Facebook's first home appliance business platform or closed down

Payvment is often referred to as "f-commerce," and once in a while it hoped to help retailers sell their products on Facebook, and believed that social networks could provide brand fans with an unprecedented social shopping experience. Facebook itself has also been making repeated dreams. The social giant feels that with a huge flow of News Feeds and display advertisements on the homepage of the site, as well as social contacts between friends, both large retailers and startups can shop here to earn income.

But the fact may be exactly the opposite. Many times, Facebook is an entertainment platform for users, not shopping centers. Most SNS users like to use "like" buttons or comment on products instead of buying them directly on social networks. This makes F-commerce's properties somewhat obscure.

Another issue that should not be overlooked is that Payvment's divergence is highly dependent on the Facebook platform. For Payvment and other startup companies, social networking is like a cornerstone of shaking, and it is also under pressure to make profits. In this situation, the prospects of startup companies on the platform are also fluctuating. One argument is that one of the reasons for the closure of Payvment is that Facebook has launched its own retail business.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Facebook launched a "gift" service, which is different from previous virtual gifts between friends on social networking sites. This service allows users to present real gifts to other users and is regarded as the first step for Facebook to enter e-commerce. .

Even if this argument is not established, the fate of the company or business incubator on the platform may be changed at any time. Take the recruitment site BranchOut as an example. This website, which was launched in July 2010, is parasitic on Facebook and hopes to help users find good jobs through their Facebook network. It has been collecting data from LinkedIn and Facebook for operations and has obtained tens of millions of dollars in investment from venture capital firms. However, it was not long afterwards. In 2011, LinkedIn cut off the data collection of BranchOut, and the company had to change its business model. In addition, Tweettro, a third-party client on Twitter, was too popular and exceeded the limit on the number of users that Twitter implemented for third-party applications, causing it to be taken off the market by Twitter.

Parasites above the platform are strong, and its prospects are largely controlled by the platform. This point after falling from Facebook's stock price, Zynga was immediately followed by the embarrassment. On the other hand, the relations between Taobao, Taobao, Mushroom Street, Beauty, and Zhimei.com are also similar.

It should be noted that the traffic of websites such as Mushroom Street is highly dependent on search engines and social networks, and revenue is highly dependent on the e-commerce platform Taobao. The commission income of each transaction is the main source of profit for Mushroom Street. Regardless of traffic and revenue at one end, this mode of operation can be disrupted. When Taobao is open-minded, this model will not have any problems; once Taobao is closed, it will inevitably affect the "parasites" attached to it. In May last year, Taobao had published a statement that “does not support the upstream shopping guide website to continue to grow.” This information undoubtedly makes shopping guide websites uncomfortable.

It can be seen that these sites have now established their own "moat", trying to gradually weaken the dependence on Taobao. Beauty said that soon after the completion of the C round of financing, a commercial product and sales team with a scale of more than 20 people was formed. The team’s main task is to develop product content suitable for sales and continue to tap advertisers. It is reported that this team has now been able to contribute 30% to 40% of revenue for beauty. Similarly, in order to get rid of Facebook’s dependence, Zynga has suspended the exclusive cooperation agreement between the two parties. In the future, Zynga will try to open another world through its own Zynga With Friends network and Zynga.com portal, as well as its mobile strategy.

But in any case, these sites must be completely "independent" and there is still a long way to go. Taking Mushroom Street and Beauty as an example, on the one hand they have to deal with the constraints of Taobao, and on the other hand they have to face the current slow growth of non-Taobao revenue. From this perspective, at the same time of realizing value-added information, how to build independent competitiveness outside the shopping guide channel is an imminent challenge.