Non-commercial mobile commerce will become mainstream in five years

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

No. 1th Store Chairman Gege

A few years ago, I had a point of view at an E-commerce conference: E-commerce is not a simple evolution of traditional retailing (evolution), but a revolution (revolution), in the future no business. Whether you embrace it, accept it, or doubt it, and resist it, it will relentlessly change the form and pattern of traditional retailing. Now I can predict again, mobile commerce in the next five years will become the mainstream of E-commerce, the future is no business does not move.

30 years ago, when I was studying at Cornell University in the United States, the thing I wanted so much was to go to an internship at a well-known company near the school in the summer, the company's name was Kodak (Kodak). Kodak at that time, almost monopolized the film market, Kodak is also the first to invent a digital camera business, but when the real digital coming and to leather its own life, it did not accept the fact that the rapid transformation, by the trend of history abandoned on the beach. A once very great company did not dare to leather their own lives, the result of others to their lives. When I served Dell seven years ago, I also experienced Dell's painful transition process. When computers became FMCG, and the basic configuration of computers met the needs of the public, IBM decisively abandoned the PC product line (THINKPAD) and focused on IT services. And Dell's own, early success factors and the survival of the direct marketing model no longer has the advantage, but has not found the next growth point. Success in the past does not mean success in the future, but the past success is often the burden of future development.

Now mobile commerce is a new wave, if we do not keep up with this trend, we will be revolutionary.

Figure I: China Mobile business Turnover (unit: 1 billion RMB; Data source: Iris Data Report 2013)

First look at the development of mobile commerce market, figure I shows the total turnover of China Mobile business in recent years, the growth and future trends. China Mobile, which accounts for about 9.2% of total e-commerce this year, is expected to double its share by 2016, a pace already far exceeding the U.S. growth rate. U.S. mobile commerce accounted for about 3% last year, about 4% this year, and 2016 is expected to reach 7%. The development of E-commerce and mobile commerce in China is much faster than that of the United States.

The development of China Mobile business has several main driving forces:

One. Smart mobile terminals-both mobile and tablet-have a fast-growing penetration rate and a rapidly falling cost. Figure II shows the growth of China's smartphone market in recent years and expectations for the next three years. For customers, now a smart phone five hundred or six hundred dollars can be done, the future price will continue to decline. Smartphones have become fast-moving consumer goods, completing a lifecycle in a few months.

Two. The sustained and rapid development of e-commerce in China--it is expected that in the next five years E-commerce will continue to grow by a composite growth rate of nearly 30%, which is still one of the fastest growing industries in China. The development of the electric business let the general customers accept the form of virtual shopping also for mobile commerce laid the foundation.

Three. The security of mobile-side payments is also increasing, and payment is no longer a barrier to mobile transactions.

Four. The adoption of mobile 3G and 4G and the popularity of WiFi have facilitated the development of mobile commerce.

Figure II: China's smartphone sales (in million; Data source: Iris Data Report 2013)

To understand why mobile commerce changes E-commerce, let us review the development of the retail industry and how E-commerce has changed traditional retailing. Retail industry through such a few stages: the first is the traditional retail, merchandise sales in the shop, E-commerce shopping virtualization allows customers to leave home from the computer shopping, now mobile commerce so that customers can shop anytime. The development of the Internet and technology has made the cycle of this change less and less.

In the beginning of E-commerce, we believe that E-commerce is only a supplement to traditional retail, but only offline sales moved online. Now everyone is aware that this view is wrong, but it is difficult to sell goods online. There are great differences between electronic commerce and traditional retailing, including physical characteristics, product display and search, talent structure, supply chain structure and management, market means and marketing strategy. For example, to buy in the store, you can directly feel the product, try to decide whether to buy. And E-commerce is virtual, can not see the physical goods, finally sent to your hands to experience this commodity. Goods are displayed on the shelves in traditional stores, and businesses decide where to put them based on the way people walk around in the shop, browse the shelves, and view the goods. And E-commerce in the online display is not the same. The store also has a sound, light, taste to stimulate your senses so that you have impulsive purchase, and E-commerce relies on the on-screen text and images to stimulate the customer's desire to buy. In particular, there are a lot of differences in the back-end operations, for example, the traditional retail store and store management and promotional staff, warehouses are mostly elevated library, and E-commerce is a planar library, picking, sorting, single, packaging and other processes and the corresponding staff, these processes are not the traditional retail and do not need. E-commerce requires a large number of it talents to develop the system, while the traditional retail is a lot of store management talent. These many differences lead to the differentiation of traditional retail and electronic commerce.

But the two have their own characteristics, these characteristics also bring their own advantages. Traditional retail has the experience of physical goods, merchandise immediately available, stimulate temporary purchase, close service staff, and so on. and E-commerce has low operating costs, a large number of customer real-time information, Word-of-mouth marketing the speed and breadth of communication, not by the geographical time and shelf space constraints, and so on.

