The Power trader needs the advanced management and the integration ability promotion

2013, China's e-commerce industry will face to the deep integration of management, enhance operational capabilities of the aspect of investment more energy, and simple rough price war, product category, page experience, supply chain management, logistics and after-sales service is the real power of the company's competitiveness. For the retail enterprise, regardless of line on-line, the fight is the backstage operation, but is not the foreground saliva.

In the 2012, China's e-commerce industry continued to be unreliable and too tossing entertainment performances, Liu led by the electric business Masters people make full use of the social media platform to all the emotions and influence of the amplification of the characteristics of an export of water more than the action of the price war, Suning, Gome, such as the traditional enterprises to test hydro-business together, In the actual price reduction and vowed not to match the rhetoric of the case, this name is not true of the so-called price war quickly encounter consumers collective spit, NDRC also intervened in the investigation, to the disgraceful way to declare the end.

Yen Zhiwei, senior director of Kearney Consulting, believes that the power of China's power provider needs to be strengthened. As early as March 2012, Amazon China President Wang Hanwa in the media interview that the low price war should be over, logistics construction should be the focus of the future development, improve the user experience and service quality is the essay of righteousness.

Ringing, in August 2012, the price war mentioned above will bring the electric dealers back to the low level of emotional competition, the official micro-blog has a big malicious words, known as "Sales 0 Gross margin" and "the lowest in the net", in fact, is to improve the price of goods to forge low discount fraud, even Liu declared " Everybody electricity three years 0 gross profit ", by spot check, the gross profit margin of the product is between 4% to 22%.

On the face of it, the farce was provoked by Liu. Forcing competitors to fight, however, the fundamental, Chinese e-commerce enterprises generally lack of core competitiveness and differentiated characteristics, practitioners will be the price of weapons to openly provoke, and the targeted party can not be in the management and services to put more sophisticated chips, No challenge means loss of traffic and customers.

Indeed, for the electric dealers, because there is no physical store location and environmental factors, prices have become the most important determinant of sales. At Amazon, prices are still seen as an important way to attract customers, but unlike their domestic counterparts, Amazon's pricing strategy is based on a rigorous analysis system that adjusts prices to match sales.

Price strategy: from Impulse to rationality

"In the Internet age, fixed prices have become the past." Decide co-founder Ollen Echoni said. Decide is a 2011 online parity site, now, more than 1 million page views per month, for countless Americans to provide online shopping guidance. And it is the background, it is e-commerce Enterprise dynamic pricing model to bring a lot of uncertainty to consumers, and decide is to help consumers make decisions, based on data analysis, tell them when to buy what is the most cost-effective.

Decide such a parity site in the United States has a huge space, and foreign electric dealers relatively mature price analysis system has a direct relationship. At Amazon, Price as part of the strategy, according to product sales and regional factors such as changes at any time, in days or even hours to change the product price. Compared with the price reduction of domestic electric dealers and the way of attracting large flow in the short term, the method of reducing the page experience is more concerned with how to make more money in a product or a region, subdivide the customer and market, and form an end-to-end full user experience. In fact, as early as 2011, Amazon (China) put forward the concept of "value war", from the front retail (products, prices, pages) to the background operations (warehousing, logistics, customer service experience) to form a complete user value chain, price is only one link, not all weapons.

When it comes to the management of the domestic electricity business, Yen Zhiwei said: "Now everyone is saying, I want to be quick." But what is the cost of serving customers while blindly seeking the fastest? Do all categories need this kind of speed? Now the logistics management of the electrical business is carried out in a sub-regional manner, however, can different products correspond to different service modes? Is there a long term complete strategy from the front-end supply chain to the backend customers? Price strategy is not how low pricing, logistics strategy is not simply the establishment of warehousing, but through in-depth management and integration to find the best combination of cost and price, and ultimately enhance the profits of enterprises.

