Source of this article: Times Finance Author: Wang Ting
[Editor's note: When we talk about "good consumption", what are we talking about? The significance of the existence of the annual 315 International Consumer Rights Day is to strive to restore the original appearance of "good consumption". This March, Times Media's Consumer Report, Times Weekly, Times Finance, and New Weekly jointly launched the "HAO Consumption" feature to focus on your consumer life.
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In the home appliance industry, the reduction of e-commerce products is already an open secret. However, many consumers are unaware of their existence.
Searching for keywords on the complaint platform, many consumers posted exclusively for e-commerce products because they bought e-commerce. During the Spring Festival, the market supervision departments in many places carried out special actions to combat counterfeiting, and strengthened supervision and sampling of more popular e-commerce products and other products.
E-commerce exclusive products, that is, products tailored for e-commerce platforms and sold in online online stores. Feng An, who runs the Tmall Premium offline experience store, told Times Finance that there are more than ten home appliance brands in the store, all of which are e-commerce exclusive models, and some are reduced versions of offline products.
Xue Meng, who worked at Gree Group, said in an interview with Times Finance that most of the Gree online models are exclusively supplied, more are affordable models, compared with offline physical stores, the product price will not be too high, and the performance will not be too rich.
Selling e-commerce exclusive products has become an industry practice
Compared with three or four years ago, e-commerce exclusive products are more low-key. Previously, e-commerce sellers would label goods as "e-commerce exclusive" to promote at low prices, but now it is difficult to see the word "exclusive" on e-commerce platforms, and the same is true for the official flagship stores of home appliance brands.
But the e-commerce supply has not disappeared. Feng An revealed that the home appliance brands in the store include Hisense, Midea, Gree, Kelong, Rongsheng, Jiuyang, Suber, Philips, etc., and the products are exclusively supplied by e-commerce.
"The sales model of the products produced by the domestic joint venture factories is similar to that of domestic ones." According to his observation, in the e-commerce exclusive supply of home appliances, there is no shortage of foreign brands, some have established joint venture factories in China, and some rely on foundries for production.
E-commerce exclusive home appliances are also divided into different types, there are special models customized for Tmall, JD.com, Suning and other platforms, there are also models sold by the official flagship store of home appliance brands, and some home appliance brands also launch sub-brands dedicated to online. Feng An store is mainly Tmall exclusive models and home appliance brand official flagship store models.
According to him, the main difference between e-commerce exclusive home appliances and offline channel home appliances is that the price is cheaper, on the one hand, the intermediate links of online sales are reduced, the price of goods raised with the same configuration and performance is lower than offline, on the other hand, the core components of some products are reduced.
"In the factory, the product quality inspection scale of some low-cost e-commerce machines will be wider." Feng An, who used to work in a home appliance factory, revealed.
He said that the e-commerce of a well-known brand sold in the store is exclusively for cross-door refrigerators, and there are often four doors that are not aligned and the width is inconsistent. In addition, in the low threshold, entry-level home appliances, other brands of home appliances also have a size ratio deviation.
The problem of e-commerce exclusive home appliances is not limited to the size ratio. On the complaint platform, a netizen posted that he bought a brand refrigerator on the e-commerce platform, the actual volume was less than half of the labeled, and contacted the customer service, the other party said that the refrigerator in the store belongs to the e-commerce exclusive supply, which does not match the indicators marked.
Liu Zhongmin, who opened a home appliance store in Hunan, told Times Finance that on the e-commerce platform, there are many counterfeit home appliances, and there will also be low-quality repair home appliances, as well as low-quality specialty products. Therefore, many people around him have problems with the quality of home appliances bought online, and repeated maintenance cannot be achieved, and they are directly sold as waste.
Liu Zhongmin has 22 years of maintenance experience in a certain brand of home appliances, and has repeatedly encountered quality problems in a batch of e-commerce exclusive models, so he has received many headquarters machine modification plans to repair and transform consumers. He revealed that in 2021, the brand has an e-commerce special 43-inch color TV to return to the factory for maintenance.
Liang Zhenpeng, a senior industrial economy observer, said bluntly that the so-called e-commerce exclusive supply is to reduce the configuration, parameters, and performance of the products supplied to online channels, which are cheap in themselves and cannot be seen in online physical stores, and the sale of e-commerce exclusive products has become an industry practice.
He also mentioned that e-commerce exclusive home appliances will be rougher to use, and the noise may be relatively large, but this is under the premise of ensuring qualified quality, "they are first and foremost qualified products, unqualified can not be sold."
Buy a low-end version, does the consumer know?
In daily life, many consumers will first check home appliances in offline physical stores, and then buy products with similar product parameters and lower prices on the e-commerce platform. They don't know that they may have bought a reduced e-commerce supply model.
Times Finance observed that home appliance companies will not indicate on the e-commerce platform that the product is an e-commerce exclusive model, nor will they disclose the core components and raw material information on the online store details page, and display more parameters, such as the number of air conditioners, energy efficiency grades, applicable areas, etc.
