Can the bottleneck encountered in the online development of second-hand e-commerce be broken offline?
Whale Merchant (ID: BizWhale) Original Author |Xiao Jie.
Second-hand trading has always been a mixed and full of business opportunities.
As a 10-year-old second-hand trading platform and one of Alibaba's "descendants", Xianyu has begun to explore multiple times since it became one of Alibaba's first strategic innovative businesses in November last year.
From the high-paying recruitment of "star-chasing experts", to the upcoming launch of the WeChat mini-program, to the first Xianyu circulation store that is now ready to be opened. It is not difficult to see that Xianyu is eager to find more commercialization possibilities. After all, after Ali implemented "1+6+N", Xianyu had to learn to be "self-sufficient". At the same time, second-hand e-commerce giants such as Zhuan Zhuan and Ai** are also actively deploying offline.
In addition, due to factors such as the platform's poor supervision and frequent unscrupulous sellers, Xianyu has been repeatedly complained. In order to make the platform develop benignly, Xianyu has to strengthen the supervision and punishment of illegal transactions on the platform. Xianyu, who is suffering from internal and external troubles, wants to get out of the dire situation, tear off the second-hand e-commerce label, and tell a new story, depending on whether its commercial effect meets expectations.
At the beginning of the establishment of Xianyu, its founder Chen Weiye made a commitment to the outside world. "Xianyu will not consider charging trading commissions to individual users. ”
However, in June 2023, Xianyu APP issued an announcement saying that the Xianyu community will officially charge software service fees for sellers with high-frequency and high-value transactions. As soon as the news came out, it quickly sparked heated discussions. The high probability that the fee policy involves some B-end merchants. Many sellers have a hunch that Xianyu is going to be turbulent.
In fact, looking back at Xianyu's data and achievements, you can indeed see clues. According to the latest data from the 2023 Xianyu Product Upgrade Conference, the number of Xianyu users has exceeded 500 million, of which 43% are post-95 users and 22% are post-00s, with a release scale of nearly 100 million and more than 1 billion products.
These data prove that Xianyu, as a second-hand trading platform, has its own drainage physique, and most of the users are young people with high activity. How to seize the new opportunities of the second-hand trading platform in combination with the background of consumption downgrade is a difficult problem for Xianyu.
Therefore, at the end of 2023, after Xianyu was upgraded to the first-level business of Taotian Group, it broke the previous positioning restrictions within the group and used a more independent strategy to face the broadest market. The innovative business and future development that Xianyu wants to do coincide with Taotian's current low-price and content-based direction.
In this adjustment, Xianyu made a personnel change. Ding Jian, general manager of Xianyu, reports directly to the CEO of Taotian Group. In terms of Xianyu's strategic decision-making, Ding Jian once told the Beijing News Shell Finance that Xianyu will not aim to make profits in the future, but will pursue more growth in the scale of users and find a business model from value-added services. Xianyu is also thinking about how to make money, and the landing plan is to go through the business model, and also think about how to build China's second-hand e-commerce model.
Judging from the specific operation, Xianyu, who had just become independent, immediately upgraded the governance plan and began to investigate a large number of risky accounts and deal with them accordingly. At that time, netizens lamented that Xianyu had the posture of "I'd rather kill a thousand by mistake than miss one". After clearing some of the smoky miasma of the platform, users have also strengthened their trust in Xianyu.
At the content level, Xianyu has upgraded its new community products, "Seafood Market" and "Huiplay" Community. Through interaction and communication, it enhances the trust relationship of the community. Ding Jian said that Xianyu's consideration for launching community-based products is to provide a field for more users from the perspective of active consumers and cultivating stickiness. In other words, the commercialization and user growth of Xianyu in the future will also come from community content and influencer interaction.
At the level of guaranteeing low prices and facilitating transactions, Xianyu has launched a worry-free shopping service and a 48-hour worry-free selling service in the four major fields of luxury goods, mobile phone digital, trendy shoes and toys, and beauty products. In addition, from the seller's point of view, Xianyu announced the official launch of the "help sell" business, and the platform will check the quality inspection, communication, valuation, promotion and sales and other links to reduce the cost of sellers and attract sellers to settle in.
This attempt at offline stores is an extension of Xianyu's community. Offline can bring new vitality to the Xianyu brand, but the additional costs of manpower, rent, operation, inventory and other costs that need to be added offline mean that Xianyu has ushered in greater challenges. At present, Xianyu offline circulation store is still in the trial operation stage, and whether it can succeed remains to be tested by the market.
According to Dianshubao data, the penetration rate of second-hand e-commerce is expected to be 33 in 202232%, a year-on-year increase of 1033%, but the growth rate has also declined significantly. It can be seen that the second-hand trading platform dominated by C2C is becoming more and more difficult to grow users, and the platforms urgently need to find increments.
Online second-hand transactions often lack trust, and offline brick-and-mortar stores can alleviate some of the anxiety of consumers. Therefore, various platforms have tested the water offline. According to the data, as of the end of September 2023, the total number of ATRenew offline stores reached 1,952; As of December 2023, the number of stores in the country has exceeded 300.