Now, domestic electric dealers are also aware of this problem, and due to the cold winter of the capital market, the profitability of the dealers are also increasingly being valued, if next year want to become the darling of capital markets, in the depth of integration and management of more effort will be the trend.

for those from the traditional industry transformation test hydro-electric companies, such as just acquired the mother and child of the red Child of the site of Su Ning and the acquisition of the 1th store Wal-Mart and other traditional retail enterprises, for them, Line on the next two resources integration and channel management will become a new challenge whether the network sales and offline physical stores together rather than fragmented, determine whether to provide consumers with a consistent brand experience.

"For international retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour, which have not yet advanced to small cities in China, they can be radiated by electricity dealers." These enterprises must move towards integration of integrated management, but need time, online and offline in the supply chain on a lot of different, the same warehouse, hair line on the customer is a small package, hair offline Shop is a large package, logistics way is not the same. At the same time, online and offline prices can be consistent is also a challenge. Online, the price of the electricity business is dynamic, in the physical store needs to be through dynamic promotion to do this. "Yen Zhiwei said.

In the next year, Yen Zhiwei believes that the two channels in the entire operation of the depth of integration will become a trend, online sales do not be tied to each other, but to become the whole of the co-ordination. Now it seems that the problem of coordination between multi-channel will be more valued and solved in the next year.

Data analysis: Analysis of customers rather than analysis of their own

In the 2012, "Big Data" has become one of the hottest concepts in the whole information management field, in the opinion of advocates, the future strategic decision, especially the front-end marketing field, will move from intuition, experience or affective decision-making process to the "rational" era which is dominated by data mining and analysis. In this area, online retailers are among the first to try. In Amazon, the personalized recommendation engine based on data analysis brings about 70% of sales directly or indirectly to Amazon, with different product referrals at different stages of the product's single page, category page, and checkout page.

However, Yen Zhiwei that the matter still has great challenges. "They can track the behavior of their customers, how long they stay on the Web page, what kind of products they are concerned about, and of course the data can be used." "However, customer segmentation itself is a very difficult thing, everyone's needs are different, for example, some people like all-inclusive commodity types, some people price sensitive, some people value shopping is not convenient, logistics speed and other factors." At the same time, in the face of different products, people's price sensitivity will also change, for comparable strong home appliances price-sensitive consumers may not care about food prices, so the data to analyze the difficulties of customers is still very large. Therefore, starting from their own products and regions, the entire end-to-end chain of meticulous and in-depth management may be a better way to solve the difference.

of course, E-commerce Enterprises can find professional data mining companies to do the peripheral collection and collation work, but the real data from the analysis of the value of the process, involving the core strategy of the enterprise, the electrical business will generally choose Independent.

Intensive or decentralized? Three types of mall models under two general trends

In the 80 and 90, the retail industry experienced the decline of small retail stores and the rise of supermarkets such as Wal-Mart, will similar scenarios appear in today's E-commerce field?

Yen Zhiwei said: "We can see that in the domestic, professional field of electricity, such as Su Ning or gome, such as online shops, are in the direction of department stores, it is difficult to say which appliance business has a special focus on the field, on the internet, we tend to sell anything." "Yen Zhiwei that the electric business is not like the offline store that has geographical difference advantage, some similar lack of core competitiveness of the Electronic Business site integration or mergers and acquisitions will inevitably."

In February 2012, Chris Dickson, an American technology entrepreneur, said in a blog post that Amazon and ebay's development model represents a competition between the two models of intensification and decentralization, which want all e-business processes to operate around themselves, and those who want to conduct e-commerce in a decentralized way, ebay does not have inventory and logistics, only to SMEs to provide e-commerce intermediary platform. If the future of E-commerce still with small and medium-sized retailers as the main body, ebay's strategic advantages can be reflected. Conversely, Amazon will prevail.

In the two trends of intensification and decentralization, the real model is divided into three kinds, one is Taobao shops, one is Jingdong and when the online supermarket, the third is the cat mode, the core is to provide online channels for the brand, and now the entity of the department store model similar, that is, shopping malls do not own products, Instead, they offer platforms and services to brands or small dealers, encouraging them to settle in and use their own platforms to sell. Taobao Shop is a decentralized business model, Taobao as a platform, only to provide basic services and support, and then the two models are relatively concentrated on the electrical business in the supply chain, services and operations, and put forward higher requirements. Yen Zhiwei that Taobao shops can not be replicated, but like the days of the mall in the future will appear. Now, Suning and Gome have opened a part, Tencent, Jingdong and when are doing similar things, the future of this model will continue to increase.

