Unclear corporate positioning can not control furniture e-commerce

Melaleuca Water Experience Hall: Binding online shopping with O2O mode

Melody: build an experience store to make furniture O2O ground gas

Melaleuca furniture: O2O mode into an ice age industry icebreaker

Melody: O2O becomes a new way for e-commerce

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Baidu News search keyword "Mele Lele", there are many similar reports about its O2O model. The author began to pay attention to the platform of the furniture O2O model before the first round of financing of Melaleuca, but after it raised 40 million US dollars in the B round, it felt that its positioning was increasingly blurred. After more than a year, I feel that it is necessary to analyze the problems and opportunities, and hope to give more or less help to Melody, and bring more thoughts to other home businesses who are ready to enter e-commerce or O2O.

Is the focus of Melaleuca online or offline? It still seems very confusing. And this must be clarified. Online or offline, because each has a completely different focus, the strategy is completely different.

Online, the most impressing consumers is price and convenience. At the same time, consumers will help themselves to judge before tens of millions of choices based on other people's evaluations. Under the line, the first key is experience, self. The moment when you feel beautiful, it doesn't matter what others say. Now there are quite a few merchants saying that I am not the best online and offline, but I am winning online and offline. Yes, this is obviously not a threshold, it is not difficult to do it. The hard part is, what is your core competitiveness?

What are the challenges of doing online?

1. How to make consumers love you more than love Taobao/Tmall? There are more choices on Taobao/Tmall, cheaper prices, and sales and user evaluation records from third parties that consumers trust. If the target population is price sensitive, Taobao/Tmall must be a good choice.

To achieve absolute advantage in price, profit margins will be crushed. Good prices can be support, but as a vertical e-commerce, you need to play a high-profile role and advantages. It is estimated that this is the reason why Melody has completely withdrawn from Taobao. It is a pity that in the homepage of Melody, the selling point is still only the price. The home is used to attract people or the price, even the new products are "new product specials."

As a vertical e-commerce, what can be done is that the method is more flexible, more innovative, and closer to the needs of consumers, and is not subject to platform rules and frameworks. In fact, Melody also has its own characteristics, such as its "five-step family" and "one-stop decoration quota all-inclusive". Unfortunately, the launch of these activities is placed in the five-page rotation of large banners, The eyeball effect is very weak.

2. In the field of furniture, what else can you spell in addition to the price? Fight for a more powerful delivery installation service. If there is no difference in the products sold, the only thing that can show the difference is the service. This is the most advantageous aspect of Merlot. They have already opened 136 stores across the country with their financial strength. The city with a store can provide the last mile of delivery installation service, and any quality problems can be solved locally.

Melaleuca can greatly enhance its competitiveness, but we have not seen this advantage strengthened. One of the big difficulties of furniture e-commerce is the installation service. If Melaleuca has this advantage, it can be the ultimate in the same way as Haidilao, thus forming the basis of word-of-mouth marketing. It is a pity that even in the microblog of Melody's more than 500,000 fans, using the service to do the keyword can not find any information about the impressed service.

3. Is the online operation and display capability excellent? It is very knowledgeable about what kind of picture to match what kind of customer group. Click on a bed pushed by the main menu of Melaleuca and see this picture:

If a customer buys a bed, you should recommend him to buy a bedside table, a bedding, or a bedroom lamp. How would he recommend him to buy two more beds? The bedroom crystal chandelier is not in line with the common sense of the home, because lying in bed will be directly glazed by the crystal lamp on the head. These details directly affect the professional image.

Consumers go to the physical store, no matter what they see, they will not go away immediately, but if they are a little dissatisfied, they will click to close. As a furniture e-commerce, there are also problems in combination with production technology, product matching, and home decoration style. To be competitive, there are many places where e-commerce operations can be studied. Take a bed show to compare the practices of Melaleuca and Lin's Wood:

Merlot's display includes 11 sheets, 3 overalls, 5 sections, 1 selling point description, 1 non-physical design, and 1 bedside table. The display of Lin's wood industry includes: 3 real shots of goods, 6 pieces of goods from bed to bed, 1 design concept, 1 set of accessories, 1 material analysis, 2 style descriptions, 1 product process , a total of 15 pictures. In addition to the number, there is a distance between the quality of the picture, the level of detail, the appeal of the text, and the speed at which the picture is opened. There is no intention to raise Lin's low Melody, but I want to compare the details to reflect the professionalism.

In fact, the furniture e-commerce investment in pictures is very large, clothing e-commerce, and IKEA official website also have a lot of pictures, but basically show the overall feeling can be, then their investment has been very large, not to mention In order to facilitate the order placement on the Internet, there must be partial details. When taking photos, you must use the same vision of the consumer to view the product on the spot.

