Digital retail, is a concept and word born in the internet age. More precisely, it is a being born in the post-e-commerce era. This has to be said to be somewhat forward-looking. However, at that time, digital retailing was just a concept, which appeared with the purpose and significance of resisting the fall of the e-commerce era.
If we were to summarise and define digital retail, we would think more of its many links with SaaS. In a sense, the so-called digital retail is synonymous with SaaS service providers. When we use this to define the concept and meaning of digital retailing, in fact, the development of digital retailing has gone back to the flow of the road, and back to the Internet track, although the digital retailing contains the word "digital", but in fact it is only a synonym for the Internet, which is just a method that Internet players have come up with in order to maintain their own advantages.
According to retail fair, digital retail players will not directly access the C-end traffic, but through the empowerment of merchants, such a B-end traffic to help them access the C-end traffic. It is not difficult to see that the flow is still the centre of gravity and origin of digital retail.
When the dividend of the Internet disappears no longer, especially when the dividend of the flow comes to an end, such a flow-led development model, also began to come to an end.
From this point of view, the digital retail development model led by live broadcasting with goods and the deep operation of public and private domain flows has really pushed the flow-led development model of digital retail to the highest peak.
The practice represented by live streaming and public-private domain traffic operation, which only takes traffic as the ultimate pursuit, although it can still obtain a certain dividend, however, compared with the traffic dividend period, the traffic at this moment, whether it is in terms of volume or quality, has long been incomparable, and the input-output ratio of digital retail players has also undergone a profound change - from "input is less than output" to "input is less than output", which is the same as that of digital retail. The input-output ratio of digital retail players has also changed profoundly - from "input is less than output" to the direction of "input is more than output".
In order to cope with such a new change, we have seen digital retail players start a new transformation. Whether it is breaking the traditional definition of traffic, adding new elements represented by AI and ChatGPT, or even transforming and upgrading from SaaS to PaaS, it is almost always a direct reflection of this phenomenon.
If the past digital retail players are summarised and outlined, they are all, without exception, a platform. On such a digital retail platform, merchants are the main players. Their mainstream business model is the S2B model, which is actually similar to the B2B model in the e-commerce industry.
According to retail fair, this is similar to the B2B model in the e-commerce industry, except that in the B2B model, the e-commerce platform is connecting merchants and consumers, while in the S2B model, the digital retail players are selling various tools and services to the merchants.
Under such a model, for every digital retail player, who holds enough merchant traffic, who occupies the mainstream of digital retail, who is the dominant player in digital retail. In essence, such a development model of digital retail is still Internet-style, and there is no essential difference between it and other scale- and efficiency-driven Internet models.
When the traffic began to peak, especially when digital retail players can no longer open up new imaginative space through the growth of traffic, we are seeing the end of the previous development model dominated by the Internet model. At such a moment, digital retail players are no longer looking outward, but are starting to look inward, starting to observe themselves and change themselves. How to define digital retail with new roles and how to find new goals and directions for the development of digital retail are becoming the new choices for more and more players.
If we define the new roles of digital retail players, I am more willing to define them as the infrastructure of digital retail and a part of digital retail.
According to retail fair, their profit model is no longer measured by the amount of traffic, no longer simply selling tools and services to merchants, but through the depth and breadth of the combination with the retail industry to achieve. At such a moment, whoever can produce as many connections with the retail industry as possible, whoever can continuously provide in-depth empowerment to the retail industry, and prompt the transformation and upgrading of the retail industry, will be able to achieve great development.
Source:
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/628516438