Talking about the future of online bookstores

Last week, there was a lot of news in the online industry that Hong Kong’s Bo School was “cleared.” So some reporters asked me, what's the impression that blogging has become the earliest Chinese online bookstore?

I replied that this incident did cause people to feel mixed. When the Bo Xue Tang was established three years ago, their presidents and general manager Li had visited our company and talked about some current status and development directions. I did not expect three years. The time is over. They spent a lot of money, about 20 million U.S. dollars, which is more than 600 million Taiwan dollars. Calculating the amount of money that blogs invest in their current accounts is nothing more than a fraction of their size. If they think about the difference, how do they look? The son spent all his money, and he also heard that he had more than 30 million Hong Kong dollars in debt. This is worth thinking about, what is going on in e-commerce. So what I talked about today is not just online bookstores or the Internet, but e-commerce.

From the example of Bo Xuetang, it is clear that the current e-commerce is very different from what we expected and expected a few years ago. What are the differences? Or is our original expectation true?

From my personal point of view, the Internet is still the closest media to the general consumer. At present, about 6.5 million people in Taiwan are surfing the Internet. The mentality and concept of surfing the Internet are very different from those two or three years ago. In the past, the Internet was probably fresh and curious. Nowadays, many people use the Internet as a tool for fun or work. From this point of view, the Internet should be mature. However, where exactly is this business opportunity?

I think we should think very clearly when we engage in e-commerce.

In general, the business opportunities for e-commerce are still very large, because the Internet is still the closest tool to the general public and the easiest to communicate, but it is also very difficult. This difficulty can be summarized into several things:

the first:

The average person sees e-commerce as too simple, especially at the beginning. For example, something on the website is virtual. When you put many invisible and inaccessible products on the Internet, you only use some pictures and words to describe, and then hope that consumers can trust you. This is very difficult.

Furthermore, it is not easy to virtualize products. In terms of books, there are about 200,000 kinds of books in our company. At present, there are about 3,000 kinds of new books published every month on the market. Many of these books require us to produce books, abstracts, guides, and updates. There are price changes, etc. This is a fairly large project. Moreover, the Internet is very convenient to look at, and the data looks infinite. However, the size of a computer screen is so large. To pass this many data streams to consumers through screen sizes is another major project.

Like Amazon, let's not talk about how much money he lost. When he built this network, he could make tens of millions of people willing to go to his website and shop on his website. This is a very successful example, so he was Make a model of e-commerce.

second:

The cost structure of e-commerce is actually very high. Most people mistakenly think that putting e-commerce on the Internet.

In fact, there are several good economies of scale for the Internet: The first type of economy is more types, and as long as the variety reaches a certain degree, it can meet the needs of most consumers. Another kind of economic regulation is logistics. The logistics of e-commerce is not supported by the size of existing bookstores or publishing houses. It requires considerable warehousing, inventory, and delivery speeds. Therefore, building such an online store requires a powerful one. OAM, such as personnel job processing and so on.

third:

The delivery of B2C merchandise is a very high cost. For example, if a book sells for two hundred yuan, the cost of shipping may be fifty yuan, but the fifty yuan transportation fee cannot be passed on to consumers. Therefore, the gross margin of an online bookstore can be very small.

The Internet bookstore in the United States has several advantages that Taiwan does not have: First, the unit price of the US books is high, and the cost of mailing is low. In addition, if someone who has been to a bookstore in the United States buys books, he may know that if a book is priced at $10, you will have to pay another 6 to 10% of the state tax in addition to the price you set at checkout. They have a loophole in the tax law that is, they need not pay taxes across states. At this time, if the use of inter-state mail-order purchases, consumers save 6 to 10% of the cost, so before the emergence of e-commerce in the United States, mail-order will be so popular, not because They are big places, but because of loopholes in the tax law.

When Amazon was founded in Seattle, as far as I know, many of their customers are from New York. From this point of view, it can be found that the price of U.S. e-commerce is not its own gross profit but the government's tax. However, this is a unique phenomenon in the United States. It cannot be done in other countries in the world. Therefore, Taiwan cannot develop e-commerce as it would in the United States. The focus of thinking must be on how to improve the quality of service, rather than on price advantages.

I have not seen Bo Xuetang’s financial statements. However, I heard that they had beaten the library’s case at a very low price. They recently launched a global postage-free postage. I think this is almost an act of suicide. It is impossible to maintain.

Others pay like credit cards, causing consumer concerns and so on.

From the above points we can understand that the difficulty of e-commerce is really not low. So we were in June this year and 7/11 strategic alliance, that is to say we provide consumers, use the convenience of e-commerce to order books on the Internet, and then to the 7/11 convenience store near the home to pay for delivery, which in addition to understanding the consumption The doubts of using online credit card payment also solved the problem that Taiwan could not receive books due to bad quality of mailing.

At present, we have cooperated with 7/11 for more than two months. It can be said that most of the books are sent to consumers through 7/11, which means that consumers are very willing to accept this method. This gives me an important revelation: I am talking about online bookstores, talking about the knowledge industry, talking about the ideal vision, but also considering the reality, that is, improving the quality of service in order to allow consumers to accept.

Q&A

Q: New Silk Road recently introduced a digital printing machine for all records. Does this make sense for blogging?

A: I personally think that POD is a matter of the printing industry. Regardless of whether the typesetting or printing is not a blog's expertise, a single digital press will cost more than 10 million yuan. Plus the investment in personnel factories, I think It may be more cost-effective for bloggers to look for a printer again. For us, such an economy is still too small.

Q: Is there a need for blogging with two or three hundred instant prints?

A: There is a need, but it is not currently mainstream.

Q: Your company is currently only serving on the island. Has it extended to international considerations? In addition, you are currently only serving a certain stratum. How can you break this stratum and continue to expand the scale?

A: Since the first day, we have been doing business globally. We probably started selling books on the Internet more than four years ago. At that time, selling five or six copies a day would be very good. But after about two years, we received orders from abroad. However, the local market is still the most important. Of course, it is only local and it is a worry.

Shanghai has a literary and art publishing house. They have a magazine called story painting. The monthly circulation is about 5 million copies, and the world ranks fourth. With the current development of the dissemination business in mainland China, there can be such circulation, and if it is more developed in the future, it would be very terrible. Therefore, Singapore has now begun to use simplified characters. Hong Kong has also started to use simplified characters since its return. Therefore, the publishing market for traditional characters has begun to shrink. This is a problem that everyone needs to work together to resolve together.

At present, office workers are still the objects of our major services. There are all kinds of books, so they are fairly average in class. Therefore, I think that the information we use to promote the Internet is very comprehensive.

Q: You mentioned that you have a book of 200,000 books. So do you have 200,000 books in stock?

A: We have a warehouse that is not small. It is quite smooth on the distribution books. However, there is no way to achieve stocks with cents.