Taobao is certainly familiar to everyone. As the largest e-commerce platform in China, although it has been challenged by jd.com, pinduoduo and other platforms, it still controls the most traffic and transaction volume. Taobao is also the main traffic battlefield of shopping festivals such as 618 and double 11 every year. In April, the frequent actions of Taobao showed that the e-commerce platform was entering a new reform period. First, the long-awaited account name modification function of Taobao users was launched, and more than 3 million Taobao users modified their names only in the gray test stage.
In the same month, Taobao launched the price protection center, which has been brewing for a long time. As a new function, Taobao will attract more Internet traffic in the next shopping festivals such as may day and 618. The launch of the price protection center also brings tmall closer to jd.com's direct sales. In the past, tmall's price protection required users to manually open each order. Now it is centralized to the price protection center. Users can protect the price with one click. From the perspective of use experience, it is very similar to jd.com's price protection channel.
Recently, Taobao has officially launched a new functional channel, Youhao price. As a new channel of Taobao, Youhao price has built-in functions such as "price comparison" and "historical price query"** Taobao's every move will attract a lot of attention. The "good price" quietly launched this time makes people wonder what new functions Taobao has in line to release? Can the launch of these new functions bring users a better experience?
How about the "good price" experience?
Interestingly, "good price" is not placed in a prominent position on the home page, and there is no entrance in other popular sections. The entrance can only be found by searching "good price" in the search bar (there may also be other entrances, but Xiao Lei doesn't find them for the time being).
After entering the function channel, the prominent position is mainly the recommendation of Taobao low-cost products. Xiao Lei browsed it and found that the selected products are obviously personalized recommended products, most of which are the categories or stores that Xiao Lei has recently browsed. The recommendations under the subsequent categories of department stores, food and medicine are more messy, which seems to be dominated by recent hot products.
The lowest price of the same product and the current lowest price of the product will be marked in the recommended bid of the product, which sounds a bit tongue twister For a simple example, take this women's handbag as an example. The recommended price of the store is 69 yuan, while the lowest price of other stores of the same product is 101.6 yuan. The lowest price of the same product here refers to the lowest price of the same product in other stores except the store
However, Xiao Lei also found a strange problem. After clicking on the commodity recommendation, he can see that there are four stores in the comparison column. In addition to the recommended stores, two stores also sell for 69 yuan. However, after clicking to check, he found that they are not the same product. At present, it is not clear whether the display information is confused due to the error of commodity information or some kind of recommendation mechanism.
In addition, in the recommendation column, Taobao also integrates preferential information such as 10 billion subsidies and poly cost-effective. Click to view different preferential information of corresponding commodity categories . For example, click "lower than promotion" to display products lower than the promotion price in previous years, and click "historical low price" to display products at the lowest price in history.
To some extent, the differentiation of these preferential information makes it easier for users to find the products currently on sale, but Xiaolei doesn't see the search function in the "good price" column, which means that the recommended products on the home page can only be algorithm recommendations and low-cost products. If you want to accurately find the lowest price products in a certain kind of products, then "good price" won't help you much.
However , if you just want to accurately obtain the lowest price of a product, there is still a way. In "good price", Taobao has also added the column of "price comparison and price check". Click to view the lowest price and historical price trend of products in the three categories of "my collection", "my shopping cart" and "I purchased"**
Therefore, if you want to query the historical price and lowest price of a product, you can add it to the collection, and set the automatic reminder of price reduction. Taobao will automatically push the reminder when the price of goods is reduced. However, it may be that the function has been online for a short time, so the historical price trend of many commodities has not been counted yet. At present, only the historical prices of some commodities can be seen.
In addition, Xiao Lei also noticed that the price comparison prompt with good price will appear under the commodity name on the commodity page entered from "good price", such as "the commodity is 5% lower than the average price of the same model on Taobao". However, if you enter the same commodity page on the normal search page, there is no such prompt, which will further narrow the scope of use of "good price" to a certain extent.
