“Does the marketplace have life in Russia?” Or “How we are trying to make a competitor Yandex.Market”
Today we will tell you how you launched your product aggregator or marketplace (market place) in RuNet (we will continue to adhere to the term “aggregator” - it sounds more Russian somehow). In the article we will try to answer the questions: why and how we did it, and what we end up with. Open all the numbers on traffic, orders, etc. We emphasize that the project is still at the development stage - we have been and are working on it in the mode of quiet work, devoting our own resources to it for a little over a year, and there is still a lot to be done.
We hope that the teams that are thinking about this kind of business can learn something interesting from this material. For others, the very history of tapki.com can also be useful. Perhaps experienced in SEO guys will be able to give some advice in the comments, because, in our opinion, we have something wrong with the indexation of a large number of pages. All the numbers and graphs that we present in the article are honest, "as is." Note that this is the first article in the series - we plan to make regular publications.
To make it clear how we came to the decision to develop this type of business, we will share our thoughts on this topic a little. The latest market news pushed us to write this article - well-known companies announced that they would become aggregators (KupiVip, Sapato, etc.). We think that the main reason for the interest of large market players in the creation of aggregators is that they can attract more potential buyers to their sites by increasing the number of products sold (their own and, more importantly, aliens). If you look at the situation that has developed now, you can see that companies that have reached some critical scale in e-commerce, for example, LaModa, Wildberries, KupiVip, Ozon, Yulmart are striving for a model for creating large marketplaces (you can give another example - Amazon.com).
To our knowledge, the largest and most profitable aggregator in Russia today is Yandex.Market: it has about 20,000 stores. Even if we assume that at least 15,000 of them are actually operating, this is still a huge amount (60,000,000 items!). Another reason for the successful development of aggregators is the desire of the modern user to receive information of interest in one place.
')
For us, the business of “aggregation” is not entirely relevant - by developing mobile applications for retail companies, we came to this idea, let's say, evolutionarily. At a certain time, we began to think about what we can do in the field of aggregation of information from retail companies (goods, stocks, etc.) in this area. As developers, we are confident that mobile applications will soon appear in all large and medium-sized players in the retail market. Our experience, as mobile users, showed that very few people would put on the phone at the same time many applications for each store or brand. After all, working with so many applications, but it will also be inconvenient to receive a push notification from everyone. This prompted us to try to create such a solution that allows the client to receive only one push - notification, which will immediately contain links to several stocks, and these links will be formed based on his interests as a buyer (this is what we write about the final goal of course).
There are, of course, very strong players (monsters) on the market, for example: Yandex.Market, price.ru and others. It was absolutely clear that it was practically useless for us to compete with them. It is unlikely that we will be able to take a leading position in the market. We just want to make a convenient service for people who would also be profitable. Therefore, for ourselves, we decided to focus on two key points: to focus on mobile technologies and to carry out the promotion of the brand first, and not the goods. On the first point, everything is clear. The second will comment. If you look at Yandex.Market, you can see that there are categories like “Electronics”, where there is a product card and store offers. And there is a "Yandex. Wardrobe", where the emphasis is on the very seller (brand). We chose the second option for ourselves - there is a product category and it represents brands, and within the brand there are products, news, promotions, etc. Why is that? There are two reasons. The first is that when we talked with various companies, we learned that many of them were not very happy with the idea of being in Yandex.Market (and in similar sites) near small shops that may not comply with the RRC (recommended prices). Branding, news and company promotions and working with a loyal audience are important to them. The second reason is quite banal - the combination of the names of one product from different companies is a rather difficult organizational and technical task, for which we simply do not have the resources.
We started to implement the project in April 2014 and called it - http://tapki.com . The name itself turned out by chance, some day in the morning they began to discuss its options, made a list, and then, during lunch, one of the guys suggested this name, and we got hooked on it. Domain really had to buy not very expensive for American squatters. In general, tapki is a derivative of the word “tap”, which means “touch”, “touch” and is well suited for mobile applications.
There were several immediate reasons that led us to tackle this project. First, we had all the necessary infrastructure to launch the project (thanks to Microsoft, we received a cloud grant for Microsoft Azure resources - this is very valuable). We developed a large number of projects in the retail sector, and therefore we already had ready server solutions for processing large amounts of data. And to make a unifying project for our clients was, in general, not very difficult.
