000 European Network reported on October 9 that this afternoon, the "2014 China Life Service E-commerce Summit Forum" hosted by Wowo Mall (Wowotuan) was held in Beijing. At this event, the "Online Store Connect" APP product developed by Wowo Mall was officially unveiled and put into use. This APP is another measure for Wowo Mall to deepen its mall model. Some joint venture merchants in Wowo Mall attended the event, including South Beauty, Xinladao, Zodenice, etc. Media and research institutions include Cao Junbo, director of iResearch Institute, and Huang Yuanpu, founder of Yiou.com, attended the event. At the
meeting, Xu Maodong, chairman and CEO of Wowo Mall, said that the mobile Internet has given local life service merchants great opportunities. Merchants need to establish a set of their own online stores to expand marketing channels and new users, and improve their old user operation and management capabilities. To this end, Wowo Mall has upgraded its strategic service and officially launched the "Online Store Connect" based on the mobile direct sales model, providing merchants with free online stores, including independent merchant mobile store clients and brand stores. In the future, it will open up a third-party platform in one-stop, allowing merchants to directly connect to users, and realize online direct sales, member operations, dynamic promotions, brand display, etc. for merchants.
This event is the first time that Wowo Mall has made a statement after financing in May. After the relatively quiet in the past year, Wowo Mall has begun to increase brand exposure.
Wowo Mall (Wowotuan) development history
Wowotuan was launched in March 2010, and is a website that entered the group buying market earlier in China. The army of group buying quickly followed. According to industry insiders, the number of group buying networks had exceeded 400 at that time, and four could emerge in a day on average during peak periods. At that time, Wowotun was in a financial dilemma, and later generations were among the top. The initiator of Wowotuan is all Tsinghua students, led by Wang Yunming. Wang Yunming, who has had entrepreneurial genes since childhood, did not boast too much bet on his part except for establishing Jitong.com, and financing was relatively difficult.
In October 2010, Xu Maodong, who had been in the traditional industry for more than 20 years and had served as vice president of Focus Media, acquired a stake in Wowotun and quickly became the largest shareholder and acquired it with full capital. At that time, Wowotun's monthly sales revenue was less than 2.6 million yuan. Xu Maodong had the dream of going public and had abundant funds. He led Wowotuan to launch a series of attacks on the old pattern of the group buying industry. In a short period of time, he adopted the "merger and acquisition plus direct sales" method and quickly expanded in 150 cities across the country. At that time, Xu Maodong also largely extended olive branches to the core backbone of competitor companies through high salaries, high salaries and options, and other means, allowing him to jump to Wowotuan. In August 2011, Wowotuan became famous in the industry, surpassing Lashou and Meituan, and continued to be relatively ahead for a long time. Wowotun also submitted a listing application to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, but Wowotun's impact on listing was not successful. Subsequently, due to various problems such as insufficient cohesion, too dispersed power system, inability to standardize operations, lack of platform genes, and entry into giants, the development speed of Wowotun slowed down after 2012.
has been silent for nearly two years until May 2014, when Wowo Mall reinjected its capital and announced its full efforts to build a mobile mall. On May 21, Wowo Mall announced that it had received US$50 million in financing. The investor was the former shareholder team of Wowotuan, with an amount of approximately RMB 310 million, in order to promote the deepening development of Wowo Mall into the life service field. Xu Maodong said that this financing will be mainly used for the strategic expansion of Wowo Mall: 1) to develop new cities and expand the number of urban coverage; 2) to expand mobile services and make every effort to build a mobile mall; 3) to continue to improve its own products and services to better serve consumers and merchants.
The competitive landscape of the group buying industry was initially decided, and Wowo Mall strives to be mistresses
00 million European Network once published an article saying that from the rise of group buying to mid-2011, the top ten websites of the group buying industry were born: Lashou.com, Wowotuan, Meituan.com, Manzuo.com, Nuomi.com, Ftuan.com, Gaopeng.com, Didituan, 24 coupon, and Tuanbao.com; by 2014, there were only five group buying websites left, namely Meituan.com, Dianping, Baidu Nuomi, Wowo Mall, Lashou.com, Wowo Mall, Baidu Nuomi and Lashou.com compete for the third position. In just four years, group buying has experienced a series of roller coaster developments such as capital darlings, wars of thousands of groups, malicious competition, failure of IPOs, capital out of food, layoffs, station cuts, intensive farming, and mobile spring.With the maturity of the mobile Internet and the recovery of the capital market, life service e-commerce has shown explosive development, BAT has penetrated into the group buying industry, and its competition has long become an O2O fight among giants! (For details, please refer to "Inventory: Four-year Festival of the former "Top Ten" group buying websites")
As early as July 7, 2011, Meituan announced that it had completed a US$50 million Series B financing, led by Alibaba Group, followed by Northern Lights, Waden International and the first round of financing Sequoia Capital. On August 2, 2012, the merger case between Gaopeng and F Group ended. In January 2014, Baidu agreed to acquire all Nuomi.com shares held by Renren, and Nuomi was officially renamed Baidu Nuomi. On February 9, 2014, Dianping.com received huge capital injection from Tencent, with Tencent holding about 20% of the shares and retaining the right to subscribe to additional shares of Dianping.com in the future. In addition, the ones sold to Suning, while Didituan, Qianpin.com, etc. either went bankrupt or transformed.