The whole function experience is not perfect. Xiaolei personally believes that there are still many areas that need to be optimized. For example, commodity recommendations are basically based on low-end and low-cost products, and some products with higher prices basically do not appear. Secondly, at present, there are many bugs in the low price function, which will mistake different goods for the same goods, and there is a possibility of misleading in the lowest price.
Xiao Lei thinks that the main reason for this problem is that many product names on Taobao are not standardized. Friends who often visit Taobao should know that the product names of most personal stores are basically a stack of keywords, just to increase the exposure of their products in the search.
The "good price" system obviously takes the commodity name as one of the price comparison retrieval conditions. If the merchant sets the wrong brand and model, or the figure is convenient to apply the same commodity information when uploading commodities, it will lead to errors in the price comparison of the system If Taobao wants to make "good price" a practical function, it may first need to make certain rectification on the category information and commodity name of the commodity platform
In addition, because this is the official channel of Taobao, the commodity prices compared are from Alibaba's e-commerce platforms, that is, Taobao, tmall, taote and other platforms, and will not display the prices of similar commodities on jd.com, vipshop and other platforms.
On the whole, the application scope of "good price" is still limited. The main purpose is still reflected in the commodities that are only sold on Taobao but not on other platforms, such as some small shops that only open stores on Taobao. For some big brands with channels on the whole platform, it is difficult to find a really affordable price through "good price".
In fact, similar price comparison and historical price query functions are not novel. Third party apps, websites and plug-ins such as "what's worth buying" and "buy slowly" have a perfect experience. Users can easily query the real network wide low price and historical price comparison through these third parties.
Therefore, in terms of the current experience, Xiaolei still prefers third-party software and websites.
ID modification, price protection center, good price, Taobao changed
Taobao, an e-commerce platform that will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year, has obviously entered a new period of reform recently. Since Jiang Fan stepped down as chairman of Taobao and tmall and Dai Shan took over, Taobao's reform actions have obviously become frequent.
Whether it is ID modification or price protection center, it can be said that many Taobao users have been looking forward to for a long time, but there has been no dynamic function. In the past, many functional channels of Taobao were added and improved for merchants and recommendation mechanism. In short, in order to improve Taobao's profitability and increase the source of revenue, there is not much improvement in the user experience.
In this year's update, there is an obvious trend, Taobao is putting some of its energy back on the platform experience, but it is not easy to turn around. Whether Taobao can really let users realize the improvement of this platform in the reform is also a difficulty** For example, the "good price" function. From the troubleshooting interface of this function, Xiaolei found that Taobao was not responsible for the operation of this module, but entrusted it to a company called "Hangzhou maoyue Enterprise Management Co., Ltd.".
From the current situation, Taobao should open the relevant data interface, and then entrust a third-party company to operate the relevant functions. Personally, I think it may be an internal attempt of Taobao to hand over the operation of some edge functional modules to a third party to reduce the operation cost and sunk cost of the modules.
In this way, it can also explain why Taobao did not carry out too much publicity on "good price" after it went online, and there were many restrictions on channel entrance and so on. Will "good price" channel become the beginning of a third-party operation channel? It's hard for Xiao Lei to give an answer, but at least it's a new attempt.
For this largest e-commerce platform in China, Taobao currently faces many threats. On the one hand, JD is occupying more and more transaction volume in electronic consumption, household appliances and other commodities. Many users are interested in JD's after-sales and fast logistics. When purchasing more expensive digital yards and kitchen appliances, they will choose JD instead of Taobao.
On the other hand, pinduoduo's strong rise has snatched a considerable share of sinking market users from Taobao's user base. Now, Taobao's biggest advantage is that the category and number of products are still far higher than jd.com and pinduoduo. When users want to buy some unique products, Taobao is still the only choice.
From user experience to after-sales, Taobao needs to improve a lot. Although many of them are the problems of other e-commerce platforms, if Taobao can upgrade the user experience first, it will occupy a greater advantage in the competition of e-commerce platforms in the future.