Renhe wants private domain retail He Tuberl to be a non-unified market, so infrastructure builders must be decentralized thinkers and non-imperialists. Infrastructure builders realize their own value by providing sufficient connection opportunities and creating more node connections. Instead of being an assassin and intercepting him halfway.

Although Tencent has clearly proposed this kind of mentality, pattern and strategy in 2011, the market will have to go through nearly ten years of testing and fully see Tencent’s credibility before retail companies can feel confident to join hands with Tencent to build private sector retail. market. Similarly, it will take time for various service providers around the private domain ecosystem to complete the closed loop of their own capabilities before they can form a heroic symphony.

In the era of shelf e-commerce, companies such as Alibaba have spent nearly 10 years making retail companies pay attention to and popularize e-commerce business forms. However, the emergence of the black swan event of the COVID-19 epidemic has caused nearly 80% of China’s retail companies to rapidly expand in the past two years. Complete the construction of digital business. And it is growing rapidly at a growth rate of 5-10% every year.

Nowadays, for most leading offline retail companies, their private domain transaction scale is between 15-30%, or even higher. This ratio is actually not much lower than the CPS private sector ratio of e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Tmall, and JD.com.

2020 is known as the first year of the private sector. In this year, Tencent finally began to assume the historical responsibility of China's private sector retail infrastructure.

All the contingencies in history have converged into necessity at this moment in history.

After three years of development. As of 2023, Tencent's public data shows that there may be 12 million companies operating in the private domain across the country, and 500 million users are active in the private domains of major companies every day. There are 5 companies with private domain revenue exceeding RMB 10 billion, and 40 companies with private domain revenue exceeding RMB 1 billion, while the revenue scale of private domain (mini programs) has reached trillions of RMB.

History has given Tencent huge opportunities, and the market has also given it new expectations for the future.

Can WeChat’s mission of connecting everything remain consistent?

Can Tencent stick to its original intention of decentralizing the business?

Tencent is getting bigger and bigger. Can the department responsible for private retail infrastructure get enough resources within the group to see the long-term development of the retail industry?

Partners in the retail industry chain are still waiting to see Tencent.

But here, the most uncertain link is still Tencent itself, especially the positioning of enterprise WeChat.

From the perspective of outside observers, Enterprise WeChat is somewhat tangled. They want to learn both DingTalk and WeChat.

So is DingTalk’s commercialization strategy suitable for WeChat Enterprise? DingTalk does not need to rely on better connection services between enterprises and C-end users to obtain revenue, so it will adopt the assassin model to charge.

For Tencent, how many connections can Enterprise WeChat create between enterprises and users? If the cost of this connection is low enough and the efficiency is high enough, how much space can be imagined for the future of Enterprise WeChat. Just like QQ and WeChat back then, they did not charge through the connection, but collected the underlying service fee through the transaction value created by the connection.

Regrettably, we have seen that WeChat Enterprise has taken the same detour that QQ paid back then. This is likely to shake the retail industry's confidence in Tencent's openness and role in connecting, and amid skepticism in the industry, Enterprise WeChat still insists on adopting the assassin model for charging.

In addition to the fact that retail companies have already paid the customer acquisition costs for Qi WeChat to bring users, Enterprise WeChat has not better explored the value space of retail business user operations, but has adopted the simplest method and directly charges based on the number of customers.

Lao Zhang is very doubtful whether this is in line with Tencent's long-term strategy and interests, although it can solve the short-term KPI problem of a department. To fundamentally solve this problem, Tencent may need to give the enterprise WeChat department sufficient strategic attention and resources, instead of continuing to benchmark it against DingTalk and wavering between 2B and 2C.

Different business models and corporate genes should not have the same commercialization ideas.

Of course, Tencent is an Internet company that continues to evolve, and it is also one of the most open-spirited platforms in China's Internet field. The private retail industry is looking forward to it continuing to be as far-sighted as ever and taking on the important task of building private retail infrastructure. .

If Tencent can realize this historical mission, it will once again achieve great leaps and bounds in the new historical cycle of decentralization just as it did when it implemented the open strategy.