The difference between WeChat service and physical store

The difference between WeChat service and physical store

What is the difference between WeChat business and physical stores and micro-stores? Let's take a look at the difference between WeChat business and physical store:

1

The same entrepreneurial group

Whether it is the tide of reform and opening up, Taobao shopkeeper when e-commerce is in the ascendant, or WeChat business now, the real market leaders are groups with the same interests, that is, grassroots entrepreneurs. What they reveal is actually a process for grassroots entrepreneurs to seek career breakthroughs.

In fact, the fate of these three seemingly different markets is exactly the same, and their earliest market leaders are all grassroots. When the whole market was deserted, grassroots entrepreneurs came in one after another and managed the market by their own efforts, and then some people became rich.

However, with the success of the first batch of grass roots, more grass roots began to flood in, followed by more intense competition, higher and higher industry thresholds and lower market profits. When the original market becomes a sea of blood, grassroots entrepreneurs urgently need a new market to break through. So when housing prices are getting higher and higher, people choose e-commerce. When the competition of e-commerce is becoming more and more fierce, the WeChat business is on fire again.

This phenomenon of market change truly reflects an urgent desire of grassroots entrepreneurs in the market, that is, if they start a business at a lower cost in the case of rising living and working costs. So apart from the same roots, what are the similarities and differences between physical stores, e-commerce and WeChat services?

2

Commodity display channel

Whether you are opening a physical store, doing e-commerce or doing WeChat business, the first problem you have to face is the display of goods. A good display channel can get twice the result with half the effort.

The product display channel of the traditional physical store is the most complicated, which needs to consider a series of problems such as the location, rent, decoration, shelves and furnishings of the store, and needs to constantly clean the products every day. It takes a lot of physical labor to make the shop clean and hygienic and make the guests look comfortable.

With the house price and rent becoming more and more expensive, people urgently need a lower-cost entrepreneurial form, and e-commerce was born at this time. At the earliest time, the slogan of e-commerce was to give everyone a chance to be a boss. Does everyone sound familiar? In fact, it is the same as the slogan of WeChat business now. The earliest ideal of e-commerce is that every ordinary person can be a boss, so that you can start a business by sitting at home and tapping the keyboard without spending a lot of money to open a physical store.

So more and more people ran to open online stores, and a group of people really succeeded in starting a business on the e-commerce platform. However, as more and more people flood into the e-commerce platform, the market will soon be saturated, and the requirements for product display will become more and more professional, so the cost will be higher and higher.

Now a better e-commerce online store needs an excellent artist to decorate the whole store for you, in addition to a basic store. You need an excellent photographer to make your products different. If you sell clothes, you need a beautiful soybean. If you sell underwear, your soybean price is higher. If you don't have any of these, you can only spend tens of dollars to buy a template and make it yourself, and then take some photos yourself or use the photos of the manufacturer. You will find that a large number of shops use the same pictures, so you are caught in a vicious competition of homogenization.

Compared with WeChat business, Eric prefers to call it community e-commerce, which was discussed in detail in the first two articles about WeChat business. To put it simply, WeChat business started with Weibo purchasing and expert recommendation. It is a marketing method for individuals to focus on their own social circle and rely on their personality charm in the whole social circle. This kind of self-promotion is a social economy with the nature of self-media.

In a broad sense, WeChat business is all community e-commerce based on mobile terminals; The narrow sense of WeChat business refers to the sellers in the circle of friends, and there is also a fraud group that conducts pyramid schemes in the name of WeChat business. For more details, if you are interested, you can see Eric's previous article. What we are talking about is the product display channel in WeChat business.

There are two channels for WeChat merchants to display their products, one is to send a circle of friends and the other is a micro-store. This is the difference between WeChat merchants and e-commerce. Due to the limited screen space on the mobile terminal, even in micro-stores, the picture content is particularly concise, basically based on photos, covering some simple product information, unlike e-commerce stores, which have to make the pictures extremely complicated and fancy. However, whether it is brushing a circle of friends or brushing a micro-store, there is a big drawback, that is, the circle of friends must be updated frequently.

