As AI evolves, it creates sustained growth.
By Hua Shang Taolue, Xiong Jianhui
In the era of AI, a new logic for e-commerce growth emerges.
【Pain Points and Dilemmas of Growth】
In 2024, AI continues to shake the world.
Alibaba's Alimama, which has long been dedicated to "AI e-commerce," has also unleashed a major move to lead the great evolution of e-commerce with AI.
On March 25th, Alimama officially launched the "1+1+3 Innovative Business Model," which consists of "LMA Big Model Technology + 1 Revolutionary Product + 3 Major Merchant Support Plans," aiming to create a new growth engine for the Taobao ecosystem and stimulate new growth potential through "AI intelligence linking the entire system."
This is a significant event that will once again guide the direction of the e-commerce tide.
As a commercial digital marketing platform under the Alibaba Group, Alimama may not be well-known to the general public, but for merchants on the Taobao platform, it is an indispensable presence.
▲Alibaba's Opening-Year Strategy
The unveiling of the "1+1+3 Innovative Business Model" by Alibaba Mama indicates not only a technological breakthrough in AI large models but also a thorough clarification of the underlying logic of AI. This is sufficient to empower merchants on a large scale, ensuring greater certainty in the growth of the entire industry.
For the myriad of e-commerce merchants, this is undoubtedly an exhilarating piece of news. After all, in the current environment, there is increasing anxiety about traffic and a strong desire for growth, facing ever-growing practical challenges.
On the one hand, there has been a significant transformation in online shopping traffic. Previously, the channels and forms through which consumers obtained product information online were relatively fixed, mainly through shelf e-commerce and keyword searches, which merchants could relatively easily grasp. Now, in addition to browsing product cards, dynamic content such as live streaming and short videos for product promotion is becoming richer, and interactive modes are increasingly diverse. However, this diversification has resulted in fragmented and disconnected shopping traffic, making it increasingly difficult for merchants to grasp, thus leading to greater difficulty in maintaining efficiency and effectiveness in advertising.
On the other hand, with the increasing complexity and diversification of traffic delivery tools, how to market and acquire traffic has become an increasingly complex technical challenge. Previously, there were precise promotion and search promotion, followed by keywords, information flow, video promotion, and then live promotion... The changes in traffic have led to a growing variety and complexity in the matching of marketing tools. Merchants find it both complex and exhausting to use these tools, let alone combining them to improve effectiveness.
However, the essence of AI is to eliminate pain points and increase efficiency. The emergence of Alibaba Mama's "1+1+3 Innovative Business Model" will construct a new flywheel for business growth in 2024, unleashing new possibilities for operations!
【AI Large Models: A Breakthrough Weapon】
Some say that under the "Hundred-Model Battle," every industry deserves to undergo another round of AI revolution.
Alibaba Mom Strategy & Technology
With the release of Alibaba Mom's LMA (Large Model for Advertising) technology, the future of marketing is here. Through AI multimodal capabilities, LMA accurately understands various behaviors and genuine interests of consumer groups. Whether consumers engage with text, images, short videos, or live streams, LMA captures their real needs, intentions, and interests, enabling businesses to match them with products they genuinely need and prefer.
In essence, LMA functions as a true intelligent assistant, insightfully understanding consumer demands and targeting specific audience segments. For example, when a consumer interested in cats searches for "sweaters," LMA quickly identifies this interest.
This insight stems from both the consumer's historical interactions, such as previous clicks on products related to cat visual elements, and LMA's ability to truly "comprehend" the products through various modalities, including text, images, and videos.
Based on this understanding, LMA accurately identifies such consumer groups and suggests clothing businesses to use "sweaters with cat patterns" to appeal to them, without worrying about promoting products to audiences who do not appreciate this style.
Such precise consumer portraits undoubtedly serve as powerful tools for product design and marketing for businesses.
Moreover, LMA not only possesses real-world knowledge but also boasts powerful reasoning abilities that adapt to changing conditions. In this sense, LMA can be likened to the "Sherlock Holmes" of AI in the e-commerce domain.
Therefore, businesses using LMA for commercial promotion can rest assured that it will not exhibit biased behavior. After all, it accurately identifies consumer needs and preferences, maximally understands and reflects consumers' real-life scenarios and interests, and truly comprehends the relevance between products, brands, and the real world, achieving a perfect match between consumers and products, thus becoming a new weapon for boosting marketing growth for countless businesses.
[Streamlining Productization, Continuous Evolution]
E-commerce operation is a systematic endeavor, and relying solely on large models cannot achieve explosive sales. Ultimately, the issue boils down to solving the source of traffic.
Thus, leveraging its new AI capabilities, Alibaba Mom has developed even more powerful and revolutionary new products.
The purpose behind the launch of this revolutionary new product is simple: to leverage paid traffic to stimulate organic traffic efficiently and help businesses operate overall traffic effectively. This marks a "traffic revolution" under the guidance of AI and will become a vital engine for the future growth of Taobao's business.
Using paid traffic to stimulate organic traffic has long been a core demand of businesses. However, in the past, this approach had two major pain points: uncertainty regarding how much traffic could be stimulated after payment and whether the stimulated traffic was accurate.
The essence of e-commerce operation lies in making clear operational decisions, creating marketing content, and improving advertising efficiency. The uncertainty surrounding the scale and quality of traffic inevitably made businesses hesitant in their advertising efforts, missing out on opportunities for continuous optimization.
