How to do it on Taobao? Find your core competitiveness

　　Three questions and six interactions

　　Host: How are we operating the store today?

　　Ms.: We started to come into contact with Taobao in 2005. We started to be a well-known home textile brand. The physical store was not very good. I insisted on designing bedding at that time. Because the business was not good, I came into contact with the Internet and saw Taobao advertisements. Then in 2005, we started to build Taobao in order to save the miserable operating conditions of the physical store. However, I didn’t expect that in 2005, 2006, and 2007, the business was particularly good, which led to the senior engineers who followed me to do design and gave up their main business of design and together with me. I started running Taobao, but the situation was beyond my imagination. In 2009, the business began to decline. I thought it was strange at the time. I didn’t do anything before. The business was always good. Later, we started to do the express train and started to have our own brand. Our brand is called Jinxilu Home Textiles, which mainly uses plain bedding products, but the current operating conditions are very bad, so I would like to ask and help us analyze what our problem is. We have participated in Tmall flagship store, the express train is also burning, and various activities are reporting, but the effect has been not good. That’s it.

　　Host: We can communicate this issue separately later. Is there anyone else who has a supplementary point of view.

　　Male: 1: Last year I just started making body shaping clothes. We are a manufacturer, so the supply is relatively sufficient. Last year I didn’t do any advertising. When there were about 300 or 500 advertisements a day, our products were among the top five. However, this year we increased our investment in advertising and carried out some gift activities. The advertising fee accounted for 20% of sales. Maybe we were wrong and kept following the low-price route. The sales volume was large, but there was almost no income. What we are doing now is a C store. I went to pack a product that made gold coins a few days ago. Products with sales of 700 or 800 yuan but not in the mall, but I think the treatment of C store and mall is very different.

　　Host: The first problem is that I did a good job in the past few years. Since 2008 and 2009, I have been getting worse every year, and I have a lot of pressure. Another problem is that I think the mall store is better than the market store. This is the current situation. Nowadays, all the sellers who sit here are still relatively large. They have their own routines in the process of building their own stores. Whether it is to make hot products, invest money to advertise, or attract old customers, everyone has many problems. So my second question is, what have we settled tomorrow? Is it income, capital, or something else we get. I don't know if you have thought about this question?

　　Men's 2: What is settled is the team. When making a product and digging out a product, the future replication will be based on this. I think this is very important and the core.

　　Host: So you think that for everything, what we will accumulate tomorrow is the team.

　　Men's 2: Team and the exploration and grasp of products.

　　Men's 3: I think the deposited customers are customers. We started acquiring orders in 2012. The data statistics show that our customers have more than 10,000, so our return rate is about ten points. We did not do secondary marketing before. We had 10,000 customers last year, and there may be 20,000 to 30,000 this year. Next, we will deposit a lot. We will do secondary marketing, but we lack a lot of experience in this area.

　　Host: My feedback on these two questions is that our team is our accumulation, our experience is our accumulation, and our customers are our accumulation. So the third question is, shopkeepers, do you think you own this store?

　　Ms. 2: I think the sense of crisis is very strong and it is not controlled at all. I think the trend of Taobao is that data will be disclosed at any time. Taobao will only support big sellers in the future. We must do it well in the past two or three years and try to make it bigger. Taobao has leaked our data in the past two years, which may also be a trend. We don’t feel safe at all. Although we are opening a Tmall store, that’s all.

　　Men 4: Hello everyone, I make mobile phones. What’s more special is that I sell parallel products. We have a very strong sense of crisis. The latest model we have on the market has not been released on Taobao. Since joining the club, I have also started to look for other directions and started to engage in other aspects, but the results are not very good.

　　Host: Our three questions have six interactions. Everyone is very real and not hypocritical. The conversation includes a sense of crisis, some rules on Taobao, and competitive pressure. These problems all exist objectively. We are here today, not to talk about something very false.

　　Find your core competitiveness

　　I have done direct trains before, Taoke, Wangshou, and many data businesses. Now I will focus on the store business, so I will share my experience with you now.

　　I didn't come out to give lectures to everyone throughout 2012. I basically sat in Taobao's office, often laughing at myself for "I won't make any more public" and just do some other things. Today I would like to share something with you. Everyone’s understanding of the store was different before. In 2007, we built a store, hoping that each seller could distinguish it from other sellers in terms of display, and it was personalized in terms of store display. The store was different, the products were different, the layout was different, and the things displayed were also different. In fact, from 2007 to 2013, everyone’s understanding of the store and the role played by the store on the e-commerce platform began to gradually become different. It carries not only the responsibility of displaying products and shopping guides. Today, in addition to sales, we have to consider what we have accumulated over the years we have been doing on Taobao. This is something we need to think about.

