Deal with the tension in the online marketplace

Online market is a very large category of Internet, whether it is E-commerce market, ordering a meal comment on the market, or housing rental market or online taxi, a large part of the market management is to manage bilateral relations, but also pay attention to deal with the market innovation caused by the tension. If you think that introducing new products or new features will benefit the whole market, what do you do when one or both of them are in conflict? Let's hear the advice of Jeff Jordan, a former ebay executive and OpenTable CEO, who is now a16z partner.

The online marketplace is undergoing a revival as entrepreneurs carry out a new generation of innovation. But I think its core management principles are the same as before.

In particular, I think the market should nurture and maintain a "perfect competition" environment to ensure market prosperity. (Note: The perfect competitive market has these characteristics-all companies sell the same product, are the price recipients, the market share is relatively small, the buyer can get all the information, come and go freely).

A big part of management is managing the tension between consumers and small micro-entrepreneurs in the bilateral market. Depending on the market, this bilateral relationship can be the relationship between buyers and sellers (Amazon, ebay, etc.), the relationship between diners, guest reviews and restaurants, facilities providers (OpenTable, Yelp, etc.), the relationship between guests and owners (AIRBNB), Passenger and driver relations (Lyft, Uber, etc.) and so on.

This kind of bilateral relationship in the online market is totally interdependent, but it may cause tension or even conflict due to different perspectives and points of interest. When you put the platform in, it becomes a third party, and then it may exacerbate the tension.

Such tensions can have a significant impact when the platform makes product development decisions. For example, I manage the ebay market when it was a complete second-hand auction market, in which market pricing is very important.

But our research suggests that we can attract more users Bing to introduce more categories by adding a fixed-price format. We call this program "buy it Now" internally.

The problem, however, was that the sellers were very fond of the auction form: on the one hand because they are already familiar with, and the second is that this form has achieved great success. They are very worried that because the introduction of buy It now limits the price of the auction within the space, it is possible to kill their own "golden Eggs goose."

One of the main concerns is that competition sellers offering the same goods at fixed prices will limit their own auctions. Choosing to introduce this new feature will alienate our core customers-because business is our main source of revenue.

Ultimately, the user of a successful market will have a great mood for change, making the task more difficult. In essence this is a very good thing, because it shows that your users are very enthusiastic about the market, but this does not make the management of change easier. It is especially difficult for you to know that the sound you hear is from a few or many.

So, what do you do if you think that introducing new products or new features will benefit the whole market, but one or both of them can't see the big picture? Here are some of the strategies I take when managing different markets:

-Must understand the user's emotions, to distinguish the signal from the noise. We develop tools to figure out these emotions, including the intensity of the sensations (such as "very strong" dislike, "a little" doesn't like it, etc.), and the percentage of users who share the same view. Because these tools are dynamic, you can learn about the mood of the community by introducing new features or policies for a long time. The whole process involves a number of things like customer management and opinion polls.

-Test innovations that target a subset of the user base whenever possible.

To form a path to get a meaningful, in-depth view of the user. One of the ways we worked on ebay was a set of programs called "Voices", and our fixed focus groups ran to San Jose to talk to people who worked on products and strategies for a few days. This helps us to understand the Community's views.

-especially thoughtful about how to communicate these changes to the user. You want to be highly sensitive to those concerns, and you want to draw a clear line on the pros and cons of discussing the matter. It is useful to take advantage of user-tested data.

-If you are wrong, the new features do not meet expectations, then remove. It's almost impossible to be creative. It's easy to be sentimental, but you have to be like an eagle to monitor the effects and react when you don't like what you see. If you want to undo the new function, to be correct and ensure transparency.

In general, however, market managers cannot be too worried about the user's complaints (though this is counterintuitive). Because most, if not all, of the existing users may have an inconsistent attitude towards any meaningful change in the platform they love. These people basically want the market to behave the way it was. Too much listening to users ' opinions may prevent you from putting great innovation into practice.

However, please note that this is not to give you the principle of giving up user experience priority! If your product innovation is clear, simple and enjoyable, it can go far. It also helps to communicate functionality (although you must balance between announcing changes and requesting permission).

I usually suggest that the balance of development conflicts be skewed towards consumers (for example, buyers, guests, passengers). One might say, "would this not lead to the loss of small micro-enterprises?" "No, because the consumer is where the merchant will go, and if you help them grow their business they will stay."

On ebay, the "Buy It Now" feature, which has caused a lot of controversy, is ultimately not just as simple as OK. It soon accounted for 30% of total merchandise Trading (GMV) and now accounts for 83 billion of ebay's GMV 70%. If my math is no problem, this is close to 60 billion dollars in annual sales!

Finally, remember that your "job" as a market manager is to grow the market. The best way to grow the market is through product innovation: by providing a new "layer" on the market "cake" to innovate. So you need to take risks to improve the user experience. If you do not, your market may be able to fire for a while, but as competitors gradually weaken your advantage, in the long run can not survive.

And, when it comes to innovation, remember Jobs ' words: "Most of the time people don't know what they want-unless you show them something." ”