Taobao SNS (TAOBOOK) Business Plan

This business plan is simulated by "First Financial Weekly" and is reproduced for reference by some entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs can use the This business plan provides in-depth analysis and a deeper understanding of the nature of business, such as the design and analysis of its own value. This is actually the core of the business plan.

Note: This business plan is generated by "China Business Weekly" based on a comprehensive analysis of Taobao's market performance, demands, available resources, etc., and is purely fictitious.

Our product is China’s future Facebook.

This will be the largest social shopping network,

It brings together 300 million registered Alipay users, more than 2.5 million Taobao sellers, and tens of thousands of mall sellers,

< p>You can even connect to the Alibaba B2B market.

Here, manufacturers, sellers and buyers can effectively connect to achieve the best match of resource information, production information and demand information.

If this network based on buyer-seller relationships can be woven,

then in the future, it will have more possibilities—including becoming the largest real-name social network in China.

Taobao’s original SNS platform Taojianghu

Project summary

Product description:

1. The largest social shopping network . Social networks simultaneously reduce the cost for sellers to display and promote products and for buyers to discover products, and at the same time enrich the purchase channels, bringing about a real long-tail effect: What is best-selling is not only the products that appeared in prominent positions through advertisements in the past? Taste.

2. The most effective B2B2C model. Alibaba B2B users connect with Taobao sellers and buyers to achieve effective matching of resources, production and demand information from all parties.

3. The longer-term future. If 300 million registered Alipay users, millions of Taobao sellers, and tens of thousands of mall buyers can form an effective interpersonal network based on buying and selling relationships, then this network will have more possibilities in the future.

Market analysis

Target market setting:

All Taobao sellers, including C2C sellers and mall buyers.

All Taobao buyers, especially active users of Alipay accounts.

Market development status and ranking:

In the United States and most parts of the world, Facebook has become the largest social network for all people and has launched an open platform service?

However, in China, a universal SNS community with a real-name registration system, authentic user information, complete personal information and a certain user scale has not yet appeared.

E-commerce companies have carried out community marketing one after another, and they are all in the trial and trial stage.

Market trend predictions and market opportunities:

1. Market trends

Social networks and community-based marketing methods will become more and more popular.

Note: The use of socialization methods can benefit all parties. However, Taobao still has no clear answer regarding the specific products and service forms. Most of the product models that can be used for reference are the extension of SNS to e-commerce, or they are social shopping products themselves. What Taobao needs to do is to look for the possibility of transforming shopping websites into SNS. There is no experience to draw from.

2. Market opportunities

The effective deployment of SNS can further activate the entire network traffic.

For sellers: the use of social marketing tools, social communication methods, social statistics and tracking services, and social customer service solutions can further reduce sales costs and the word-of-mouth effect of social communication It can bring more transactions, and the scale of online transactions is likely to increase significantly.

For buyers: Social shopping experience is more pleasant. They will be more willing to accept "recommendations from friends" than advertisements. There are also more ways to discover goods.

For brand advertisers: Through social networks, the shopping information needs of users and their circle of friends can be accurately discovered, and targeted advertising can be pushed or marketing activities launched. Advertisements that used to be placed in stores or product categories have become targeted ads targeted at specific individuals. Increased advertising value.

Competition Analysis

Industry Monopoly:

SNS deployed by e-commerce companies has no representative monopolist in China;

< p>In existing SNS communities, real-name registration and universal communities covering a wide range of user levels have not yet appeared.

Competitor products:

1. Tencent - "Friends Community" + Weibo strategy

Advantages: Relying on QQ clients with more than 600 million registrations, By October 2010, the number of monthly users covered by Tencent’s “Friend Community” had reached 131 million; by February 2011, the number of registered users on Tencent Weibo had exceeded 100 million. In terms of traffic, by December 2010, the number of monthly page visits on Tencent’s C2C platform Tencent Paipai was second only to Taobao. At the same time, Tencent also owns Tenpay, the second largest third-party payment platform in China. In the past two years, Tencent has continued to expand its B2C business through acquisitions. The most recent case is the acquisition of Yixun, the third largest 3C product online mall in China after JD.com and Newegg.