　　So this year, our big strategy in store business is to return the right to the seller. This is one of our major policies, as long as the store ownership is returned to the seller. The news about store transfers a few days ago is a test and an entry point. We will do a lot of work in the future on the store’s rights. We will explain the explanation of the store’s rights in detail in the subsequent strategies. Secondly, in addition to repaying the rights, we also need to give sellers an opportunity to achieve the core competitiveness of the store. Through the store, sellers can achieve their own core competitiveness, because only by having their own core competitiveness can they gain a foothold in Taobao, and can make the traffic purchased higher, transform into more purchases, and form their own brand.

　　So what is core competitiveness? Some people may say that my marketing team is very strong, my ability to place keywords on the express train, and I have strong ability to do activities. These are all marketing areas. Some people may say that my interactions with customers are good. For example, some shopkeepers are beautiful women, and she will put photos of her daily life or photos taken by her model in the introduction of her baby. This is an attraction. Maybe the people who come to her store did not mean to buy clothes but to see models. They may think the clothes are good and bought them while walking around. This is an example I gave casually. This is also a core competitiveness.

　　It is not necessarily because of our supply chain and our funds, because no seller did a lot from the beginning, especially most Taobao sellers, unlike Tmall, which have introduced many traditional shops. Taobao stores are growing slowly, and no one is rich from the beginning. How can we make ourselves rich? This requires us to find our own advantages, what are you good at, you are good at supply chain, you are good at marketing, you are good at interaction, and you are good at service.

　　For example, if you sell mobile phones, I can flash the phone for you for free, install software for you, and I will put a film for you, which is also a kind of service. There are also some people who have strong online store decoration design capabilities or strong organizational and coordination capabilities. For example, some people among our club members have strong affinity and cohesion. Everyone thinks that it is very good to cooperate with him, and they are willing and trusted to cooperate with him, which is also a kind of ability. Or some sellers have strong store data analysis and can always find new business opportunities and new entry points in the market. All of this is your core competitiveness, not necessarily your capital or your supply chain. As long as you are proficient in one aspect, you can win.

　　Understand customer needs

　　There are many people in Alibaba Group. People here may operate various products, may also be sales services, or provide services to end consumers, or serve sellers. For example, the designer of online store decoration is also a seller, and some of our partners are also sellers. There are many funders, but the store needs are different. This is the scope of our service. Then everyone will ask, what can I do to win? I can’t guarantee that you will definitely win, but the work done by our team will create possibilities for everyone. Therefore, whether you can win in the end depends on everyone's own efforts, their own understanding of business, and the industry, rather than just relying on a tool, just like doing a direct train and Taobao.

　　On the express train platform, some people can use a small investment to exchange for a great return, but some people do not invest well, invest a lot, but have very little profit, and the subsequent transactions are very poor. The direct train is just a platform, a product, and it depends on how you use this tool, so we will provide such a platform, but it cannot guarantee that everyone can win. We will build a core system of a store, which will include content, products, relationships, data, members, etc. On top of it, we will also build an interactive and collaborative platform, an application market similar to the APP Store, and some marketing systems will be built, which is the system we need to focus on.

　　For a website, I just asked you what you have accumulated today. You may say how much my transaction volume is. What else can you say besides that, it seems that there is no more. But if you are really doing an independent B2C, or if we treat each store as an independent B2C, will you say what the traffic volume of my website is, and how many registered users of my website are, and in the end, I will say how much my sales are.

　　Why do I say we have to pay the right to sellers? Because most sellers do not feel that they have traffic in this store, nor do they feel that they have members of this store. The so-called members are actually members of Taobao. It is just that Taobao members do consumption in your store, and then you have done some exploration and marketing work on these members.

　　Precipitate the core assets of the store and commercialize it. For example, when I was having a conversation with Lao Gao on Taobao last time, I asked him a question. If one day we do something to let the store owner sell the traffic of his own store by himself, do you think it is reliable? Do you think it is willing? He said yes. I also asked the host if you are willing to sell it. He said it depends on how much the other party pays, and I can sell it if I pay more. I found that everyone's view on this aspect is not that they cannot sell their own traffic, but that they have to see if there is any profit, or that there are some restrictions such as not trading with their competitors, but products that complement each other can be accepted.

　　The same goes for customers. You can tell big customers how many members you have, which is what you can do. Otherwise, if you go to invest now, the other party will worry that you have business today and no business tomorrow, and the other party will feel insecure, but if you have stable and fixed customers, the persuasiveness may be stronger.

　　Similarly, when you cooperate with other stores, if you have enough active members, the other party will be willing to cooperate with you and your strength will be greater.

　　The few repeat customers are not something you need to send some promotional information to save you, but you need to understand what consumers really need.

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