Maternal and infant vertical e commerce is at the end of the road

Text|One View Business Li Yan.

Edit|Wooden fish.

Recently, according to Beijing Business Daily, the Beijing headquarters of the mother and child e-commerce baby lattice has been emptied, and the investment promotion staff of the park said that the baby lattice has moved out of the park around June this year.

As early as February this year, a number of high-level executives resigned at the top of the board of directors of Baby Grid, and in March this year, Zhang Lijun, the controlling shareholder of Baby Grid, **2890460,000 shares, with an interest in the original 3437% fell to In January, the founder Zhang Tiantian was successively exposed to more than 13 million shares of **Baobaoge subsidiary**.

On August 13 this year, Baby Grid issued an announcement on its intention to cancel its subsidiary, planning to dissolve and liquidate and cancel Grid Youpin (Beijing) Technology *** According to ** report, since August, the founder has continued to lose contact.

Ten years of honor and disgraceBefore making a baby lattice, Zhang Tiantian has accumulated more than ten years of Internet operation experience. He used to work for Shangpin.com as Director of Operations. After that, he participated in the initiation of the establishment of Dingshiguang (Moment.com), and received direct investment from Lei Jun and Feng Xin.

As a vertical cross-border maternal and child e-commerce platform, Baby Grid has positioned itself as an operation model of "overseas direct mail + global sale" at the beginning of its establishment. It aims to provide Chinese consumers with % safe overseas goods by integrating global overseas first-class chain resources and adhering to the business philosophy of "zero price difference in overseas shopping and global shopping for babies".

Focusing on "cross-border global shopping", Baby Grid once established a complete warehousing and logistics system in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and other overseas countries, and directly provided domestic maternal and infant products through overseas companies.

In 2014, the baby lattice cross-border e-commerce platform was officially launched, which has been established for 10 years. At the beginning of its establishment, Baby Grid did not get the desired growth. According to public information, from 2014 to 2016, it lost 259 respectively730,000 yuan, 3406850,000 yuan and 3881460,000 yuan;In the first half of 2017, the net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company was -498470,000 yuan, still in a state of loss.

It was not until the second half of 2017 that the company successfully turned losses into profits after the layout of offline business. It is reported that in 2017, the operating income of baby lattice was 2100 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5062%, with total revenue of 6473 for the first quarter of 2018430,000 yuan, a year-on-year increase of 30978%

The reason for the substantial increase in profits, in addition to the improvement of profit margins brought by the optimization of the first chain and logistics, is also largely due to the successive opening of baby lattice offline stores.

Zhang Tiantian said in a previous interview that the ** chain is the core of the baby grid, and at the same time, by making high-quality content on the e-commerce platform, it can reduce the cost of customer acquisition and increase user stickiness. At the same time, it is also necessary to make efforts offline to provide users with a scenario-based consumption experience integrating maternal and infant retail, children's amusement, swimming, early education and other consumer formats.

Therefore, Baby Grid has created an offline franchise brand Grid Youpin, and created a "1+X" artificial intelligence maternal and infant complex, in which "1" refers to the ** chain of Baby Grid, and "X" is the integration of the offline format of maternal and infant family consumption, so as to create a closed loop of comprehensive maternal and infant consumption.

This set of play of baby lattice has indeed achieved considerable results for it in a few years.

From 2016 to 2021, Baby Grid has entered the first-class innovation layer for six consecutive years. As of June 30, 2021, the cumulative number of registered users on the Baby Grid platform was 13.92 million (including joint login through third-party channels), the cumulative number of Baby Grid APP was 100.14 million, and the cumulative number of integrated stores nationwide was 14,000. According to the financial report data, until 2020, the revenue quarter and net profit of Baby Grid have achieved double-digit year-on-year growth.

However, with the slowdown in the growth of e-commerce transactions in the maternal and infant industry, Baby Grid soon went downhill.

According to the "Dianshubao" e-commerce big database, in 2014, the growth rate of the maternal and infant e-commerce market was as high as 11139%, and the growth rate from 2015 to 2022 is5%, the growth rate has slowed down significantly.

A glance at the financial report data of Baby Grid found that in the first half of 2020, the franchise service revenue of Baby Grid fell by 48% year-on-year81%, the company's overall net profit and revenue also showed a year-on-year decline, down 4469% and 1461%。

The slowdown in the growth rate of the industry, the transfer of users' reproductive needs, the overlap of uncertain factors such as the epidemic, and the hot consumption of live broadcasts have all brought an impact to Baby Grid.

On September 25 this year, the financial report data disclosed for the last time by Baobao Grid showed that in the first half of 2023, the company achieved operating income of 10.3 billion yuan, down 3543%, with a net loss of 242150,000 yuan, a year-on-year profit turned into a loss, and a net profit of 1171 in the same period last year120,000 yuan, basic earnings per share of -00200 yuan.

