Becoming the richest man starts with making complaints

Cao Shen was not notified of Xiao Gang's actions.

After all, this matter sounds easy to handle but the process is cumbersome and complicated, and it cannot be done in a short time. And there may be various uncertainties involved, especially when it comes to overseas transactions. No one dares to make any guarantees until everything is settled.

Naturally, Xiao Gang wouldn't jump out and make a fuss before the matter was settled.

Cao Shen is also thinking about his e-commerce business. With Mr. Cao’s current situation, e-commerce companies will naturally not want to just build a “Taobao brand”, but will naturally want to be a platform-type enterprise.

But e-commerce is difficult, really difficult. Otherwise, there would be no saying that e-commerce is as deep as the sea.

If you want to do this well, the investment will be huge, but it is impossible to just get some traffic and do it lightly.

I think back then, Pony Ma’s father had the largest traffic portal in the country, but e-commerce didn’t even start.

On the surface, the Malaysian father seems to be doing it lightly, but in fact, he is not doing it lightly at all. In order to engage in e-commerce, we have developed a series of seller tools and software, such as Alipay, cloud computing, and Cainiao Network. Companies in the logistics industry alone have set up a special fund and invested a lot of money. Of course, there are many who have gone bankrupt and paid tuition. few……

Not to mention the man who drinks milk tea, he built his own entire logistics and warehousing system.

As for Pinxixi, which relied on WeChat's social traffic, it took advantage of Xiao Ma's father's failure to prevent Malaysia's father from inserting traffic blocks, and reaped the cheap social e-commerce traffic dividends. If I want to take a few more steps later, I will have to invest in redoing it.

But fortunately for him, relying on Dad Malaysia's promotion of the efficiency of the express network, he does not have to make a lot of repeated investments. The so-called water drinkers will piss off the well diggers.

The difficulties of building an e-commerce platform are different from those of pure 2C products.

When making pure 2C products, you have only one customer, which is your C-end users. Just serve them well. However, there are also difficulties here. If the product does not have strong stickiness for C-end users, it will be easy for them to be ruthless and stop using it in a matter of minutes.

Therefore, C-side products must keep pace with the times and keep up with changes in users. Once you can't keep up, it will be difficult for users to come back, and there are always new and interesting products that will attract users' attention. You are competing with all products to seize users' time.

Pony Daddy is a typical pure C-end product player. If you look carefully at Pony Pony's product matrix, you will find that all the products that are relatively successful are products that kill users' time. WeChat, QQ, games, videos, reading.

As for other products that don’t occupy time and attention, they all use investment methods to capture points, such as e-commerce, taxis, takeaways...

So, when another player who killed time appeared, Pony's father was particularly nervous. Because this player’s Douyin, Toutiao, and free novels have taken up many users’ time.

E-commerce is different from pure C-end products. It has to serve two users, consumers who buy things and merchants who sell things. The needs of these two users are actually opposite.

Consumers want rich, cheap products, good services and convenience, and they want to buy as little as possible and spend less money while meeting their needs.

Sellers don’t like too many SKUs. I hope that the best I can do is to make one product that is universal. The higher the gross profit, the better. The more you buy, the better. It is best to fall into the trap of consumerism and be unable to extricate yourself. Good service requires costs. , the lower the cost, the better.

Therefore, it is extremely difficult to serve both companies on the same platform.

Or, you find a balance, but that balance may also mean that neither party is satisfied.

Or, you have decided who you want to serve well.

In this regard, almost all e-commerce companies choose sellers. Everything they do is to get more traffic for sellers. All shopping festivals seem to be carnivals for buyers, but in fact they are a means of generating traffic. The seller ships the goods.

The introduction of convenient payment tools is to lower the threshold for consumers to make purchase decisions.

Launched a lending service to allow everyone to spend more money for shopping.

Logistics services, improve inventory turnover, make things more convenient and more frequent for consumers.

Not to mention the large amount of consumer data and big data provided to sellers.

There is actually nothing wrong with this from a business perspective.

When doing business, you must first think clearly about who your customers are.

In this way, we can provide a series of services around customers.

Whether it is commission, traffic advertising, or data services, e-commerce platforms make money from sellers. Naturally, sellers are the real financial backers of e-commerce.

Providing good services to consumers is just taking on some of the services that sellers should do, allowing them to sell products more easily.

If you don’t believe it, just look at the product.

For example, on WeChat, every new feature and every chat is relatively restrained and the user experience must be taken into consideration.

