What is e-commerce? How can I be an e-commerce?

What is e-commerce? Simply put, it is e-commerce and online shopping, but e-commerce is definitely not just opening a Taobao shop or being a Taobao. When most enterprises start to do e-commerce, their understanding of e-commerce is only a preliminary concept: enterprises directly connect with consumers, remove the price difference between middlemen and earn more profits. Then recruit programmers and start your own e-commerce journey.

Imagination is beautiful, but the reality will not be so smooth, and it is likely to be particularly painful to fall!

E-commerce is actually a very broad concept. It is like a net, and the program is just a dotted line in this net.

Before talking about e-commerce, let's first understand what business is. The core of business is enterprise, peer enterprises constitute industry, and related industries constitute industry. This is also a business process that can be described by value chain, supply chain and industrial chain.

Value chain refers to enterprises creating value for customers, which can be simply described as: product design-raw material procurement-factory production-warehouse storage-logistics and transportation-marketing promotion-intermediate sales-consumer purchase. In the middle of the sales process, many roles are derived, such as dealers, distributors, distributors and retailers. Such a simple chain has expanded into a complex "small network".

Supply chain is to combine the related roles in the process of product production and circulation into a reasonable network structure according to a reasonable process. For example: raw material suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and end consumers. Supply chain is like a team network, from one enterprise to multiple enterprises, and multiple enterprises are combined into a larger collaborative network.

What is the industrial chain? The industrial chain is more macroscopic and belongs to the cluster structure, but the industrial dimension is basically beyond the scope of most small and medium-sized enterprises.

Knowing the physical business process makes it easier to understand the business model and product positioning of e-commerce products. Common types of e-commerce are B2C, B2B, B2B2C, C2C, O2O, Fengkou New Retail, C2M and C2B. If cross-border trade has the particularity of customs clearance, cross-border e-commerce is actually a big classification. To put it more simply, the current e-commerce models are generally divided into: business-to-business, business-to-user, business-to-user, user-to-business and so on. , and choose different e-commerce modes according to the positioning of enterprises and users.

If you are an e-commerce company now, do you think it is better to be Taobao or Taobao? First of all, you should understand your position and what position you want to put your career in. If you just want to be a B2C, and want to hand over the goods directly to users, the wisest way is to open a Taobao shop, a fast and safe e-commerce idea.

If you position your business in an industry, this is a huge goal. You must develop your own independent shopping mall platform, and you can also cooperate with mainstream platforms such as Vipshop. These platforms also have open SDK, which will be of great help to your own mall.

What should an independent e-commerce platform do? It is definitely not a simple order and purchase, but an integrated system composed of commodity center, dispatching center, payment center, WMS and many other plates. Once it is decided to build such a system, enterprises will be located in a more macro position, not limited to the dimension of a single enterprise. Building a platform and optimizing industry efficiency will always be a bigger cake.