Advantages of offline entities in e-commerce industrial park

E-commerce companies need a physical office environment. E-commerce park is produced under this background. It can be seen as the projection and landing of online ecology, and it is the e-commerce ecology of offline entities.

First, analysis based on hardware.

The development of e-commerce parks mostly begins with finding more suitable office space (house). E-commerce is a kind of online retail, which is regarded as a new retail model without store constraints. However, we should return to the starting point of "house" as a park.

Why is this happening? Because the data of e-commerce can float in the cloud, the personnel, goods, desks and computers of enterprises operating e-commerce are tangible and need tangible space to carry them.

Before the emergence of e-commerce parks, online merchants were also operating and had their own "houses". Why did the park appear later? Let's review the office environment of online merchants before the emergence of the park. E-commerce enterprises, especially grassroots online merchants who started Taobao, have the following initial office environments: residential areas (many of them are their own homes), rural houses, and factories and warehouses in the urban-rural fringe. Until today, many online merchants still gather in such an environment. The biggest disadvantage of residential quarters and rural houses is that they are unsafe and irregular, not to mention the problems of fire regulations and company registration. There are no special warehouses and freight elevators in such places, so it is not convenient for goods to be stored and entered. This kind of environment gives employees the impression that unlike regular companies, it is difficult to expand the area during development. Although factory warehouses can solve the problems of company registration and warehousing, most of them are located in remote areas and lack living facilities. For e-commerce companies with college students as the main body, it will be more difficult to recruit people in such an environment.

In view of the above problems, when choosing the location of e-commerce park, the "house" as the hardware foundation needs to be considered in three parts:

1, office location: among the hardware requirements of e-commerce park, this is the most basic, and grassroots network operators often have low requirements for office environment. The problem we should pay attention to is to control the cost and not to choose a good location. Although metropolises subsidized the early rent of e-commerce park, the higher rent will still bring greater cost pressure to the future development of the park.

2. Storage location: Today, most online merchants still integrate storage and office, which is related to their business model and development scale. Few domestic e-commerce parks can really separate the office area from the storage area. There are generally two ways to solve the storage problem: one is to directly combine office and storage, which is the easiest way to operate, but it brings problems that it does not meet the fire protection requirements, the access routes of goods and people cross, and the park environment is more difficult to manage. The other is to set up a special storage area in or near the park. This mode is a good choice at present, but it needs to be considered when selecting the site of the park, and it is difficult to find a "house" that meets the requirements of office and storage location.

3. Living facilities: This problem has always been a problem for most parks, because the larger parks in China are located in relatively remote locations, such as Hangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, Chengdu and Shenzhen. Have encountered such problems. Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to solve this problem: first, we should pay full attention to this problem when choosing a site. Sometimes it's not terrible to choose a place far from the city. As long as there is a certain maturity around, living facilities can be self-contained. Secondly, if the surrounding facilities are not well built, the park can make its own internal facilities, such as canteens, supermarkets and sports facilities. , are not very expensive. Finally, we should make full use of the power of the government and strive for its support in talent dormitories, public facilities and bus lines.

Second, based on the analysis of the main views of the park

The hardware problem is basically solved, and then the "software" problem is solved. No matter how hard the hardware is, it can be solved by one-time investment. What is really difficult is the software problem. For e-commerce parks, the subjects closely related to the parks can be divided into three categories:

First of all, online merchants are undoubtedly the most important subject of an e-commerce park. The maturity of online merchants in each region is different. There is no uniform standard for choosing online merchants. Of course, it is best to gather a group of high-quality online merchants according to the local actual situation, but often the park may not be so attractive to online merchants at the initial stage of operation, so don't be arrogant. Regarding the choice of network operators, a more important consideration is to attract a group of network operators related to local advantageous industries, regardless of their current development. In the long run, the essence of e-commerce is business, and a good online merchant can't do without the support of offline advantageous industries.