The second reason is our main successfully developing business - notissimus.com - a company developing mobile applications for online stores and retail companies. How we developed it you can read a great article here . Application development is a fairly specific business that is not aimed at a mass audience, requiring us to run projects, etc. It is worth noting that we are trying to automate the development process as much as possible, but all the same, this is not an application designer and our direct participation is required (by the way, there are pluses and minuses). We tried (and continue to try) to enter a more scalable market aimed at reaching a wide audience of both consumers and online stores.
The third is completely banal, when a company leaves a request to connect to tapki.com - we actually get a slightly warm client, with whom it becomes easier to conduct a dialogue on the topic of mobile applications.
The development of the service took about 6-8 months in the “abstract” mode and today the website (tapki.com) and mobile applications (Apple iPhone / iPad, Windows Phone, and Google Android, strangely enough, have not yet mastered, but we plan to complete work on it in the next couple of months). We will not dwell on the functionality here in detail - it is fairly simple, although we have spent a lot of time optimizing server computing and have not yet fully resolved the search question (most likely we will run sphinx). The customer chooses a product category (for example, shoes) on the website or in applications, sees the logos of the brands (companies) and, by clicking, can see the assortment, news, promotions, store addresses, etc. Well, of course, make an order. The order arrives in the mail to our partner (store) for further processing. As a source of information, we, like many other players, prefer to work with Yandex.Market xml (yml), processing the files of all stores at night and uploading information to the database.
Sample screen mobile application tapki.com
The main goal of our service is to reduce the time that a person spends on the study of assortments and stocks from many companies. Using the mobile application (and site) tapki.com, you can easily see what activity is next to you, for example, the pulse of stocks in your area; there you can find all the current offers of local shopping centers where tapki.com partners (stores) are located. This is very well suited for the omnichannel concept: you can look at the necessary product and its availability online with reference to your specific location. And this all happens, as they say, at your fingertips on your mobile phone. Today, mobile devices are great at helping retail companies build personal communications with customers when the latter are within walking distance of their outlets.
We are now talking about technologies such as, for example, iBeacon. The iBeacon technology helps to combine the growth trends of the mobile segment and the desire of marketers for personalized communication with the client.
What is its essence: if the company buys the iBeacon beacon and places it near the entrance to its store, the application can show a push notification when a person gets into the signal area from the beacon (10 meters). IBeacon combines the advantages of mobile gadgets and applications in relation to client locations and retail outlets, that is, in fact, it is a kind of bridge between online and offline, and this, it seems to us, is currently the current market trend. Mobility and personalization is where in our opinion the market is now moving. Those who want to learn more about the technology iBeacon refer to our article on Habré .
However, with all the boom in the field of mobile, in fact, not all retailers can afford the development of mobile applications, and besides this there is, and there is a competitive struggle for a place on the screen of a smartphone, which is very, very expensive. And we provide an opportunity with our tapki.com project to work with such an audience.
Of course, tapki.com is very difficult to compete with such giants as, for example, Yandex or Yulmart. However, as elsewhere, everything has its pros and cons. Our advantage is that we will never sell our products ourselves - this is a key aspect. We will deal exclusively with services. Objectively, we now have small traffic, but we are developing. Ozon.ru, Amazon.com and KupiVip.ru have, of course, gone far, but they have a dilemma: in addition to their own, they also sell affiliate products. Therefore, in the end, there will always be a conflict of interest here - any player would like to sell his product first, and not promote someone else's.
Initially, we tried to work on paying for actions - CPA. In our opinion, this is a non-life model. It works properly only in those services that have payment by bank cards (as the moment of the transaction is very clearly recorded). After we crammed the implementation of the work on the CPA, we realized that we are closer to a model similar to the Banki.ru service: they earn as an interface between a multitude of banks and a consumer. In fact, they are aggregators of banking information. This draws the attention of the user because it is convenient for him to receive consolidated information in any one source. In fact, we are building a similar aggregator. In our opinion, the CPA model in Russia does not really work if you do not have payment by cards.
While our service tapki.com is still in the beta stage and is developing. At the moment, about 270 stores take part in it, this number is increasing by 5-7 new ones per day. We have no restrictions on the size or popularity of the company when connecting, because we focus on the brand itself. Therefore, in our project, major well-known brands, such as oodji, befree, FC ZENIT, Bukvoed, etc. side by side with lesser known stores. But we do not see anything terrible here, because we do not compare and will not compare products at a price, allowing each partner to present themselves as profitably as possible. This, by the way, is our difference from competitors - the distribution of orders is somewhere around 60% - well-known retail chains by 40% - small and medium online stores.
