Top of the Great Era

Chapter 3083 Wechat Business

Zhou Buqi said: "The best business should be like collecting taxes. If you make money, you pay me; if you don't make money, you should at least pay consumption tax. This is the logic of e-commerce advertising. Social advertising is different. It is a booth-type traffic model with great instability."

"I'll tell you, you already know this!"

Boss Ma laughed.

Zhou Buqi said honestly: "It wasn't my idea. It was one of my executives. When I acquired Snapchat, I talked a lot with Spiegel, the founder of this product. He did raise many doubts about the business model of social products."

Boss Ma said: "Now is the explosive stage of mobile Internet. Entrepreneurs are coming one after another, and many domestic and foreign big investors are entering the market to support. Under this situation, search advertising and social advertising can make a lot of money. In fact, most of the money you make is the marketing fees of those startups and small and medium-sized enterprises to promote apps."

Zhou Buqi just said "hmm" and did not comment.

On this point, both at home and abroad are similar.

The profits of social products mainly come from traffic advertising. Most of these traffic advertising are for promoting other apps, and the promotion fees are getting higher and higher. Even for promoting a new user for an app, you can charge $10 or $20.

The increasingly expensive data traffic fees mainly come from the promotion of these apps.

In fact, what is earned is the investors' money, which is the funds that startups and small and medium-sized companies continue to raise from investors.

Once investors stop investing.

Not only will these startups and small and medium-sized companies be liquidated, but even industry giants will be hit hard.

Ma went on to say: "Now is the growth stage of mobile Internet, and it is far from the peak. However, if it passes the peak and starts to decline, and industry investment is shrinking, the crisis of social advertising will come."

"Ah."

Zhou Buqi nodded.

Boss Ma was a little surprised to see that he was calm, "Aren't you worried at all?"

Zhou Buqi said: "When the car reaches the mountain, there must be a way."

Boss Ma snorted, "I see you already have a way to deal with it?!"

"What do you mean?"

Zhou Buqi looked at him in confusion.

Boss Ma said in a bad tone: "Compared to the instability of social advertising, e-commerce advertising can create a more stable cash flow. Build a house when it is sunny. Now is the sunny day for the social industry, and it is time for you to build a house!"

Zhou Buqi laughed and said, "What kind of house did I build?"

"You still need me to tell you?"

“Do you mean domestic business or overseas business?”

"Depend on!"

Boss Ma felt that he was being slandered.

Alibaba actually started out by relying on its overseas business, but that was ToB business. The overseas expansion of real C-end business has only been vigorously developed in the past two years. Alibaba's international development is really mediocre and is not worth discussing at all.

Zhou Buqi said: "I don't really care about domestic business. This time next year, I will resign as CEO of Ziweixing."

Boss Ma was surprised, "You want to resign?"

Zhou Buqi said with a smile: "Didn't you also make a retirement plan?"

Boss Ma asked, "How old am I? How old are you?"

Zhou Buqi said: "I want to go study."

"Don't give me that crap!" Boss Ma waved his hand and went straight to the point. "The momentum of micro-business is quite strong. Is this something you did?"

"what?"

Zhou Buqi was slightly startled.

Of course he knew the concept of "micro-business", which refers to e-commerce activities based on the WeChat circle of friends, but that was a concept from his previous life.

He has never heard of it in this life.

  From what Mr. Ma said, WeChat has made the micro-business in China flourish? It has even aroused Mr. Ma's vigilance?

Boss Ma has known this guy for many years and has experienced his ability to play dumb many times, so he doesn't believe that he doesn't know. The underlying logic of this transformation from social advertising to e-commerce advertising must be driven by a higher level and more macro level.

Boss Ma thought he was acting and was too lazy to play along, so he said bluntly: "If you want to rely on WeChat to transform into e-commerce, of course no one can stop you. And I also think that WeChat's gradual shift from social advertising to e-commerce advertising may be a long-term strategy. However, I also want to remind you that it is not easy to do e-commerce! This kind of socialized e-commerce is not as easy as selling goods to college students on the campus network!"

