In the e-commerce world of China, honey trap and mushroom street are undoubtedly a pair of unique existence. They used to be extremely light: they didn't sell goods directly to users, they didn't build their own logistics, and they weren't responsible for the supply chain. They only charge the store commission by guiding users to trade, and they swim and survive in this mode; They are also very similar: positioning young women to play fashion and community e-commerce, the two biggest foodies on Taobao cake, neat posture, similar faces, and even many things they think overlap, which are completely competitive and imitate each other; Now they have to go in a heavy direction: from 2065438 to August 2003, Taobao severely banned the shopping guide platform, which almost drove them to a desperate situation. Vertical e-commerce is their new way. It used to be beautiful Taobao has nearly 500 million registered users, more than 60 million regular customers every day, more than 800 million online products every day, and an average of 48,000 products are sold every minute. In such a huge ecology, any stakeholder can live a very moist life. Now I am very conscious. Without such a huge ecological dependence, two competitors who were mirror images of each other finally turned their eyes to each other and started the transformation practice based on their own DNA. Gene Retrospection: Media Broadcasting VS Community Building In 2009, Xu founded The Theory of Beauty and sold the RSS online reading subscription website Catch Shrimp, which was founded in 2005, to Douban. These are two completely different entrepreneurial directions, one focusing on the female consumer market and the other on readers. In 20 10, Chen Qi established Mushroom Street, jumped out of Taobao and became a member of taobao guest. He has also done a project before, which is a link tool for community e-commerce webmasters. Becoming a Mushroom Street is a process for Chen Qi to further improve his skills. Have found a rich mine of women's fashion consumption. The early beauty theory is very similar to Mushroom Street in positioning, function and customer base. Taobao-based shopping sharing and shopping guide to attract customers. The profit model is mainly Taobao commission and merchant advertisement, and the UI design is quite similar. The same pink main vision is full of femininity, and it is changed to waterfall interface display almost at the same time. Although there are many similarities, the genetic differences between honey trap and mushroom street determine their essential differences. Beauty said that she lives in Beijing, where there are rich fashion information and media resources. Besides the technical team, most of her members come from the media and fashion fields, so she has carried certain media attributes from the beginning and knows more about the media's gameplay. Focusing on the core of social media, Beauty said that on the one hand, taking advantage of Beijing fashion circle, holding the export of authoritative information, she opened a column of "turning magazines" on the website and cooperated with fashion magazines to lay the foundation for the tonality of the website; On the one hand, columns such as "Talent", "Clothes-picking" and "Shops with Good Reputation" were launched, and active users who love to bask in the sun and share were used to produce UGC information, so as to lead the opinion orientation in the community. Beauty said that the users in the community are divided into three layers, and the top layer is the opinion leaders with opinions, accounting for about 5%, mainly relying on the incentive system of the community to attract them; The second layer is active users who are willing to share, accounting for about 20%, mainly attracted by products and functions; Most of the remaining low-level users are onlookers. Compared with Mushroom Street, Beauty said that it pays more attention to organizing the production of high-quality content to attract users and advertisers. Chen Qi, who has a working background in Taobao, knows more about e-commerce and retail, how to communicate with users and how to interact with consumers, so she is better at creating a community atmosphere. Generally speaking, the website will personalize the push according to each user's browsing history to infer what he needs in the future and what he may like. For all this, Mushroom Street has its own algorithm. For example, Chen Qi once said that when Mushroom Street finds that User A is similar to User B, it will think that User A will like what User B likes next, and consider this matter from the relationship between people. At the same time, Mushroom Street has more functions than beauty, such as sun-drying, sun-drying, etc., and uses commercial operation methods such as sun-drying cash back to attract users. However, almost all the goods in Mushroom Street point to Taobao, and the dependence