During my time at Tencent Advertising, I was mainly responsible for small program e-commerce and advertising business, and witnessed the drastic changes in the Internet e-commerce industry, especially the fact that many e-commerce companies have embraced the private domain traffic, and live streaming with goods has become a new trend, and the advertising investment has continued to increase. Through these experiences, I have accumulated a lot of experience about Internet e-commerce and developed the idea of trying a side business in e-commerce.
On Xiaohongshu, women's fashion bloggers have attracted a large number of fans by virtue of their unique sharing of their outfits, and the culture of "planting grass" + e-commerce + private domains is becoming the future development trend. Combined with my own e-commerce background and resources, I tend to focus on small program e-commerce, but I am also interested in Pinduoduo stores and cross-border e-commerce.
In the process of exploring small program e-commerce, I have made many friends and met several colleagues engaged in e-commerce operations. Initially, I focused on the small program women's clothing project, planning to select goods from high-quality suppliers in Shenzhen, to create a complete small program platform integrating product display, purchase, payment and private domain. However, the high return rate of the women's clothing industry far exceeded expectations, almost every ten items sold, seven were returned, which made the program difficult to sustain.
Therefore, I started to consider other directions, such as cosmetics. Cosmetics are highly profitable due to stable demand and low return rate as daily consumer goods. Next, I will share my personal exploration in the field of cosmetics e-commerce.
I. Small program cosmetics
Regarding small programs, we have actually considered many different directions. For example, we had envisioned a vertical platform that mainly sells cosmetics or women's clothing. We also had other ideas, such as selling products like jewelry. However, after running through the actual process, we found that small programs have many limitations in many aspects. Below, I will briefly explain how to create a small program.
1.1 Small program preparation (business license & WeChat payment & small program appId)
First of all, if you want to develop a small program, you must have the function of WeChat payment. And WeChat payment is not available for individuals, so you need a business license. First, you need to apply for a personal business license.
After obtaining a business license, the next step is to use this business license to apply to open WeChat Pay.
Next, you need to register a small program. In the last year, you can register through some service providers or agents, and the registration cost is only a few cents per small program. But now this route has been restricted, and it now costs about 300 yuan to register a small program. In addition, in order to go live with a small program, you need to pass an audit, which again costs about $300.
At the same time, you also need to prepare the domain name and server resources. We chose a server configured with 8G RAM because we don't have a large volume of transactions and this configuration is sufficient for daily needs.
1.2 Small program development
In terms of applet development, since we were trying to develop it completely independently, we first looked up an open source project for an e-commerce applet from GitHub. Although we looked at a lot of projects, basically none of them worked directly, and all of them required minor modifications. We improved it by accessing WeChat Pay and Tencent's COS object store.
Next, we built our own MySQL database. Considering the small transaction volume of our app, we did not use the complex structure of split database and split table, and a single MySQL database is sufficient. If the transaction volume increases significantly in the future, you can consider using other vendors' split database and split table solutions, such as TiDB.
Development of the framework online are similar to the same, divided into the following modules, the overall feeling of the code is not complex (CRUD), is more time-consuming.
- Membership System: User registration, login, membership level, points management, etc.
- Commodity management: Adding, editing, deleting, inventory management, category management, etc. of products.
- Order Management: Order Generation, Payment, Cancellation, Returns and Exchanges, Order Status Management and more.
- payment system: Supports a variety of payment methods, such as WeChat payment, Alipay payment, UnionPay payment and so on.
- Marketing Tools: Coupons, Groupons, Spikes, Bargains, Markdowns and more.
- logistics: Express company management, logistics information tracking, etc.
- data analysis: Provide sales data statistics, user data analysis, merchandise sales analysis and other reporting functions.
- Customer Service System: Online customer service, message boards, message notification, etc.
- Rights Management: User rights role management, different roles have different operating privileges.
Online those agents have praise, micro alliance and so on, you can 0 yuan to get a small program, but if you want to use to the marketing function (seconds, coupons, etc.), all have to give thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. The bottom cost of entrepreneurship, just find your own Kaiyuan get a little, front and back end will point. In terms of cost, because individuals are not familiar with cosmetics, but also can not distinguish between creams, tonic water and so on, so it cost about 500 yuan to ask others to help upload commodity information. The effect is as follows, you can also go to WeChat small program to search for the experience (do not pay).
Here are some of the main features of the applet:
Domain Configuration: It can't be used via ip, you need to apply for a good domain name + https to be able to use it.
WeChat Payment: As mentioned in the previous step, the business license can be docked to WeChat Pay after the small program
WeChat Logistics(shipping information management): the previous online can be integrated with the function of the express 100, now need to be charged, the good thing is that the official WeChat provides its own WeChat logistics, can be directly docked, free of charge, after filling out the shipping information WeChat can also directly notify the user.
first aid: This is important and needs to directly interface with regular users to answer some inquiries and after-sales content.
