Some time ago, Alibaba and Starbucks reached a strategic cooperation news, so that Starbucks and Ali become a hot focus.
In sharp contrast to Ali’s boundless beauty, Tencent, as another mountain of the Internet, has not performed as well as expected during this period. Tencent’s net profit fell 23% to 17.87 billion yuan in the second quarter of this year, with online game revenue down 12% from the previous quarter, according to public data. Tencent’s shares fell broadly.
For this market change, some might argue that the real reason for Tencent’s decline is that it is shifting its focus from online games to e-commerce. Moreover, Tencent, composed of jd, Vipshop, Pinduoduo and other e-commerce giants, is an e-commerce fleet, which cannot be immune from the stock market. Now, JD.com’s share price has closed below $30 per share, while Vipshop’s share price fell below $7 in August. Although Pinduoduo was successfully listed, it has continued to decline due to the problem of fake goods, and even fell below its ipo price of $19.
Back to ali and starbucks trade events, for starbucks, on the arrival of the new Chinese retail era WeChat tencent has more traffic, and the small program of ecological development in full swing, take-away, electricity and other patterns are involved, this should have more cash, why do not win the favour of starbucks?
Before the flow era, Ali than Tencent cost-effective?
The competition between alibaba and Tencent has never stopped, and market traffic is especially important in the battle where both companies have a big presence in the new retail market. But for Starbucks, which wants to break into the new retail market in China, Alibaba seems to have the best value for money in terms of traffic and market advantage.
On the one hand, in the new era of retail, Alibaba, an e-commerce company, has inherent advantages. As we all know, the concept of new retail was put forward by Jack Ma. Although JINGdong also put forward the concept of unbounded retail after the new retail concept was put forward, from the market reaction, the concept of new retail is more popular, and most enterprises in the market are also constantly pouring into the battlefield of new retail. Before Jack Ma put forward the concept of new retail, Ali, a pioneer, had already had a clear direction for its future development of the new retail market. Therefore, in the process of development, Ali, a former e-commerce company, has a higher market dominance than Tencent, a former social company.
Taking the new business format as an example, the average online orders of Hema Fresh under Ali reached 4,000 orders, accounting for 33% of the market, far higher than the 10% market share of Super Species under Yonghui. In other words, Alibaba, a former e-commerce company, is well versed in consumer market demand. With the support of new retail dominance, the retail mode of “offline experience and online consumption” promoted by Alibaba in the new retail era is changing consumers’ consumption habits, leading Tencent to take the lead in the new retail market.
In this era of new retail, After holding the leading position, Ali can improve the new retail layout step by step. Tencent, which is in a passive state, is trying to earn more market benefits in the market by virtue of the upsurge of new retail, which seems to be out of state.
On the other hand, the flow of cost-effective war, Ali a bit better. Take the cooperation of Starbucks as an example. In the process of looking for a cooperation platform, it is essential for Starbucks to investigate its market partners. In the process of investigation, the cost-performance ratio formed between potential consumers in traffic and transaction price has become the most important criterion. Flow ratio of the most representative platform by the parties, for example, according to new data released by the tencent, in the first half of the year, WeChat and WeChat combined active users reached 1.058 billion, but the ant gold dress well, chairman and CEO xian said recently, on the building, pay treasure in China has more than 700 million the number of active users, active users reached 870 million in the world. Although wechat has nearly 200 million more users than Alipay in total, in terms of monthly active users of mobile payment service, wechat Pay has 800 million monthly active users, which is slightly less than Alipay’s 870 million annual active users.
From the analysis of the structure of the payment group, most of the users of wechat Pay are social users, and most of them are medium and low consumption stores. Alipay, which covers the two e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall, covers more consumers than wechat Pay in terms of consumption level and habits, and accounts for a slightly larger share of mobile payments. In other words, when choosing the two giants with the same number of consumers, Starbucks will naturally choose Alibaba, which has more cost-effective traffic.
In other words, Alipay, the pacesetter of Alibaba, has developed and grown rapidly with the feedback of taobao and Tmall, the two e-commerce platforms. Its e-commerce attribute is also becoming more and more deep-rooted. In the future, Alibaba’s e-commerce business will be more or less arranged around Alipay. While wechat Pay, which is only half a teenager, has a huge social user base, Tencent seems to be lagging behind in new retail because of genetic problems.
However, Tencent’s e-commerce dream is being ignited by micro channel small program?
Although WeChat on payments still cannot reach the influence of the alipay, become a new retail enterprise in the eyes of many incoming “legs”, but it is worth noting that WeChat release in the first half of this year the WeChat influence report 2018, according to data driven by WeChat information consumption totalled 209.7 billion yuan, accounting for 4.7% of the total amount of China’s information consumption; Wechat accounted for 34 percent of total user data traffic, well ahead of Facebook’s 14.1 percent of north American mobile traffic consumption. ; Meanwhile, wechat also boosted 333.9 billion yuan of traditional consumption, including travel, dining and shopping.
