Where should the e-commerce economy go in the next decade?

The official website of Xianghe Furniture City () has experienced rapid growth for ten years, and China's e-commerce has grown into an economy with a scale of over 8 trillion yuan. In this emerging economy, Alibaba's Taobao undoubtedly occupies a central position, while the e-commerce in the economy emerges and stars shine. China's e-commerce, represented by Taobao, has experienced rapid growth in the past golden decade, which has caused a big ecological explosion. At the same time, it has brought profound changes to China from the aspects of domestic demand, urbanization, and enterprise transformation and upgrading. However, the 3D era brings opportunities and challenges. At the crossroads of China's e-commerce economy, where will the next decade go?

status quo

The influence and subversion behind the feature

In the spring of 2003, the SARS epidemic that was raging was brought to an unprecedented e-commerce enterprise in Hangzhou, bringing unprecedented opportunities. And its head Ma Yun, once was troubled by the coldness of the website. This home appliance business is the current industry "big Mac" Alibaba.

Today is not the same, now Alibaba is behind the rapid development of China's entire e-commerce economy. According to the survey data of the Ali Research Center, the scale of China's e-commerce economy has reached 8.2 trillion yuan in 2012, and will reach 50 trillion yuan by 2020, 10 times that of 2010.

"China's e-commerce is at the critical point of the macro outbreak. This sign is that the transaction growth from Taobao last year increased from 4.5% to 5.5%." Jiang Qiping, secretary general of the Information Science Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was interviewed by the Commercial Daily. According to the interview, according to the current development speed, China's e-commerce transaction volume will surpass the US transaction total in 2015.

A curious Russian engineer integrated data from 350,000 websites in 196 countries around the world to create an “Internet Planet Map”. The blue represents the United States and the yellow represents China, which is like the “Gemini Constellation”. Hui. However, the genes of Gemini are fundamentally different in the eyes of the industry. "The United States develops e-commerce based on three industrial revolutions. E-commerce is promoted in the United States like a child. But in China, e-commerce has to play the role of a teacher, making up for the traditional economy of our country." Jiang Qiping said.

In the field of e-commerce, there is such a story full of "inspirational" colors. In 2011, Suining County’s per capita GDP ranked 47th in 50 counties and cities in Jiangsu Province. The county’s Shaji Town has no natural resources such as minerals and energy, and it has no furniture processing tradition. In 2006, Sun Han, a villager from Dongfeng Village, Shaji Town, opened the first online store to engage in the processing and online sales of assembled furniture. In 2011, there were 600 online merchants and more than 2,000 online stores in the town of Quansha, driving the entire furniture industry chain from nothing. Yes; sales in 2012 amounted to about 800 million yuan, which led to the formation of an economic ecosystem in the region. The ecological explosion of e-commerce economies has brought profound changes to China, such as promoting domestic demand, changing development patterns and structural adjustment, urbanization, and upgrading and upgrading of enterprises.

“E-commerce is naturally suitable for new urbanization ideas.” Liang Chunxiao, vice president of Alibaba and director of the research center, said that in the information age, one of the keys to new urbanization is to shift from a centralized urbanization path and model with a central city as the core. It is a distributed urbanization path and model centered on small towns. "In addition, another major change brought by e-commerce is to promote the transformation of development mode, economic restructuring and upgrading of enterprises." Liang Chunxiao said that e-commerce economies have accelerated the transformation of traditional service industries into modern service industries and promoted the transformation of manufacturing industries. In the organizational model, manufacturing is “e-commerce” and absorbed into the e-commerce economy.

According to Alibaba Research Center, by the end of 2010, Alibaba's B2B platform involved 15.2 million professional e-commerce practitioners. By the end of 2012, Taobao had created 3.921 million direct jobs, and indirect jobs were Up to 11.096 million.

opportunity

Scale growth and latecomer advantage

"China's Internet economy can develop rapidly, catch up and partially surpass, mainly depending on the huge netizen base and consumer market, rapid economic growth, and late-comer advantage." Liang Chunxiao said.

The first is the huge netizen base and consumer market. CNNIC's data shows that by the end of December 2012, the number of Chinese netizens was 564 million. It is expected that the number of Chinese netizens will exceed 1 billion in the next 15-20 years, about four times that of the United States. Under the netizen base, China's consumer market has great potential and has a "giant country effect."

There is such a set of data for the United States, one of the "Geminis". On November 11, 2012, more than three-quarters of Chinese online retailers launched promotional activities, and the online retail sales of one day was as high as 30 billion yuan (about 48.4 One hundred million U.S. dollars). Correspondingly, the online retail sales of the US "Online Shopping Monday" on November 26, 2012 was $1.46 billion.

"Secondly, the rapid growth of China's economy has brought unprecedented prosperity to various industries including the Internet industry," said Lu Zhenwang, a well-known e-commerce observer. According to Boston Consulting, it is expected that China's economy will grow at a high rate. By 2016, the scale of China's Internet economy will be the same as that of the US Internet economy.

"China's e-commerce economy has a late-comer advantage." Liang Chunxiao said that compared with developed countries, China's Internet infrastructure is still not perfect, the economic development of urban and rural areas and the eastern and western regions is still uneven, and traditional industries and circulation industries are still underdeveloped. However, these relatively imperfect, unbalanced and underdeveloped countries also provide an excellent opportunity for the Internet to create new commercial value. The simultaneous development of new industrialization, informationization, urbanization and agricultural modernization, and the leap-forward development of social productivity It opened up a huge space for imagination.

