Community e-commerce has always been a concept that confuses many people. What is e-commerce? What is community e-commerce? Is this a fantasy? Confusion comes from the "sequelae" of web2.0. The concept of web 2.0, which is highly praised by the industry, has long been synonymous with the unprofitable model. Community is one of the main forms of web2.0. By analogy, does community e-commerce inherit the "glorious tradition" of web2.0, but is it also an unreliable thing with no profit model? This logic sounds very reasonable!
A thousand theories and a thousand inferences are not as good as one example. One example is accidental, but a hundred examples are inevitable! Rather, let’s look at those behaviors associated with transactions in this area of the community. Transactions made through the Internet may not necessarily use Taobao-like methods or Alipay. Even transactions can be negotiated online and settled offline. As long as it is a transaction, as long as it is through the Internet, broadly speaking, this is also e-commerce. According to this principle and through analysis, we found that the so-called community e-commerce currently has six specific forms:
1. Community online trading
"You can make money by posting on BBS!" Do you believe this? To be honest, before 2005, I didn’t believe it either!
In 2004, Laiba.com opened a website in Nanjing, and some merchants completed the initiation of community e-commerce in Laiba Forum. As a netizen, I suddenly discovered in 2005: The BBS we play actually has commercial value? ! However, due to insufficient understanding of the mechanism and many key details of community e-commerce, Nanjing Fence was imitated and surpassed by Huaqiao Road Tea House, which had more upstream resources. Most of the early merchants encountered bottlenecks that they could not break through, and Nanjing Fence was unable to break through. Become martyrs together.
So far, the largest section of Xici Hutong is the Prodigal MM Concentration Camp, which is a market for online transactions through BBS. It has also spawned a unique online and offline interactive store model like Xici Taotao Alley.
"You can make money by posting on BBS!" This is the truth. All sellers want to ask how others got orders by posting? There are only two core points: he trusts you and he likes you. Trust is common to all e-commerce; and liking is unique to community e-commerce, a web 2.0 transaction - a humanized transaction.
2. Community group buying
When multiple people gather together to buy items from the same merchant, this is called group buying. Just like the principle of price difference between wholesale and retail, the seller’s sales and service costs are reduced, and the price can be moderately reduced. This model currently evolves into:
·Buyers convene group purchases online.
·Sellers convene group purchases online.
In addition to the aforementioned concentration camp for prodigal girls in Xici Hutong, several websites have emerged in this field: 55BBS in Beijing and Deyi.com in Wuhan.
3. Offline group buying and centralized purchasing
Since buyers and sellers can convene group purchases, can a third party do it? From this, a business model was derived: group buying network. The main tasks of the group buying website are:
·The third party is responsible for helping sellers organize group purchases.
·Offline group buying meetings organized by third parties.
·Third-party offline large-scale group buying fairs: This method is often carried out by integrating traditional media and online media channels.
·A third party organizes buyers to collectively negotiate competitively with sellers—collective purchasing.
At present, this is the main profit model for vertical websites or vertical channels of portal websites in industries such as home furnishing and weddings. The core of group buying is cheapness, and many times, the advantage of cheapness also becomes a trap. Sellers and third parties (such as group buying websites) are also doing things that should be convened by buyers themselves. Therefore, this model has gradually changed, so that the sense of trust has gradually decreased. At the same time, this model has two flaws:
A. It is difficult for the website to profit from group buying transactions realized through the community.
B. The value of professional group buying websites’ own channels is not high, and they often gather through traditional media channels, so the profits are often occupied by traditional media.
Many factors led to the failure of group-buying websites with this model in the early days, and group-buying became a form of activity on almost all websites.
4. Group buying (Meituan model)
The Meituan model, which originated from the American website Groupon, has recently become popular across the country. This model no longer requires too much explanation. The essence of this model is viral marketing through extremely low prices as bait. The goal is no longer to sell goods but to promote the brand.
This pattern has given rise to many buzzwords:
·Group purchase once a day.
·Have you done any group shopping today?
·Unity is strength, and group buying can bring discounts.
The shortcomings of this model are obvious: the model is simple and too easy to copy, leading to a rotten market; the industry is complex and lacks specific profit points; customer interaction is poor, making it difficult to form community stickiness. Therefore, this model will gradually turn from a model into a means, just like the early community group buying that also became group buying.
5. Classified information
E-commerce does not necessarily have to be conducted online, therefore, classified information should be attributed to community-based e-commerce. Classified information can also be called classified advertising, which is actually an advertising and display platform that is segmented according to industry.
Classified information, like communities, is a source of traffic in the local portal field. However, classified information is easy to generate traffic but difficult to generate income. The reason is that the value of the suitable industry is not high and the sales cost is high. Word-of-mouth is already a lesson learned!
The shortcomings of classified information are that it is not interactive, detailed, and informal. The advantage is that it embodies regionalized life services.
Classified information can never replace search engines, but search engines are also improving, and vertical and life-oriented searches are gradually emerging. It is foreseeable that search engines and real e-commerce platforms will gradually phase out classified information.
6. Community electronic mall
Everyone thinks that e-commerce is e-commerce, and the ultimate ideal of e-commerce must be e-commerce. The e-mall has the following elements: display, classification, retrieval, interaction, and security. These elements constitute different aspects of digital transactions.
So, what are the similarities and differences between community e-malls and e-malls like Taobao?
At the end of 2005, I suddenly thought that I could set up a small home furnishing mall similar to Taobao on the Huaqiao Road Teahouse. It took a year for the idea to be accepted; it took another year for the concept to be realized. This is the home treasure system of house365.
At present, there are many such projects in this field: Hefei Forum’s wedding treasures and car treasures; Xiaoyu Forum’s wedding mall, etc. are all successful cases.
Regional communities will give birth to electronic shopping malls that are dependent on regional communities. This mall has the characteristics of product regionalization, customization, and offline delivery. The significance of this mall lies in the realization of the value of the website.
The best cooperation model between communities and e-commerce should be to complete transactions in e-malls and cultivate brands in the community. The above six major forms reflect the following truth: In the world of web 2.0, community and e-commerce are intertwined with each other, and they are intertwined and difficult to separate. (Text/Qin Huai in Dreams)