Secondly, another important subject in the park is the service provider, which is increasingly valued by more and more parks. An important feature of online business is the outsourcing of a large number of links, not to mention express delivery. In photography, modeling, art design, promotion, training, operation, warehousing and other links, there are various outsourcing needs. Even in the financial sector, many small online enterprises choose to outsource. At present, many parks have realized the importance of attracting service providers, but the difficulty is that the market maturity of service providers is lower than that of network operators. Many parks are worried about not finding excellent service providers. Suggestions can be given as follows: First, attract service providers with more favorable policies than online merchants. Under the so-called reward, there must be a brave man. Second, consciously train some offline traditional enterprises to be service providers. For example, there are many talents who do photography and art work offline. How to guide them to surf the Internet? As long as you make money, you are not afraid that no one is interested.

Finally, in addition to network operators and service providers, many external stakeholders also affect the development of the park, including the government, industry research institutions, media and so on. The most important thing is the government. At present, more than half of the parks in China are directly built by the government, and other parks also have close cooperation with the government. This phenomenon is not surprising. As a new thing, e-commerce park has a large investment and a long payback period, so it needs to be given great discounts in the early stage to attract network operators and service providers. Without the cooperation of the government, such behavior is almost impossible. The focus here is how to deal with the relationship with the government. On the one hand, we need to actively communicate with the government and gain its understanding and support. On the other hand, judging from the specific operation of the park, this is not what the government is good at. It should be outsourced to a professional third party and operated according to the enterprise model. This has been proved in the practice of many parks, and it is a feasible and efficient mode for the government to participate in e-commerce parks.

Thirdly, analysis based on business process.

The composition of e-commerce park has been analyzed from the perspectives of "hardware" and "subject", but in fact, both "hardware" and "subject", as the constituent elements of the park, need to be integrated through reasonable planning and resource allocation, and the "hands" behind this are the operators and business processes of the park.

The operator of the park can be the government, a third party entrusted by the government, or an enterprise investing in the park. Judging from the practice of many parks in China, no matter who the operators are, the healthy development of parks can not be separated from three stages:

The first is the planning stage:

E-commerce is developing rapidly, and the transaction volume of Taobao is expected to exceed 1 trillion this year. In such a hot market atmosphere, many parks are competing to launch and want to share a piece of this field. But in fact, making parks is the same as making products. If you want to be your own brand, you must have your own market positioning and do something different. The positioning of a park is closely related to its geographical location, surrounding environment, the level of local Internet vendors and local industrial advantages. Only by combining these specific conditions and finding the right development direction of the park can the development of the whole park get twice the result with half the effort.

For example, we often emphasize the importance of talents to the park, but not all parks have the conditions to vigorously develop talent training. For those parks with dense universities and low labor costs, we can focus on talent training and output. Without these conditions, there is no need to consider talent output when planning, and more attention should be paid to how to attract talent input.

For another example, the positioning of industrial advantages is also very important. At present, the top categories of Taobao's transaction volume are clothing, cosmetics and 3C electronics, but many parks do not have this offline resource, so we should consider choosing the category that suits us, or by what means grafting the supply of core categories such as clothing and cosmetics.

Now there are some parks all over the country, which have begun to transform from doing everything to developing sub-industries. For example, the parks in Changshu, Jiangsu Province are mainly clothing, the parks in Cixi, Zhejiang Province are mainly small household appliances, and the parks in Zhuji, Zhejiang Province are mainly socks and pearls. Positioning itself is a process of continuous exploration and refinement, which may not be triggered at any time. But without positioning and brand building, we will gradually lose our first-Mover advantage in the future competition in the park, which is the same as opening a shop on Taobao.

The second stage is the investment stage:

The problems in the process of attracting investment in the park will mainly appear in three aspects:

One is that there is no threshold for attracting investment, and you have to seek more and faster. As long as it is an e-commerce, it will be recruited in the park. This practice is very common in some parks that require rent or occupancy rate. The main purpose is to make up the park as soon as possible in the short term, and less consideration is given to the quality of online merchants. This practice will be easy to take shape in the early stage, but if it develops, it will be found that the network operators in the park are very unstable and the rate of rent withdrawal is relatively high, which will seriously affect the stable operation of the park.

