In September 2009, Weiyi.com began to enter e-commerce amid many people's doubts, objections, and concerns. Over the past nine months, we have continued to explore and find a way to effectively combine community and e-commerce. It has not been easy all the way. There are also some small gains. In the past 9 months of Weiyi.com’s e-commerce development, I have a lot of feelings and experiences that I can share with you.
Weiyi.com’s background in B2C:
Weiyi.com was founded in early 2008. After one and a half years of development, it has become the largest cosmetics community in China, with nearly 500,000 female members. Members of Weiyi.com have high stickiness and like to discuss the use of cosmetics in the community. , purchasing experience sharing and other behaviors. In addition, Weiyi.com also has a cosmetics database of nearly 200,000 review data. The team at Weiyi.com has extensive experience in technology and community operations, but has almost no experience in the field of e-commerce. How to transform from community operations to e-commerce operations is our biggest challenge.
Although there are many difficulties, this has not hindered our development. After 9 months of stumbling and groping, we have gradually got on the right track. After 2 years of operation and accumulation in the field of cosmetics, many distributors and manufacturers have gradually become our close partners. . B2C's business strategy is more of a continuation of our community operation thinking, and has also embarked on many innovative paths. It has also formed our unique management system in user management and analysis.
I believe that many friends will be very concerned about the effects of the combination of community and e-commerce. Our development history and some data can also be simply shared with you:
1. Because of the existence of the Weiyi.com community, the overall conversion rate of its orders has reached about 2%, and the conversion rate of Weiyi.com community users has reached 4%-5%;
2. Within 9 months, the repeat purchase rate has basically reached about 40%;
3. Sales may be what more people pay attention to. We have almost no advertising investment and we have not done Taobao. Only on Weiyi related channel platforms, after 9 months of development, monthly sales have exceeded 1 million. ;
4. We started doing B2C and moved from Shanghai to Jiaxing. From a team of 5 people, we developed into a team of 10 people after 6 months and a team of 20 people after 9 months. We will need more people in the future. We are in 9 Within the month, the team reached two small steps.
We are indeed a new force in e-commerce. We started almost everything from scratch. We have no people, no experience, and no funds. What we have is the original Weiyi.com and 500,000 precise members. In addition, It is the tenacious will of the Weiyi team that we must do e-commerce, and we must do e-commerce well, no matter what difficulties we encounter.
In the past nine months, I have indeed had a lot of feelings and experiences to share:
1. It is absolutely accidental that a community can successfully become an e-commerce company, and it is even more rare for an e-commerce company to become a community. I am worried that the social commerce I advocate will bring misunderstandings to more e-commerce companies. Our little achievements today There is no reference at all. The probability of success of communities is much lower than that of e-commerce, and the probability of success of e-commerce is not high. Even if the success probability of both is 1%, then the success probability of combining communities with e-commerce is only 0.01%. . E-commerce companies don’t have the patience to spend two years developing communities without food or drink. However, there are very few communities in China that have actually achieved results, and how many communities dare to bet their lives on e-commerce?
2. E-commerce management and community management are two completely different categories. The community is actually the media, and the media is a light company. 5-10 people can build a million-level community platform, but to do e-commerce, you need to do what e-commerce does. In everything, no link can be missing. Just like the bucket effect, any shortcomings can prevent your performance from improving. Supply of goods is the most typical thing. Without inventory, you can't do e-commerce. We are not doing well now. We have basically achieved a 60%-70% inventory rate, and we will achieve 100% in the future.
3. E-commerce is a happy and painful business. When the scale is not large enough, the company can make profits and reach tens of millions per year. It has no worries about survival and has certain development. This stage is happy. But after this stage, without strong enough financial support, the bottleneck of growth is very obvious, and there is almost no hope of getting bigger. So now I understand more and more why the powerful B2C keeps taking money, because in the end, the ROI of B2C investment in media is almost the same, and the rest is to compare who invests more, and whoever has more money will have bigger sales, unless Someone can open up the competitive landscape by improving conversion rate and ROI data. Mecoxan's data is better than VANCL, which means that to achieve the same sales, Mecoxan will spend less money. In the end, e-commerce will become a completely formulaic operating system. .
4. The value of member behavior analysis is inestimable. We are now gradually starting to build this system. For Weiyi.com, we have a considerable number of users, and users have iconic behaviors at different nodes, such as: registration , multiple logins, posting, high level, trial, adding to shopping cart, placing orders without payment, shopping, repeat shopping, VIP, etc. Accurate analysis of users in different channels can clearly analyze the value of channel media, which is very important for marketing guidance. I think the meaning of independent B2C is not entirely to break away from the constraints of Taobao, but more importantly, you can mark any node you pay attention to, understand consumer behavior, and make targeted responses. The future competition of e-commerce will be every Each detail depends on who understands the consumer better.
5. The problem of traffic. When the conversion rate is stable, the amount of traffic determines the amount of sales. As we gradually digest the must-do things for e-commerce, we find that the essence is to obtain effective traffic at a suitable cost. Suddenly, we find that our advantages are not complete. To exert more resources and energy into e-commerce, it is inevitable that the community will be neglected. Now, the awakening community is the most suitable strategy to obtain traffic without large capital investment, so we have revised the version and returned to our core, just We take e-commerce as our first guiding goal.
Our journey on this road is too uneven. Although we still have problems in many basic links, such as SEO, EDM, advertising, marketing strategies, etc., we will always continue to strengthen our core competitiveness: community and By effectively integrating e-commerce, continuously improving the efficiency of conversion rate, repurchase rate, number of users and other indicators, and optimizing the user conversion model and behavior analysis system, I believe that Weiyi.com will be able to create its unique value in the e-commerce field in the future.
In 2010, Weiyi.com has gradually kicked off its development. Recently, we have made a major revision, which reflects our 9 months of exploration experience in combining community and e-commerce, and re-presents the new look of Weiyi.com. We also hope that friends can understand our thinking during our revision and development process, and that our experience can be used by everyone. Finally, we changed the new domain name, which represents a new starting point and a new journey for Weiyi.com: Weiyi.com www.w1.cn
Editor in charge: Yang Yang