When you open Alipay, you can see a variety of functions piled up, and it can provide you with everything you want. Moreover, often commonly used functions are still at the secondary entrance, so you have to look for them.

This is obviously not a design with the user in mind. What it thinks about is that anyway, the functions you commonly use are just needed and you must click on them. It is better to use various services to occupy your attention when you open the product, and maybe you will use it.

If it was just to make money, Cao Shen would not do e-commerce. The chain involved in this matter is too long and it is really troublesome. With Youxin, it is the most comfortable choice to directly follow the path of Pony Daddy.

In order to take revenge on Taotao Technology, it is not worth it.

But Cao Shen has to do it!

There are two companies in the world that are the most powerful in public cloud.

One company is called AWS, which was born out of Amazon.

The other one is called Alibaba Cloud.

These two families have one thing in common: the father is an e-commerce business.

E-commerce has a large amount of data, rich data types, large transaction volume, high concurrency, etc., which all have extremely high requirements for the efficiency, cost, security, reliability, and stability of cloud computing. This is the experience gained in practice. .

E-commerce customers and sellers are the backbone of the secondary industry. Further upstream in their industrial chain are more secondary industry industries and material manufacturers.

Cao Shen wants his cloud computing technology to fully penetrate into all aspects of social production and services. E-commerce is a good entry point and can accelerate progress.

The first wave of using cloud services was the Internet, and then there were sellers who were unaware that they were using the cloud but were very happy with it. Then in order to improve the efficiency of the supply chain, sellers were forced to use cloud computing upstream. and various SAAS applications.

From an industry perspective, the penetration of cloud computing is in the order of Internet, communications and finance, education, electric power, and manufacturing.

Being an e-commerce company has advantages in getting into the cloud. This can actually be used as a reference. In the original world, there was no e-commerce in the Pony Papa Cloud. It was only later that it became an all-out bet on cloud computing. However, compared to the Pony Papa Cloud, Yun is still not that interesting.

As for why we need the cloud, the cloud is an important cornerstone for realizing dataization, intelligence, and abstraction of the entire world. Technology changes the world, but first, people must use it!

On the other hand, Cao Shen is also thinking about it, if you are rushing to develop e-commerce in front of you, can I do traffic, cloud, and payment to provide you with an arsenal in the back?

This saves me some trouble.

So, rarely, Cao Shen began to do research seriously.

The conclusion is, no!

Dongguo now mainly focuses on B2C e-commerce, which is different from the former World Milk Tea and Ma Papa, which together accounted for more than 70% of the e-commerce share.

Taotao Technology here accounts for less than 20%, while hundreds of other B2C e-commerce companies, large and small, account for more than 80%. In other words, the e-commerce market here is extremely fragmented.

Among B2C e-commerce, the top ten companies together account for 20% of the market share. And they are so tight with each other that it is completely unclear who can win and take all.

All platform-type companies pay attention to scale effects. E-commerce cannot be large-scale. If it increases its voice over sellers and reduces its own costs, it will be difficult to make profits. In the end, it will close down after all the money is burned.

In other words, even though there are hundreds of them now, it’s quite exciting for Cao Shen to rush in and provide services. But maybe there will be fifty next year, thirty the year after that, and in two years there will only be a few left.

There are fewer and fewer customers. Although the customers are getting bigger and bigger, when the customers reach a certain level, cloud computing may be done by itself. Even if he didn't do it himself, Cao Shen counted his fingers and found that his cloud computing would only have two or three big customers in the end. Is he just lonely?

Moreover, these e-commerce sellers are not customers of Tongcao Technology. If they want to build some tools based on cloud computing so that cloud computing services can fully penetrate and even penetrate into the seller’s upstream industry chain, it is basically difficult to control them. Because Cao Shen has no say.

So after thinking about it, I still have to do this myself.

So the question is, what to do?

The e-commerce company of Ma Daddy in the original world has given birth to a large number of excellent sellers. With full competition and profitability, they have forced the supply chain to grow with them, continuously upgrading the capabilities of the entire supply chain, and giving birth to other countries around the world. Incredibly efficient and low-cost manufacturing.

But now, no!

The development of Taotao technology is far inferior to that of Papa Ma back then. This has led to the fact that most of the products on Taotao are not high-quality supply chain products.

Therefore, if we operate in the long-tail market, the dilemma Cao Shen faces is that there are neither high-quality sellers to operate it nor high-quality goods to support the supply.

