Another wave of change in the e-commerce industry is emerging.
The “end point” of 2020 is approaching. When we look back at the development context of the e-commerce industry this year, we may be able to conclude with one sentence: traditional e-commerce goes down, Baidu goes up.
Mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo use search as a medium and use knowledge content as the foundation to achieve people looking for goods and improving people. The so-called "people looking for goods" is actually Baidu's "search + e-commerce" model, which provides users with products that meet their needs based on their active search and information presentation.
With Baidu and Amazon cooperating to launch overseas purchase smart applets, its new model of "search + e-commerce" has been further presented, and Baidu's new e-commerce logic has gradually become clear- from search to obtaining product knowledge and information, and then to decision-making , Consumption orders, forming a tripartite link of "people, information, and commodities".
Now that the construction of people and information is completed, Baidu is making up for the product link and gaining the power of "pulling up".
Baidu's new e-commerce ecology
After the comprehensive layout and construction of infrastructure in 2019, 2020 will become a crucial year for Baidu's e-commerce ecosystem.
This year, Baidu has continued to deploy in e-commerce. After the official completion of the delivery of Youzan (social e-commerce and private domain traffic), it has invested in Gide Ranking (the public comment of the e-commerce business) and Kamila (high-quality supply chain). And launched the "shopping channel" to build a complete "search + e-commerce" service closed loop.
Baidu is still providing more power rockets for the closed-loop "search + e-commerce". On November 13, two weeks before "Black Friday" in 2020, a news came that Amazon Overseas Purchase and Baidu announced that they would launch the "Amazon Overseas Purchase" smart applet during the Black Friday of this year, bringing domestic consumers E-commerce consumer experience of "one-stop shopping for global goods".
During the "Black Five" period, Baidu and Amazon's overseas purchase of smart applets will focus on differentiated categories such as maternal and child, sports outdoor, home furnishing, and technology. On Thanksgiving Day on November 26, Amazon Overseas Shopping will bring domestic consumers global products with prices lower than Double Eleven through Baidu's smart applet. At the same time, Baidu will also cooperate with What Worth Buy to provide the functions of real-time price comparison and historical price comparison across the entire network of Black Five products.
This is another landing of Baidu's "search + e-commerce" strategy after 618 and "Double 11". The strategic cooperation with Amazon has allowed Baidu’s e-commerce service capabilities to extend to the world, bringing together many international brands such as Tiger, Champion, Philips, Jiebi, Dunhill, Medela, Kouchi, etc., to provide users with more abundant and more products. The overseas shopping scene of the service attribute.
This also means that with the cooperation with Amazon on the eve of Black Friday, the layout of Baidu's e-commerce service chain will be more complete. It will bring users a variety of domestic and international product information, knowledge and purchases through search + smart applets. Integrated services.
Let knowledge become the new flow of e-commerce
The strategic cooperation with Amazon has further enriched Baidu's "search + e-commerce" service ecosystem.
At Baidu’s Vientiane Conference on May 13 this year, Baidu Group Executive Vice President Shen Zhuo pointed out that in the mobile era, users want to obtain services faster than ever before, so Baidu will link creators and service developers. Relying on the advantages of search and information flow, and with the help of small programs and other sectors, it provides users with fast and efficient end-to-end services.
In the service strategy proposed by Shen Ke, there is an implicit keyword "knowledge", which means that Baidu's "search + e-commerce" service ecological construction purpose is to allow consumers to obtain the most convenient, accurate and efficient The high-quality knowledge required for similar consumption makes knowledge an important tool for consumer decision-making.
In fact, Baidu’s service strategy centered on knowledge as the core began to test the waters as early as 2015. The intelligent service assistant "Du Mi" was an important landing in the O2O field that year. This marked Baidu’s transition from "search as information" to "search". That is, the strategic upgrade of information + service.
From search applications to the expansion of heavier service applications, this is the in-depth development of Baidu's business field, and it is also an inevitable move after it has experienced the changes in the behavior and habits of its 1 billion users.
With the rapid development of e-commerce in China, people are becoming more and more accustomed to online shopping. However, under the existing e-commerce operation model, attracting users is still through price induction, fancy smashing of coupons, daily pop-up recommendation, SMS bombing, and advanced consumption. Not only does it have little effect, but also causes users to be disturbed.
For a large number of rational consumers, they need to understand more information and knowledge dimensions of the product before purchasing, not just the single dimension of price.
Baidu has a billion users with frequent search habits. It has found that users who used to do simple searches have continued to increase their demand for services, including various types of goods. E-commerce and search engines have a natural intimacy. Online shopping, invisible to the physical object, consumers rely heavily on the mastery of product information, the more comprehensive they are, the more effective they can make an effective judgment on whether the product meets their own needs.
