The essence of electronic commerce

The essence of e-commerce: Sales channels

In the field of E-commerce, generally divided into business-to-business, consumer and Consumer-to-consumer, while in the traditional sales area, generally divided into wholesale and retail. Business-to-business is generally done wholesale, while the consumer and Consumer-to-consumer are doing retail, the former such as Alibaba, after both Taobao Mall and Taobao.

Sales channels, that is, a diversion of goods to the customer's pipeline. In this pipeline, there are two core attributes: 1, to make it easy for customers to find you, 2, to find you, can quickly deliver goods to customers. In fact, is essentially a property: convenience.

However, many e-commerce sites, especially commodities, such as furniture, tourism sites, more is a marketing channel, because they mainly through the website to promote products, and then through the telephone (call center) to accept orders, to store contracts, payment.

The nature of the channel: Convenience + low Price

For example, in Chengdu, near my home, there are Carrefour, Red flag chain, WOWO Supermarket, as well as the community door of the canteen, in the premise of my purchase, I have only one selection criteria: convenience, followed by the low price. As for the shopping experience and service attitude, can almost be neglected.

In fact, for most people who go to the supermarket, the standard of choice generally has five aspects: commodity category, convenience, price, shopping experience (environment), service. For those who are financially capable, they tend to focus more on the shopping experience than on low prices;

For the virtual mall, the properties are as follows:

Convenience: Users to find you quickly, that is, the most famous E-commerce money to build

Shopping experience: The website opens quickly, looks for the goods convenient, the interface is beautiful, the reservation is quick

Service: Fast delivery speed, after-sale guarantee. Online Mall, and the entity shop one of the largest service differences: physical stores can directly pick up goods, and online shopping malls generally have to wait 1-3 days.

For E-commerce sites, if the user finds you and another one, that is, there is no difference between the commodity category and the convenience, such as when and Jingdong, the difference is only price and service, and the shopping experience is a secondary demand, and their services have been done very good. The rest is only parity.

There are two kinds of parity, not member price and member Price (integral). If the non-member price is the same, then you are spelling out who is the member.

In other words, the homogeneity of e-commerce sites (the same user base), the final competition is the price. If further, the price competition is the website popularity competition + Logistics competition. Because more users will get lower price of suppliers, more efficient logistics, will save the cost of enterprise, provide faster delivery services.

Users of a brand will have loyalty, but for a channel business, probably only the difference of satisfaction. No one will be loyal to Broadway unless the whole city is selling computers.

You may be aware that the person sitting opposite you is using a iPhone4 or an tianyu cell phone, but you don't care where his phone was bought, but for the person who is playing the phone, he thinks so.

The foundation of e-commerce: Trust degree + honesty

E-commerce, can be decomposed into electronic + business, that is, virtual + transactions. In the real world, the first element of our attention is: the quality and authenticity of the goods, so we often choose some well-known channel retailers, such as buying clothes to the Pacific, Wangfujing or Parkson.

In the virtual world, we will give priority to choose some well-known brand stores, such as Jingdong, when, or Taobao on the crown of local businesses. This means that for e-commerce, our first concern is the degree of trust, which is the premise and basis of all transactions.

E-commerce website Trust degree, the core is the brand building. Brand is a social image, which determines the degree of social recognition. For products, websites or enterprises that have not yet formed a brand, it is particularly essential to build the trust of the site. Trust the construction of specific aspects, please refer to my article: "E-commerce website Trust degree." However, to build E-commerce site trust, often overlooked. Why the cottage a Beijing-east, the same 1000 people visit, it's high conversion rate, and you are not high, the reason for this.

Just talking about virtual, now talk about trading. Trust occurs before a transaction, that is, the user does not trust you and never orders. If trust is the premise of virtual trading, then honesty is the basis of the actual transaction. Distrust, customers will go, but not good faith, customers will complain.

How to build good faith? The core, is to reassure users after the purchase of worry, such as inspection, return guarantee, this is all well-known E-commerce site at the bottom of the general help bar. For example, in Taobao, there is a credit system, such as business level, product satisfaction rating, Punishment system, Alipay guarantee transactions. It can be said that there is no integrity system, there is no Taobao.

Brand building of electronic commerce

Because E-commerce is the essence of sales channels, and the nature of sales channels is convenient, then, in building awareness and brand marketing, our focus should be on the convenience, in the creation of convenience at the same time, stealth to build trust, rather than to create product characteristics. It can also be said that E-commerce website brand building, not a variety of, do not need too much creativity.

For example, for a sales Jiuzhaigou tourist line of the site, we should pay attention to the site's trust, price advantages, product details, booking and tourism in the process of considerate service. As for the style of the website, do not need jiuzhaigou dark green, even with Orange can, as long as it is pleasing, because we are not Jiuzhaigou official website.

Another example, a sales iPhone4 site, you can highlight the lower price, cod, door-to-door collection and other users worry about lifting the factors, and do not have the Apple website introduced all moved over, because these are not users to visit your site's core needs.

Product brand, generally not through sales channels to create. For example, the charm of mobile phones, in addition to the official through the media vigorously propaganda, more is the quality of the product itself, the user Word-of-mouth to promote, the channel is simply to facilitate the flow of products to the hands of customers. Of course, the channel can create product visibility: For example, for a while, many counters are selling Samsung i908e.

For product marketing, we advocate differentiation, looking for specific user groups, such as the minimalist fashion of the iphone, corresponding to those young people, and BlackBerry security, calm, corresponding to those business people. And for a buy 3C products online Mall (counter), they are no difference.

Of course, in the marketing channel, also need the crowd positioning. For example, the winter to sell cashmere is, you can emphasize its lightness warmth, and fast to the Spring festival, you can emphasize its gift-giving characteristics: to go home, filial piety you, also let parents have a warm winter night? However, this kind of advertisement, may still be the product manufacturer designs, then the channel merchant advertises.

Brand-building for the channel, more well-known to build, because it is a functional demand: convenience, but not to bring more personality and social, such as LG mobile phone (sexy woman), BMW 7 (noble, nouveau riche?) )。

The construction of e-commerce website

For E-commerce sites, development is decoration, product entry is a commodity shelves, promotion is the site.

Why is promotion the site? Because the site is essentially a user portal, we buy keywords on google, essentially providing a user purchase entry. The rent of a shop depends on the location of the shop, and the cost of promotion is decided by the position of promotion, such as Sina homepage, Google hot keyword, are very expensive.

Any E-commerce site, can be broken down into four aspects: products, prices, promotions and channels, that is, marketing 4 p:

Products: More categories, Introduction details

Price: enough to compete with peers

Promotions (Promotion): The price to be attractive, it reflects the vitality of the site

Channel (place): Channel channel, that is to bring you (channel) users of the site (channel), such as Google, Sina side bar ads.

We can build and operate E-commerce sites around these four areas, and I'll focus on this later.

Because the channel nature of E-commerce, the future, such as the 10, those on the junior high school students have entered the community, because the popularity of online transactions, there may be no e-commerce concept. Online Trading and offline trading are just two ways for users to buy goods. You didn't say that you were cooking with rice cookers? However, in many parts of the country, or the use of firewood cooking rice, rice cookers is a thing to show off. You've never heard of a PDA, have you? Because all smartphones have PDA functions.