Disadvantages: Tencent’s friend community is an SNS product, while Weibo is closer to the media. Tencent is still in the exploratory stage of connecting users of the two and how to introduce e-commerce needs.

Note: Among many competitors, Tencent is the Internet company with the largest number of domestic users and has a strong platform. Sina and JD.com are working hard to transform into platform companies. Competition between platform companies requires, in addition to successful products and operations, the interests of upstream and downstream partners and the health of the ecological chain to be considered. Taobao needs to be prepared for this.

2. Sina - Sina Weibo connects with Mecoxlane

On March 2, 2011, Sina announced the purchase of 19% of the shares of Mecoxlane, a B2C clothing and apparel company. Sina first launched Sina Mall in 1999 to test the e-commerce field, but it did not achieve major development.

Advantages: The acquisition of Mecoxlane is another layout of Sina’s e-commerce, and the new weight is the popular Sina Weibo. Sina Weibo currently has more than 100 million registered users. Its open platform planning provides the possibility for Sina to transform from a media company to a platform company. On this platform, the combination of user base, account number, and payment method can stimulate potential e-commerce demand.

Disadvantages: Sina Weibo’s media attributes are too strong. It has already launched a “group” product, but its transformation to SNS has just begun. Whether it can implement a wider user real-name system in the future is also a test. one.

Note: Sina Weibo is a product that integrates the features of Twitter and Facebook. If it can maintain its current traffic and user activity, it is very likely that Sina Weibo will become China's Facebook.

3. Renren—Group buying and e-commerce

In early April 2011, Renren planned to go public in the United States. The F-1 document it published showed that Renren owned There are 117 million active users, and the number of active users in the previous three years was 33 million, 83 million, and 110 million respectively.

Advantages: The predecessor of Renren was Xiaonei.com founded in 2005. It was acquired by Thousand Oaks Group in 2006 and integrated with Thousand Oaks' 5Q campus network. It is currently the SNS with the largest user base in China. One of the websites.

Disadvantages: Renren’s revenue sources are mostly concentrated in advertising and paid value-added business models. In June 2010, Renren’s “Nuomi.com” was officially launched and officially entered the group buying field. Statistics from the F-1 documents released by Renren show that more than 60% of Nuomi.com’s users come from Renren. However, Renren’s current layout in the open platform and e-commerce fields is not clear. Among its 110 million users, campus users still account for the majority, and there is still a certain distance between it and Facebook-style universal real-name SNS.

Competitive advantages:

1. Taobao is already the largest e-commerce platform in China, with a large user base, active access, and extensive internal communication needs for business and product information.

As of December 2010, Taobao had 2.35 billion monthly visits, 178 million orders, and a transaction rate of 7.6%. (iResearch data)

The second-ranked Paipai.com: 267 million monthly visits, 8.033 million orders placed, and a transaction rate of 3%. (iResearch data)

JD.com, ranked third, has 167 million monthly visits, 3.21 million orders, and a transaction rate of 1.9%.

Taobao Mall has more than 30,000 brands and tens of thousands of brand merchants, including official direct stores, authorized agents and distributors.

Number of C2C individual sellers: more than 2.6 million.

2. Alipay users who have undergone real-name authentication have authentic and reliable identity information and a reliable credit verification system.

Number of Alipay users: 300 million registered users nationwide, with approximately 50 million to 80 million active users.

Note: The real-name system for user transaction accounts and considerable access traffic are undoubtedly Taobao’s biggest innate advantages. Effectively guiding those active users to implement SNS for some products and categories may be one of Taobao's future plans.

Alipay market share: Occupying more than 50% of the country’s third-party payment market share.

Number of external merchants: more than 500,000.

The daily transaction amount completed using Alipay: more than 2 billion.

The Alipay platform has been further extended: it has launched clients that support mainstream mobile operating systems such as Symbian, iOS, and Android to seize the mobile payment market; it has begun to penetrate into the TV payment field.

3. The Taobao open platform is beginning to take shape

The developers gathered on the open platform can be buyers and sellers under SNS. Develop rich application tools to enhance the experience and promote the positive development of this model.

