Wowotuan is not a new website. Wowotuan was established in 2007. It is the second well-known group buying website in China and is one of the largest life service e-commerce platforms in China. The leader and pioneer of service e-commerce. Its business covers 350 cities across the country, with local service teams in more than 150 cities, providing services to more than 300,000 merchants. Xu Maodong acquired Wowo Tuan in 2010 and served as the company's chairman and CEO.
Wowo is committed to connecting local life service merchants and consumers through the Internet, especially the mobile Internet, helping merchants directly sell their remaining service capabilities online and manage repeat customers, and help consumers choose to consume economically and rationally, aiming to We are building China's largest online shopping mall of food, drink, entertainment and life services. Wowo has gathered online brand stores from hundreds of thousands of lifestyle service merchants across the country, offering various group purchases, vouchers, discount coupons, limited-time promotions, etc., covering food, movies, leisure and entertainment, travel, hotels, beauty and health care, weddings, etc. industry, basically covering people’s daily needs.
Wowo has entered the field of life service e-commerce from group buying (Wowo Tuan), and launched a group buying model of multiple orders in one city and multiple orders in one city. The mall model was launched in early 2012 to help merchants open online brand stores and provide operational support, allowing merchants to directly sell products and services. In July 2014, the online store upgrade service was launched to provide merchants with their own online stores, including independent merchant mobile store clients and brand stores, and one-stop access to third-party platforms to help merchants directly connect with users and provide merchants with The realization of online direct sales, membership operations, dynamic promotions, brand display, etc. has quickly promoted the development of life service merchants towards mobile e-commerce.
The purpose of Wowo Tuan is to provide consumers with considerate and personal group purchasing services, and at the same time provide localized online advertising services to merchants through consultative marketing.
Wowotuan is one of the first 29 group buying websites in China to pass the e-commerce credit certification of the Ministry of Commerce. It is one of the 17 websites to obtain "good" grade credit certification and is one of only more than ten One of the legal group buying websites that has obtained the "Internet Business License" (ICP Certificate).
But as of 2014, the group buying websites with the largest market share were Meituan.com, Dianping, and Baidu Nuomi. Pioneer group buying websites such as WoWo and LaShou have shown a clear downward trend.
Now that Lashou has been acquired by Hongtusanbao, whenever the domestic group buying market is mentioned, Meituan, Dianping, and Baidu Nuomi will always be mentioned. I don’t know how long it has been, intentionally or unintentionally. Wo Wo Tuan selectively forgets.
On January 10, 2015, Wowo Mall (Wowo Tuan), one of the domestic e-commerce platforms for daily life services, submitted a prospectus to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and officially announced its listing plan.
Wowotuan plans to raise up to US$40 million through IPO transactions and plans to list on the Nasdaq market with the stock code "WOWO".
Wowo Tuan, whose performance is not remarkable, can get the biggest supplement after going public: capital. Money can make the world go round, Wowo Tuan's reputation can be greatly enhanced, and its actions can be bold and drastic. On the other hand, you cannot do whatever you want when trying new things. Capitalists pay more attention to profits, and sometimes they will not hesitate to take measures that harm the user experience.
While Nuomi, Dianping, and Meituan are still competing fiercely in the group buying market, Wowo Tuan is planning a new market direction. Judging from the recent launch of "Online Store Tong", Wowo Tuan has clearly released a signal to decentralize group buying and transform into an O2O life service platform.
It can be seen that Wowo Tuan is more pursuing long-term market opportunities in the life service industry, and is no longer willing to spend money on the group buying model. First of all, group buying is only a promotional tool for merchants, rather than a healthy business model that cannot support the industry to go further. Secondly, the mobile Internet has fragmented traffic, and group buying wars that compete for money and traffic no longer make much sense. This can be seen from the data performance of Meituan, Dianping and Nuomi after they "successfully joined" BAT. Finally, the rapid growth of mobile Internet users and mobile consumption has brought huge growth space for local life O2O. Otherwise, BAT would not have chosen traditional group buying websites to become shareholders and launched their own applications to "connect merchants and users". In Xu Maodong’s eyes, group buying is not the future of the life service industry (agreement). Now is the time to focus on future market development, so Wowo Tuan is transforming into a life service platform. As for group buying, it will become an integral part of the larger ecology of Wowo Life Services e-commerce platform and continue to play a promotional role for merchants.
The group buying model is to stimulate the consumer market first, and then force the service industry to surrender. Wowo Tuan’s calculation is that if the system can stabilize a large number of merchants, then users will naturally follow. Come, serve merchants first and then serve consumers. This is the biggest adjustment of Wowo Tuan’s business strategy. Moreover, service merchants do not have to fight for funds or traffic for the time being. What they fight for is the ease of use of the system. This is an opportunity for Wowo Tuan.
Services are not commodities. Commodities are standardized, but services are flexible and changeable, so they cannot be sold in a supply and marketing model. The life service industry needs to rely on its own operations to participate in networked competition, rather than relying on After the service is productized, it is packaged and sold on e-commerce websites.
For lifestyle service businesses, Wowotuan’s online store is a relatively positive attempt.
Through a unified back-end system, merchants have independent decision-making power and can be more flexible and faster in product introduction, optimization, price adjustment, etc. The unified back-end system also facilitates merchants to do operational data analysis, CRM marketing management, etc. After the service industry is networked, it is not just the location that matters. Every detail can have an impact on the performance of the store. The competition between Tmall stores is the most direct reflection of the future.
For the service industry, group buying allows them to realize the power of e-commerce. However, group buying is not the best form of e-commerce for the life service industry. In the future, life service consumption will tend to be regular prices. Just like Taobao initially won the favor of consumers with its price advantage, but now price is no longer the only factor in e-commerce, and service quality is more valued. This is also the case in the e-commerce market in the local life service industry. This is the law of the market.
Helping life service merchants adapt to online operations will have greater market potential, rather than using group purchases to quench thirst. Some people say that group buying can monetize the remaining consumption space of a store. This is true, but it should not be the group buying website that determines whether a store does group buying, but the store itself.
To put it bluntly, currently group buying is just a crude form of playing with traffic, but in the future it will focus more on operations. In the early days of Taobao, you could make money by just opening a Taobao store, but now operational capabilities are the basic skills. In the O2O life service industry, extensive development will soon end, and refined competition will follow. (PS: A large wave of training and agent operation companies teaching store operations, analysis, and marketing will appear soon.)
Xu Maodong said that Wowo wants to be the Tmall of the life service industry, that is, a platform. This direction may be in line with Ali's appetite. If Wowo Tuan can achieve good results, Ali will not be stingy in investing in it.
Perhaps Wowo Tuan’s strategy of giving up group buying and turning to a life service platform is correct. At least this way the prospects are more imaginative!