Although micro-stores have virtual stores, there is no unified ecological platform, and your store has no place to display, so you can only hope that your customers will collect your store on WeChat, or you need to constantly update the micro-store links in the circle of friends every day. Although there is a virtual store, I still can't get rid of the strange circle of brushing the screen.

If you want to manage your customer information effectively, then you have another option, that is, to establish a certified WeChat official account, and then guide customers to pay attention to you, and directly bind the store to the public menu like Lao Luo. In the long run, this is WeChat business.

The final trend is that in the future, more and more WeChat businesses will take the road of WeChat official account+micro-store combination mode and become real' community e-commerce'. The WeChat business based on social software other than WeChat system will basically move closer to this trend.

three

Looking for a good source of goods

There is no standard answer whether to find the channel or choose the goods first. For e-commerce and WeChat business, the channel comes before the supply, so Eric puts the supply behind the channel here.

Due to geographical restrictions, offline stores in traditional industries mostly get goods locally, and most of them buy goods from local wholesale markets, so the final result may be that everyone sells similar things. As a result, some people with abundant funds and large sales began to go to some large first-line wholesale markets to get goods, such as Sijiqing in Hangzhou and Humen wholesale market in Guangdong. Those who make electronic products go to Zhongguancun or Huaqiang North.

However, the shipments of more small business owners are not large, and they generally take goods nearby. For example, some friends who run the market set up stalls in the night market, or in which alley they set up shop with kidnappers, and most of them still get goods from the local wholesale market. Most of them can't afford the high rent, so they choose a place with cheap rent to open a shop. If the same rent is cheap, the sales volume will naturally be much worse. Poor sales make less money, less goods, and even worse business. It will eventually become a vicious circle.

A few years ago, Eric once opened a night market with his friends. Due to the problem of funds, he didn't get many goods and categories, and finally fell into the vicious circle just mentioned. In the end, he made no profit or loss. The adventure failed. At that time, Eric was faced with another problem faced by ordinary entrepreneurs, that is, doing offline stores, opening online stores or doing WeChat business.

Offline stores have no money to rent houses, so there are few products in online stores. The pixels of the mobile phone are blurred, and even photos can't be taken. There are few people in the circle of friends in WeChat business, so I reasoned and ran to set up a stall. The problems faced by Eric at that time were those faced by many grassroots entrepreneurs.

That is, whether you are opening a physical store, doing e-commerce or doing WeChat business, the threshold is actually quite high. Physical stores need enough funds to operate, and e-commerce also needs enough products, as well as the cost of taking pictures and decorating stores. Wechat business also needs you to have enough social resources to interact with you for a long time. Obviously, the vast majority may not have the three, so the rumor that "as long as you are a WeChat merchant, you can change your destiny" is actually self-defeating.

In fact, this hierarchical agency system in WeChat business can be traced back to the era of e-commerce. At that time, many websites had posts on the forum, indicating that they had an e-commerce platform. You only need to pay a little membership fee and then open a shop for you. Then you can develop offline, and you can get a commission for each offline, and you can also get a commission for the goods they sell. At that time, I was only active in the forum and didn't invade the circle of friends, so most people didn't feel much.

Now they have invaded their circle of friends with the times. At that time, this e-commerce platform was quite developed, and the slogan was similar to the current WeChat business, with no change, except that the e-commerce model of the era they shouted at that time has become a thing of the past. We are not attacking the WeChat business here. As mentioned earlier, there are three kinds of WeChat business: one is a serious community e-commerce, the other is to sell goods by swiping the screen, and the other is an organized fraud gang. I saw the third one on TV recently.

Let's go back to the source of goods. The earliest e-commerce companies actually got their goods from the nearest local wholesale market, just like physical stores. However, with the increasing homogenization of the market, many people began to focus on the whole country and consciously look for products. Moreover, with the rapid development of e-commerce, more and more physical stores have begun to enter the e-commerce channel, and even the wholesale market has entered the e-commerce platform by virtue of its price advantage, which directly confuses the price of the whole market. The end result is that the way physical stores and online stores get goods is more and more similar, the price is getting closer and closer, and with the spoiler of the wholesale market, the whole ecology is deteriorating.

