The past year may have been the year with the most complaints in the e-commerce industry. The rise of the concept of new retail and the sudden downgrade of Taobao have made 6 million Taobao sellers at a loss.
The big seller is fine, the scale is large enough and the formation is strong enough, so don’t worry too much. However, it is not so simple for small and medium-sized sellers.
Traffic in the e-commerce industry is king, and the platform provides customers with entrances and solutions to their needs. But the platform always relies on big sellers.
"Small and beautiful" sellers provide higher-level experiences or self-realization needs, which cannot meet the needs of platform monetization.
Therefore, small and beautiful sellers rely more on whether the platform gives them opportunities.
In the past two years, content e-commerce, celebrity e-commerce, and social e-commerce have risen one after another. These e-commerce companies are representatives of traffic innovation. They have all broken through the original traffic thinking and completed transactions based on their connections and influence.
In this environment, small and American e-commerce development is relatively difficult.
How to define small and beautiful?
As early as 2009, Jack Ma delivered a speech entitled "The World of the Future is Beautiful because of Smallness" at APEC. Since then, the concept of small and beautiful has been officially born.
Three years later, at the 2012 Internet Business Conference, Jack Ma officially proposed the "small but beautiful" e-commerce, which means: small means segmenting the market and meeting the needs of a certain group; beauty means moving users in details, innovating creative methods, and pursuing the ultimate.
Since 2012, the term "small and beautiful e-commerce" has appeared frequently. Everyone thought that they had discovered a new traffic outlet, but in fact, the small and beautiful model has existed for a long time.
Huang Ruo, one of the founders of Tmall, once gave a detailed explanation of this.
Huang Ruo believes that small and beautiful sellers have existed for a long time, such as bra shops that can be seen everywhere on the streets, with a single category of business, but their sales are quite considerable.
In addition, there are music CDs, snack shops, etc., which are all small and beautiful forms.
If these stores are developed online and their sales model is transformed into an e-commerce model, then what we now call "small and beautiful" e-commerce will be born.
What are the excellent examples of the current situation of small and beautiful e-commerce?
By 2017, people have changed their name to Xiao Ermei and are more willing to call it vertical e-commerce.
"Small and beautiful" has developed from the existence of a newborn e-commerce entity to a sales strategy. In recent years, it has been striving for speed. Like the famous nut brand Three Squirrels, it is a classic representative.
Three Squirrels was founded by its founder Zhang Liaoyuan in 2012. In just two years, it has become the number one nut brand on the Internet, with annual sales of 1 billion yuan, creating a miracle in the e-commerce industry.
However, the sales category of Three Squirrels is very narrow. At first, it only started as an Internet snack brand. Compared with women's clothing, home furnishings, etc., this is a smaller scale. However, Three Squirrels' marketing strategy is recognized as powerful in the industry.
As the first group of marketers to go online, Zhang Liaoyuan was able to deeply grasp human nature, so that he could quickly dig the blue ocean from the red ocean.
The Red Sea refers to the entire nut brand, while the pecan fruit in Zhang Liaoyuan is the blue ocean. When the pecan fruit was not famous at first, the old-fashioned pistachio occupied a large market.
However, compared with pistachio, pecan has greater advantages in terms of taste and efficacy, and is more in line with the aesthetics of young people.
Therefore, Zhang Liaoyuan took pecan fruit as the main focus and launched a series of promotion and marketing models, which successfully supported the sales performance of the early Three Squirrels and made a name for themselves.
In addition, Three Squirrels also pays great attention to details such as food packaging and customer service humanization. The cute cartoon image of squirrel and the customer service calls the customer "master" and is impressive.
Now the valuation of Three Squirrels has reached 4 billion. On Double Eleven, Three Squirrels' transaction volume exceeded 500 million, becoming a representative company of small and beautiful development in the e-commerce industry.
In fact, there are far more than large companies like Three Squirrels. There are also many small and beautiful e-commerce sellers in the Laogao e-commerce circle. Although their business categories are very small, their development momentum is strong.
For example, a member who operates cat food, this category is too small, and it was caused by several young people after quitting their jobs. However, by controlling the repurchase rate and emotional marketing, they achieved an annual sales of 30 million, retaining many old customers who raise cats. It can be said that they are very powerful.
In Lao Gao's view, if small and American e-commerce wants to become bigger and stronger, it must do these three aspects.
1. Choose the right product
If there are no good products, the later design and promotion process will be very difficult. For most sellers who have no background and no funds, they can only compete with others through excellent product quality.
Moreover, the product must have the characteristics of high gross profit, otherwise it will be difficult to produce better benefits.
After you have done a good job of product positioning, it means that the target consumer group is determined. It’s like Lao Gao’s member who makes cat food. Their positioning is to bring happiness to every cat owner.
Therefore, they gave cat food the concept that equals happiness. While selling, they will do a series of actions that make customers feel warm, such as cute cartoon images, and promote their charity activities that often help stray cats, which will make customers feel a sense of identity and high loyalty.
2. Control professionalism and repurchase rate
There has always been a misunderstanding in e-commerce: It is necessary to have a large scale to make a profit?
In fact, few companies can make the scale large enough. Vertical e-commerce does not need to occupy a large amount of traffic, but they need to efficiently utilize every bit of traffic, retain users, and increase repurchase rate in order to continue to develop.
Secondly, professionalism is also a factor that must be considered. Like the bra shops and music CD shops mentioned earlier. If consumers often cannot buy the records they want, it will cause a very bad user experience. Being small and beautiful, one must be high in the first place!
3. Tell good stories and create IP
In addition to working hard on products, sellers also need to think carefully about marketing. A real brand story can easily lead to the relationship between sellers and customers.
For example, the old food store in the second update video, the restorator of "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City", etc., all have strong brand competitiveness, but they are very lacking in marketing. So emotional marketing can make them explode instantly. And small and beautiful e-commerce needs to create such a brand story.
In addition, there is also the creation of a personal IP image. In fact, creating an IP is roughly connected with the brand story. Sellers launch a subject image so that customers will think of their own products when they see them.
For example, today's celebrity stores, such as Zhang Dayi, Xueli, etc., as well as Luo Yonghao representing Hammer, Lei Jun representing Xiaomi, etc. While the big guys are working on technology, they are also creating product culture, so this is also a very important point.
Finally, in 2017, many Taobao sellers experienced ups and downs and endured hardships, but those who persisted undoubtedly burst into strong competitiveness. In 2018, a new era of retail is about to begin, and the general trend has arrived. There are tens of millions of roads to success, but only persistence is the only one. May you form unique competitiveness and embark on a prosperous road.
Click to register to apply to join the well-known e-commerce network - Laogao E-commerce Club. Any merchants from all over the country, Tmall merchants, Taobao Crown Store, Jinguan Store, and other e-commerce platform merchants can apply to join!
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