on Taobao is higher. According to the data, from 20 12 to 20 13, 80%~90% of the income of Mushroom Street came from taobao guest's commission. Excluding the monthly 10% technical service fee of Taobao Alliance, the monthly commission income of Mushroom Street is about 3.6 million RMB. Coupled with the advertising revenue in the form of CPM (display advertising), its total monthly income is about 4.3 million yuan. Beauty said that in addition to CPM, it also developed advertising forms such as bidding ranking and CPC (pay-per-click), which contributed about 40% of its revenue. It is estimated that during the same period, Meili said that the total monthly revenue was around 9.2 million. Comments: From people to gameplay, honey trap is different from mushroom street. Honey trap is better at communication, and mushroom street is good at service, and it has evolved step by step. Metamorphosis posture: fierce metamorphosis VS steady return to the biological world. Many parasitic insects will kill their hosts after ingesting the nutrients necessary for their own development. The relationship between host and parasite, in other words, is the struggle for the right to life. Around 20 12 years ago, nearly 10% of Taobao's traffic came from the shopping guide community centered on Meitan and Mushroom Street. Of the 3 billion yuan in 20 12, shopping guide websites such as Mushroom Street and Meitan accounted for 2 1%, 600 million yuan more than Taobao. The rise of parasites means that the host suffers from insomnia. Ma Yun issued instructions such as "the upstream shopping guide website is not supported to continue to grow, and Ali's traffic entrance should be grassland instead of forest, and the rebate website is not supported". Taobao quickly adjusted the taobao guest rules. In August of 20 13, Taobao launched the strictest ban policy in history, stipulating that the low-price drainage of third-party platforms will not count the sales used in the main search ranking and display. Almost at the same time, Beauty said that the products of Mushroom Street could not access Taobao merchants, and even by the end of 20 13, Taobao began to ban the use of Alipay in Mushroom Street. At the same time, Taobao also launched its own shopping guide platform "love taobao". At one time, I clicked on other shopping guide websites, and even jumped to love taobao first, and then went to Taobao's website. In fact, even without the ban of Taobao, more and more beauty theories and mushroom streets are seeking a kind of self-change. The data is not open, the business can't be controlled, and it can't be profitable. These are the old problems of shopping guide websites. No matter whether Meitan exerts its strength in the media or Mushroom Street exerts its strength in the community, they all compete with each other in basic actions such as sorting out and displaying pictures, and these actions do not need the support of Taobao. Once you want to make things deeper, the support from Taobao becomes particularly important. I just didn't expect the place of despair to come so quickly, and the transformation between the two became passive. Beauty theory-drastic pure e-commerce For beauty, the first step to make a living is to transform into C2C vertical e-commerce. Before being banned by Taobao, there were tens of thousands of Taobao merchants who had long-term advertising cooperation with Beauty. In the early days of the transition, Beauty said that thousands of Taobao sellers were selected from cooperative businesses to open stores on their own platforms. At the same time, Beauty said that it also offered conditions far superior to Taobao: free commission for the first year, click on 0.3 yuan for the external chain, and click on 0.03 yuan for the settled merchants. On Taobao, the transaction commission is 5% of each transaction, and the single click price of the through train is at least 1 yuan. In 20 14, Meili said that the "Meili said 100" business support plan of 100 billion yuan was intended to focus on supporting100 high-quality businesses with daily sales exceeding one million. By the end of 20 14, the number of businesses mentioned by Beauty had exceeded16,000, and the total number of daily active users peaked at 20 million. Beauty said that the change is rapid and decisive. On June 5438+0 1, after being suspended, Xu gave the team a death order. In June of 5438+04, we must develop a trading system that conforms to women's fast fashion vertical e-commerce, and the result is really made in a closed environment; On the last day of June, 20 14, the beauty said that it was excellent. Com and Gourmet, as M&A vipshop, shook hands, and all their core teams were taken over, concentrating their human and financial resources on the mobile side; 20 1 14 years 10 month, Xu made a high-profile publicity, and Meili said that she would build China ZARA and launch a brand-new brand-MUA, hoping to pull up a brand with real fast fashion attributes and consumption influence by relying on the traffic advantage of Meili platform. One action after another, Beauty said that the changes are obvious, and there are more and more online categories, from clothing, shoes and cosmetics to home and accessories. Judging from many modules and contents, the original shopping guide website was completely abandoned. They even developed a complete commercial advertising system, allowing Taobao sellers to advertise directly on beauty theory without going through Taobao. 