From Taobao intern to the father of Pinduoduo

Chapter 58 Public Opinion

"Holy crap, you can play like that?"

Wang Zaixing was truly convinced. He felt that Lin Mu was in a very high position, guiding him, who was in a lower position, and that every idea Lin Mu proposed was ahead of its time.

He gave Lin Mu a thumbs up and said, "Dayan, I'm impressed, I'm truly impressed. I'll go write the proposal right now."

"You absolutely have to sign your name on the proposal. Your idea is so ahead of its time. If you hadn't mentioned it, I would never have thought of organizing an Ugly Things Festival."

Lin Mu knew that this was not because he was particularly good, but because he stood on the shoulders of giants.

For someone as talented as Wang Zaixing, as long as he studies diligently in this industry for five or six years, and the industry's development level catches up, he will be able to come up with such a proposal on his own.

After Wang Zaixing left, Lin Mu officially began working. He turned on his computer and first checked the intranet. There were quite a few people chatting on the intranet, mostly about the personnel changes at Taobao Mall.

Lin Mu noticed a lot of discussion about Taobao Mall. Among them, many people were pessimistic, but there were also some insightful people who argued in a simple and reasonable way that Taobao Mall must exist.

The reason is simple: although Taobao is constantly growing and thriving, there are still many hidden crises beneath the surface.

While the deposit-free policy has attracted many merchants to open stores on Taobao, greatly increasing Taobao's SKUs, it has also led to the proliferation of counterfeit goods.

Many outsiders believe that Taobao is a mixed bag, and that cheap goods are of poor quality.

Some buyers feel that Taobao is like a big marketplace where they can experience browsing a market and seeing novel products. However, no one who shops on Taobao feels that they can buy high-quality goods here.

This lack of positioning is fatal.

This means that if any e-commerce platform can provide this kind of legitimate flagship store online shopping experience, it will become a major threat to Taobao.

Therefore, if Taobao Mall collapses, if you don't seize this market, your competitors will.

The discussion at that time will not be about whether it is worthwhile to spend so much effort supporting Taobao Mall, but about how Taobao can survive.

Lin Mu sighed, "Look at all the talent at Alibaba. I've met another person with a deep understanding of the industry and a forward-thinking mindset." He glanced at the poster's ID, which read "Cold Moon."

Cold moon?

Lin Mu suddenly realized that this ID was also very famous in Alibaba in later years. Sure enough, even when a person is a newcomer, they are already very impressive.

Leng Yue's real name is Dai Shan. She joined Alibaba in 2007 from a position as a business director at a well-known 4A company in Shanghai.

Her main achievement was creating the first Double Eleven event with the marketing team in 2009.

Later, in 2015, she took charge of Tmall Global's business, helping Chinese brands go global.

Under this post, everyone was relatively focused on the facts, rationally and objectively discussing the advantages and disadvantages of Taobao Mall, its significance, the reasons for its current failure, and what reform directions are likely to lead to future success.

To be fair, Alibaba's internal network is, to some extent, a highly educated community. Watching a group of highly intelligent people discuss a topic is truly a pleasure.

Lin Mu then opened the Taobao seller forum and glanced at the posts. The public opinion on the forum was completely different from that on Alibaba's internal network; it was utter chaos.

A large group of merchants were celebrating, saying that Taobao Mall was going to fail and go bankrupt.

Some people made very offensive remarks, shouting, "Yellow Dog is gone, Zhang Dog is here again." These extreme comments were quickly banned by the administrators, but in general, sellers were pessimistic about the future of Taobao Mall.

This is not a good sign. Even if Alibaba's employees understand the correctness of Taobao Mall and support it, what's the use without the support of sellers and buyers, and without a unified understanding?

Lin Mu carefully analyzed the reasons why sellers on the forum disliked Taobao Mall so much, and it was quite interesting to delve into it.

First of all, the root cause of everything is the hidden dangers brought about by Taobao's recent high growth.

Taobao's policy of not requiring a deposit to open a store has attracted a large number of merchants of all kinds. Furthermore, the rapid development of online e-commerce has allowed these merchants selling counterfeit goods and engaging in fraudulent activities to thrive on Taobao.

After Lu took over Taobao, he immediately implemented three major initiatives, the first of which was to crack down on counterfeit merchants and drive out inferior goods from the market. His series of measures have effectively combated these substandard merchants.

At this very moment, Mr. Lu introduced and promoted a policy that canceled sellers' right to appeal reviews.

What is a seller's right to appeal a review? It means that if a seller receives a negative review, they can appeal to Taobao staff through the backend. As long as the appeal is reasonable, Taobao staff will delete the negative review.

This right has, on the one hand, created opportunities for corruption, as some unscrupulous merchants collude with Taobao staff to remove all negative reviews indiscriminately.

Secondly, many buyers who leave negative reviews will feel unhappy.

Because apart from a few professional negative reviewers, most buyers leave negative reviews because they genuinely had a bad experience, such as the seller shipping slowly, sending the wrong color, or the goods being damaged due to rough handling during logistics.

These kinds of normal negative reviews are often deleted during the processing due to review errors.

Mr. Lu introduced this reform to consider both the buyer experience and cost savings, given the increasing number of sellers and the lack of sufficient manpower to handle negative reviews.

However, this reform triggered an unexpected reaction from the market. Many unscrupulous sellers who suffered losses claimed that the policy was encouraging the emergence of professional negative reviewers.

Many legitimate merchants are also unhappy, since no one likes to have their rights taken away.

Moreover, many merchants are indeed misled by substandard merchants, believing that this will prevent them from selling goods normally, as buyers will threaten them with negative reviews, leaving them no choice but to comply.

Meanwhile, a third force was also involved in this incident: Taobao Mall.

Taobao Mall was launched in the first half of 2008, but it has been lukewarm ever since.

Many merchants complained that Taobao is obsessed with making money, requiring a deposit of 2 yuan to open a store on Taobao Mall.

Some people spread rumors during the review scandal, saying that Taobao's move was to drive everyone to Taobao Mall, and that the capitalists on Taobao made a rash decision and were competing with the people for profits.

During this process, another thing happened: Taobao cut off Baidu's traffic display.

Before 2008, if you sold a pair of jeans on Taobao, you could find your Taobao store link on the first page of Baidu search results for the category "jeans".

In order to reduce its future reliance on Baidu traffic, Alibaba directly cut off this part of external traffic and focused on operating internal traffic.

This move left Taobao sellers bewildered and deeply uneasy. Many merchants whose sales had declined for various reasons even believed that Taobao's foolish decision to cut off traffic from Baidu was the reason their business was struggling.

Thus, the two forces merged. One was the unscrupulous merchants whose profits were damaged by the crackdown on counterfeit goods, and the other was the normal merchants whose businesses were declining due to insufficient capabilities.

Their unease, discontent, and fear needed a clear outlet, and that outlet became President Lu and Taobao Mall. Now that they heard Taobao Mall was going to go under, they were naturally overjoyed.