Baidu is essentially a network-wide knowledge information search service platform that collects information about various goods and services, covering pre-purchase (price, function), in-purchase (purchase evaluation by other users), and post-purchase (how to use, Maintenance) throughout the entire process, which is why a large number of users choose Baidu to obtain product knowledge and information.
The changes in consumer demand coincide with Baidu's service-oriented extension based on user information and search demands and the improvement of its own mobile content ecology. It can be said that Baidu's recent acceleration in the field of e-commerce is behind the comprehensive advancement of its service strategy, and it also releases the value of its own knowledge service platform through the e-commerce system.
In the closed loop of Baidu's "search + e-commerce" service, there are various functions such as price comparison, brand ranking, etc., and the evaluation content of Xiaohongshu and Zhihu will be presented in the information flow, turning a single product information into rich product knowledge Recognition, users will no longer blindly consume and realize reasonable shopping.
Baidu has also created a knowledge-based service interface for users' online shopping consumption: users search with questions-find answers-find and select products.
In this regard, the attributes of Baidu's knowledge platform are integrated with users' needs for solving, solving the information blind spots and pain points of consumers "what to buy" in e-commerce consumption. With the continuous enhancement of Baidu's content service capabilities, one billion users can search for more information and content that help them fully understand various products, and obtain the optimal solution of "what to buy" and "how to buy".
Baidu e-commerce not only embodies accurate and efficient connection attributes, but also shows its unique "upward" value-making knowledge search a rigid demand for e-commerce, so that every consumer can enjoy the service ability of "people looking for goods" ; Promote sensible and healthy consumption of user groups who are accustomed to cautious consumption (often because they don't know enough about certain products and are unwilling to sell).
Knowledge serves users, transforms information understanding and search desire into precise purchasing power, becomes the core competitiveness of Baidu's "search + e-commerce" ecology, and also becomes a new traffic portal for the e-commerce industry.
Closed-loop service of "people, information, and goods"
From searching to obtaining product knowledge and information, to decision-making, and consumer ordering, Baidu has formed a tripartite link of "people, information, and products". With the cooperation with Amazon, Baidu has expanded its own product pool and strengthened this bond and Baidu's closed-loop e-commerce service ecosystem.
In terms of people (users), Baidu’s 1 billion user base is currently only a small part of it. Black Friday, as a well-known consumer holiday, will help strengthen users’ awareness of Baidu’s e-commerce and make them understand and familiar with Baidu.” "Search + e-commerce" consumption scenarios and user experience have realized the conversion of 1 billion users to Baidu's new e-commerce consumer group.
In terms of information, through the transformation of the mobile ecosystem in recent years, Baidu is complementing the mobile content ecosystem and sorting it out so that it can better connect with e-commerce, such as the investment ranking, such as the embedded shopping module in the Baijia account.
At the same time, Baidu's accumulated data and technical capabilities have made it more accurate in the capture and display of product information and corresponding consumer content. In the future, it is expected to realize the customized presentation of users, products, and services.
If in the past, Baidu has basically completed the layout and sorting of the mobile content ecology, then under the servicing strategy, it is working hard on the product side, and the cooperation with Amazon is based on this.
Baidu cooperates with Amazon to launch a smart applet for overseas purchases. Global products can be compared in real time, historical prices can be inquired, and users can be searched for consumption knowledge and content acquisition, and information can be quickly guided to the full link of products.
This is another manifestation of its service strategy. Through the cooperation with Amazon, Baidu's service ecology has gradually become clear, from information search to service search, opening up the mobile ecology, and mining various consumer intentions behind user searches.
One billion users with clear information and knowledge needs can find products from platforms and merchants such as Amazon, Suning, etc. through search and build rankings. This is Baidu's "search + e-commerce" path, and it is also a closed loop of its services. With the further opening of the closed-loop service, Baidu is expected to leapfrog into a new growth curve.
And entering the "Black Five" battlefield can be said to be another "pull-up" of Baidu's "search + e-commerce" ecology. The core of the pull-up is to get rid of the shackles of the earth's gravity through the accumulation of its own strength and technology, and achieve a contrarian upward trend.
Baidu has more than 20 years of "upward" power accumulation. It has created a one-stop service platform from information knowledge to services, so that it has all the content and structure needed to help one billion users rationally consume from decision-making to purchase. Even this is not just Baidu's "pull-up", but the common "pull-up" of Baidu content creators and consumer groups.
For Baidu, 2020 is a year of harvest after planting the seeds. The biggest gain may point to Baidu's e-commerce ecosystem building, which represents the full implementation of its "personalized and service-oriented" strategy. Baidu's "search + e-commerce" model, due to its inherent inexhaustible upward force, may become the "X factor" that triggers the fission of the e-commerce industry.