Xianyu is more and more like Taobao

Source | Author | Mr. Da

After the National Day holiday, Xianyu, which has more than 100 million monthly active users, implemented a new standard: the standard requires operating sellers to provide a “seven-day no-reason return” service, and buyers return goods should be in good condition.

A platform that is positioned to “sell idle and scour second-hand” actually implements the “seven-day no-reason return” rule. Is there any difference between it and Taobao? Really, even if the “seven days no reason to return” is implemented, in terms of complete after-sales service, Xianyu is far inferior to Taobao.

According to Xianyu’s own definition, sellers are divided into business sellers and commodity sellers. The former is commonly known as “merchant” and the latter is “individual seller”. Xianyu stipulates that sellers who have completed the certificate or personal statement and displayed the “business” logo on their personal homepage are business sellers. When the business sellers release products that support “seven days no reason to return”, the service will be enforced. .

For ordinary users, Xianyu is getting farther and farther away from themselves, and they are all professional sellers as far as they can see. From the point of view of merchants and professional sellers, except that the entry threshold still requires zero deposit, every change in Xianyu in recent years is moving closer to Taobao.

If Xianyu successfully becomes a “second-hand Taobao”, is it still necessary to exist?

01 Merchant’s Carnival

There is a question on Zhihu “How to make money on Xianyu”. As of press time, there are 1072 answers to this question.

Among the thousands of answers, the content is similar: I will tell my understanding from the entry threshold, operation process, traffic mechanism, operation method of Xianyu store, and finally attach a screenshot of my transaction amount, showing a “zero threshold can be handled by handling.” make big money” business story.

The logic of handling is also very simple: obtain the source of goods from Alibaba, Pinduoduo, Taobao Alliance, World Factory and some sub-commodity purchase channels, and then mark it on Xianyu at a price higher than the purchase price, and the product introduction directly copies the original channel That is, it operates in a business model of earning the difference. Different from the traditional wholesale and retail model, this model does not require stockpiling. When a customer places an order at Xianyu, the merchant can then place an order from an established channel for delivery.

To give an example: The Sony PlayStation 5 game console comes standard with a single handle. The price in the flagship store is 4,299 yuan. Through Pinduoduo’s tens of billions of subsidy activities, it was bought at a price of about 3,700 yuan, and then it was put on the shelves of Xianyu. “With invoices”, “long warranty period” and other characteristics, the other “90% new”, “few times launched”, “purchased last year” and other products are vertically rolled, and the price of 3900 yuan and 4000 yuan is also marketable.

After 2020, a large number of merchants and professional sellers with operational qualifications continue to pour into Xianyu, such as the field of digital products, and the information released by merchants and professional sellers can drown the information of ordinary individual sellers. Compared with individual sellers, merchants and professional sellers are well versed in the traffic flow, are more sensitive to the market price of commodities, and have more time to operate. The sales volume and Sesame Credit are much higher than those of individual sellers, which eventually forms the “Matthew effect”. .

It is not only the commodity display space of individual sellers that is squeezed. When individual sellers are insensitive to the market price of idle commodities, they mark prices that are slightly lower or even far below the market price of commodities. “Script program” scans the goods, and sells them at a higher price when you get them.

“Unbelievable but true”, even second-hand trading platforms need to “anti-cheat”.

How many restrictions can the new “seven-day no-reason return” regulations impose on merchants and professional sellers?

Xianyu’s new “seven-day no-reason-return” rule applies to business sellers, who release new products and meet the specification requirements and must support the seven-day no-reason return service. The product type is mandatory to open, and sellers of other product types can voluntarily open it according to the situation. The page prompts the operation when the product is published.

To put it simply, in order to meet the mandatory requirement of “seven days no reason to return”, it is necessary to meet the three conditions of a business seller, release a new product and meet the product type. If the three conditions are not met at the same time, the “seven days no reason to return” is still a merchant Voluntary opening.

Merchants still have a variety of ways to circumvent the “seven-day no-reason-return” policy: for example, when releasing a new product, it will no longer be marked “new” but instead “9.999% new”, and the “seven-day no-reason return” policy can still be avoided.

