落园专注经济视角下的互联网 / Economic Observation of the Internet

You can see the Chinese version here: http://www.loyhome.cn/481.html

.Com bubble in the starting of this century is still in someone’s memory nowadays. But today I’d like to talk about the latest trend in present website world.
The bulletin board system (BBS) was anticipated to become three shapes by someone in the past:

• News Aggregation (Like Yahoo.com or Sina.com),
• Community and Forum (Like MySpace.com and Mop.com),
• and E-commercial website (Like Ebay.com and Taobao.com, or Amazon.com or Dangdang.com).

This results from the three main prototypes of BBS. Here I am not going to discuss this topic in a theoretical way. Instead, I’d love to introduce what I have focused on during these days.

Dangdang.com (just a website like amazon.com) is one of the most popular and successful B2C (Business to Customer) website in China. It shares a bigger proportion in online shopping than the compeers and sometimes we regard it as the leader of these websites. Now the hottest pieces of news in the Chinese Internet world is that “Amazon.cn decreased the rate of return-back to the spread alliance” and “Also increased the standard of free-carriage shopping”, which represents the idea about “Internet’s winter is coming” that Ma Yun, the leader of Alibaba.com, said some days ago in his company’s conference.

But let’s see it in the long-term. I had my first experience of online shopping in nearly the year of 2001 on Dangdang.com( In Chinese only). Today Dangdang.com is much more different than it used to be in the past. No matter what we see, the indexes from its statistic data like sale quantity and the gross visits of the website, or the explosion of its goods and new pattern of selling, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that dangdang.com has undergone a long-term change and benefited much from these years. In some ways, we can say that dangdang.com is a lucky one, although not as strong as Amazon.com. It has build a wonder in the internal environment. Who smiles last smiles the best. These years witnessed the growth of domestic publication and transportation. The success of dangdang.com is not only because of its fortune, but also a certain result. Without dangdang.com, there must be someone else doing the same things like it as well.

However, the most popular class of websites in China currently is SNS, which can be represented by Xiaonei.com which is the copyist of Facebook.com. Douban.com is welcome by many people here in China as well. I don’t want to distinguish them clearly, though there is much difference. In fact they are in the same way of attracting individual’s attention and trying to keep them in their spaces. Although douban.com copied the mode of website from the US, the managers of it have done a good job in localization. I wonder that how many of you have the feeling that it’s difficult to choose a valuable book from thousand of publications in today’s market and how many of you are willing to share the happiness or soreness with the others who read the book as well. All these problems are solved by the free service from douban.com. The information exchange is the most essential and significant task of the Internet, which can be shown well in this way.

The last one I’d like to talk about is Taobao.com, which is well known in China by the old and young. It is famous for the hundred and thousand categories of goods the sellers supplied. Nevertheless, many people are fond of it as well as hating it. They usually have the happy experience that a lot of money was saved and the good quality productions were bought by shopping there. Meanwhile, some sellers were cheating and the buyers lost much money. Despite of these, Taobao.com has successfully surpassed Wal-Mart in selling scale, which is more than surprising. Most people still remembered that taobao.com won the competition with ebay in China a few years ago.

The only reason why I put these types of websites together here is that we can easily see the trend –they are learning from each other – in the present market. Maybe it’s better to take Baidu.com into account at the same time, but not yet.

Taobao.com offers most of the information in the ground of exchange web pages. In spite of those, the most welcome area is Taobao’s community, where visitors can share their experience and give advices to others. The numerous posts show the real situation of online shopping to every one in this electronic and numeric world.

Douban.com is a community of reader and music fans. So there isn’t any need to say more.

Obviously, dangdang.com is devoting itself into the establishment of the customer-response system. A series of strategies have been used to draw the users’ attention and encourage them to leave a comment on what they have bought or what they are going to buy. Another sign is that the best-selling book list on dangdang.com now becomes one of the best references for customers. Most of the books on this list can provide much money to both the authors and the publishers. More precisely, the famousness comes with money together. Meanwhile, the deeper exploitability of these books is developed rapidly.

It seems that now most people go shopping online not only for the convenience and low price but also the trust of the valuable information, which represent the low cost of information exchange through the network has remarkably decreased the exchange cost. Maybe it’s a very interesting phenomenon in economics and there are appearing more and more new ways of trade using the Internet. It does not simply influence the traditional distribution pattern, but contains much about advertisements and spread ways. We can say that almost every step in the culture industry has been changed much and benefited from this application.

There are always people who like to make a forecast. In fact, the Internet certainly brings us surprise every a few months. It’s really hard to say which method can succeed in the future. I would rather like to say that the advanced pattern, spread strategy, ability of techniques and continuous improvement are the pivotal elements in the success.

1. Advanced patterns: The spirit of innovation, and the test of creating something absolutely new.
2. Spread strategy: According to the success of Kaixin001.com, most community website need a large number of users and must keep them in their spaces.
3. Ability of techniques: To realize the ideas and ensure that others cannot copy their pattern in a short term.
4. Continuous improvement: Rapid response to the change in the market and requirement of users.

Commonly when we are going to evaluate a program the first thing we do is to set up our goal and the most important part of the goal is the market sharing proportion. So what should we consider more? I cannot give you an exact answer here because there are the numerous variables and the perfect model based on mathematic analysis could not explain the realistic world quite well. Even though we cannot use the happiness of a fact to explain another fact, the better way should be just follow the forth goers. As a matter of fact, the survival websites in China are most like the shadows of some foreign websites.

At last, the web2.0 let us to participate widely in present virtual world. This is the very chance that websites could survive and grow. The community and users’ circle are good ways of keeping the visitors which is called “User’s Loyalty” in management. But it is also easy for others to rob users from you and you only achieve the financial loss. In the information age, how to exploit the most of user’s information and try to apply it in your service is a key awareness. Many websites are doing excellent tests and maybe a rapid progress can be seen in a short time. But according to the form of internal environment, it’s more likely to see that some big websites who have the monopoly of the market, which is resulted from the technical barrier. On the other hand, it may not be a bad thing to today’s Chinese Internet industry. Who can know the future result?

Posted by Liyun

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