And the advent of mobile commerce will redefine retailing and bring revolutionary changes. This trend stems from the characteristics of mobile commerce: 1 at any time, anywhere, carry. Mobile phones, ipads and so on. Just 3G, 4G, and WiFi are available for shopping. 2 positioning function makes it possible to now hot location-based services (LBS). 3 scanning, shooting function, you can directly scan two-dimensional code, fuzzy recognition of the image to identify the goods, to carry out the matching and search. 4 Communication, sensing function, a mobile phone can interact with other mobile phones, with other devices, so that the concept of the Internet of things become possible. 5 There are voice recognition and fingerprint recognition functions, not convenient typing, you can also operate. This is what mobile commerce has, and PCs do not have or are weaker. These features make mobile commerce more innovative, more user-friendly places, and even more different from traditional retail places.

Of course, mobile shopping also has some weaknesses, such as the mobile phone screen is too small, the amount of information each time limited, the image is small and can not be very clear display of goods. The input is more difficult, as convenient as the keyboard, retrieval capacity is weaker. Based on these restrictions, we design the mobile business model must be suitable for mobile devices these characteristics.

The electronic commerce of mobile commerce and PC has a great difference in the period of customer usage and the coverage of the area. For example, the PC's E-commerce shopping peak is on weekdays, the daily Peak is basically at 10 o'clock in the morning to three o'clock in the afternoon, while the mobile business peak at weekends, after the evening nine o'clock. At night, people have stopped turning on their computers, using their mobile phones and ipads for shopping and entertainment. The weekend was originally a relatively plain e-commerce time period, but mobile commerce is the peak.

Based on these characteristics of mobile commerce, which models are suitable for mobile commerce? First of all, because it is difficult to input and search, so it is suitable for short process, easy decision mode, such as group buying. Buy most of the purchase is a single product, do not need too much search and parity, see immediately after can buy, and buy a lot of single goods usually package mail, also do not have to input too much information and so on.

Second, the mobile is complementary with the PC, in addition to the above mentioned in the time of complementarity, but also functional complementarity. such as localization, you go to the cinema to see a movie, you can temporarily use the mobile phone on the social networking site to ask and search which movie is worth watching, you can use the phone to buy tickets from the internet to get some discounts, immediately received a two-dimensional code form of virtual tickets, immediately can go in. The game function of mobile phone or many interesting patterns make you feel interesting, this process does not make you feel that shopping is very boring, let you have pleasure feeling.

Third, O2O, combining mobile commerce with localized services. Now we try to work with some business circles, online activities, so that customers go to the line to experience this service and access to goods. For example, some large goods, such as furniture, baby stroller, child bed, etc. Drive the traffic to the store. When the customer approached a shop, the merchant can push the store's promotional activities or coupons by the mobile phone, and attract the customers to the store.

We made some superficial explorations in mobile commerce. The first is to carry, anywhere, at any time, we launched two years ago the model of virtual supermarket, in the subway station display virtual shelves advertising wall, with the real object of the same size of goods in the form of pictures displayed in the shelves above, very three-dimensional. Use the mobile phone client to scan the image below the two-dimensional code can be purchased immediately. Later, the next iteration of the innovation to expand into three-dimensional virtual supermarket, using GPS positioning function in any place can build this virtual supermarket, for example, in Lujiazui, the Great Wall, Jiuzhaigou, five minutes can be built such a shop. By mobile Map Guide customers to the virtual shop, into the virtual shelves, virtual goods, you can directly click to buy.

Based on the complementary of PC shopping and mobile shopping time, we do shopping carnival on the weekend, use the business model suitable for mobile equipment to promote, such as group purchase, flash purchase, etc., to attract more passenger flow with special discount.

Using the sensing function, we tried some effective marketing activities, such as we use the smart phone and vending machines to connect with the induction function, each time the customer shook the phone, a Coke from the vending machine fell down to the customer. We in Shanghai, a square to do "shaking" activities, the most day there are thousands of people shaking, and interesting, but also through micro-BO micro-letter Word-of-mouth spread.

In the search personalization aspect, we have introduced the shopping footprint module, if the user has previously purchased the goods on the PC or the handset, we can understand the user search, the collection and the purchase behavior, when the user uses our app, we may immediately provide a shopping footprint and helps the customer to build a shopping list, The next time it is easy to buy the previous shopping clear monotonous out, in the above for Gaga reduction, complete shopping. This feature allows our mobile phones, Web sites to meet the personalized needs of customers.

Because search is more difficult, we need to reduce the time cost of customers, so that customers do not spend too much time on the phone for repeated search, comparison and parity. We have launched a "daily benefits" function, customers come up to see all of our promotional information, the equivalent of helping customers to do parity and search. Effectively reduce the customer's search time and cost.

The industry also has a lot to learn from, for example, gilt is the United States to do the flash-purchase site, each time an activity before the start of a mobile phone to push activity information to remind customers that this activity immediately began, and very personalized, know what activities are interested in customers, customers can select their own activities These activities will be notified to you at the beginning, and these are single goods shopping, very simple, very convenient.

In short, I think mobile commerce is not the evolution of e-commerce, not simply to move e-commerce from the PC to mobile devices, but the revolution in E-commerce. The features of mobile devices introduce more innovation, create new business models, and even erode or even subvert e-commerce, not to mention its impact on traditional offline retailing. This is not alarmist talk to everyone that the wolf has come, the wolf has come.