Speaker: Yu Shuai, Product director of Tencent Cloud Smart Retail
Background: On May 23-24, Tencent’s “Cloud + Future” Summit with the theme of “Huan Qi” was held in Guangzhou. Leaders of government agencies at all levels in Guangdong Province, academic experts in the industry at home and abroad, industry giants and technology giants discussed the innovation and development of cloud computing and digital industry on the scene.
Yu Shuai, product director of Tencent Cloud smart Retail, released Tencent cloud smart retail products at the smart retail special session of Cloud + Future Summit. The following content is compiled from the speech.
For the past year, everyone has been talking about retail. Why retail? Because traffic is growing less and less online. Many online giants target offline, so offline giants ready to fight? Among them, some retail industry experts used to specialize in supply chain, but for opening stores and store management, they may rely more on experience. Is there a way we can do that with some kind of data-driven drive? That’s what I want to share with you today. When we talk about the retail industry, people may prefer to buy goods online rather than go to offline stores. By the time we reach offline stores, consumer sales conversion is likely to be low. There’s no way we can tell how many people came to the store? Who buys things through stores? What are their preferences? This is the “insight” you just mentioned, so how to solve these pain points?
Tencent Cloud, as one of our seven tools, provides full-link digital connectivity. Tencent is an enterprise engaged in connection, including what a retail enterprise should do at the beginning of opening a shop, who is in the business circle after opening a shop, and how to obtain such information. In addition, the store could be a thousand faces, and we now want to expand the original concept to a thousand faces. And very important point is that the best Mall is tencent cloud with optimal figure this product provides very important stores digital assistant, through AI ability help store managers understand what kind of people in the stores, in different period of time every day to many people, in which parts of the world, these are all tencent cloud for the retail industry to provide digital tools.
Next, we will introduce our retail products to you. The first product to be introduced is for small and medium-sized chain enterprise site selection products. Mr. Xu Biao once mentioned that when talking with the owners of the retail industry, especially small retail enterprises and traditional retail enterprises, they adopted a very simple method when opening their stores. One person was asked to stand at the corner of the street and count down the number and report to the boss. 1,800 people passed by every day. If the boss sees an empty shop here, he can open a shop. In fact, this lacks theoretical basis. Tencent Cloud has huge big data and AI capabilities, and the combination of engineers can tell retailers where to set up shop. What is the potential of each block in a minimum 100-by-100 network? If want to enter new city, how to find the position that suits format and brand to open shop? We had a client who was doing fitness business before found three vacant shops, and finally chose where to set up shop to achieve higher floor efficiency? These are very practical cases.
As shown in the figure above, the whole process of site selection begins with a macro analysis of the city. In this city, we will select the target area and make a horizontal comparison, and finally output the site selection report. In this process, we can help retailers figure out which place is more efficient for opening stores. In fact, the model of 5C site selection is used for system analysis. This model analyzes and makes a comprehensive judgment within the city, business district and competition, and finally comes to an estimate of the cost and revenue of this place. And then we get back to the essence of retail opening, which is making sure that you can make money in that place, and that’s what we can offer right now.
So after opening the store, how should we deal with other problems? A shopping mall, for example, is not just a storefront but a piece of land. Wanda, for example, how do I know what my customer base is within a radius of three or five kilometers? What are their preferences? Now I would like to introduce the second product — youke product for business strategy. It combines human insight with location information to help shopping malls and brands understand the hobbies and brand attributes of potential customers around them. In the process of communication with commercial real estate operators, the way of determining turnover is more. If the turnover of this store is not good, it will be replaced. But from the consumer’s choice, more depends on whether there is a favorite brand. This is used to determine how the mall format should be matched, not just by judging sales volume for brand substitution. The product of Youke can achieve insight into customer groups through data support. At the same time, it can also connect with marketing products and put effective advertisements into effective customer groups through SMS mass messaging.
The above is Tencent’s understanding of people accumulated at the C end in the past. We can’t say Tencent understands retail very, very well, we’re still trying to do that. Tencent’s combination of people knowledge, location knowledge and retail format owners’ understanding of retail is believed to provide a very powerful tool for everyone.
I just mentioned that after opening stores, products are very important for our category management. When we talked with O2O brands before, we found that selling cherries at 80 yuan in Beijing had a good sales effect, but the same things could not be sold in Shandong, which was related to local habits. So now we are working with Yonghui, and we are also working with Bestseller to help them use the combination of first-party and Tencent data to help forecast the future. In some promotional scenarios or pricing scenarios, give our retail owners some auxiliary decisions.
To take a simple example, I’m sure everyone in this room regards supermarket freedom as a level of financial freedom. Many people go to the supermarket and do not even bother to see whether it is 3 yuan or 3.11 yuan, but the difference of 10 cents can be exported to the retailer through the ability of premium products. The fluctuation of this price is based on the calculation of big data and party data. Because the cost does not change, the profit of retailers is actually increased through the integration of ERP.
