news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

Author: Gu Senqi, Retail Park

Recently, Taobao made major changes to its merchant rules, which were officially implemented on August 9. Among them, the most discussed was the adjustment of the "refund only" rule, which is to enhance merchants' after-sales autonomy based on experience points and reduce or eliminate after-sales intervention for high-quality stores.

It is reported that after the implementation of the new regulations, for merchants whose store comprehensive experience score is ≥4.8 points, the platform will not actively intervene through Wangwang and support refunds only after receipt of goods, but will encourage merchants to negotiate with consumers first.

For merchants in other segments, the platform will grant different degrees of autonomy based on experience points and industry nature. The higher the experience score, the greater the merchant's autonomy.

In addition to grading merchants and no longer applying a one-size-fits-all approach, Taobao is also constantly optimizing the refereeing side and is committed to improving fairness on the merchant side.

For example, in the refund appeal process, after the merchant initiates the appeal, the platform will ask a third-party testing agency to conduct random inspections on the products. If the inspection passes, the platform will compensate the merchant for the loss. At the same time, Taobao announced that it will upgrade the refund-only abnormal behavior recognition model to enhance the recognition of abnormal behaviors such as abnormally high-frequency refunds, returning empty packages with few items, and high-frequency refunds for counterfeit products. At the same time, it will pay close attention to unreasonable refund behaviors to protect the rights and interests of merchants.

At this point, in the game between Taobao users and merchants, the balance that had previously accelerated in the direction of imbalance and tilted toward users has shown a tendency to return to balance.

This drastic reform follows the intensified conflicts between users and merchants after the "refund only" pilot on Taobao for more than half a year, which led to the rise of freeloaders and the unbearable suffering of small and medium-sized merchants. Some merchants even took malicious refund buyers to court, and were willing to pay huge lawyer fees to vent their anger.

This also taught Taobao a lesson, making it realize once again that the soil of e-commerce is "oranges grown in the north of the Huai River become sour" - blindly copying Pinduoduo's experience is not advisable, and imitating others will only result in a mess.

Today, through a series of operations such as "only refunding in different levels" and withdrawing from price wars, Taobao has found a delicate balance between merchants and users, and is gradually regaining its own path.

1. Overcorrection leads to a mess

Between users and merchants, the role of e-commerce platforms has always been awkward: like a son caught between a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, or parents in a large family, they face the life-and-death decision of "who to save first if someone falls into the water" every day.

If we are not careful and fail to handle the balance issue properly, the conflict between the two will be exacerbated, leading to a farce of "discord between children is mostly due to the immorality of their parents."

This is mainly due to the fact that as Alibaba's user growth rate continues to slow down and its market share is being eroded by Pinduoduo, Taobao is eager to please users and is inevitably overcorrecting.

In April this year, Alibaba Chairman Joseph Tsai publicly reflected on the reasons why Alibaba fell behind, and even used such a heartbreaking phrase as "reaping the fruits of one's own actions."

"Because we forgot who our real customers were. Our customers were the people who were using our app to make purchases, and we weren't giving them the best experience. So in a way, we kind of reaped the fruits of our own labor."

In addition to public reflection, the overall strategic shift has already begun. In May last year, Jack Ma said at a small-scale communication meeting of Taobao that "the methodologies that Alibaba relied on for success in the past may no longer be applicable and should be changed quickly." The "past successful methodologies" undoubtedly include the "customer first" strategy that was once proud of and oriented towards the interests of merchants.

Last September, Wu Yongming, who assumed the position of CEO of Alibaba Group, identified the two strategic focuses of "user first, AI-driven" and said: "We must be more determined to shift to the user perspective and meet user needs in multiple dimensions. User needs are prioritized above all else."

In December last year, Taobao officially released the "refund only" rule, which means that if a seller has too many negative reviews or violations, is complained by consumers, or the seller delays or forces shipment without the buyer's permission, the system will support buyers to only refund.