Zhou Buqi smiled and said, "I'm not really sure about this, but it's quite creative to use WeChat to do e-commerce."

"It's not WeChat, it's Friends Network! It's been around for five or six years!"

Boss Ma knows the origins of micro-business even better than he does.

Zhou Buqi listened.

It dawned on me.

He didn’t know how micro-business came into being in his previous life, but after hearing what Boss Ma said, he probably had an idea of ​​what micro-business was like in this life.

Group buying on campus is very popular.

However, on-campus group buying is only available to college students.

  What to do with the many off-campus needs?

So many years ago, someone discovered this demand and took advantage of the "brother relationship" between Friends.com and Campus.com and the public nature of Friends.com to post some product information on Friends.com and conduct some simple product sales through Friends.com.

But it's on a small scale.

Later, Pengyou.com launched the mobile version of the Pengyou App, which integrated secret circles, interest circles and friend circles, and the friend circles were integrated into WeChat, thus opening up the relationship between the products... It just so happens that WeChat is the App with the largest number of users and the highest popularity in China.

Thanks to communication on WeChat and promotion in the circle of friends, we finally got this model up and running.

Micro-business also emerged.

This was not planned by Zhou Buqi or the senior executive of Ziweixing, but grew out of the soil. Now Ziweixing's product ecosystem has been built, which is like a country's business environment. Once the system, structure, and environment are built, many investors and entrepreneurs will naturally grow up in it, and the seeds will germinate, bloom, and bear fruit.

Zhou Buqi said: "This should have grown spontaneously within Ziweixing's product system."

"Whether it's a spontaneous growth or your instruction, I'm reminding you." Boss Ma looked at him seriously, "You have to take this matter seriously. I'm not afraid that this WeChat business can compete with Taobao, that's nonsense. I'm just giving you a friendly reminder!"

Zhou Buqi asked: "What do you want to remind me of?"

Boss Ma said: "Someone reported to me that in the first three quarters of this year, the transaction volume of WeChat merchants may be close to 500 billion."

"so much?"

Zhou Buqi was shocked.

  Can the sales of this little-known micro-businessman be compared with those of on-campus group purchases?

Boss Ma snorted, "Do you think this is a good thing? What they told me is that they are worried that WeChat business will become Taobao's biggest competitor after it becomes popular, so they want to curb it. Do you know what the strategy of curbing it is?"

"Can't guess."

"report!"

"What?"

Zhou Buqi was a little surprised.

Boss Ma said, "If you really don't understand the situation, then go and find out. This is not an ordinary matter. On WeChat business, counterfeit and shoddy goods are mainly sold. Those counterfeit and shoddy goods that were cracked down by Taobao and cannot be sold on Taobao have all gone to WeChat Moments to sell."

Zhou Buqi said in a deep voice: "This does need to be handled with caution."

Boss Ma said: "As far as I know, the most popular product in WeChat business transactions is facial masks. Some are domestically produced, and some are purchased from Korea and Japan. However, they are basically counterfeit and inferior. The cost of a piece is a few cents, and it can be sold for a few yuan or tens of yuan. It seems that some celebrities have participated in it and have made more than 100 million yuan just by selling cheap facial masks."

Zhou Buqi said with embarrassment: "This kind of thing is really hard to handle. WeChat is just a platform, and a social platform at that. How can you tell whether other people's products are real or fake? The Moments only provides a window for display. In fact, this is a transaction between buyers and sellers."

Boss Ma laughed and said, "Now you know how difficult it is to operate Taobao. In the past few years, Taobao has been labeled as counterfeit and shoddy. We are a platform model, so it is not easy to manage it."

Zhou Buqi said: "There is a market only when there is demand, which shows the necessity of the existence of counterfeit and shoddy products."

"what?"

Boss Ma was a little surprised, not because of his remarks, but because of his mentality.

This guy's business philosophy has always been upright, but now he is engaging in counterfeit and shoddy business?