We are still looking for customers on our own, offering our services to each store. Although some have already begun to come themselves. Now we transmit about 10 –15 orders to different stores per day. The total amount of orders transferred to the stores from the tapki.com service, in rubles by day, is shown in the graph.
Order statistics in rubles by day
If we talk about prospects, we would like to connect about 13,000 - 15,000 stores in Russia to the project, then enter the markets of the Eurasian Union of Goods. Currently, tapki.com has about 1,500,000 products.
Attendance of the site tapki.com today averages about 1,100 unique per day, although at the end of 2014 it reached as high as 1500. The reason for this recession was not immediately made a mechanism for storing goods that go out of sales at partner stores. As a result, they “grabbed” 404 errors from search engines, which very seriously pessimized search traffic.
Attendance of the project from the first days of launch
Now we started to correct these errors and the traffic began to grow gradually - we came up with a special mechanism that allows you to transfer this category of goods to the archive and as a result a product card with information about it, but already without a price is stored in this archive. By the end of this year, we plan to achieve traffic of 20,000 - 30,000 per day only from search engines (these are our expectations, but we will look at the result).
Of course, mobile applications are necessary and important, but they are not enough for such projects in Russia. The site is required. Unfortunately, we did not understand this immediately, but when we realized it, we did it and did not regret it. Why? The specifics of the project imply a large number of product cards (now there is something around 1.5 million with books, and the number is growing) and low-frequency search traffic has not yet been canceled. In mobile applications, the contents of the applications themselves are not indexed and the search is carried out on fairly limited text descriptive blocks. Therefore, the site is needed and now it gives us a tangible effect on the growth of both the audience and new companies. In addition, it is easier for a person to quickly go to the site to see what project in general it is about, than to search and install applications that are generally oriented towards a loyal audience.
Originally tapki.com was an internal project of the company Notissimus. Now the project has no monetization, but we managed to attract foreign investments in the amount of 3 million rubles - we found an investor in Moscow. He liked the idea, and with his support, we will develop it more actively.
In the near future, we have to finish tapki.com site and finally get out of the beta version, release a mobile application for Android in July, improve the search and make it relevant.
We are a fairly open company and are ready to talk about almost all the intricacies of our development, disclose our financial indicators and statistics, share our failures and talk about how we managed to overcome them. Recall once again that we plan to describe all this in the following materials of this blog.
Thanks for attention! We will definitely write a sequel and hope that it will be more saturated with numbers from our experience. Our life can be followed in a more “live” mode via twitter or through my facebook account.
We hope that the teams that are thinking about this kind of business can learn something interesting from this material. For others, the very history of tapki.com can also be useful. Perhaps experienced in SEO guys will be able to give some advice in the comments, because, in our opinion, we have something wrong with the indexation of a large number of pages. All the numbers and graphs that we present in the article are honest, "as is." Note that this is the first article in the series - we plan to make regular publications.
To make it clear how we came to the decision to develop this type of business, we will share our thoughts on this topic a little. The latest market news pushed us to write this article - well-known companies announced that they would become aggregators (KupiVip, Sapato, etc.). We think that the main reason for the interest of large market players in the creation of aggregators is that they can attract more potential buyers to their sites by increasing the number of products sold (their own and, more importantly, aliens). If you look at the situation that has developed now, you can see that companies that have reached some critical scale in e-commerce, for example, LaModa, Wildberries, KupiVip, Ozon, Yulmart are striving for a model for creating large marketplaces (you can give another example - Amazon.com).
To our knowledge, the largest and most profitable aggregator in Russia today is Yandex.Market: it has about 20,000 stores. Even if we assume that at least 15,000 of them are actually operating, this is still a huge amount (60,000,000 items!). Another reason for the successful development of aggregators is the desire of the modern user to receive information of interest in one place.
')
For us, the business of “aggregation” is not entirely relevant - by developing mobile applications for retail companies, we came to this idea, let's say, evolutionarily. At a certain time, we began to think about what we can do in the field of aggregation of information from retail companies (goods, stocks, etc.) in this area. As developers, we are confident that mobile applications will soon appear in all large and medium-sized players in the retail market. Our experience, as mobile users, showed that very few people would put on the phone at the same time many applications for each store or brand. After all, working with so many applications, but it will also be inconvenient to receive a push notification from everyone. This prompted us to try to create such a solution that allows the client to receive only one push - notification, which will immediately contain links to several stocks, and these links will be formed based on his interests as a buyer (this is what we write about the final goal of course).