WeChat Certification: This microsoft forced, no way, 300 dollars. Ensure the legitimacy of the content of the goods, pictures, text, etc., and avoid infringement behavior. Comply with relevant e-commerce laws and regulations, such as consumer rights protection, return and exchange policy.
Despite the fact that the mini-program is live, the overall functionality, although complete, is not as effective as expected.
We originally envisioned that when a user placed an order it could be shipped from suppliers in South and North China. However, the overall calculation shows that the lack of sufficient exposure has resulted in the merchandise of the small program not being promoted as it should be. On the WeChat platform, the goods of small programs do not automatically get promotional exposure and need to be promoted by the developers themselves.
We planned to attract traffic through small programs combined with private domain traffic in the early stage of development, and the main strategy included: establishing small programs, attracting fans through community traffic and promotion, and then increasing the order volume through marketing activities such as promotions and seconds. However, the first step of promotion encountered difficulties. There were almost no user clicks and visits throughout May.
The initial direction set up was more ambitious, with plans to boost sales through private domain traffic. However, due to the lack of deep understanding of the cosmetic industry, coupled with the problem of fake products in the market, it was also inability to promote more.
Do the math on the total input:
Business license (180) + WeChat payment certification (50) + applet appId (2) + server (100 / month) + hire someone to record cosmetics (500), the most important thing is that the business license also needs annual review, tax check and so on, if not used also have to spend money to cancel.
II. Poundland e-commerce
When building my own private domain ecosystem, I realized that relying on applets alone wasn't ideal, so I started to consider other e-commerce platforms, such as Xiaohongshu and Pinduoduo.
On Xiaohongshu, Alibaba's 1688 platform doesn't quite support direct batch uploading of products, and all products and pictures need to be entered and uploaded manually, which is very inconvenient. As for choosing Pinduoduo or Taobao, I personally prefer Pinduoduo because of its relatively large number of users.
When choosing suppliers, I realized that cosmetics on 1688 either didn't exist or were niche brands that I couldn't sell with confidence. As a result, I decided to go with a vertical direction and ended up focusing on women-related jewelry, such as bracelets and pet necklaces.
I found some bracelet stores on 1688 and paid a deposit of $1000, then distributed the products directly to Pinduoduo through 1688's distribution center. However, Pinduoduo's pricing strategy needs to be adjusted on its own, otherwise the profit is very low and you may even lose money.
At the beginning of the sale, I didn't notice that shipping was not included in * and Tibet, which resulted in a loss of more than ten dollars for one order. Overall, although we gained some traffic and exposure through advertising and promotion, and realized about 10 orders with sales of more than $200, half of the orders were eventually returned, resulting in a profit of only about $100.
As the return address was given on my side, all the returned items were sent back to me. Upon inspection, I found that they were indeed of poor quality. Due to the hassle, I decided not to send the returned items back to the 1688 merchant and simply kept them for myself.
Cost: the transaction amount of 270, about half of the refund order, their own responsibility, did not return to the 1688 merchant, probably a loss of about 130.
III. Cross-border e-commerce
During my time at Tencent, I heard that some people had achieved remarkable success through cross-border e-commerce, such as selling e-cigarettes to Europe and the United States, or even earning a house in Shenzhen within a year. Of course, this may be somewhat exaggerated. However, the domestic e-commerce market is extremely competitive and profits are slim, especially the squeeze on factories by Pinduoduo, which makes it difficult for suppliers to survive. The incident of Guangzhou Aoyuan is also an example that shows the difficult situation of suppliers in the midst of fierce competition in the country.
I have also considered the possibility of cross-border e-commerce, such as setting up an independent station or operating on Amazon. At the moment, these ideas are still in the examination stage and need to be further understood and evaluated.
I happened to hear someone say: the middle class doing business to return to poverty road is the milk tea store, cross-border e-commerce!
IV. Summary
Small program + Poundland store, should be a loss of about 1,000, as a tuition fee, in general, but also accumulated a lot of experience. There will be some understanding of the overall e-commerce process, including the opening of stores and private domain marketing. But frankly speaking, the e-commerce market is very competitive, and the profit margin is compressed very much.
First of all, in the case of Poundland, it directly connects factories and users (B2C), eliminating a lot of middlemen. If you want to promote marketing as a middleman in this process, you must have a unique advantage. Some platforms, such as live banding, now use bulk purchasing. This approach really cuts costs and profits from bulk purchasing.
On the other hand, many users don't know about sourcing platforms like Alibaba, and some others even still use Taobao. Using this information gap, you can still make some profit, but this also makes the e-commerce industry more competitive.
In terms of the next direction of development in the field of e-commerce, I personally believe that live streaming with goods may be a more potential option. Combined with grass culture and private domain traffic management, this approach may relatively bring more revenue. As an intermediary, it seems that this is the only way to explore at present. Unfortunately, not everyone can be Li Jiaqi or Dong Yuhui.