20 13, the contribution of this system has accounted for most of the income. In terms of marketing, beauty said that she began to spend a lot of money to build a brand image. To this end, Mei Li said that she signed a contract with the Korean idol group EXO to become a brand spokesperson and placed advertisements on TV stations such as Hunan Satellite TV. Beauty's audience group has a high degree of overlap with EXO's fan group. In order to manage this group of fans well, Meili said that EXO-m fan memorial area was specially set up and Hanzhi Post was opened to meet their needs. Beauty said all the way to expand, trying to copy a small Taobao in the vertical field of women's fashion. Things are also moving in the ideal direction. In August last year, Murray completed the E round of financing, led by HillHouse, followed by Tencent and Sequoia. On February 27th, Beauty said that it was officially revealed that Ms. Wei Ping had been invited as CFO of the company. Wei Ping previously served as CFO of Bao Zheng Distance Education, successfully led the company to be listed on NYSE, and also participated in the listing of New Oriental in the United States. Joining Murray said that it was also interpreted by the outside world as preparing for the Pre-IPO financing that Murray said. In addition, the annual performance of 20 14 given by Murray said that the total turnover of goods was 5.6 billion yuan, and the annual performance target of 20 15 was set at 654,380.5 billion yuan. Mushroom Street-The transformation of mushroom street's return to socialized operation is undoubtedly the process of migrating the original users, but it has formed a huge difference with the theory of beauty in its development. After the transformation, the mushroom street has cut off the simple consumer recommendation community and expanded the previous nature of sharing talents. Although the number of categories and businesses is not as good as that of Meili, Mushroom Street is not in a hurry to expand, but is increasingly inclined to develop into a "small and beautiful" buyer-made shopping mall. In the words of Fan, the brand director of Mushroom Street, the "fashion buyer street" of Mushroom Street, like Chinatown and Wall Street, has its own intensive characteristics, except that they gather culture or finance, and Mushroom Street gathers women's fashion. Mushroom Street users are divided into two typical groups, one is a young girl aged 16~22, and the other is an urban white-collar worker aged 23~28. The former is characterized by loving fashion and advocating trends, while the latter has higher consumption capacity and pursues fashion without losing elegance. 20 14 10, Mushroom Street signed Su Hong, who became popular because of the TV variety show The Goddess's New Clothes, as its fashion mentor. Su Hong was once the head of the first-line fashion magazine in China and one of the most influential figures in China fashion circle. In addition to cooperating with Hong, a professional fashion buyer's tutor, Mushroom Street has also signed a large number of "grassroots" buyers and buyer brands, and established a 5000-square-meter product selection center. Buyers are actually professional "reds". All the products displayed on the platform are selected by buyers, which realizes the recommendation of product collocation in different brand stores. This mode of expanding the buyer's economy while continuing the shopping guide business of the previous platform is the direction pursued by the Mushroom Street team. On the homepage of Mushroom Street, you can see the collocation recommended by experts, celebrities and tutors, which is very in line with the user positioning of Mushroom Street. It is the difference in the autonomy of user groups that makes Mushroom Street amplify the characteristics of "opinion leaders" after the transformation without a sense of disobedience. Judging from the number of settled merchants, Mushroom Street is slightly lower than Beauty. However, under the core positioning of "the first street for fashion buyers", Mushroom Street does not need to start in a hurry, but takes the "small but refined" niche route, so it is not easy to repeat the old road of "scattered" e-commerce platforms. Compared with Beauty's drastic transformation of pure e-commerce, Mushroom Street retains more genes from the former community, returns