There are, of course, very strong players (monsters) on the market, for example: Yandex.Market, price.ru and others. It was absolutely clear that it was practically useless for us to compete with them. It is unlikely that we will be able to take a leading position in the market. We just want to make a convenient service for people who would also be profitable. Therefore, for ourselves, we decided to focus on two key points: to focus on mobile technologies and to carry out the promotion of the brand first, and not the goods. On the first point, everything is clear. The second will comment. If you look at Yandex.Market, you can see that there are categories like “Electronics”, where there is a product card and store offers. And there is a "Yandex. Wardrobe", where the emphasis is on the very seller (brand). We chose the second option for ourselves - there is a product category and it represents brands, and within the brand there are products, news, promotions, etc. Why is that? There are two reasons. The first is that when we talked with various companies, we learned that many of them were not very happy with the idea of being in Yandex.Market (and in similar sites) near small shops that may not comply with the RRC (recommended prices). Branding, news and company promotions and working with a loyal audience are important to them. The second reason is quite banal - the combination of the names of one product from different companies is a rather difficult organizational and technical task, for which we simply do not have the resources.
We started to implement the project in April 2014 and called it - http://tapki.com . The name itself turned out by chance, some day in the morning they began to discuss its options, made a list, and then, during lunch, one of the guys suggested this name, and we got hooked on it. Domain really had to buy not very expensive for American squatters. In general, tapki is a derivative of the word “tap”, which means “touch”, “touch” and is well suited for mobile applications.
There were several immediate reasons that led us to tackle this project. First, we had all the necessary infrastructure to launch the project (thanks to Microsoft, we received a cloud grant for Microsoft Azure resources - this is very valuable). We developed a large number of projects in the retail sector, and therefore we already had ready server solutions for processing large amounts of data. And to make a unifying project for our clients was, in general, not very difficult.
The second reason is our main successfully developing business - notissimus.com - a company developing mobile applications for online stores and retail companies. How we developed it you can read a great article here . Application development is a fairly specific business that is not aimed at a mass audience, requiring us to run projects, etc. It is worth noting that we are trying to automate the development process as much as possible, but all the same, this is not an application designer and our direct participation is required (by the way, there are pluses and minuses). We tried (and continue to try) to enter a more scalable market aimed at reaching a wide audience of both consumers and online stores.
The third is completely banal, when a company leaves a request to connect to tapki.com - we actually get a slightly warm client, with whom it becomes easier to conduct a dialogue on the topic of mobile applications.
The development of the service took about 6-8 months in the “abstract” mode and today the website (tapki.com) and mobile applications (Apple iPhone / iPad, Windows Phone, and Google Android, strangely enough, have not yet mastered, but we plan to complete work on it in the next couple of months). We will not dwell on the functionality here in detail - it is fairly simple, although we have spent a lot of time optimizing server computing and have not yet fully resolved the search question (most likely we will run sphinx). The customer chooses a product category (for example, shoes) on the website or in applications, sees the logos of the brands (companies) and, by clicking, can see the assortment, news, promotions, store addresses, etc. Well, of course, make an order. The order arrives in the mail to our partner (store) for further processing. As a source of information, we, like many other players, prefer to work with Yandex.Market xml (yml), processing the files of all stores at night and uploading information to the database.
Sample screen mobile application tapki.com
The main goal of our service is to reduce the time that a person spends on the study of assortments and stocks from many companies. Using the mobile application (and site) tapki.com, you can easily see what activity is next to you, for example, the pulse of stocks in your area; there you can find all the current offers of local shopping centers where tapki.com partners (stores) are located. This is very well suited for the omnichannel concept: you can look at the necessary product and its availability online with reference to your specific location. And this all happens, as they say, at your fingertips on your mobile phone. Today, mobile devices are great at helping retail companies build personal communications with customers when the latter are within walking distance of their outlets.
We are now talking about technologies such as, for example, iBeacon. The iBeacon technology helps to combine the growth trends of the mobile segment and the desire of marketers for personalized communication with the client.
What is its essence: if the company buys the iBeacon beacon and places it near the entrance to its store, the application can show a push notification when a person gets into the signal area from the beacon (10 meters). IBeacon combines the advantages of mobile gadgets and applications in relation to client locations and retail outlets, that is, in fact, it is a kind of bridge between online and offline, and this, it seems to us, is currently the current market trend. Mobility and personalization is where in our opinion the market is now moving. Those who want to learn more about the technology iBeacon refer to our article on Habré .
