In fact, maternal and infant vertical e-commerce is not a “new thing”. As early as 2004, Redbaby entered the field of maternal and infant vertical e-commerce. However, as Taobao, JD.com, Amazon and other major comprehensive e-commerce platforms successively opened maternal and infant channels, Redbaby, which was once glorious, fell into trouble and was eventually acquired by Suning at a low price. Today, maternal and infant e-commerce has once again become the darling of VCs for two reasons: first, the mobile wave has reshaped the consumption scene, giving vertical e-commerce room to survive; second, the pilot of cross-border e-commerce has enabled high-quality maternal and infant products from overseas to enter the country at a low cost, greatly satisfying the needs of domestic mothers.
However, if we analyze it in depth, it is easy to find such a reality: the mobile terminal outlet is the absolute factor that promotes maternal and infant e-commerce, while cross-border e-commerce is only a supplementary factor. In other words, if there is no mobile wave, it is almost impossible to have the spring of maternal and infant vertical e-commerce, and even if there is no cross-border e-commerce, maternal and infant vertical e-commerce will still be favored by venture capital.
Why do you say that?
First, the mobile terminal has revolutionized people’s shopping scenes for the second time, allowing the e-commerce form dominated by “search” to migrate to the fragmented “wandering and social” form, which allows vertical e-commerce with insufficient number of products to still obtain a large number of users. Without this factor, it is difficult for any vertical e-commerce to land in China. Previously, the failure of Redbaby is a typical case.
Second, the pilot of cross-border e-commerce has indeed made maternal and infant e-commerce shine, but it is only a channel for overseas maternal and infant products to enter China. If there is no such channel, these maternal and infant e-commerce companies can still import overseas maternal and infant products through general trade, but the efficiency of general trade import is lower and the cost is higher. Therefore, vertical maternal and infant e-commerce was formed under the tide of mobileization, and cross-border e-commerce is just a factor that adds icing on the cake.
As a major category of cross-border e-commerce, maternal and infant products did enjoy a lot of cross-border e-commerce dividends before the tax reform. Now that the dividends have receded, maternal and infant e-commerce has to return to the essence of e-commerce, focusing on user needs, and deepening its efforts in O2O, social networking, and even children’s education, medical beauty and other fields. Only in this way can differentiation be formed and a moat can be formed to resist e-commerce giants.
In short, the rise of maternal and infant e-commerce has never been based on the trend of cross-border e-commerce.