Moreover, the current express delivery business in this world is really not good.

In the original world, the development of e-commerce has made the entire express delivery business grow by leaps and bounds. By 2019, nearly 70% of the express delivery business was covered by e-commerce.

The speed of logistics is a matter of speed experience for consumers.

But essentially it is a delivery issue, and the length of time will seriously affect inventory turnover and capital turnover.

The faster the delivery, the faster the turnaround, and the quicker the feedback.

Ma Papa's initial logistics delivery took 5-7 days. Milk Tea's delivery took two days, which made the entire company get up significantly faster than Ma Papa's back then. In the food delivery industry, the delivery time has become half an hour, so food delivery is developing faster.

Later, with taxis and taxis, it took more than ten minutes to complete a service, and the development speed was even faster.

Therefore, if Cao Shen wants to surpass other companies in developing e-commerce, he must greatly improve logistics efficiency.

Express delivery now takes about five days, which is improved from six or seven days a year ago. It is also thanks to the development of B2C e-commerce. Now, Taotao Technology and a large number of B2C e-commerce companies actually use express delivery networks.

The reason why express delivery is not fast enough is because Taotao has not developed. In the original world, Papa Ma’s family accounted for more than 70% of the e-commerce express delivery business.

On the other hand, although current B2C e-commerce claims to deliver goods nationwide, it is actually very regional.

Because they basically sell standardized products and everything is of the same quality, consumers will choose e-commerce stores that are close to them when purchasing.

As a result, B2C e-commerce companies use more regional express delivery networks, which does little to improve the efficiency of the national express delivery network.

And precisely because of the regional nature, many e-commerce companies are also setting up their own warehousing and logistics nearby, sharing part of the express delivery business.

This pattern has also led to another problem. E-commerce is concentrated regionally. In first-tier cities or economically developed areas, there are many e-commerce companies, but in cities below third-tier cities, the penetration rate of e-commerce is basically very low.

In other words, everyone is chasing the same group of users, price competition becomes more intense, and traffic costs are getting higher and higher.

Therefore, there shouldn’t be so many B2C e-commerce companies, Cao Shen complained.

But unfortunately, e-commerce is booming and investors are throwing money at it, making it a hub for entrepreneurship.

Everyone's development is similar, and it's hard to see who can become a big one. Every investor thinks that this company will be owned by him, so he continues to spend money.

Cao Shen analyzed it and felt that the current model of being a Malaysian father really did not meet the conditions. The sellers, products, and logistics were not good, and it could not be improved in a short time.

Is it okay to do business as a brand seller?

Now many brands have followed the trend and have Youxin official accounts. Is it okay to directly provide them with selling tools and let them sell things through mini programs on Youxin?

Set up another logistics and warehousing company to provide them with services?

Cao Shen thought about it carefully, and it seemed that it wouldn't work either...

The B2C e-commerce boom has only happened in the past two years. Brand manufacturers have just been "shocked" and have not yet mastered the e-commerce thing.

The current B2C e-commerce model is basically a purchase model. The seller is a supplier who sells goods directly to the e-commerce platform, rather than opening his own store in the e-commerce platform to operate.

In other words, current brand e-commerce companies simply do not have the ability to operate their own e-commerce businesses, and they will not sell goods online!

In the original world, the first wave of brand manufacturers who tried to sell things by themselves were basically brought down. Later, Dad Ma supported a group of people who knew how to do it and specialized in the "agents operation" business, and then they gradually pulled up the e-commerce business of the brand owners. .

By 2020, Papa Ma already has nearly 900 agent operators working.

In fact, there are many mature ones, such as Baozun, a comprehensive agent operator, Beauty Beauty, a personal care and beauty company, OneNetOne, a fast-moving consumer goods company, and Yuewei, an underwear company...

But now, nothing, nothing!

E-commerce is difficult, and there seems to be no shortcut...

Thinking about it now, it’s too difficult to stand and talk without having back pain and complaining about Taotao Technology’s poor performance.

It was born at the wrong time, and before it could gain a firm foothold, it created a model that allowed sellers to become bigger and stronger. Later, B2C came out to grab jobs, making it very passive now.

After thinking about it, it seems that if you want to build an e-commerce business, you can only do it from beginning to end by yourself. It is really a huge project.

Now the question comes again, what to do first and how to do it?

Although the challenge is huge, Cao Shen is very excited. How can he not be excited when he rarely needs to burn his brain!