The influx of merchants and professional sellers has not only changed the traditional C2C ecology of Xianyu, but also made Xianyu coincide with Taobao: merchants can open stores in Xianyu and Taobao at the same time, and users can also link to the products searched by Xianyu Going to Taobao, Xianyu mainly focuses on the second-hand market, and Taobao can also sell second-hand goods. Since it is the same between users and merchants, the gap between Taobao and Xianyu is gradually narrowing, not to mention that Taobao is significantly better than Xianyu in terms of complete shopping experience.

02 Attitude of users

However, some users welcome the gradual Taobaoization of Xianyu.

Xianyu was originally a pure C2C platform with a complete “person-to-person” model. The main transaction disputes focused on “slashing a knife on the ankle”, “getting a knife in hand”, “wrangling for a postage for three days”, “goods and description does not match” etc.

Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes. Buyers want to save money and buy other people’s idle goods. Naturally, there are sellers who use shoddy products to hide some product defects in order to sell them as soon as possible. The transaction process is accompanied by endless wrangling, so that “refreshing” has become a rare word in transactions. In the end, a strange situation emerged: if you, as a buyer, take pictures too quickly, the seller will be stunned - you must be a liar who wants to get a knife or even want to give up my treasure?

What is worrying is that the problems of fake goods and fraud are the road that Taobao has taken, and Xianyu is taking it again.

In such an environment, some sellers are more willing to sell to merchants, and the identity of the merchant’s “father” is less important than the wrangling that an individual buyer may bring.

For buyers, the “heirloom” problem also breeds under the premise that individual sellers are less price-sensitive. A PlayStation 5 purchased at the end of 2021, after playing for 10 months, is priced at 4,290 yuan in Xianyu. At this time, the original price purchased through the official channel is 4,299 yuan. It is true that the price list is completely the seller’s freedom, but such freedom is not very good for the buyer’s experience.

In the personal-to-personal trading model, another problem that has caused Xianyu a headache is the issue of pornography and edge balls, which have been rectified by Xianyu officials for many years.

It is extremely difficult for individual sellers to provide standardized services, and merchants who can provide standardized services cannot implement the “seven-day no-reason return” in Xianyu, which is a common practice in other e-commerce platforms.

All kinds of situations make Xianyu’s situation very embarrassing: if you insist on the person-to-person transaction model, you need to spend a lot of resources to operate and maintain the transaction process, in order to face the community atmosphere where the dispute rate is far higher than Taobao; The old users who have lost their original Xianyu: they all buy things from merchants. Isn’t it good to go to the serious e-commerce platform to enjoy complete shopping protection?

If the proportion of personal-to-personal transactions gradually declines, how can Xianyu pull in new ones? A weakened version of Taobao that mainly buys second-hand products? Even some second-hand products are more expensive than new products on other platforms?

Initially, Xianyu wanted to tell a good social story, use Taobao ecology to increase the frequency of second-hand transactions, and use second-hand transactions to establish connections between users to form a perfect cycle. From the perspective of Zhuge Liang after the fact, the biggest problem facing such a cycle is user stickiness: only on the premise that buyers and sellers are happy, there is a social foundation. If the buyer and the seller are disgusted with each other during the transaction, they will be “blocked” after the natural transaction. Unfortunately, in the second-hand transaction, the probability of buying and selling is much lower than that of seeing and hating each other.

To this day, Ali has no intention of competing for social interaction, and standardizing Xianyu’s trading system has become the primary purpose, which is also the original intention of “seven days no reason to return”. However, due to the characteristics of second-hand transactions, it is impossible to enforce the “seven-day no-reason return” policy to all transactions, which magnifies the possibility that the policy will become a dead letter.

Xianyu founder Chen Weiye once said that making Xianyu another Taobao is not what Ali wants to do. However, with the change of three leaders in the four years of Xianyu and the influx of operating merchants, the homogenization of Xianyu and Taobao has become an established fact.

Xianyu has already stood at a crossroads.