From the above three points, the level of investment in Melaleuca is not enough. Obviously, Melody is not willing to be online only. Taiwanese designer Gao Hongshu joined Merlot Furniture Network in December 2012 and hopes to bring high-end fashion space design to more customers after cooperation. Melaleuca sees only two major problems on the line:

First, the traffic cost is getting higher and higher;

Second, the profit margin in the price is getting smaller and smaller.

So I want to play a world under the line. For this purpose, what is the challenge of doing offline?

1. How to display products in an inspiring way so that consumers can generate purchasing impulses. I have seen it in the store of Melaleuca. From the perspective of the furniture store, it can be said that it has not yet entered the role. The display, product mix, shopping guide and sales ability have no advantage compared with other furniture stores.

In fact, frankly, the real value that these physical stores are currently seeing is the service line. The purpose is to give consumers the opportunity to access the products so that they can buy more confidence. At the same time there is a fulcrum for delivery and installation in this city. If it is for this purpose, find a warehouse and simply decorate it, just like the IKEA pick-up area, so rent and decoration costs can be saved.

2. There must be a reason for the consumer to go to the store on the website. There are 15 places on the website of Melaleuca that mention the physical store. How can you think of it?

In the United States, many furniture websites can achieve true O2O. They are very clear about the benefits of taking passengers from the line to the offline. The biggest advantage is that they can reduce consumption and increase the unit price. So they will tell consumers a lot of physical store activities on the website, the most absolute of which is that offline prices are cheaper than online! It can be said that most of the furniture currently made in China is the O+O model, which is the online and offline multi-channel sales. There is no real sense of taking passengers from the line to the offline.

As O2O, the website itself is very different from online sales in terms of Internet product design. It is very important to interact with the user around the content and shopping experience, and thus promote consumers to the physical store. Now the main interaction on Melaleuca is to pop up a small box asking "What can help you", which does not add points to the experience.

3. How to rationalize input and output? Only the excellent grouping ability and offline operation ability can make the effect. O+O can be said to be the heaviest way of doing business. It has to be invested online, and it has to be invested offline. How much output will each investment have? Everyone said that IKEA is very powerful, there are many small things to sell, in fact, the emergence of these goods is not how far they look forward to, there was only one simple purpose: you can earn a small amount to pay for the usual cost of opening a shop. People who know the offline retail will see every square meter as precious, not just make it look good.

Melaleuca not only has to face the challenges of both online and offline, but also consider how to really get through, form a circular system and promote each other.

At this point of analysis, it can be said that neither the advantages of the Melaleuca line nor the advantages of the offline line can be seen, and the advantage of O2O is not seen.

In the final analysis, e-commerce is nothing more than two directions, or become an efficient retail channel, or establish your own brand. The former focuses on improving the efficiency of each retail segment and selling the same things cheaper than others; the latter focuses on reaching the target users and building a premium capability, which can sell things more expensive because of their own traits.

If you want consumers to remember that you are a great retail channel, whether it is European, American, Chinese, Korean, English, Mediterranean, neo-classical home products, you have the most cost-effective choice in Melody, enjoy the most Fast and appropriate services, you need to focus on the efficiency of the supply chain, focus on cutting costs. It is impossible to fight the price with high cost.

If you want consumers to remember that you are a very professional home brand, you can show the designer's design through the online, and through the physical store to let consumers remember that you are better than others, but it is impossible to be in the European, American, Chinese, Korean, English, Mediterranean, and neoclassical have become experts, and each lifestyle has its own unique culture, appeals, and target groups. Consumers' minds are not so well occupied, and it is not easy to remember them in one aspect. Each targeted target consumer has many characteristics that require in-depth understanding and then explore and guide their needs.

In other words, to be a cost-conscious retailer, don't open a store and ask for a designer. If you want to open a store and ask a designer to make a brand, you should concentrate on understanding where to build a premium. If you want to do anything, if you don’t focus on being unprofessional, the flow of money can’t be saved. As for Melaleuca's increasing categories and cooperation with Haier, it does not seem to make much sense in the case of unclear positioning.

Only if the positioning is clear, you will not be entangled, you can concentrate resources to do one thing. Melaleuca must be clear about its direction as soon as possible, and continue to do deep work in this direction. The author hopes that Melody will survive very well and become a model for vertical e-commerce in China's home furnishing industry. 40 million US dollars can be burned with a fire, and it is impossible to survive by financing. Moreover, it is not an easy task to get the next home by scale in the current environment. It is important to face the problem and live in reality.

For all companies, it is necessary to first understand what their core competitiveness is, and then say O2O.