The parameters published by the air conditioner online Image source: screenshot of the e-commerce platform
"The air conditioning manual will not indicate the brand of the compressor and four-way valve, will not write the thickness of the steel pipe, and will only teach consumers how to use it." Guangdong haitao runs a brand of home appliance stores, after the e-commerce exclusive home appliances are disassembled, he can see the difference from the store, but ordinary consumers can't see it.
He told times finance about an experience, that is, in the air conditioning price war a few years ago, the purchase price of an air conditioner sold online and offline simultaneously dropped from 3000 yuan to about 1700 yuan, the name, number of horses, energy efficiency level has not changed, but the core components have changed.
That year, he sold more than 100 units of this air conditioner, and the performance was very good. However, the following summer, his phone exploded, and consumers found that the air conditioner was slow to cool, the cooling effect was poor, and the quality was not as good as the previous advertisement.
In the home appliance industry, people are well aware of the particularity of e-commerce products, but they cannot be publicized.
Liu Zhongmin revealed to Times Finance that the headquarters has strict regulations, maintenance personnel can not comment on the quality of home appliances, even if the repair found to be a repair machine, old inventory machine, can not tell the user, can only report to the headquarters. If the user knows and calls to complain, the maintenance staff may face a fine of 500 yuan to thousands of yuan.
"E-commerce is cutting corners, making it impossible for consumers to compare." An employee who used to work in a home appliance company said that the quality of home appliances in online and offline channels is not the same, and when he wants to save money, he buys online and goes to physical stores if he wants to buy high-end ones.
In 2018, the Department of Finance and Finance of the National Development and Reform Commission issued the "2018 Credit Risk "Double Eleven" Early Warning Report in the E-commerce Field", which mentioned that the "e-commerce exclusive" goods and the products sold in physical stores look exactly the same, and if you look closely, you will find that there are differences in color, internal parts or some functions.
Cao Lei, director of the E-commerce Research Center of the Network Economics Society, told Times Finance that e-commerce exclusive products are hidden infringement points, and many consumers are not aware of it.
Enterprises: Doing e-commerce exclusive home appliances is for channel differentiation
In the home appliance industry, why are e-commerce exclusive products flooded? On related topics, Times Finance interviewed the relevant personnel of the United States, and the other party responded that the e-commerce exclusive product is mainly for channel differentiation, and there are exclusive models online and offline.
Dealers and experts interpret it differently. As the "old man" of the home appliance industry, Liu Zhongmin believes that the biggest feature of e-commerce is low price, but the required operating costs are not low, and it is impossible for enterprises to do loss-making business, thus giving birth to e-commerce exclusive products with reduced allocation.
Liang Zhenpeng, a senior industry observer, told Times Finance that in promotional nodes such as 618 and Double 11, consumers rush to low-price online shopping, and e-commerce products can meet such needs, which also makes consumers unable to compare prices with physical stores and avoid conflicts between channel providers.
He also observed two changes in the home appliance industry, one is that the high-end transformation trend is very obvious, because high-end products can ensure profits, home appliance companies can adopt a consistent price strategy, and the other is suning, Gome and Gree Dong Pearl stores to promote online products and offline same price, online and offline channels have a trend of integration.
Behind the e-commerce exclusive home appliances there is also competition between platforms. Cao Lei said that in the early years, e-commerce platforms had "two alternatives" clauses, so home appliance companies found another way to customize models for various e-commerce platforms.
He revealed that although there is no "two choice one" clause now, the e-commerce platform will grab the first launch of new products, and after a period of time, it will go to other platforms for sale, and the e-commerce exclusive home appliances customized for the platform will continue to exist.
What happens if multiple platform appliances have exactly the same model and configuration? Feng An said that they will implement price subsidies, vicious competition, "large activity nodes to do subsidies, through various channels to stare at each other's prices, at any time to change prices."
In his view, home appliance companies customize models for various e-commerce platforms, and the products with the same core components are different in appearance and partial performance, which is beneficial to brand price control, stable supply, and profit protection of all parties.
At the legal level, Yang Naichao, director of Beijing Jingzhi Law Firm and lawyer of the Lawyer Group of the China Consumer Association, told Times Finance that if the appearance and coding of online products are exactly the same as those of physical stores, but the quality and performance of products are very different, merchants cannot give reasonable explanations, and there is no material to prove that the quality of products and physical stores is consistent, it may constitute false publicity of products.
In this case, he suggested that consumers first negotiate with the merchant, if the consultation fails, it is recommended to collect evidence of quality problems in the purchased home appliances, complain to the consumer association organization where the operator is located and the market supervision department, or file a lawsuit with the court.
However, he also said that if the consumer did not ask about the difference between the online and physical store products when communicating with the merchant in the early stage, and did not ask the merchant about the main ingredients, information, quality, performance, etc. of the product, the merchant did not involve infringing the consumer's right to know.
Finally, he suggested that businesses selling home appliances should provide true and comprehensive information on related products and actively protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers. If the same product involves online and offline dual channel sales, and there is a difference in quality, it is recommended to distinguish the commodity number and mark "e-commerce exclusive supply".
(The characters in the text are pseudonyms)