to the promotion activity of Word-of-mouth Double 12, they can enjoy very practical discounts when consuming in the store, which also satisfies people’s shopping experience. Moreover, as there are many merchants participating in the activity, users can experience consumption in the nearest activity store, which is very convenient. Many netizens posted their prices after using word-of-mouth discounts on Singles Day, including an aunt who bought 63.71 yuan worth of goods for 0.11 yuan. It can be seen that empowered by new retail, word-of-mouth Double 12 not only brings experience gain to merchants, but also many benefits to users.
For Alipay, koubei’s new retail concept to empower local lifestyle services could also help it seize the high-frequency payment market and further improve user engagement. Statistics show that daily transactions on Meituan-Dianping reached 18 million in the first half of 2017. As the main wechat payment method, Meituan-Dianping’s O2O local life service payment frequency can be seen. The competition between Alipay and wechat in the mobile payment market seems to be neck-and-neck at present. The word of mouth is mainly about in-store consumption. By expanding the offline market of Double 12, it is more conducive to seize the payment market of local life service and help the “dad” Alipay.
It can be seen that by means of the new retail ecological operation, word-of-mouth can help merchants more accurately distribute online traffic and operate and manage offline traffic. It can also improve the consumption experience of online and offline users by jointly launching Juhui activities with merchants. In addition, it can help Alipay to stabilize traffic. In general, the new retail approach is a great way to keep word of mouth pleasing to the market, and as online traffic growth slows, it’s also an important way to tap deeper user needs. But at the same time, the inexperienced reputation still faces many challenges.
In front of the enemy, long whip, word of mouth for transformation is still challenging
It can be said that this year’s “Word-of-mouth double 12” is a good start for word-of-mouth layout of new retail, word-of-mouth performance is not bad, but at the same time, it is also facing fierce competition among peers and self-transformation pressure.
The first is the arch-rivals, such as Meituan Dianping and Wallet Life. Dianping was founded in 2003, Meituan was founded in 2010 and merged into Meituan Dianping in 2015. From the perspective of development time, Meituan Dianping has been deeply engaged in the local life service field for many years. In terms of experience, user base, user engagement and popularity, Meituan Dianping is slightly better than Koubei.
According to Analysys, in the first half of 2017, meituan ranked first with 2.69 launches per user, Dianping ranked second with 2.42, and Koubei ranked third with 2.02. While Koubei is backed by Alibaba ecosystem, Meituan-Dianping is now backed by Tencent. And recently, Meituan Dianping has rearranged its business structure and announced a comprehensive layout of the retail ecosystem. In view of this, Meituan-Dianping is also rapidly expanding to gain more growth momentum, which will inevitably lead to more fierce competition with word-of-mouth in some areas, such as one of word-of-mouth’s advantages — in-store business.
In addition, other local life service platforms also pose challenges to koubei’s ecological layout in the future. For example, Wallet Life recently completed B round financing of 1 billion yuan. At present, the way of wallet life is similar to that of word of mouth. It takes the payment link of local life service consumption scene as the breakthrough point, and provides merchants with operation, marketing, finance and other services based on the precipitation and analysis of transaction data, achieving rapid development.
In addition to external rivals, the great hope that word of mouth is placed on can be a big pressure. It is reported that The goal of Fan Chi, CEO of Koubei, is to increase the daily active users of koubei App from more than 200,000 now to tens of millions next year. Moreover, since word-of-mouth apps are currently mainly dependent on Alipay, it will take some time for them to run independent apps well. During this period, they must be at full speed, otherwise they may fall into a passive situation. It is conceivable that under the urging of Alibaba, word-of-mouth apps after independence must find the motivation to support themselves as soon as possible and leave the embrace of Alipay to take the lead on their own like Meituan Dianping.
On the other hand, many large supermarkets and chain stores may no longer rely on koubei and other platforms, or even build their own local life platforms, depending on their own capital and supply strength and years of cooperation with Meituan Dianping and Koubei and other comprehensive local life service platforms, after gradually establishing a mature operation ecology in line with their own. If such large supermarkets and chain stores operate independently from the platform, they may lose some stable flow of word-of-mouth and reduce the profit space. For example, Carrefour and Wal-Mart have perfect membership system, strong capital chain and supply capacity of goods. After exploring the strategy of activating offline traffic, they may break away from the platform to establish a new retail ecology.
One is from the fierce competition between meituan Dianping and other peers; the other is from the possibility of large supermarkets and chain stores leaving the platform after their operation ecology becomes more mature. In addition, Koubei itself also faces huge growth expectations within Alibaba. It can be seen that in order for Word-of-mouth to develop into an ace local life service platform of Taobao e-commerce, it still needs to break through numerous challenges.
In the face of multiple challenges, continuing to empower the new retail ecosystem may be a good solution
The future development of Koubei can focus on the application of artificial intelligence combined with big data, constantly improve the new retail ecology, help offline merchants to transform, and show the value of the platform can be stable and continue to grow.
The first is to improve the new retail ecosystem from the aspects of artificial intelligence and big data. Word of mouth from alipay, ant gold take good advantage of strong database, such as but it is not perfect, still need to continuously strengthen technology in artificial intelligence, big data input, prompting more accurately analysis using data platform, for the user portrait, marketing for merchants to provide the optimal solution, let users enjoy the most suitable for the consumer experience, such as price, service, etc, to improve the user viscosity.
For example, the unmanned restaurant can be further promoted to add freshness to the user’s in-store experience. With the help of big data analysis, relevant preferential activities are launched for different user groups to further stimulate users to spend in the store and increase the repurchase rate. Tencent, Alibaba, Decos and others have launched their own unmanned restaurants.
Moreover, in terms of the future profits of the platform, how to balance the interests between the platform and merchants is very important. Due to the difference in the flow of different platforms, merchants are unwilling to rely on only one platform. Relying too much on one platform will make merchants lose their right to speak and be controlled by the platform. Therefore, they can open up the platform in terms of the percentage of the platform and the degree of data openness to truly implant new retail into the genes of merchants. In addition, the reasonable sharing of interests between the platform and merchants also determines the length of cooperation between them.
Taken together, word of mouth in the day, month, transactions are active users, the respect such as volume has maintained good growth, especially amid 12-12 flow together, based on user consumption enthusiasm unabated, and merchants to increase subsidies, cooperate with new retail ecological model, multimodal transport, online APP make word-of-mouth promotion has played a good effect, The platform’s influence has been enhanced, but the fierce competition among peers and the pressure of its own growth have also brought many challenges to the advancement of word-of-mouth. In the future, with the help of scientific and technological forces such as artificial intelligence and big data, and constantly improve the new retail ecology for their own blood transfusion, may become a game-breaking tool.
Liu Kuang, meditation on the Internet, wechat official account: Liukuang110