Baby is vying for dominance in cross-border e-commerce, Alibaba is determined to compete with Amazon, and Wish, a young upstart, has quietly emerged. Wish focuses on the mobile terminal and is a pure third-party marketplace platform. This Silicon Valley startup founded in 2011 started out as a humble photo social application. Until 2013, the platform added a commodity trading function to sell Chinese goods to American users.
This change has made Wish a dark horse in the cross-border e-commerce mobile terminal. The transaction volume reached 100 million U.S. dollars that year, and now it has soared to 3 billion U.S. dollars. The profit model is to charge a fixed fee of 15% based on the transaction volume. commission. In terms of cheap goods, Wish and AliExpress have similar target consumer groups. Keywords and pages are based on Amazon’s model. The user interface is recommended based on gender and hobbies on the mobile side, similar to eBay’s “Collections” preference collection model. , when searching for products, the weight ranking is mainly based on sales volume and collection degree.
In addition to learning from many schools, Wish must have unique skills to win unexpectedly. The biggest feature is the mobile terminal. 98% of orders come from the mobile terminal. Even if you open the PC web version, it is extremely simple and only provides search. There are columns for you to choose from, and there is not even a category catalogue. Users are unable to make price comparisons due to the limited display of mobile devices. The chance of gaining more attention through low-priced products on the Wish platform is much smaller than on other platforms. Therefore, sellers cannot blindly choose low-priced products when selecting products. They must establish a product line suitable for mobile terminals.
Another distinctive feature of Wish is its precision marketing model, which uses users’ registration information to analyze past browsing information and speculate on users’ preferences. When you use Wish’s mobile app, you will find that it will automatically push popular collections under a certain category, and will also recommend products based on the user’s previous search and reading habits.
Among them, popular collections are the seller’s reference for product selection. Precisely because Wish recommends accurate products to users through its own system algorithm, unlike sellers on other platforms who need to buy advertising space and traffic, Wish’s traffic distribution is more fair.
After the success of Wish, it successively launched five market segment apps, namely electronic 3C product Geek, maternal and infant product Mama, cosmetics Cute household product Home, and high-quality and affordable product ScreamPrice. Fragmented browsing with unclear purchasing purposes will lead to high consumption impulsivity and desire, and the visual range is very focused, making it impossible to rely more on memory comparisons. This is the main reason for the high conversion rate on the mobile terminal.
However, the maturity of the new platform still has several hurdles to overcome. First of all, mobile has become a standard feature of major platforms and even brands. Cross-border mobile apps such as BellaBuy, StyleWe, and Chic Me, which focus on mobile, have more or less imitated Wish’s route. How to maintain this unique advantage will definitely require sustained efforts. Technical follow-up.
Secondly, due to the competition between user experience and low-priced products, the unit price per customer is too low, resulting in unguaranteed product quality and low logistics efficiency. For this reason, Wish has strengthened intellectual property protection and severe penalties. system, “Wish Post” has strengthened logistics and added policies such as delay insurance and overseas warehouse subsidies. Finally, it is difficult for users with high traffic to make secondary purchases. Wish was born from Facebook ads. Users went to Wish to buy things because they got a $5 gift card.
Therefore, the new platform is highly dependent on traffic from social platforms and relies on constant investment in activities, promotions and advertising. With the commercialization of social media, many have launched their own e-commerce platforms or shopping options. Facebook has cooperated with the e-commerce platform Shopify to launch shopping functions, and invested in Farfetch Amazon. Quidsi entered Facebook. Competition has become increasingly apparent, and Wish has fallen out of favor. In 2015, in order to enhance complementarity, Wish received investment from JD.com.