The introduction of Alibaba Mom's new product will completely reverse this situation. Businesses can now achieve more accurate measurements and definite results in terms of investment in relation to traffic generation across the entire platform.
Previously, businesses could only analyze the sources and composition of traffic to measure the results of their investments, as paid traffic and organic traffic were separate entities, with businesses having very limited control over the traffic they could generate.
Now, with the upcoming launch of Alibaba Mom's new product, through further enhancing algorithm efficiency, paid traffic and organic traffic will be integrated and interconnected, making it clear how much traffic can be generated for a given investment, thus enabling businesses to have a clear view of their overall ROI.
While providing "certainty" to businesses, Alibaba Mom's new product will also be faster and simpler, making it easier for businesses to operate throughout the advertising process. It is suitable for all businesses, even those unfamiliar with advertising, as they can quickly learn to use it.
Nevertheless, Alibaba Mom believes there is still room for improvement.
[Evolution of New Productivity]
Once the horse has been mounted, it must be led on its way.
Thus, Alibaba Mom has tailored "3 major support plans" for businesses, including the New Quality New Brand Plan, the New Quality Good Product Plan, and the New Business Cultivation Plan, to help new products, good products, and new businesses get on the AI express train as soon as possible and achieve sustainable growth.
Each plan has its own focus. For instance, the New Quality New Brand Plan primarily targets outstanding merchants in segmented markets. Leveraging Alibaba Mom's LMA large model technology, it can rapidly identify and accurately determine the potential for rapid growth in segmented trend tracks and scenes.
For example, the outdoor + sunscreen trend track is booming, and LMA can accurately understand this segmented market, covering not only common categories such as sunscreen cosmetics, outdoor equipment, but also encompassing services such as tickets, hotels, and dining, and quickly and accurately target consumers with relevant needs.
To meet such trend tracks and high-potential scenes, Alibaba Mom has launched the New Quality New Brand Plan, supported by AI capabilities and equipped with exclusive marketing clients, customized operating solutions, and high-value service rights, to help outstanding merchants in these segmented tracks achieve faster growth and seize consumer dividends.
In addition to accurately determining consumer trends and demographics, Alibaba Mom's AI capabilities can also discover and cultivate high-quality goods based on different search and recommendation scenarios and capabilities, creating a pool of millions of quality products.
To this end, Alibaba Mom has invested heavily in cash subsidies of over one hundred million CNY into the New Quality Good Product Plan, aiming to cultivate a large number of new quality products for rapid explosion, better meeting consumer needs. For top-tier vendors, such a golden opportunity is simply too good to pass up. And for small to medium-sized businesses, or even new businesses not yet familiar with platform rules, Alibaba's Mommy Program has tailored a set of New Merchant Cultivation Plans. In this program, Alibaba's AI tools will be fully and freely available, ensuring AI accessibility. This includes AIGC tools like the Wanxiang Laboratory.
Previously, launching new products meant sourcing models, photographers, setting up scenes, editing photos, and shooting endless pictures... a huge investment of time and budget. Now, with "Wanxiang Laboratory," visual materials can be generated in batches in seconds, models can be adapted at zero cost, intelligent video material generation, and even multiple template mixing, AI voice narration, dynamic effects, all seamlessly done, significantly reducing the operating costs for new businesses.
But that's not all. In 2024, Alibaba is also offering a 3 billion CNY cash subsidy package, the "New Merchant Support Gift Pack," which helps new merchants with their first three orders, reducing their startup pressure and trial-and-error costs, and helping them take that bold "first step."
For Alibaba, this marks a leap in technological iteration; for thousands of merchants, it's an unprecedented evolution in AI. When everyone is asking, "Where is the next growth opportunity?" Alibaba's answer is clear: only through evolution can we secure the future.
This kind of evolution is consistent with Alibaba. Last year, Alibaba opened up many AI tools and delivered them in an inclusive manner. This includes the "AI Business Analyst," which helps businesses monitor market fluctuations in real-time, provides operational analysis recommendations, and generates marketing solutions.
This year, Alibaba will continue to unleash AI capabilities to help businesses operate more scientifically.
This AI tool, on a small scale, has helped countless businesses reduce costs and improve efficiency; on a larger scale, such capable and grounded AI is what China's economy truly needs to develop and drive new productive forces.
The so-called new productive forces are those where "technological innovation plays a leading role" in productivity. Many AI large models have undoubtedly achieved this aspect of "new quality"; however, when it comes to "productivity," most still fall short.
But with Alibaba's LMA large model technology, accompanying the release of "Alibaba's new products," it will not only trigger a comprehensive linkage between Taobao's paid traffic and organic traffic but also become a new flywheel driving the growth of thousands of merchants' Taobao businesses.
Behind this, it's not just about bringing tangible benefits to quality merchants and providing consumers with genuine goods; it also has an overall driving effect on China's manufacturing supply chain.
In the end, the "two-way rush" of AI e-commerce promoting new quality productive forces and high-quality consumption will propel the entire industry into a new realm of high-quality development.
With the landing of Alibaba's "1+1+3 innovative business model," the infinite possibilities of AI e-commerce are gradually becoming a reality.
More and more people believe that the new gameplay and new scenarios created by AI will profoundly change e-commerce even more than mobile internet, pushing e-commerce into a new era of reshaping growth.
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