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May 24, 2024, 09:32:58 AM |
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15 years ago, I was facing graduation from college and needed to submit a paper. Although I was a student majoring in finance, I saw the online shopping platform that had not yet become a trend. I found a company in Beijing called "e-country 1 hour". It claims that as long as you live in the urban area of Beijing, as long as you place an order on its platform, even if it is just a bottle of Coca-Cola, it can still be delivered to you within 1 hour.
After studying its business logic and current situation, I asserted that it was about to go bankrupt. Yes, it went bankrupt soon. But it had a profound impact on me.
From its rise and fall, I found that the core point of the online shopping platform is to have a strong logistics system. This logistics system can ensure the life cycle of completing orders while still allowing merchants to make profits.
Since then, I have become more and more interested in online shopping platforms. From Taobao, Amazon, eBay, JD.com, to today's TEMU, giants are fighting fiercely in this market. Now, online shopping is the jewel in the crown of business, and everyone is eager to get it.
Pinduoduo and its subsidiary TEMU have launched a subversive revolution against the old giants in recent years. In the past, merchants needed to pay high fees to the platform to ensure their exposure on the platform and obtain valuable traffic. These costs were eventually transferred to the consumer side. However, Pinduoduo innovated the business logic: it obtained a huge amount of "deterministic orders" from the seller side, forcing merchants to compete with each other - whoever has a lower price can get these orders.
As a result, the cost of consumers has been greatly reduced, and merchants have obtained stable and deterministic orders. They do not need to worry about inventory and are only responsible for production.
But the problem follows: the products born under such logic are useless from brand to quality. Why is Pinduoduo still successful?
The answer still lies in consumers - these consumers are at the bottom of society, their number is so large, their Engel coefficient is so high, their income is meager, but they still yearn for a better life.
Nobel Prize winner and Indian economist Banerjee wrote a famous research book "The Nature of Poverty", which contains counterintuitive statistics: in many families who are so poor that they can't even afford to eat, after finally earning some money, they will choose to buy entertainment products such as game consoles.
The reason is somewhat similar to the theory of pacifiers: day-to-day poverty will gradually dispel a person's expectation that the future will be better, so they would rather not spend money to verify the change - such as learning a skill - and satisfying the desire to live in the present is the most important, so even if they live in areas with high incidence of malaria, between only being able to buy a mosquito net and a box of potato chips, most of the experimental subjects will choose the latter without hesitation.
The world is still poor. From the perspective of the long tail theory, they are the real market.
Now, if there is a shopping platform based on blockchain, these poor consumers buy goods on this platform at low prices, and they will receive block rewards for every purchase and the amount of purchase. And this shopping platform implements the Pinduoduo model, and the goods provided by the platform will be unbranded and guaranteed to be of the lowest quality. Therefore, these consumers can not only get the guarantee of quality of life, but also get extra subsidies from their shopping behavior.
They can even abandon their own junk currency and rely on the stable currency issued in the blockchain to ensure that they will not be affected by inflation.
They can try to learn DEFI and open up additional income channels for themselves. They can learn to pledge and make their own contributions to the security of the system. The most important point is that they can hold the money in their own hands and avoid being exploited by the strong.
Blockchain should not be a game for technical hackers and big capitalists to make money, nor should it be a castle in the air limited to the cyber world. The essence of blockchain technology is to save people in the real world from the exploitation of centralized power - whether it is political centralization or financial centralization.
This is a grand dream, but I know that I can't do it all by myself. I hope someone is willing to discuss this with me, or even willing to act with me.
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