In July 2012, the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "Amazon: Hands on hand," pointing to third-party sellers complaining about Amazon's decision to purchase demand by monitoring their sales figures and taking customers at lower prices. Amazon, they argue, sees a third-party platform as a giant laboratory, where it discovers new products and tests sales potential, and when it finds a best-selling product, it incorporates it into its own procurement plan. And when Amazon sells a product, a flexible pricing system makes it impossible for other sellers to compete. In fact, the controversy is disputed, Third-party sellers use Amazon's warehousing and logistics systems, the cost is greatly reduced, Amazon's high traffic also makes their sales fast growth. Tyler, vice president of the Amazon Logistics department, said in an interview that businesses using Amazon's warehousing and distribution services had an average of 50% increase in sales. Therefore, although the competition is at a disadvantage, but the benefits of the platform so that they can not give up.

On the other hand, for Amazon, the benefits of Third-party platform business are becoming increasingly important. In 2011, Amazon's 48 billion dollar sales performance, Third-party trading platform contribution 9% to 12% of the share, in the next five years, this turnover will reach 55%. At present, Amazon has more than 2 million Third-party sellers worldwide, while the profit rate of the electric business services is as high as 84%, much higher than the 15% gross profit margin of its own electric business, that is to say, Amazon's profits will increase as the proportion of third party turnover increases.

In China, from the competitive landscape, Taobao is the pioneer in this field. As a platform business, it has a huge registered user and forms a monopoly form on the network level. November 11, 2012, the cat and Taobao sales reached 19.1 billion yuan, of which the cat 13.2 billion yuan, Taobao 5.9 billion yuan, the future of the third party platform business with Ali competition, still need time. In contrast to the two numbers, perhaps the future of the electric business depends more on the cost and price advantages of the mall-style intensive development, rather than decentralized management and operation. In any case, the status of the Ali department in the short term still no one can shake.

In short, in 2013, the power companies will continue to increase online and offline operational capabilities, in-depth analysis and management, the establishment of a flexible analysis mechanism to study customer and regional characteristics, price strategy will become more dynamic and targeted, these capabilities can guarantee the continued growth of corporate profits. Yen Zhiwei believes that China's electricity dealers will be in the analysis of tools and capabilities of the investment and promotion, more momentum than the actual price war is no longer the only exciting point.

Social media: Full embracing and deep integration

Now, the search engine ruled the internet world has changed dramatically, social media has become a new focus. When everyone, that is, all clients of the enterprise share life and opinions on the social media platform, enterprise-class social application will be from the level of single brand marketing to the overall social, social is no longer a simple advertising channel, but will become the core strategy of the enterprise.

as long as social media is not as hot as it is today, Amazon is already a hot spot for users to comment, and it is clear that people always want to comment, and if they don't give enough room to speak in their own area of control, they will go somewhere else to say it. In China, data show that about 20% to 30% of people have commented on and commented on products and online shopping malls, compared with 5% to 10% in the United States, where cultural differences dictate the impact that e-commerce companies need to pay more attention to social media at home.

Yen Zhiwei that the process of attracting customers and eventually completing sales can be divided into three stages: first, to attract customers, marketing departments through various advertising channels to build brand image, attract customers to come; second, in the sales phase, social media can have a lot of help at this stage, To convey more specific information about products and discount promotions; third, customer service stage, social media platform can become a new channel to solve customer problems, need an active management system, in the presence of criticism timely communication. "Usually we talk about the social concept of social media, different aspects have different roles and ways," Yen Zhiwei said, "Not just marketing departments, online promotions and post services, but at all stages of social strategy." ”

In the 2013, more and more electric dealers will realize that it is not enough to say the right thing in social media, but to do the right things.