On February 6, 20 18, the once popular e-commerce platform Mushroom Street was successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange. This is the dawn of victory that Mushroom Street has been waiting for for for eight years, as if it were reborn. However, in this long eight years, Mushroom Street has experienced a bumpy corporate life.
The Ice Age Mushroom Street was founded by Qi Chen, a graduate of Zhejiang University, and his classmate Wei Yi Bo in 20 1 1. Mushroom Street was originally just a consumer sharing community, but it evolved into a shopping guide platform on 20 12, earning commissions by helping e-commerce.
The period from 20 13 to 20 14 was the heyday of Mushroom Street, with daily page views exceeding 100 million, which was very popular for some time. However, just when the business of Mushroom Street was booming, Taobao ordered to ban all kinds of shopping guide platforms, and Mushroom Street, as one of the leading platforms in the industry, was not spared. Taobao is the main target of shopping guide docking in Mushroom Street.
The forbidden mushroom street can only be forced to transform. After being "banned" for half a month, Mushroom Street began to enter the e-commerce industry and became a vertical e-commerce designed for female consumers. Surprisingly, the renovation took only two months to complete the single month of Mushroom Street.
The impressive performance of 65.438+0.2 billion yuan. Although the predecessor was good, the later development of Mushroom Street was not as easy as expected, and various efforts were made to "survive". In order to keep pace with the times, Mushroom Street merged with Bellevue for the first time on 20 16 1, and explored the financial field to launch the product "Bai Fumei".
Later, the online celebrity live broadcast mode was introduced, and the WeChat applet was launched on 20 17. The small program attracted 3 million new customers only two months after it was launched, and the turnover was gratifying, and the conversion rate was twice that of app. Judging from these data, it seems that Mushroom Street has successfully found a way to break the situation, but the ending is still embarrassing.
Life on Mushroom Street is getting worse and worse. According to the prospectus, Mushroom Street has been losing money for many years, with an annual loss of 400 million yuan. Facts have proved that Taobao's "ban" has dealt a fatal blow to Mushroom Street. Relevant data shows that the user retention rate of the banned Mushroom Street has plummeted.
Even after many transformations and adjustments, its development trend has not improved significantly. It has been five years since it was banned, but if it doesn't break out in silence, it will only die out in silence. Behind the fact that Mushroom Street has never turned over, today's e-commerce industry is surging and the competition is fierce.
There are natural reasons why Mushroom Street failed to win in the chaos. First, the users of Mushroom Street are mainly young women aged 15-30. On the one hand, they are young, fashionable and diversified, and it is difficult to be loyal to a certain platform; On the other hand, the age range is small and the individual iteration frequency is high, such as a series of users trained in 20 13.
Five years later, due to the great changes in demand, the platform may no longer be applicable. Therefore, compared with other platforms, Mushroom Street is more difficult to guarantee the user retention rate. Second, the operating products have a high coincidence rate with strong competitors and have no competitive advantage, especially compared with those integrated e-commerce platforms with a wider audience.
At that time, Ali and JD.COM gained a firm foothold and carved up the big market of e-commerce. Compared with these large-scale integrated e-commerce platforms, the SKU of Mushroom Street is limited, and its self-classification product modules are obviously duplicated. Some users said that when brushing products, they always see similar or even identical products.
Mushroom street with limited competitiveness can only seize a small part of customer resources by cheaper customer unit price and more exquisite product display form, and find hope in the cracks. Third, there is no dominant force, the long board is not long, and it is impossible to form a differentiated advantage. As a low-end e-commerce platform, the product category of Mushroom Street.
Brand awareness and commodity price advantages are not as good as those of Pinduoduo; As a community platform, its audience size, user interaction activity, content breadth and depth, and delivery ability are far less than those of Xiaohongshu. Generally speaking, Mushroom Street has not found its own characteristic development model. Fourth, fame has not yet been opened.
Has not yet formed a good reputation. Perhaps due to the lack of funds caused by years of losses, Mushroom Street has not carried out large-scale marketing promotion. On the one hand, Mushroom Street has been cooperating with well-known online celebrities for a long time, and rarely invites celebrities to endorse; Even if a star is invited, it is only a short-term front page advertisement.
Can not set off a strong star effect, enhance the brand image. On the other hand, the daily promotion activities of Mushroom Street are primitive and single, and the activities are unattractive, even in the major promotion periods with fierce competition, there is no particularly outstanding performance. For example, during the 20 18 Double Eleven, Mushroom Street launched the activity of watching live broadcasts and doing tasks to receive coupons, but most of the activities were below 10% discount, and the products with strong activities were very limited.
Indeed, the number of customers in Mushroom Street is already low, and there is not much room for price changes. However, from the comparison of figures, "10% discount" is particularly uncompetitive. How does Mushroom Street compete with those platforms that promote sales? Although mushroom street burns a lot of money every year, it is only burned in the right place, which really brings benefits or convenience to consumers.
Consumers will see it and pay for it. Going public in the United States, but after years of turmoil, Mushroom Street, which urgently needs a big congestion to continue its life, finally chose to go public. If it can be successfully listed, Mushroom Street can get a lot of cash flow and enhance the company's reputation, which can be said to be the right medicine. Finally.
Mushroom Street, which walks on the edge of the cliff all the year round, successfully squeezed into the capital market in June 5438+February this year. Of course, this is due to a series of "compromises" made by Mushroom Street, otherwise it will not meet the listing standards. However, the newly listed "Gu Mo" has been in constant turmoil and even pushed to the forefront of public opinion.