As of the end of 2010, it has developed: more than 100,000 developers; more than 20,000 applications; more than 500 million API (data open interface) daily calls; more than 200 API open interfaces; up to more than Single application daily sales record of 30,000 orders.

Project risk analysis

Market uncertainty risk:

1. Buyer SNS demand is highly uncertain.

Whether buyers need to be "social" and the required social methods need to be explored;

Buyers generally do not reject advertising, but too many and too heavy marketing methods will also produce disgust. The scale of social marketing and the means of effective implementation are still difficult to grasp.

2. It is difficult to form an equal communication mechanism between buyers and sellers.

3. Privacy issues bring potential risks.

Not all users are willing to share their shopping lists, and not everyone who shares their shopping lists is willing to display all purchased items.

R&D risks:

1. The existing product display and ranking system based on search and advertising has serious contradictions with SNS.

The foundation of the current business model, in addition to the traditional path of user search-discovery-purchase, is the product exposure method in which sellers' paid advertising occupies a prominent position. Merchant promotion costs are high, users find products through a single method, and the time they stay on the page is short. These are far from the characteristics of SNS products.

The overall structure of the website must be changed.

Note: The overall structure must be changed, which is to revolutionize one's own life. The risk is not that great. Deviations in understanding SNS, lack of experience in related fields, and lack of professional talents will also be obstacles for Taobao to develop social products and businesses and shift to SNS.

2. There is a lack of professional team and insufficient experience in the research and development of SNS products. Many products have failed in the past.

Taojianghu: It is a primary product that does not have a social display, recommendation and purchasing mechanism, nor is it fully connected with the buyer group. Most users only use it to post orders or play some simple games. , or become an advertising platform for merchants. For online transactions, Taojianghu has not played any leading role.

Juhuasuan and Gold Coin Exchange: In the end, they only become promotional tools for merchants. By gathering users within a specific time, they can carry out discount activities and sell discounted goods to promote transactions.

The above-mentioned products are simply attached to the existing platforms, and the promotion of transactions becomes the only guide. The user relationship is too superficial and cannot be regarded as a real SNS product.

Competitive risks:

1. If the SNS community marketing platforms of rivals such as Jingdong Mall succeed, they will bring certain threats to the segmented SNS markets such as clothing and 3C products.

2. Facebook is very likely to enter China.

There has been constant news that the world's largest social media website is going to enter the Chinese market.

Facebook registered the .cn domain name in 2007 and launched the simplified Chinese version in 2008. At the end of December 2010, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg came to China in a low-key manner and visited well-known domestic Internet companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.

Currently, Facebookzai is performing well in Taiwan, China, relying on the famous online game "Farm" to become the second largest website in Taiwan.

How Facebook will enter China is unclear. Judging from Groupon's experience, it is possible to establish a joint venture. Currently, Groupon has established a joint venture with Tencent to establish Gaopeng.com. News has spread that Facebook will cooperate with Baidu to enter China on a curve.

Once Facebook enters China, although its advantages cannot be immediately reflected due to various restrictions, the situation that China does not have a representative "national SNS" may change.

Note: No Internet company should ignore the threat from Facebook. But Facebook entering China is definitely no longer the original Facebook. In the shadow of this behemoth, products and services that meet the needs of domestic users still have their own space.

Management risk analysis

The high revenue and profits generated by search, advertising, and bidding rankings. These business models that have been operating stably for many years will create resistance within Taobao that curbs innovation.

Note: The biggest resistance for a company to make changes often comes from within. It comes either from highly successful products, from common experience, or from business models that have always worked. Whether Taobao is truly determined to break the existing model and create a disruptive innovation is directly related to the success or failure of Taobao's SNS transformation. This time, can Jack Ma still kill him?

In 2009, Taobao's total advertising revenue exceeded 1.5 billion yuan, and bidding ranking express accounted for more than 80%. Compared with that year, the entire network completed a total of 208.3 billion yuan in merchandise transactions, and the number of sellers exceeded 2.6 million. Among them, total revenue from advertising accounts for 80% to 90%; while transaction commissions and value-added service revenue only account for 10% to 20%.

Users’ habit of relying on advertising and search has been developed for a long time.

There is no practical plan on how to guide users to adapt to the new social model.