Internet shopping Guide is a good business: why the United States did not appear beautiful said

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

Shopping guide is like 36 Krypton to seek coverage of the category of the large, and only November, we reported the domestic shopping guide site, I roughly calculate that there are four, the four also have a good institutional investment. Also in the continuous influx of entrepreneurial projects, let me talk about the internet shopping Guide is not a good business.

Perhaps this wave shopping guide entrepreneurship fever is beautiful said/Mushroom street One after another burst of financing news and hundreds of millions of dollar valuation stimulus, perhaps the larger the more complex Taobao, users really need a lower cost of the discovery of goods, so the start-up companies caught a new opportunity, then this wave of start-up companies to grow into a big company opportunities?

In addition, the Network Shopping guide is the development of a certain stage after the business state, and in the early development of E-commerce in the United States market, shopping guide site is far from domestic so prosperous, which also makes me very want to know how the U.S. users to find the lower cost of love goods is how to meet the demand?

Why does the American market have no beauty to say and Mushroom Street?

The site Shopping guide in the United States is not a "sexy" business, at least with the domestic than a lot worse. America's most well-known shopping guide website Thefancy, also did not reach the domestic beautiful say or mushroom street influence. Beauty said in November 2011, after the third round of financing of the valuation in 150 million U.S. dollars, c round of financing 20 million U.S. dollars, its investment side Blue venture, Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital is a star company. Beautiful said rival Mushroom Street at the end of October announced the C round of financing news, rumors of financing after 200 million U.S. dollars, the cumulative financing amount of 50 million U.S. dollars, its investors have Zhao Xin Capital, Bertelsmann Asia Investment Fund, Qiming Venture and IDG. As far as I know, these two UV-rays are nearly 3 million.

In my adoption of various channels of opinion collection, we have a consensus on the differences between the Chinese and American Network shopping guide industry, but there are views on the reasons for this phenomenon. I list a few possible factors:

1, the industrial environment is different:

In American cities, businesses and users have a stronger sense of brand. Small businesses in some of America's nooks and cranny are also actively recommending their social accounts to users and building their own brands in a variety of ways. In addition to online shopping malls or Amazon and other electric platform sales, many businesses will also choose to build a monopoly cabinet or independent sales website. One investor shares data that nearly 90% of the U.S. city's goods can reach consumers through a variety of proprietary channels, while domestic brands are less than 10%.

The important use of a brand is to make it different, to differentiate, and it is easier for American users to grow up in this business culture to know what they want.

And the relative maturity of the U.S. business brand awareness corresponding to the domestic cottage culture. Domestic businesses not only lack the awareness of brand building, in product design and other stages there is a strong imitation. The result is that on the one hand, it produces a very rich product for users to choose, stimulating the user's personalized needs, on the other hand, a large number of design to manufacturing in all aspects of the lack of brand-separated goods, increased the user's choice of difficulty.

2, Amazon and Taobao do personalized recommended difficulty coefficient is different:

Amazon and Taobao are the United States and China's largest electric business platform, the former personalized recommendation, the latter is passable, the domestic shopping site market opportunities are basically based on Taobao bad site found and recommended results.

But this is not necessarily Taobao's technical staff than Amazon's poor, both platform features determine they do personalized recommendations of the difficulty coefficient is different.

1 The quantity of goods is different.

Taobao has at least one order of magnitude more goods than Amazon. What makes Taobao more complicated is that the same product has many different sellers. For example, a Samsung mobile phone in the Amazon may have only one seller or several, but Taobao on the same phone will have hundreds of sellers. So the absolute quantity of goods on Taobao is bigger, but the purchase data density of each item is more sparse, personalized recommendation difficulty increases.

2 to shop as the recommended unit VS product as the recommended unit.

Taobao is the basis of the Consumer-to-consumer, the information above is organized in shops as a unit, shops have each product page control. Amazon is the foundation of the Business-to-consumer and has more control over each product page.

So when users open a product page, Amazon can according to the user's purchase or click Behavior, "guess" users also like which products, Taobao is difficult to do. For example, you open a women's package on Taobao page, even if Taobao can guess what you still like, but the owner certainly do not want to be on the page of their own store on the other store products (except for the partnership).

Taobao can be in the page advertising position to do related products bidding rankings. Perhaps when it comes from beautiful talk and Mushroom street pressure is big enough, Taobao will come up with a better way to optimize the search in the site and find the effect.

Taobao in the domestic e-commerce market share of more than 70%, more vertical business is joining Taobao platform, but apparently its search and referral system can not keep up with the speed of expansion, which gives the shopping guide site to leave a chance.

3, the user shopping guide needs the different emphasis:

The network shopping guide essentially solves is uses the lower search cost to reach the shopping demand. Any market user will have this demand.

But because the previous introduction of several differences, resulting in the domestic user "find" the demand for unknown products more prominent, need to find their favorite from a large number of goods, the demand focus on the "guide" on the beauty of the Mushroom street so similar products to guide the navigation site in the domestic market.

The demand for us users may be more diverted by the community of interest and the monthly subscription mode. The monthly order, is that you put the purchase decision right to the third party you trust, provide a monthly subscription service to the third party is equal to provide you with a kind of ultimate personalized shopping guide. Monthly order items appearing in the United States, more than the domestic shopping guide site, in early 2012, we have done a summary of the United States monthly order start-up company summary, there are one weeks ago Wired Magazine, "Monthly subscription year: From razors to condoms there is always one you need."

In order to make it as clear as possible and not let an article cram into multiple themes, I put the topic of the two title split into separate articles, another article, "Shopping Guide is a good business?" and Taobao game "mainly talk about the opportunity of the domestic shopping guide site how many, and the next 2, 3 years after the shopping site may become what it looks like, Finally, there is a simple information to organize the "domestic shopping guide site how much."

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