Among them, the first offline store of Ai** opened at the end of 2013 amid doubts. Since then, it has soared, opening stores in 273 cities. Today, Ai**'s store revenue accounts for more than 50%, but I don't know how to cover the high cost of offline transactions and advertising in stores.
Huang Wei, CEO of Zhuan Zhuan Group, announced in early November 2022 that the store business has been open to the whole country to join.
Xianyu saw that love ** and crazy ** "harvested users", and on the other hand, saw that the Internet increment had peaked and the market had entered the stock fight, so it also began to prepare for the offline layout.
However, the author believes that it will not be easy for second-hand trading platforms to enter the market. Because offline stores are a typical asset-heavy model, the soaring costs of rent, manpower, logistics, and platform maintenance are all tests for the platform. In today's fierce competition in the red sea of e-commerce, how to control costs and improve efficiency while increasing contact points is a major problem in front of the second-hand trading platform.
In the case of Duo Fish, which is mainly engaged in the second-hand book business, Mao Zhu, the founder and CEO of Duo Fish, once admitted that because of a mistake in site selection, the Sanlitun store landed in the Mechanical and Electrical Institute, and there was no customer flow that could support the operation of the store.
Catching more fish does not want to give up the offline market because of this. Perhaps because second-hand clothing is more profitable than second-hand books, at the end of 2023, Duo Catch Fish opened a second-hand clothing store in Shanghai and held a pop-up store event at its office on Dawang Road. According to Maozhu's explanation to the outside world, the Anfu Road store and the Sanlitun store basically rely on the income of the clothing business to subsidize the income of books.
Back to Xianyu's store, from its official ** point of view, Xianyu's circulation store selection is concentrated in second-hand luxury watches, digital accessories, video game peripherals, etc. It can be seen that Xianyu has also concentrated on choosing categories with higher premiums and more profitable. At the same time, consumers can also consign unused items in the store, or "hang out" the services they want to provide, such as running errands, walking dogs, etc.
According to a staff member of the Xianyu Circulation Store, the Xianyu Circulation Store will operate for a long time, and the second-hand goods in the store are officially self-operated. The author believes that if the income is considerable, Xianyu may also be open to joining, but with the increase in the number of stores, the difficulty and pressure of management will also increase.
In short, Xianyu's new actions in brand expansion and offline layout are continuous, and the results still need to be tested by the market. But having said that, the second-hand trading platform opened a store to eliminate some of the hidden dangers of trading. If the trust problem in the platform still exists, and problems such as transaction fraud, illegal transactions, and counterfeit goods are frequent, it will also cause a decline in brand value.
The operation of the second-hand trading platform is based on fidelity and buyer trust. As of press time, there are as many as 150131 complaints related to Xianyu in black cat complaints, 80,616 complaints related to transfers, and 6,802 complaints related to love**.
At present, the main platform players in the second-hand e-commerce market include Xianyu, Zhuan Zhuan, Ai**, Hongbulin, etc. While the transaction volume of these platforms is soaring**, various doubts are still continuing. For example, the platform's commission problem and the question that non-standard products cannot be objectively identified.
In response to the issue of commissions, when Xianyu announced that it would charge software service fees to sellers with "high-frequency and high-value transactions", it caused a wide range of discussions. Ji Shan (the nickname of "Ding Jian" above) replied, "The commission for professional sellers is not only to spread part of the cost of maintaining the operation of the platform, but also to express that if you want to do business in Xianyu for a long time, you need to use more commercial logic." ”
In response to the identification of non-standard products, many consumers complained on the complaint platform that some second-hand e-commerce platforms will greatly discount the second-hand products on the grounds of a variety of machine damage, and then sell them through higher ones. Not long ago, an Internet celebrity's complaint about a second-hand mobile phone trading platform attracted widespread attention.
In the process of "turning" the purchase and selling of the second-hand trading platform, the Internet celebrity found that the quality inspection report issued by the platform at the time of sale showed that there was no problem with the mobile phone, but when the same mobile phone passed through the transfer again after less than half an hour, it was found that defects such as "the camera took a spot" and "the screen was slightly scratched", resulting in a large difference between the purchase price and the ** price.
This kind of questioning is also one of the main reasons for second-hand trading platforms to be complained, and there is a long way to go to achieve an open, transparent and credible entire transaction process.
On the other hand, catalyzed by the economic downturn and the change of consumption concepts, the development of second-hand consumption has accelerated, and a large number of consumers believe that problems such as online counterfeiting, false publicity, poor after-sales service, and difficulty in returning and exchanging goods also affect their consumption decisions.
The asymmetry of information in domestic second-hand transactions leaves room for bad money to drive out good money and online fraud. In this regard, the platform has to be deeply involved in the transaction, supervise the buyer and seller, and the quality of the goods, and strive to make the circulation order and transaction behavior more standardized.
The rapid development of second-hand trading platforms and the sound of skepticism are two sides of the coin. At present, the transaction mode of second-hand e-commerce has evolved from C2C to C2B2C and B2B2C, and the transaction scale has also been expanding. But the market has not yet given birth to a giant.
With the development of old players such as Xianyu, Zhuan Zhuan, and Ai**, short ** giants such as Douyin and Kuaishou have also begun to enter the game. How to build a community atmosphere, enhance the trading interest of buyers and sellers, and standardize the transaction process are what new and old players need to solve.