The way WeChat merchants get goods is slightly different from that of physical stores and e-commerce. The earliest Wechat business is purchasing and drying orders, and the products sold are all high-profit things, which are basically concentrated in two fields: women's bags and masks. However, with more and more people doing WeChat business, it is inevitable that there will be the same dilemma of finding goods in physical stores and e-commerce.

four

How to do marketing?

Traditional physical stores have inherent disadvantages and advantages in market acquisition. The congenital disadvantage is that it can only get a certain range of business in Fiona Fang due to geographical and spatial constraints, and the space of the store limits the number of people it serves.

For e-commerce and WeChat business, there is no need to worry about this issue at all. They can look at the national market, as long as the network cable is constantly, they can constantly accept customers' inquiries and provide them with services. The most exaggerated statement is that an e-commerce customer service can chat with dozens of customers in real time at the same time, which is completely impossible in traditional stores.

The inherent advantage of traditional shops is that people flow naturally. As long as the door is open, there will be business, just a matter of quantity. Ordinary shops are operated by their innate geographical location and popular services in the later period. In fact, ordinary owners have no idea about marketing.

This practice is completely unimaginable for e-commerce and WeChat business, especially for WeChat business, which is definitely a fatal blow. For e-commerce and WeChat business, network promotion is a daily homework. From this perspective, although e-commerce and WeChat business are not under the pressure of store rent, they are actually doing more complicated work.

At this point, e-commerce is actually luckier than WeChat business, because e-commerce has a mature business ecosystem platform. Ordinary e-commerce shopkeepers only need to find ways to do their own reputation, then often do some marketing planning, and then actively participate in some platform activities. Under the condition that the products are OK enough, we can do very well through long-term honest management and high-quality after-sales service.

This is actually normal for the topic that more than half of e-commerce platforms do not make money. In fact, many offline stores don't make money. Interested friends can observe a street for a long time and find that there are advertisements for transfer and rental all year round. Every year, the shops in a street will change some. Eric heard about making money in the night market, so he went into the night market. As a result, he found that more than 5000 merchants in the seemingly lively pedestrian street night market, more than half of them don't make money, and people will come in every few months.

The essence of business is a game played by a group of people who lose money and a few people who make money.

Wechat business does not have an innate platform to brush reputation or participate in platform activities, so if you want to have business, you need to do everything yourself. This innate disadvantage forces WeChat business to become a community e-commerce, and a successful WeChat business must build itself into a self-media company. In other words, WeChat business must make itself a public figure, at least in a small range, otherwise you won't make money.

This is a very difficult thing. Compared with fame, WeChat business actually requires you to be famous or become a nickname. In the absence of credibility and protection platform, you need strong trust to make users become your customers for a long time. The acquisition of this kind of trust is definitely not something you can learn by listening to several marketing classes of WeChat business.

In the impression of ordinary people, e-commerce must be the sworn enemy of physical stores, and WeChat business must be the subversive of e-commerce. These are actually untenable theories. E-commerce will have a certain impact on the physical industry, but it is not as exaggerated as the legend. The decline of many industries is actually the problem of the industry itself and the inevitable result of the current situation and fierce market competition.

Physical stores, e-commerce and WeChat services are not so completely different. They have their own advantages and disadvantages, and the objects they serve are different, not to mention who subverts who and who ends who. And in fact, many physical stores are also doing e-commerce and WeChat business, and those who do e-commerce are also doing WeChat business. Whether it is a physical store, e-commerce or WeChat business, it is just a channel in business form and can be integrated in parallel.

The phenomenon of e-commerce in those days and the phenomenon of WeChat business now are essentially collective escape under fierce competition after the market is saturated, and it is an attempt of grassroots entrepreneurs for the future direction. In this process, some groups are bound to fish in troubled waters, consumers need to have their own ability to distinguish, and industry supervision needs to be in place in time.

No matter what channel you start a business through, success requires bit by bit accumulation. There is no business model that can make you turn around in just a few months. All you need is certain social resources and the ability to succeed. Therefore, grassroots entrepreneurs who are eager to succeed must first lay a solid foundation and accumulate enough resources before thinking about business models, otherwise they will put the cart before the horse.

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