Recently, a number of e-commerce platforms announced that this year's "618" promotion will cancel the pre-sale mechanism and choose spot sales, which has aroused widespread concern.
As a flexible sales strategy, pre-sale is intended to enable consumers to lock in their favorite goods in advance, and help businesses to accurately arrange production plans, reduce inventory risks, and reduce capital and logistics pressure.
In recent years, the scale of online shopping promotion has been expanding, and the pre-sale system has gradually exposed, which has been criticized by consumers repeatedly. With the increase of links and processes, the time cost paid by consumers is higher, but the shopping experience is worse. The complaints received by the National Consumer Association last year showed that the pre-sale mode of e-commerce platform had problems such as dishonest "final payment" price increase, unsatisfied pre-sale goods, unfulfilled promised gifts, non delivery of promised time, and false "lowest price" publicity. Some consumers reported that they chose online shopping to save time and worry, but pre-sale turned saving worry into bad worry.
With the rapid normalization of e-commerce, consumers have changed their buying habits and consumption concepts after experiencing various promotion routines, preferring simple and direct shopping methods. It has become the consensus of the current e-commerce platform to reduce complexity and simplify, and give priority to user experience. The cancellation of the pre-sale mechanism is a choice to adapt to changes in consumer psychology.
The e-commerce industry has entered the era of stock competition. The traffic dividend is no longer and the user scale is at the top. If the platform and businesses want to retain users, they must learn to subtract and focus on users. E-commerce should strive for lower prices, more services, more reputation for sales volume, and give consumers real discounts and good consumption experience.
E-commerce platforms should rationally use promotional means to shift from pursuing short-term sales peaks to pursuing long-term sustainable development. We should promote the upgrading of whole process services, improve the added value of commodity services, better meet the personalized shopping needs with services and details, and win the reputation of consumers. We should also continue to explore and innovate sales models, enrich consumption scenarios, and realize the healthy growth of the platform itself by improving its market competitiveness. (Author: Yan Weiqi Source: Economic Daily)