In the field of e-commerce, mobile payment is only a part of the business structure of the platform, and another important part is advertising business. Therefore, Tencent, which has the ability to stimulate market consumption, chooses wechat mini program promotion as a breakthrough to open the e-commerce market. Recently, data from the 2018 Mini Program Ecological Report released by the third-party service provider Speed App show that in the second quarter of 2018, the total number of micro programs in wechat reached 1 million, and the number of users also exceeded 600 million, and the small programs were mainly concentrated in the first, second and third-tier cities, among which the second and third-tier cities accounted for 46.3%. The rapid development of offline service scenes in second and third-tier cities is more in line with the “civilian” wechat. The market demand for wechat small programs is also expanding, and small program developers are also flooding in.
First ikea teamed up with wechat to empower traditional retailers. On August 27, IKEA and wechat officially launched the world’s first e-commerce mini program “IKEA a Household pop-up Store”. As the world’s largest furniture and home furnishing enterprise, IKEA has more than 300 stores in various countries and regions around the world, and more than 20 retail stores in China. Nevertheless, ikea faces new market problems in China, the largest consumer market, under the impact of the new retail market.
Recently, the world’s top brand and marketing consulting company platinum hui issued a “popular with Chinese consumers 50 big brands” market report, the report data show that in 2018, ikea’s list ranking from last year’s fourth suddenly dropped to 37, ranked in the top 50 brands, Chinese brand occupies 6. From last year to this year, the new retail market in China is rising rapidly, ikea is not cool in the new retail market in China, so it is inevitable to join the competition in the new retail market.
Bricks-and-mortar retailers have long been wary of Alibaba, an e-commerce startup, and of Tencent, which is struggling to expand online traffic. Bricks-and-mortar retailers from Wal-Mart to Carrefour to BETTER Life, Yonghui Supermarket and now IKEA are voluntarily sharing their product and transaction data with Tencent to avoid being swallowed by alibaba, which dominates the market in the future. Therefore, ikea, a physical retailer, naturally chooses the “pollution-free” and more popular wechat as its partner in China’s new retail market, and obtains the explosion point of wechat traffic realization through small programs.
Then there are small game ads. In the first half of this year, with many small games such as Tiaotiao and King of Mind flooding the screen, small program games quickly entered the horizons of many wechat users. The development of small program games, the original intention is to adapt to the players in today’s “game fast food culture” era, the popularity of the game decreased and derived products. But in fact, the development of small program games, while bringing new markets to game development enterprises, but also for wechat’s e-commerce dream to broaden the channel.
Social game has always been Tencent’s strengths, and in this new game era of continuous compression of players’ game time, wechat small games from “jump” hidden bonus points in the promotion of wechat pay, and in other small games to join the game strategy of “watch 15-second ads to get props”. Wechat expands its e-commerce channels by increasing the exposure rate of advertisers through mini-games, which also allows wechat to find a flood of traffic in the e-commerce market.
And in terms of the exposure rate of small games, in addition to sharing to friends through the circle of friends and wechat, the public account tweet has also become a new way to promote small games in wechat. Of the 1,901 mini-games developed on wechat, 182, or 9.6 percent of the total, were exposed in public tweets, according to data from China’s wechat top 500 monthly report released by the new list. At the same time, these small games will be exposed in the average of 2.5 public promotion articles. Visible, the public number to promote small game is gradually recognized by small game developers.
From scratch, from small games to small programs for e-commerce, game developers and physical retailers favor wechat’s e-commerce properties more and more obvious, and small programs have become a powerful competitive artifact of wechat in the e-commerce battle field.
Small program e-commerce dividend upside, wechat should be alert to what?
The birth of micro channel small program, let micro channel e-commerce dream into the rapid spread of high-speed growth, but the influx of small program developers, micro channel to bring e-commerce traffic up at the same time, still need to guard against two risks.
First, dividend upside and regulatory risk coexist. According to data released by the wechat team on July 11, wechat mini program ecosystem has more than 1.5 million developers and more than 5,000 third-party cooperation platforms, and the highest daily activity in June was more than 260 million. More and more brick-and-mortar retailers and game developers are piling into the development boom brought about by e-commerce applets and game applets. And this increasingly powerful small program developers and users, the supervision of wechat will cause no small challenge. Once the micro channel small program in the market problems, then also have small program function Alipay may again take advantage of the situation.
Second, the accuracy of the lack of micro channel small program advertising in the short term is a loss. From the current point of view, although Tencent advertising business is gradually inclined to micro channel small program, but for advertising businesses, the current micro channel small program ecosystem is not mature, there is a low retention rate. In addition, the promotion mode is too simple, the scope of advertising audience is too wide and other problems, businesses may not make ends meet when advertising. At that time, the micro channel small program market will appear technology developers and micro channel platform to make money, partners lose money, and eventually lead to small programs become advertisers “rush in, rush out” on the market. Therefore, while solving regulatory problems, wechat also needs to give positive guidance to the small program market to ensure the steady maturity of wechat small program business model.
In a word, the emergence of small programs makes wechat, a closed ecological chain of traffic, release pressure, interact with external APPS, and form an ecological connection with the offline market, so that Tencent has a broader space for imagination in the new retail war. However, in the rapid growth of the small program market, wechat still needs to carry out reasonable supervision and communication of the market, so as to avoid wechat small program becoming a short-lived product of cooperative merchants.
Article/Liu Kuang public number, ID: Liukuang110, this article first kuang Venture capital network