Chapter 12 The tragedy of Taobao: two major conflicts with small and medium sellers

The first major conflict occurred in 2006. In May of this year, Alibaba launched a project plan called "Zhaocaijinbao". For a fee, his store can be recommended to some more prominent web pages.This model is very similar to the PPC implemented by Baidu. When this plan was launched, it was opposed by some Taobao sellers.Their reason is: when Ma Yun launched Taobao at the end of 2002, he said that there would be no fees for five years, but now it has only been three years since he started charging in disguise. Therefore, throughout May 2006, some Taobao sellers posted messages on various portals and Taobao forums, and proposed a "general strike" on June 1 of that year.

Until May 31, Alibaba proposed a referendum to decide whether to implement the project of "recruiting wealth and wealth", but the project was eventually rejected.This is the first very big conflict between Alibaba and Taobao sellers. The second major conflict occurred on October 10, 2011.On this day, Taobao Mall released the "2012 Announcement on the Adjustment of Merchants' Investment Renewal and Rules of Taobao Mall". It was 6,000 yuan a year, but this time it was raised to 30,000 to 60,000 yuan a year.The second is the adjustment of the amount of breach of contract deposits for shops. The default deposits have been increased from 10,000 yuan to 50,000 yuan, 100,000 yuan and 150,000 yuan.

The adjustment ratios of these two amounts are very large, and the announcement announced at the same time that the adjustment plan will be implemented from January 1 of the second year. After the announcement was made, an event called the "October Siege" took place.At that time, the media reported that throughout October, 50,000 Taobao sellers opposed the announcement made by Taobao through the "revolutionary" method of "using violence to suppress violence". At that time, many conflicting incidents occurred. For example, many Taobao sellers rushed directly to the Taobao headquarters in Hangzhou, held banners at the entrance of Taobao headquarters, and sat in to protest against the Taobao announcement.

At the same time, they also launched many attacks on the Internet. For example, the first big attack was that these small sellers ran to the pages of big Taobao sellers to attack big sellers.What is the method of attack?That is, the small seller first purchases the product, then completes the payment, and then quickly applies for a refund.Because Taobao has a system that consumers can refund unconditionally and free of charge within 7 days.As a result, some big Taobao sellers added tens of thousands of orders within a few hours, and these orders quickly became invalid orders, which directly interfered with the normal trading behavior of these big merchants. caused confusion in the market.

The second big attack is against Alipay.Taobao users directly withdraw their Alipay balances and transfer them to their bank cards.This is a bit like a bank run.For any bank, if the bank has 10,000 depositors and 100 million deposits, but 8,000 depositors withdraw money at the same time on the same day, then the bank can directly declare bankruptcy.So this "run" is a very big credit crisis for Alipay. The occurrence of these two attacks disrupted the entire Chinese e-commerce market and caused a huge credit crisis to the third-party payment system.At this time, it is a very dangerous moment for Alibaba.

After the incident, Jack Ma continuously posted articles on his Weibo to appease the emotions of Taobao users. In the end, the Ministry of Commerce even directly intervened. Finally, on October 17, Alibaba made a compromise.For example, regarding the technical service fee, it proposes "the old method for the old, and the new method for the newcomer", that is, all old users will not increase the amount of their technical service fee.As for the bond for breach of contract, it proposes that Taobao sellers can pay half of the bond announced in accordance with the new rules in 2012. At the same time, Alibaba also set aside 1 billion yuan as a consumer protection fund, which will be supervised by the Zhejiang Provincial Administration for Industry and Commerce and handed over to The People's Bank of China conducts fund management.Alibaba resolved this crisis in this way.

The two incidents that occurred in 2006 and 2011 can be said to be among the top ten business news in China that year.