From the peak market value of 8 billion yuan in 2020 to 52.03 million yuan now, why has the maternal and infant vertical e-commerce road of Baby Grid come to an end?

In 2014, the death of maternal and infant vertical e-commerce, which was born at the same time as the baby lattice, was also positioned as a mother and baby special sale, and Miya, which was transformed into an imported maternal and infant brand sale. A series of companies, including Babytree and Hot Mom**, have set foot in the field of vertical e-commerce during this period, launched their own platforms and apps, and made efforts in the private domain of online communities.

The favor of capital also reflected the popularity of maternal and child e-commerce at that time to a certain extent. In January 2014, Babytree won the Good Future 1500 million yuan of strategic financing, in 2015, Beibei.com received 100 million US dollars in Series C financing. Miya, which has received nearly 2 billion yuan in financing from Meihua Venture Capital, Zhen Ge**, Sequoia China, etc., has been on the "Hurun Global Unicorn List" for three consecutive years, with a valuation of nearly 10 billion yuan at its peak. According to hydrogen consumption reports, data have shown that from 2014 to 2019, the cumulative financing amount of China's maternal and child e-commerce reached 13.3 billion.

However, the vertical e-commerce of mothers and babies is quickly declining. According to a report by the Prospective Industry Research Institute, in the three years from 2013 to 2015, the penetration rate of maternal and child e-commerce climbed all the way from 6% to 188%。In the three years that followed, the penetration rate only increased from 225% grew to 247%, with a change of only 22%。

A number of maternal and child e-commerce companies, including Beibei.com and Hot Mom Gang, have long been rumored to be bankrupt and bankrupt. Babytree, the head platform for mothers and infants, was also revealed to have a turbulent senior management team and a loss of 4 in 20226.8 billion. On July 1, 2022, the Miya app also announced its closure.

In the eyes of industry insiders, the decline of maternal and infant vertical e-commerce and the impact of integrated e-commerce platforms are the main reasons.

First of all, vertical e-commerce does not have such a large number of users as integrated e-commerce, and it is impossible to get more advantageous products for users.

Shen Meng, director of Xiangsong Capital, pointed out that when the integrated e-commerce platform is rolling SKU and **, the competitiveness of vertical e-commerce in these two indicators will become smaller and smaller, coupled with the gap in the level of market operation capacity and capital reserves, if you do not find a differentiated development path, the later development of maternal and child e-commerce is still passive.

Secondly, users cannot get enough increments, and for vertical e-commerce platforms, self-management is easy to be constrained by inventory pressure, and the platform is not competitive compared with comprehensive e-commerce. In the view of Yang Yu, the founder of Yilan Business, integrated e-commerce naturally has more traffic advantages. From the standpoint of the best business, you can get more traffic in the integrated e-commerce investment, and there will be the advantage of the first subsidy, which is naturally a more cost-effective choice. Finally, the maternal and infant vertical e-commerce "lacks money" to solicit customers. Different from other tracks, the particularity of the maternal and infant market is that consumers will only have demand and attention for such products within a certain stage of time. Once the child grows up, users who have a certain degree of stickiness to the maternal and infant vertical e-commerce will gradually leave this platform. This means that in order to maintain the stability of the number of users and GMV, such e-commerce companies need to continuously spend money to attract new users. However, the gradual increase in traffic fees has dragged down such platforms.

At present, the general trend of maternal and infant vertical e-commerce has gone, and how to seek survival in the new stage has become a problem for the remaining players off the field.

How to transformAt present, it seems that the maternal and infant vertical e-commerce that can still be done collectively chooses to transform.

Relying on the "Private Family Album" APP to deeply cultivate in the maternal and infant track, the baby is recently accelerating the layout of offline physical stores and moving towards a business model with the DTC brand as the coreIn addition to deepening online e-commerce, Babycare has accelerated the expansion of offline stores and has opened more than 100 brand stores. Relying on Dai Kesi, which started online, it has chosen to reach stable cooperation with many maternal and infant chain channels, supermarket channels, and personal care channels such as baby-friendly rooms and Wanning.

Obviously, the offline force can not only provide consumers with better services through actual scenarios, but also help to establish brand mentality, which has become the main trend of maternal and infant brands.

In Shen Meng's view, in the current comprehensive e-commerce platform, the maternal and infant brand of "big road goods" is still the mainstream, and consumers are often measured by the best when buying brands on these platforms.

However, if they can establish their core advantages through different perspectives such as service and user operation, e-commerce or brands of maternal and infant vertical products can still build their core competitiveness in the current e-commerce environment. Shen Meng said.