There is nothing wrong with protecting the interests of users, but the introduction of refund-only policy is undoubtedly too radical and pushes merchants into the fire pit: "You only care about the life and death of small babies, have you ever cared about the life and death of big babies?"

After the refund-only policy was launched, countless merchants reported that they were almost "fleeced" by the wool-grabbing party - in addition to individual freeloaders, there is even a related industrial chain that only refunds the money immediately after receiving the goods, and then sells them at a low price on Xianyu.

The malicious freeloaders are infuriating, but the platform's inaction is even more disheartening for the merchants. In addition, the platform even took the initiative to jump out and indiscriminately side with the users - a merchant reported that the customer just wanted to change the size of the clothes, and the Taobao system automatically identified and directly refunded the customer's money; small orders were only refunded, saying it was a quality issue, and the platform refunded the money immediately...

Merchants who frequently suffer losses can only strive to save themselves, from traveling thousands of miles to chase products to even resorting to lawsuits.

In June this year, Jie Wenhui, a seller from Shanghai, drove more than 900 kilometers to Kaifeng, Henan to find a buyer for 12 pairs of socks. Later, the buyer returned the 12 pairs of socks under the persuasion of local police, which was hailed as "very gratifying" by the industry. In July this year, a buyer only received a refund after purchasing clothes worth 11 yuan online. The seller sued the buyer, who was sued after mediation by the People's Court of Zhongshan County, Hezhou City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and the seller finally paid 800 yuan in costs for the buyer's rights protection.

At the same time, merchants across the country are uniting to form a merchant mutual aid association to launch a "self-defense counterattack" against the wool party. According to Hangzhou Daily, from the establishment of the merchant mutual aid association on May 19 this year to the present, in just two months, the number of merchants who applied to join the merchant mutual aid association has grown from more than 2,000 to nearly 20,000, and the amount of "refund only" orders ranges from a few yuan to several thousand yuan.

Taobao has also noticed this, and merchants have reached the point where they can no longer tolerate the one-size-fits-all "refund only" policy.

Based on this, Taobao began to turn the tide.

2. The industry withdraws from the "Pinduoduo imitation show"

Why is Taobao's refund policy "a thankless task"?

In fact, at a time when the industry is "questioning Pinduoduo, understanding Pinduoduo, and becoming Pinduoduo", it has overlooked one fact: not everyone can become Pinduoduo.

The mess of Taobao's refund process alone has taught the industry a lesson: blindly ignoring its own ecosystem and imitating Pinduoduo will only lead to the "unfair imitation effect".

Take the "refund only" policy that many industries are benchmarking against. It was originally a means for Pinduoduo to punish merchants selling counterfeit goods.

Pinduoduo has many white-label products at low prices because it avoided big brand manufacturers in the early days and connected the goods of small white-label manufacturers with the vast sinking market to achieve demand allocation and resource docking. The implementation of the "refund only" policy can deter counterfeit merchants.

At the same time, the prices of white-label goods are generally low, and the logistics costs are also low. They follow the route of "cheap and large quantity". Even if merchants occasionally encounter freeloaders, the overall market is still profitable. They will not easily take hundreds or thousands of dollars for free and suffer major shocks and be directly "fleeced" like Taobao merchants.

As Dingjiao reported, Meng Qi, a senior practitioner in the retail industry, pointed out in an interview that each company has different advantage categories. Pinduoduo has many white-label merchants and the entry threshold for merchants is relatively low. The merchant ecosystem needs strong supervision. "Only refunds" appear to be to protect consumers, but in fact it is also one of the main ways for the platform to govern and put pressure on merchants.

Now, Taobao has clearly awakened - those who learn from Pinduoduo will survive, and those who are like Pinduoduo will die. Taobao, having learned from its experience and lessons, is now finding itself again: in addition to loosening up and only providing refunds, Taobao is also gradually withdrawing from the price war.

Last year, Alibaba shouted the slogan "Return to Taobao", which essentially means returning to the low-price field.