to the real social e-commerce form, and recombines "socialization" and "e-commerce". This is also in line with Qi Chen's consistent style, expanding deeply in his familiar fields, and being calm and conservative. Qi Chen concluded at the 20 14 annual meeting of Mushroom Street that the business model of Mushroom Street has become more complicated after going through the stages of community, shopping guide, e-commerce platform, and then returning to social e-commerce. In addition to gathering merchants, commodities, buyers and talents, we must also do a good job in IM, payment and after-sales. However, the data is not bad. The total transaction volume of Mushroom Street 20 14 is close to 3.6 billion yuan. Comments: Beauty said that the business model of C2C+B2C is almost a copy of JD.COM. COM+ Taobao. This business model will encounter strong frontal attacks from JD.COM and Taobao. Second, it will burn more money and make money harder. If the listing fails, it will be greatly weakened. Mushroom Street has slightly raised the threshold for businesses to settle in, so the number of businesses currently settled in is far less than that of Beauty, only over 3,000. The unique buyer model is more mobile, but at the cost of giving up greater traffic potential, the growth prospects are no longer so predictable. In fact, before the transformation of Beauty Theory and Mushroom Street, Ali extended an olive branch to them respectively, but no cooperation was reached. After the ban, the beauty theory was put into the arms of Tencent. On May 29th, 20 14, the store was officially launched. Murray said that as the first service number to participate in the internal test, it was officially "open" after the internal test. After the D round accepted Tencent's capital injection, in September last year, Meili said to access the mobile phone. During the Spring Festival, Beauty said it became another company with a heavyweight interface after JD.COM, Didi Taxi and public comment. It also squeezed out the middle seat selected by JD.COM and stood firmly at the top of the red envelope. Although Mushroom Street didn't choose who to rely on, it still has a steady stream of funds. In June last year, Mushroom Street received the C round of financing, with an amount of more than 200 million US dollars, which was jointly invested by Houpu Investment and Zhixin Capital, and its valuation soared to 65.438 billion US dollars. With financial support, Mushroom Street has launched a brand-new App:Top. Top focuses on the concept of "the first street of fashion buyers", trying to form a mobile community of buyers by gathering professional buyers and buyers' mentors, including professional buyers, fashion labels and matching experts. "Top" and "Mushroom Street" are the core products of Mushroom Street in the field of women's fashion consumption. Nowadays, the layout of the two on the mobile side has made obvious gains. Last year's "Double Eleven", Beauty said that mobile orders accounted for 80.4%, and the proportion of mobile transactions in Mushroom Street remained stable at over 75%. Beauty said that Xiong, the senior vice president, was even more outspoken. The United States says that there is no mobile internet department and no PC department, and almost all departments are OEM mobile. The two are running forward with all their strength, behind which is the mobile ecological dispute between Ali and Tencent. Mushroom Street re-aligned with Alipay, and Beauty said that docking payment, from the payment link, both have a stable cooperative ecology, which is difficult to shake; From the macro environment, Ali is a big business based on the ecological environment, and Tencent is a big business based on the social system. Compared with them, Beauty said that the role of Mushroom Street is only a supporting role. At present, it can only gain a certain market share and it is difficult to break through. Have the strategic height and planning limitations of the founding team. More importantly, the continuous development of the mobile terminal requires the continuous existence and innovation of capital, and the acquisition of new traffic is an eternal problem. But they also have their own advantages and gained a young user base, which at least gave them upward confidence. Comments: With the addition of various e-commerce platforms such as JD.COM, Store 1 and Jumeiyoupin, Taobao has suffered a big impact. Users are also more mature and rational, and businesses enjoy it. Based on this, the diversion platform will have a stable rising period. After Beauty Theory and Mushroom Street, many high-quality diversion platforms have been born. Their similarities are vertical, subdivided, precise, and independent, which makes it easier to gather popularity in a single field. Therefore, instead of competing for merchants and users, the diversion platform is not as good as Qi Xin to make the cake bigger.