From the actual market size analysis, the five group buying websites after the Thousand Groups War account for nearly 90% of the national market share. From the perspective of market layout: 1) Meituan's first- and second-tier cities are balanced, expanding third- and fourth-tier cities, and the group products are mainly localized services; 2) Dianping is concentrated in third-tier cities and no national group products; 3) Nuomi is balanced in all tier cities, and the national group products account for a high proportion; 4) Wowo Mall's fourth-tier cities are concentrated, and the third-tier cities are balanced; 5) The handle front is the widest. Xu Maodong, CEO of
Wowo Mall, had previously told the media that the entry of BAT giants into the group buying market means that new competition has just begun. It is too early to draw conclusions that the pattern has been decided: 1) Group buying websites are seriously homogeneous, and have not formed a strong competitive barrier, occupying the uneven market, and there is still opportunity in the mobile Internet era; 2) The giants have not yet entered the group buying market, and there are great changes in the future. Many players have done the mall model of
Wowo Mall, but most of them ended in failure. For example, the O2O local life service mall Qianpin.com, which was launched in August 2011, in its early O2O layout, realized the importance of mobile terminals and the broad market prospects of local life services and developed well, but it was closed due to insufficient funds, inappropriate entry timing, insufficient execution ability, and other reasons. In the early days of
, the online mall was immature, resulting in the premature death of related cases; at present, the online mall has entered the market relatively mature. However, there are two difficulties in promoting APPs for merchants: 1) Merchant education is the key to success or failure. The level of education for practitioners in the life service industry is uneven. Some merchants are not familiar with the Internet and even do not know how to access the Internet. Merchants use the Online Store APP by themselves, which is a certain difficulty; 2) The direct sales channel is weak. Online Store provides merchants with store APP business, and stores directly push discount information to customers through the Store APP to achieve direct sales. However, if the merchant’s APP is not connected with the main external sales channels, the sales volume will inevitably be very small. Xu Maodong, CEO of
Wowo Mall, said in an interview with the media that Wowo will continue to adhere to independent development, hoping to take a differentiated development path in the field of life service e-commerce, and also hope to attract more partners to participate, so as to truly create value for consumers and merchants. The online store network developed by Wowo Mall today provides merchants with store APP business. Stores directly push discount information to customers through store APP to achieve direct sales. During the entire process, Wowo Mall plays the role of a channel between merchants and users, traffic diversion, APP development work and user operation system construction. Wowo Mall’s move is to deepen the mobile strategy of the online mall model. In the future, Wowo will help merchants provide e-commerce services such as online direct sales, member management, marketing promotion, inventory management, etc. through group buying, Wowo store, merchant mobile client, etc. The launch of
online store mobile Internet products has helped traditional enterprise merchants transform from PC to mobile Internet, transform offline users into online users of their own online stores, and is a typical reverse O2O (from offline to online). In the era of mobile Internet, it is difficult to satisfy merchants by simply traffic, and providing merchants with one-stop platform services such as traffic acquisition, customer relationship maintenance, and supply chain maintenance has become an inevitable trend in e-commerce in the mobile Internet era.Bian Jiang, deputy secretary-general of the China Culinary Association, believes that life service merchants have urgent needs for the Internet, but in the process of promoting cooperation between the two parties, four points need to be paid attention to: 1) Internet companies need to go deep into catering and other service companies to understand their needs and provide related products. At the technical level, Internet products are enough to meet the needs of traditional enterprises; 2) In terms of cooperation, it should be more flexible on the basis of commercialization; 3) Internet and life service merchants need to achieve win-win results, and restaurants and other service industries are industries that "get money later". Merchants are unwilling to invest too much in the early stage and need to see actual results; 4) Traditional merchants need to popularize Internet knowledge. The most difficult thing in cooperation between Internet products and life service merchants is the docking stage, and group buying is just the beginning of the life service industry's access to the Internet.
At present, the group buying industry structure has almost been determined, and the data of the eldest and second brothers and third brothers are far from each other. Wowo Mall is striving to be third, and there is basically no hope of independent listing. Whether Wowo Mall can make a counterattack with the mobile Internet will wait and see.
The author of this article is Li Shuang, an expert author of Yiou.com, WeChat ID: youyou317628, Weibo: Li Xiaoshuang-Yiou.com; please indicate the author's name and "Source: Yiou.com" when reprinting; the content of the article is the author's personal opinion and does not mean that Yiou.com agrees or supports the views.
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