For example, he said that although the rural Internet penetration rate is still relatively low (about 24%) compared with urban areas, since the beginning of 2011, the popularity of rural Internet has begun to slightly exceed that of urban areas, ending the trend of widening the gap between urban and rural Internet penetration. Great potential for the development of the network economy in China's vast rural areas and third- and fourth-tier cities.

"At present, China's e-commerce has left the stage of rapid growth and turned to a mature and rational development stage." Analysys International analyst Mao Ajing told Commercial Daily that mature and rational Chinese e-commerce will develop more smoothly and at a higher speed. .

challenge

Supply chain, traditional industry and threshold restrictions

The Chinese e-commerce economy, which has experienced the golden decade, is standing at the crossroads of the next decade. There is no pointing target, no navigation, but there are serious challenges of “complex governance” and the third industrial revolution. Where do you go?

“The complexity of the e-commerce economy is becoming more and more prominent, and how to manage it becomes the current difficulty. At the same time, the arrival of the 3D era, 3D printing and makers represent a considerable degree of new production methods and lifestyles, and are causing e-commerce. A huge challenge." Liang Chunxiao said.

"E-commerce is a bottom-up revolution. The biggest challenge is three: one from the traditional industry, they adopt a cold war strategy for e-commerce to protect vested interests, and even besiege the development of e-commerce; second, once e-commerce appears Local problems, such as deceiving consumers, have a great impact on e-commerce; third, the threshold is limited, and e-commerce is not allowed to be involved in the domestic medical field, for example, Jiang Qiping said.

Mao Ajing believes that supply chain and support are two major challenges in e-commerce development. In the supply chain, e-commerce companies that do not have self-built logistics will be subject to logistics. E-commerce of self-built logistics should also consider logistics distribution. And the problem of facility construction. In addition, some traditional industries do not trust e-commerce, such as the clothing industry, they often choose offline mode when faced with online and offline choices."

"Logistics and traditional industries are two thresholds." Lu Zhenwang also told reporters that the number of online shopping is more frequent and the amount is large. Can logistics bear the pressure? As e-commerce moves deeper into the central and western regions and to rural areas and rural areas, the logistics system has the ability to serve those regions. “Some traditional brands do not buy e-commerce accounts, they rely more on physical sales methods. The development is a considerable challenge."

In this regard, he suggested that, like the upgrading of China's economic structure, e-commerce should also transform the quantity and scale advantages into quality and service advantages. At the innovation level, technology and service support should be grasped at the same level. The construction will build the logistics infrastructure in the central and western regions and rural areas, and strive to narrow the “digital divide” and explore a new path to promote urbanization with the Internet economy.

"Electric business must do its own positioning and take the road of differentiation and specialization." Mao Ajing told Business Daily reporters that e-commerce companies like Taobao should not rush to change marketing models and seek innovation, but pay more attention to the market. Trends, for short-term and long-term development strategy planning, are more effective than innovation for innovation. "Innovation is inseparable from the user experience. If you do not innovate according to the needs of users, it will not help."

Deep

Alibaba's next decade

Beginning with self-revolution

For Alibaba, how will the next decade change and innovate? Zeng Ming, chief strategy officer of Alibaba Group, said in an interview with the media that in the future, one-third of Taobao’s total traffic is expected to be category, one-third is search, and one-third is interaction by SNS community.

In order to transform the ecosystem, Ma Yun recently invested 586 million US dollars in Sina Weibo to build a larger community system for the big Ali e-commerce including Taobao. In fact, in addition to restructuring the ecosystem, changing the business model and recreating the mobile terminal will have a key impact on the industry in the next decade of Taobao. In fact, Alibaba, standing at the crossroads, is already “self-revolutionary”, and the value brought by big data in the future will far exceed the current advertising and transaction commission model. Taobao Mall founding general manager, Huaping investment partner Huang Ruo like this metaphor: "If you compare Taobao to a fertile land, just take a bamboo pole to the ground and the oil will come out. What is oil? It is the buyer and the seller. The business value behind all transaction data."

Corresponding to the transformation of the business model, in the reform of the mobile terminal, Ma Yun once said that the responsibility of the Ali wireless team is to destroy Taobao. At present, this revolution is in full swing: Tmall and Taobao expand to the mobile side. Tmall launches the “Thousands of People” mobile client. Users can choose the brand displayed on the homepage according to their preferences. Tmall will also target different users. Recommended; Taobao is testing the "micro-Amoy", providing users with customized products.

It is a tough attempt to change his own life, both for Taobao and for Alibaba. "Taobao after the pain will go further in the mature Chinese e-commerce industry," said Liang Qianggong, a well-known e-commerce observer.

Glossary

E-commerce economy: In February 2013, the Alibaba Group Research Center first proposed the concept of “e-commerce economy”. It is believed that the information economy is becoming the most important development engine of the global economy after the “BRICs”. Its logo is the rise of the Internet economy. The most striking thing in China is the emergence of e-commerce economies. And predict that in 2020, China's e-commerce scale (including B2B online transactions) will become the world's largest e-commerce economy.

For more information on the home industry, please pay attention to the official website of Xianghe Furniture City.