In addition, in our cooperation with Yonghui, we are pleased to see a number — top ten products with the highest promotional sales. Tencent’s current model hits 90% of the time, which is pretty impressive. Fundamentally, it can also help supermarkets to prepare for the problems of inventory and capital flow, so that there is no need to put a lot of capital on inventory, because inventory is a very big problem in the retail industry. The other thing we talked about in terms of pricing, and finally in terms of marketing, is the ability to select products that can help the retail industry.
Of course, there are a lot of scenarios behind this that can help us predict the sales of individual items. There are also some pull new and pull live action, in fact, Tencent is based on years of accumulated data and data modeling model. Through some of our clustering models, we can predict customers’ preference for products and recommend the products they like to them. This is the recommendation of youpin for the selection of goods in stores.
After finishing the product, we will launch the computer vision store data management product — Excellent Mall. Tencent cloud and Belle in the process of exploration what kind of results? In fact, e-commerce itself has very strong digital ability. From the day it was born, customers left a digital trail on the site through various data selling points. But in fact, in offline stores, it is difficult to know how our customers behave in stores through such ability. The only data we were able to capture before was when the order was made, I could know how many sales were generated and how many items were sold each day, but that was far from enough. A straightforward question is how many people come to my store every day? What time periods are they? Male or female? And what is his in-store roaming line? What areas do customers like to stay in? This combination of data collection and retail commonalities leads to interesting things, as well as the ability to adjust the placement of categories in stores. Through the data to support the question of how to charge rent, which shops with large flow should charge higher rent.
The above picture shows the various capabilities provided by Mall products for stores. In addition to the customer insight mentioned above, we are also working on the integration with CRM. When the VIP customer arrives at the store, inform the shopping guide directly that the VIP is coming and what kind of products he likes. We can push this information directly to the guide, and the sales conversion rate can be further improved. In fact, this is based on Tencent’s computer vision capability accumulated in the excellent map for many years. Tencent has also constantly updated the indicators in the computer vision competition, which is of great help to solve the ability of large-scale operations.
Just now, when it comes to customers arriving at the store and recommending products, you can see the description of the scene, which can also understand how different customers move in the store. Supermarkets can be adjusted according to these high pin goods or pile head should be placed. We made some attempts with Belle, mainly for the assessment of shopping guide. In the clothing industry, it is very important for the guide to really communicate effectively with customers, which directly affects the sales rate of stores. The store would have done very well in the past when the supervisor was there, but not when the supervisor wasn’t. This is also the ability of Mall in continuous polishing.
Finish the optimal Mall, and the optimal code for the product. Mengniu dairy products bottle that layer of paper can be torn, the code inside is superior code, this is the marketing we do together with Mengniu. This is actually Tencent Tianyu and Tencent cloud in the commodity a code management of the new exploration. In the field of FMCG, both Dongpeng and Mengniu have a good landing. What kind of problem does that solve?
As we all know, codes can be delivered to boxes and boxes, but not to individual goods. For the relationship of goods, traceability, introduction of goods, and anti-brush marketing, can now be formed by a TWO-DIMENSIONAL code through the excellent code. For the understanding of data and the protection of security, Mengniu case is a good embodiment. Because of such marketing activities, after the sale of goods, scan code rate can be very high. With the small program also has a good linkage, the loss rate further decreased. Brand owners know exactly which consumers buy my products, where they are distributed, and even what kind of portrait they have, which helps them adjust their brand strategy, which is actually very important for secondary marketing.
After introducing the product, we finally go back to branding, or retail. We will be very concerned about the reputation of public opinion and the network. With the help of Tencent’s natural language understanding technology, we have launched excellent review products. When facing large brand joint managers or brand merchants, we can tell them what kind of reputation this brand has on the Internet, what kind of brand index it has, and how it compares with rival products. This product is now online on Tencent’s official website. If you have retail needs, you can directly apply to use it. The scenario problem we solved actually gathered a lot of data from the whole network, but it was all public data. After collecting these data through search, the brand can be told scenically how users feel about the brand, whether it is good or bad, and what the trend is. We have passed the accumulation and experience of many practical cases, which will not be repeated here.
Tencent Cloud has launched 6 products or 6 tools to help the retail industry to do digital transformation. We have corresponding products and services from shop opening to business strategy, store management and finally brand positioning. Tencent is not trying to enter an industry, or to create an industry, we just hope to provide Tencent’s advantages to this industry. There are many excellent partners in this industry. We also hope that Tencent’s products can be organically combined with the capabilities of these partners to contribute to the fifth revolution of the retail industry.