The other is that the investment threshold is too high, the non-annual sales are tens of millions, and non-Taobao well-known stores do not recruit. Some parks also focus on well-known B2C platforms. In this way, most governments are directly involved in the investment promotion of the park, hoping to build the park to a higher level. In fact, at present, Taobao's online merchants account for more than 70% of the sales in the B2C field, and among these 70% of the sales, medium-sized online merchants account for the most important share, and their sales are mostly between one million and ten million. If we break away from this situation and set the threshold too high at the beginning, it will lead to a very slow progress in attracting investment and unable to gather enough online merchants to form a cluster effect.

In the third case, there is no investment stage, and investment will continue until it is full. The development of an e-commerce park, just like a person, will inevitably go through different stages of start-up, growth, formation and maturity. In the early stage of this process, the cluster effect of network operators in the park is not obvious, the visibility of the park is not very prominent, and the attraction to well-known network operators is also weak. From the experience, if the park is developed for more than half a year, the advantages of the cluster will gradually be reflected, which will attract more high-quality online merchants. Therefore, it is impossible to fill the whole available space at one time for investment promotion in the park, otherwise good online merchants can't arrange it when they want to come in. Generally speaking, the progress of attracting investment can be divided into three stages, the early stage, the middle stage and the late stage, with the use area of 50%, 30% and 20% respectively, and the whole cycle is usually about one year. Of course, some parks are small in scale or new buildings are constantly being built, so it is impossible to completely copy this idea.

The third is the operation stage:

Compared with the planning stage and investment stage, it is the operation stage that really determines the development quality of an e-commerce park. Planning and investment promotion are basically completed in a limited time, while the operation of the park is a long-term process. In the operation stage, integrating internal and external resources and promoting the growth of online merchants are the embodiment of the value of the park.

The operation of the park is a big or small concept. Many parks simply understand the operation as providing venues, property management and network maintenance. This method can be used in office management, but it is far from enough for e-commerce parks. The contents of the park operation include: introduction of service providers, training and exchange, talent recruitment, warehousing and logistics, software services, investment and financing, industrial and commercial taxation, policy support, and improvement of living facilities. It takes a lot of energy to really do these things well.

This involves a question, why is the traditional office building rental so simple and the management of the e-commerce park so complicated? According to our experience, it is mainly influenced by the following factors:

The traditional business system consists of production (including brand building), distribution and retail, and each enterprise only plays a part of it. For example, no matter how big Procter & Gamble and Apple are, most products are not sold by themselves, but are distributed and retailed through third-party channels. The change of sales model brought by e-commerce directly leads to the gathering of production, circulation and retail links to one enterprise, and many online merchants are such a role. In this way, the length of network business chain far exceeds that of a traditional enterprise.

The enterprise scale of actual Internet providers, especially grassroots network operators, can't be compared with traditional enterprises at all. How to do more in a smaller scope? The solution here is division of labor and outsourcing. The whole growth history of Taobao is a process of continuous refinement of division of labor and outsourcing.

Nowadays, e-commerce has become a highly detailed division of labor. In the business chain of an online merchant, many links need to be completed in the form of outsourcing, from photography, art design, training and promotion to warehousing and logistics. Offline traditional enterprises often do these jobs themselves, and online businesses mostly do them through outsourcing. The premise of outsourcing is that there must be enough outsourcing service providers with sufficient quantity and quality, which is one of the biggest problems of network operators at present and the reason why the park has cluster advantages. By gathering network operators and service providers in the park, it is easier for them to find each other, thus improving transaction efficiency and reducing transaction costs.

If we compare the construction of e-commerce park to a drama, it must be the result of close cooperation of many links, in which "hardware" is a prop, "subject" is an actor and "operation" is a director. Only by effective cooperation of all links can we have a wonderful performance.