Taobao 3rd applications form an industrial chain

The biggest disadvantage of online shopping is that you cannot see the truth.

But now, when buyers shop in Taobao Mall, they will find a change: after clicking a picture of a skirt, you can drag and drop the picture with the mouse, or zoom in and out the picture with the scroll wheel, you can even clearly see the logo wash details of the skirt.

The pictures may look nice on your own. It is a headache for many women to try on clothes online. However, one day, the buyer found a "fitting room" on Taobao, compared and selected a model similar to his own, and then replaced his face with his own photo, click the appropriate model to see your "try-on" effect.

The demand for buyers is increasing, and the demand for sellers varies widely. Demand is the market, but it is only based on Taobao's own strength that it is difficult to develop so many applications to meet user needs.

On July 6, June 2008, Taobao announced the opening of API interfaces. In layman's terms, any third-party developer can access Taobao data through APIs and provide applications that can be "installed" on the network page. For example, the technology of product image changes in Taobao Mall is the product named "flash store". This is not the creation of Taobao's technicians, but the Silverlight technology invented by Microsoft.

The open APIs of Taobao benefit not only large companies such as Microsoft, but also a large number of ISV developers (independent software developers, can be companies or individuals) who have designed many applications for sellers on Taobao, A complete industrial chain has been formed.

Seller transformed into ISV

Many ISVs selling software on Taobao were originally sellers on Taobao. Because I have worked as a seller, I know how Taobao is a business and what the seller's needs are. These demands have inspired many ISVs to start their businesses.

At the end of 2005, Qu Haichao, who graduated from college, opened his own store on Taobao. Because of lack of experience and supply of goods, the store's business is not good. However, after a long period of time, Qu Haichao found that sellers on Taobao had many personalized needs. Qu Haichao further analyzed his own advantages: he is a technical person, and his advantage is software development, using their own technologies to develop some software for Taobao's online merchants to provide tools for these sellers "Taobao", may benefit from this. Qu Haichao, who is on the bright side, is now taking action.

Due to his own experience in opening a shop, Qu Haichao found that many sellers want to know the browsing status of their stores. What is the page views of stores every day? Which products have large page views? Which products are unattended? Such data has a strong guiding significance for sellers to purchase goods or adjust business categories. Therefore, Qu Haichao developed a software named "good store Statistics. This software can collect statistics and analyze the traffic that flows into the store. For example, how many times and people are checked for each item, and the distribution of customer regions, from which city and province, how long have you stayed? Statistics on the shop page, the number of visits on the homepage, the number of visits to a specific category, the number of current online visitors, and the number of visitors within the last 15, 30, and 60 minutes.

As soon as the software is listed, the user feedback is obtained. A shopaholics selling cosmetics on the Internet use this software to find out which products are most visited, which products are selling well, and which ones are most concerned about, then he will promote these products in a targeted manner. With the help of precise data analysis, the shopkeeper achieved three secrets within a year. Using the "good store Statistics" software, Qu Haichao opened his door to creating wealth on Taobao. At present, Qu Haichao has more than 0.1 million customers, and launched the "good store statistics Mall version" in 2008, which already has hundreds of users, these include Li Ning, Mengniu, old head, IBM Think Pad laptop, Asus, Hengyuanxiang and other brands of specialty stores and flagship stores.

Coincidentally, in 2006, Tan Jin switched from a Taobao buyer to a seller and opened a store online. During the shop opening process, Tan Jin found that many shopkeepers on Taobao wanted to "decorate" their stores more personalized and characteristic. At that time, the individual decoration of Taobao was time-consuming and laborious, some people do not upload images even if they have templates. In view of this, Tan, who is engaged in software program development, flashed an inspiration in his mind: if a good system allows the store to operate on its own, he can quickly put the baby diagram in the template while having a template, in this way, the album and template are implemented at the same time, which is convenient and fast. You do not need to know the usage of those codes, so that you can respond to the rapidly growing demands of shopkeepers.

After one year of hard work, the "Tao e photo album decoration manager" website was launched. After more than five months, the ranking of the world's more than 10 million websites has risen to the current 0.6 million world ranking, attracting more than 25000 members to register, these members are independently decorated.

Software Vendor "Taobao"

Just like Microsoft, Taobao's varied needs have attracted a large number of third-party software vendors. Cui Zhen, founder of financial website, is one of them. Cui Zhen, who was born from financial statistics, studied software development in college and founded a financial management website with his entrepreneurial partner at the end of November 2006. Users only need to input their daily expenses on the webpage in different categories and get a complete personalized financial report and consumption analysis at the end of the month, clearly and clearly know where your money is spent, what money is necessary, and what is accidental consumption behavior to facilitate financial management. After one and a half years of development and improvement, financial management easily has over 20 thousand registered users.

However, financial management is easy to open to users free of charge, and it is difficult to make a profit in the short term. However, doing business is never one-way. Cooperation with Taobao has suddenly broadened the user base for financial management. On Taobao, 80% is a small seller, and these people are the target consumer group with ease of financial management. Cui Zhen said that for customers whose monthly turnover is less than 10 thousand yuan, their own software will be more suitable, and too complex software is not suitable for them. The "easy-to-manage Taobao seller accounting" software developed specifically for Taobao sellers provides fully automatic accounting functions for Taobao users (including sellers and buyers), and clear revenue management is integrated with lifestyle management, life and business accounts have been sought after by many Taobao sellers.

In 2006, Cong Rong, who holds an MBA certificate, founded an interactive information technology company in Beijing. The company looked at the value-added service field of digital TV. According to the development plan of easyTV tos TV shopping and operation platform, in the future, users can browse hot-selling goods on TV through the remote control to order online, it meets the convenience and experience characteristics of home shopping. At the same time, it makes online payment more reliable and secure through digital TV dedicated network.

In fact, Taobao announced the opening of its API interface, which is an open network platform integrating member management, product release, fee settlement, activity organization, and community. This allows the majority of software developers and companies to develop various e-commerce products through open interfaces of free applications to form value-added applications, making e-commerce-related product development and applications more and more abundant. In this regard, the interaction is "consistent with Taobao ".

In the future, users can log on to Taobao to complete all their work on the Internet: shopping, blogs, emails, communities, music, and entertainment ...... Taobao provides all kinds of applications. "I can't think of it, but I can't find it ." From a pure e-commerce website, Taobao will gradually become a social shopping interactive network platform. Cong he and his "gathering interaction" will completely "transplant" Taobao's development dream into the digital TV field, making digital TV the second platform for people's leisure, shopping, and entertainment, this further expands the reach of online shopping.