After the 618 Shopping Festival this year, Taobao Group announced a series of major strategic adjustments at a closed-door meeting with merchants. The most eye-catching one is that Taobao will weaken its absolute low-price strategy - the system of allocating search weight according to the "five-star price power" will be weakened and changed back to allocation based on the total GMV merchandise transaction amount.

Previously, Wu Yongming had stated that he would use GMV as the primary indicator and return to the shelf e-commerce model.

It's not just Taobao, the industry is gradually withdrawing from price wars.

As previously predicted by Zhuang Shuai, a retail e-commerce expert and co-founder of Bailian, "When all platforms are involved, the final result is that the prices of goods on major e-commerce platforms will quickly converge, and the dividends that can be brought by simply relying on price cuts will decrease."

A person close to Douyin's e-commerce department revealed that Douyin's e-commerce algorithm rules may return to the GPM era from OPM. Douyin will no longer pursue small profits but quick turnover of orders, but will focus more on the sales in the live broadcast room. Only because of the fierce internal competition of the 618 promotion, it triggered a strong backlash from the merchant side. Many leading merchants chose to flee the promotion, and the conflict was brought to the table.

Today, the industry is changing its tune.

Taobao, which has switched back to allocating revenue based on GMV merchandise transactions, is once again trying to find its feet in "brand" and "service" - weakening the low-price strategy will help improve the overall quality of merchants on the platform and encourage merchants to attract consumers by improving product quality, optimizing service experience, etc., rather than relying solely on low-price competition.

At the same time, when "consumption downgrade" has become a keyword, the more important trend of "consumption stratification" is often overlooked. Today, Taobao has realized the increasingly diverse needs of consumers and is working to promote "each consumption level" within the platform.

In response to this, Taobao, which has withdrawn from the "craziness of pleasing consumers", has gradually found a balance between merchants and consumers.

3. Multi-party return to balance

After this rule change, Taobao still holds the initiative in the hands of the platform and uses "carrots and sticks" on merchants, forcing them to improve their services and quality in order to gain more disposal rights.

For merchants, if they want to avoid after-sales service, they need to improve service quality in the entire chain of pre-sales, sales, and after-sales. To this end, Taobao also included a prediction and answer to merchants' concerns under the notice: "I want to improve my store experience score to 4.8 points or above, what can I do?"

Taobao responded that the store experience score is a comprehensive assessment of the data indicators in the past 30 days from the three dimensions of product quality, logistics speed, and service guarantee. Merchants need to improve the delivery logistics speed while ensuring the quality of the goods, and provide timely and high-quality after-sales service guarantees to consumers. "For details, please refer to the store experience score improvement strategy. You can view the store experience score performance through the "Qianniu Workbench Store-Comprehensive Experience Score", analyze and locate problems and make targeted improvements."

Today, driven by policies, not only Taobao, but the industry in general will strengthen support and protection for merchants and promote the healthy development of the e-commerce ecosystem.

Starting from September 1 this year, the State Administration for Market Regulation's "Interim Provisions on Anti-Unfair Competition on the Internet" will be officially implemented. Article 24 of the "Provisions" states that platform operators shall not use service agreements, transaction rules and other means to impose unreasonable restrictions or impose unreasonable conditions on transactions, transaction prices and transactions with other operators within the platform.

Even Pinduoduo is loosening up its refund-only policy. It is reported that although there are no major changes to the text of the new "Pinduoduo After-Sales Service Rules" released by Pinduoduo on July 22, there have been rumors from multiple channels recently that the refund-only policy will be revised, and the direction is likely to be to relax the refund-only policy. According to Phoenix Finance, an e-commerce blogger said that he had received an internal letter from Pinduoduo's backend that the platform would no longer intervene in refund-only policies rejected by merchants within 36 hours.

As all parties return to balance, the e-commerce industry is also ushering in a new normal of development.

There will not be another Pinduoduo legend, nor will there be another decisive battle of "you die or I forget" - seeking growth between balance and maintenance is the key word in the second half.