Online Social + e-commerce

What is the best social shopping (Social Shopping) website you've ever seen?

In the near future, media companies may become retailers, so will retailers become media companies?

This is one of the hottest conversations in the community that really is based on social relationships, and there's a lot of talk on the hot topic of this kind of "online social + e-commerce" trend, and the answers are various.

For example, a user who has in-depth research on the American mass online consumer goods market Liu that social shopping should be divided into two directions, one based on its own shopping information platform to develop social functions, such as thefind.com (docking Facebook), RetailMeNot.com (own social platform), savings.com (question and answer), this kind of characteristic is the social platform is establishes in own huge shopping flow foundation, the social function plays the icing on the cake the function. The other is the product in the positioning is social shopping class, some have now been proven to be successful, compared to the social function of shopping information type website, this kind of website should undertake more model innovation risk, but have better explosive power and investment value.

Yes, in the future, online social and e-commerce integration is an inevitable trend, but the most concern is how to merge? This is a practice that many websites have tried and now have more websites doing.

About 10 years ago, the American shirt website Threadless tried to sell shirts in the community, and its model was simple. The design competition is held every week, nearly 700 participants to the T-shirt design uploaded to the website, Threadless let the visitors according to 5 points to the design rating, the site staff from the most popular works selected winners. With the threadless of the shirts that the user voted for, each shirt sold out, the viral marketing brought a high volume of traffic to Threadless, and Threadless sold 35,000 t-shirts one day in the spring of 2001.

Threadless also encouraged new users to blog, upload photos, write attractive comments, make the community grow, and T-shirt sales almost a by-product. Many users are also registered as threadless users of electronic magazines. Founder Karmikov said that the site to send 370,000 mail every week, in which 75% of the recipient opened the letter to view the latest content of the site.

It is also oldnavyweekly, a community-class site established in 2009 by the Gap, designed to pull online shoppers out of the offline physical stores. Oldnavyweekly only a simple homepage, but for the user's stickiness is very strong, on the network can even find a dedicated to this site discussion group and chat room. Oldnavyweekly's main selling point is a weekly purchase coupon for Oldnavy entity store shopping.

Oldnavyweekly soon spread on the internet, not only to provide users with discounts, to attract users, it allows users to search the Internet through the "treasure" game way to find coupons, so the user fans are always online gathering discussions, the latest coupons hidden where, This has brought a very high popularity to the gap.

In China, the online shopping mall in 2007 also began a threadless attempt, online mall in charge of Hou Tong want to be able to viral marketing to enhance user stickiness and bring new customers, of course, also for the online mall to create a fashion and share the cultural atmosphere.

In 2007, a community of South Korean fashion websites called the fashion uprising was hotly discussed by Chinese clients. On the fashion Uprising website, the models for each dress are voted out by the users of their communities. This is like the Super Girls mechanism, those popular models, by the fashion uprising invited to take pictures abroad, and through the diary and fans share travel and photography experience, enhance the site stickiness. The fashion uprising saved promotional fees, and those who had been voted on were more likely to be bought by their fans.

However, Oldnavy closed the oldnavyweekly website more than a year ago. Hou Tong, the head of online shopping mall, said his site had a long time before the forum, comments, users upload photos, such as Web 2.0 features, and for a while he also very carefully to operate, but now do not spend energy on it. The fashion Uprising's forum channel has now vanished into a purely web of business-to-consumer.

Why?

Because Oldnavyweekly moved the community to Facebook, and through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, the gap built its own fan base rather than work on its own web site. The Hou Tong also believes that online retailing is the focus of the Web Mall, and the forum for customers, is one of countless sites, do the community is equivalent to the mainstream of SNS competition, retail and community, for the people, is the primary and secondary points.

At the end of last year, he and his official website and Sina scarf, Tencent scarf, Facebook, Twitter and other mainstream SNS through, is still exploring how to effectively use these public SNS resources.

If you look to the world, social networking giant Facebook and Amazon, the online retail giant, are trying to move in the opposite direction.

Disney sold 800,000 North American movie tickets on Facebook at the Toy Story 3, but Facebook did not receive any money from the sale itself, which earned money on advertising. In this perspective, Facebook is the media, not the retailer.

Amazon also has a media function. Know the talent gene thinks Amazon is more valuable to the media, the interest chain is shorter than Google, the flow of more accurate value to produce more direct, ancillary also provides FBA, EC2 and so on services. The core value of the electric dealer is to "shorten the supply chain", prior to vendor-distribution (possibly multilayer)-retail (possibly multi-layered)-consumers ' retail supply chains would be shortened to manufacturers-retail (possibly multi-tiered)-consumers, even manufacturers-consumers, and intermediate links could be categorized as "retailers" or "media". In other words, the main role of the retailer now is "media" + "cushion" + "service".

In other words, although Facebook may have users on it, it is still a social-networking site, and Amazon, despite its more efficient and accurate media capabilities, is still at the heart of retailers.

This path to opening up Facebook-represented social networks and online retailing, represented by Amazon, will create a new value chain that will spawn more innovative business models, and more specialization will be made.

In China, there are many cases in which e-commerce companies and communities are trying in the direction of each other.

For example, Taobao has Amoy lakes and Amoy gangs; where guests have recently launched a fan of the people (a bright), Jingdong Mall has the world's largest 3C product review database, which is to do the community's high-quality resources; before the official launch of Yintai department store, first set up in the official website of the fashion community, launch users to invite friends to register, Each registered user can get 10 yuan voucher ...

and social networks and communities are also experimenting with community e-commerce, for example, a cabinet brand for the regional community Hangzhou 19 floor launched 19 floor cabinets; Last year, 30% of the income from E-commerce sites, not to mention Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo and other micro-blog marketing; Since last year, most of the promotion put in SNS and community, because before that, Yue live juice through happy net to do promotion, received unexpected good effect, this is the most cost-effective in recent years, the promotion of consumer goods cases.

In addition, buy, LBS, there are also in the social media based on the combination of E-commerce and e-business innovation practice.

Perhaps for the proprietor of a tens of millions of users such as Jingdong or van, the establishment of their own SNS with innate user base, but for a large number of small and medium enterprise platform, Sina, Tencent, happy, such as SNS or community, they can not ignore the public resources, the enterprise is the best choice for low-cost establishment of CRM. Not to mention Jingdong Mall and every guest, also in Sina, Tencent and other micro-blogging on the establishment of their own fan group.

The future promotion of online retailing will be wide Web-wide, not confined to its own community.

For example, Burberry's windbreaker beat site artofthetrench.com, which encourages Burberry users to upload their own windbreaker to the site, each photo with Facebook and Twitter buttons, users can share it to all kinds of SNS;

Same， Boutiques.com is also a Web site with a full web sharing concept, it will be based on street photos to find other sites of clothing, users can also create their own shops, in the creation of stores you can choose what type of clothes, like what color, etc., when the choice is over, your shop will automatically appear a lot of clothes. Users can then use Twitter and mail to recommend to your friends. And the site also has the concept of attention and attention.

In fact, there are many new business models around "online social + E-commerce" and created, in this value chain, there will be more innovative business models emerge.