Huachuang Securities released a research report today saying that in March 2024, Taobao Tmall GMV increased 14% compared to last year, exceeding Pinduoduo's 13% year-on-year increase.
Taobao is also leading e-commerce platforms in terms of user activity and length of use. In March of this year, Taobao's MAU (number of monthly active users) reached 910 million, an increase of 10% over the previous year, maintaining the first place among e-commerce platforms. Compared with the generally negative growth of short video platforms, Taobao increased 25% year on year, and the number of pages opened also showed a marked year-on-year increase.
Huachuang Securities pointed out that due to the impact of low price competition, the overall order conversion rate and price of domestic e-commerce have declined compared to previous years. From January to February 2024, the average unit price of packages across the network was 78.3 yuan/piece, down 28 yuan/piece from the same period last year. It was mainly affected by the increase in low unit price products in Pinduoduo and Doukuei. However, the customer unit price on Taobao and Tmall bucked the trend and increased 8.4% year-on-year in the first quarter.
Taobao and Tmall gained a new driving force for growth from a series of business actions returning to users, and achieved a sharp rise in volume and price in the first quarter of this year.
Since Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group, became the chairman of Taotian Group, he proposed using “returning to users” as the core of the strategy, focusing on the experiences users are most concerned about in e-commerce competition and carrying out comprehensive improvements. Since then, Taotian Group has launched a series of initiatives to comprehensively enhance the comprehensive experience of products, supply, and services.
Since this year, Taotian Group has continued to optimize various aspects such as logistics, after-sales, and 88VIP service, and launched a “refund-only” service to upgrade the user experience. The average delivery time decreased by 8.1 hours, the average return and refund time decreased by 17 hours, and Wangwang's customer service satisfaction increased by 6 percentage points.
The comprehensive experience rating standards for stores have been comprehensively upgraded to include factors that users are highly concerned about, such as the store's “refund rejection rate”, “platform help rate”, “return shipping insurance”, “abnormal trajectory rate”, “promised timeliness”, and “door-to-door delivery” in the assessment to provide resources for good service merchants.
In March of this year, Taobao launched a “use first, pay later” service. Consumers can order products for 0 yuan at the contracted merchant's store, confirm receipt, and then pay. For this service, merchants can independently choose whether to sign up or not, and can withdraw at any time. If bad debts occur, the platform is responsible.
Taobao updated its freight insurance rules at the same time. In the case of a consumer refund in transit, the freight insurance can directly cover the courier interception fee. In other words, when a user refunds an order that has not yet been delivered, the platform will connect logistics and automatically intercept the goods in transit. The merchant does not need to bear the courier interception fee and the risk of being “refunded only”, and the user does not have to accept the goods first and then return them.
In response to the problem of long pre-sales of apparel products, which are often reported by users, Taobao has also introduced new regulations requiring that the daily pre-sale period for women's clothing products should not exceed 15 days.
On the merchant side, in order to reduce the operating costs of merchants, starting in April of this year, the Taosha management tool “Business Counselor” will be completely free. At the same time, the Xiaomi customer service robot and image space are free for businesses under a certain size. This move has been widely interpreted by the outside world as an important transformation move by Taobao to improve operational efficiency.
On April 16, Ali Mama released a new product “full-site promotion” based on large-scale model capabilities. It will be fully connected to the search and recommendation resource site to provide a one-step full-site traffic operation solution for products, and significantly improve the traffic conversion efficiency of merchants. During the closed beta period, sales of products sold by all participating merchants increased 62% month-on-month compared to before launch. The rate of sales of existing merchants increased by 301.92%, and GMV increased 2.97 times.
Recently, Taobao and Tmall released a series of AI tools and services for merchants. Merchants can use AI to open stores with one click, support rapid delivery, intelligent decoration, and detailed generation, and complete new store creation and product sales within 5 minutes.
Industry insiders generally believe that Taobao's attention and investment in user experience since this year has significantly enhanced the platform's competitiveness, and it is expected that GMV and user activity will continue to grow.