However, with all the boom in the field of mobile, in fact, not all retailers can afford the development of mobile applications, and besides this there is, and there is a competitive struggle for a place on the screen of a smartphone, which is very, very expensive. And we provide an opportunity with our tapki.com project to work with such an audience.
Of course, tapki.com is very difficult to compete with such giants as, for example, Yandex or Yulmart. However, as elsewhere, everything has its pros and cons. Our advantage is that we will never sell our products ourselves - this is a key aspect. We will deal exclusively with services. Objectively, we now have small traffic, but we are developing. Ozon.ru, Amazon.com and KupiVip.ru have, of course, gone far, but they have a dilemma: in addition to their own, they also sell affiliate products. Therefore, in the end, there will always be a conflict of interest here - any player would like to sell his product first, and not promote someone else's.
Initially, we tried to work on paying for actions - CPA. In our opinion, this is a non-life model. It works properly only in those services that have payment by bank cards (as the moment of the transaction is very clearly recorded). After we crammed the implementation of the work on the CPA, we realized that we are closer to a model similar to the Banki.ru service: they earn as an interface between a multitude of banks and a consumer. In fact, they are aggregators of banking information. This draws the attention of the user because it is convenient for him to receive consolidated information in any one source. In fact, we are building a similar aggregator. In our opinion, the CPA model in Russia does not really work if you do not have payment by cards.
While our service tapki.com is still in the beta stage and is developing. At the moment, about 270 stores take part in it, this number is increasing by 5-7 new ones per day. We have no restrictions on the size or popularity of the company when connecting, because we focus on the brand itself. Therefore, in our project, major well-known brands, such as oodji, befree, FC ZENIT, Bukvoed, etc. side by side with lesser known stores. But we do not see anything terrible here, because we do not compare and will not compare products at a price, allowing each partner to present themselves as profitably as possible. This, by the way, is our difference from competitors - the distribution of orders is somewhere around 60% - well-known retail chains by 40% - small and medium online stores.
We are still looking for customers on our own, offering our services to each store. Although some have already begun to come themselves. Now we transmit about 10 –15 orders to different stores per day. The total amount of orders transferred to the stores from the tapki.com service, in rubles by day, is shown in the graph.
Order statistics in rubles by day
If we talk about prospects, we would like to connect about 13,000 - 15,000 stores in Russia to the project, then enter the markets of the Eurasian Union of Goods. Currently, tapki.com has about 1,500,000 products.
Attendance of the site tapki.com today averages about 1,100 unique per day, although at the end of 2014 it reached as high as 1500. The reason for this recession was not immediately made a mechanism for storing goods that go out of sales at partner stores. As a result, they “grabbed” 404 errors from search engines, which very seriously pessimized search traffic.
Attendance of the project from the first days of launch
Now we started to correct these errors and the traffic began to grow gradually - we came up with a special mechanism that allows you to transfer this category of goods to the archive and as a result a product card with information about it, but already without a price is stored in this archive. By the end of this year, we plan to achieve traffic of 20,000 - 30,000 per day only from search engines (these are our expectations, but we will look at the result).
Of course, mobile applications are necessary and important, but they are not enough for such projects in Russia. The site is required. Unfortunately, we did not understand this immediately, but when we realized it, we did it and did not regret it. Why? The specifics of the project imply a large number of product cards (now there is something around 1.5 million with books, and the number is growing) and low-frequency search traffic has not yet been canceled. In mobile applications, the contents of the applications themselves are not indexed and the search is carried out on fairly limited text descriptive blocks. Therefore, the site is needed and now it gives us a tangible effect on the growth of both the audience and new companies. In addition, it is easier for a person to quickly go to the site to see what project in general it is about, than to search and install applications that are generally oriented towards a loyal audience.
Originally tapki.com was an internal project of the company Notissimus. Now the project has no monetization, but we managed to attract foreign investments in the amount of 3 million rubles - we found an investor in Moscow. He liked the idea, and with his support, we will develop it more actively.
In the near future, we have to finish tapki.com site and finally get out of the beta version, release a mobile application for Android in July, improve the search and make it relevant.
We are a fairly open company and are ready to talk about almost all the intricacies of our development, disclose our financial indicators and statistics, share our failures and talk about how we managed to overcome them. Recall once again that we plan to describe all this in the following materials of this blog.
Thanks for attention! We will definitely write a sequel and hope that it will be more saturated with numbers from our experience. Our life can be followed in a more “live” mode via twitter or through my facebook account.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290866/
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