---
title: "Beidian Collapses: How to View This Defeat in Social E-commerce?"
description: "Following the capital chain ruptures of Taojiji and Tongcheng Life, suppliers are again holding up banners to demand payment! As a quasi-unicorn in the social e-commerce sector, this e-commerce platform, once valued at 10 billion yuan, has met such an end! Recently, reliable sources say the headquarters of Beibei Group is empty, and its subsidiary Beidian owes merchants over 60 million yuan, leading to blocked doors and debt collection. Currently, more than 600 merchants are owed money, with total arrears exceeding 60 million yuan, and the longest delay has been over 200 days."
author: "新经销何年"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2021-08-12"
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# Beidian Collapses: How to View This Defeat in Social E-commerce?

> Following the capital chain ruptures of Taojiji and Tongcheng Life, suppliers are again holding up banners to demand payment! As a quasi-unicorn in the social e-commerce sector, this e-commerce platform, once valued at 10 billion yuan, has met such an end! Recently, reliable sources say the headquarters of Beibei Group is empty, and its subsidiary Beidian owes merchants over 60 million yuan, leading to blocked doors and debt collection. Currently, more than 600 merchants are owed money, with total arrears exceeding 60 million yuan, and the longest delay has been over 200 days.

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"
 _**Following the capital chain ruptures of Taojiji and Tongcheng Life, suppliers are again holding up banners to demand payment!**_
 _**As a quasi-unicorn in the social e-commerce sector, this e-commerce platform, once glorious and valued at 10 billion yuan, has met such an end!**_
"
Recently, according to reliable sources, the headquarters of Beibei Group is empty, and its subsidiary "Beidian" owes merchants over 60 million yuan, leading to blocked doors and debt collection. Currently, Beidian involves **more than 600 merchants with outstanding accounts, total arrears exceeding 60 million yuan, and the longest delay has been over 200 days.** Additionally, according to internal assessments by suppliers, the total amount owed by the Beidian platform **is estimated to potentially reach 200 million yuan.**
On August 9, Beidian's official platform issued a "Notice of Business Adjustment for Beidian," stating that "the original mall business will be upgraded to a shopping guide business, integrating third-party supply chains such as Taobao. After the upgrade, merchants do not need to re-register. It also stated that Beidian will integrate more whole-network supply chains in the future."
This major business adjustment notice became the direct trigger that ignited the powder keg.
**Beidian Collapses**
Beibei Group owns business platforms including Beibei.com, Beidian, Beicang, Beisheng, Beidai, and Ximei. Looking at Beibei's overall business, it is not difficult to see that apart from Beidian being a quasi-unicorn in the social e-commerce field, other businesses appear lukewarm.
If we sort out the business trajectory of Beibei Group, we can see that in 2014, vertical e-commerce was booming, and the group launched Beibei.com to enter the maternal and infant track, enjoying great popularity at the time. In 2017, social e-commerce emerged, and the group switched tracks, launching Beidian, becoming one of the three giants in Hangzhou e-commerce. In 2019, inventory e-commerce became a trend, so they launched the brand flash sale platform Beicang. Now, after the old business weakened, they are transforming again, stepping into new brands.
According to information learned by New Distribution from merchants, suppliers believe that "Beidian launched a self-owned brand new project called Ximei, and Beidian diverted merchants' payments to purchase goods for Ximei! Currently, in the entire Beibei Group, Beibei.com is basically abandoned, Ximei is operating normally, and Beidian is basically no longer operated by anyone."
Ximei is a model where factories produce goods under OEM, and the platform is responsible for branding, entering the new brand track. In March this year, Zhang Lianglun announced at the "Beidian × Ximei 2021 Brand Spring Launch" that in 2021, Beidian would "All in Ximei," betting on its own new brand.
However, regarding this collapse of Beidian, **some industry insiders commented that Beibei Group burned cash to subsidize distributors during its peak, leading to a capital chain rupture, resulting in the current situation.**
It is understood that during Beidian's peak period, the commission for small B (distributors) selling Beidian products was **10%-40%** , and on average, **it burned over 100 million yuan per month to subsidize distributors** .
**Seeing the Essence Through Phenomena**
For this typical representative in the social e-commerce field, the fall of Beidian always feels like the end of an era.
**New Distribution specially invited Mr. Zhuang Jianzhong, an expert and practitioner in the social e-commerce field, to discuss the deep-seated problems in the entire track reflected behind the superficial information, besides the above-mentioned surface reasons for Beidian's current situation.**
**1\. Upstream Supply Chain: Homogenization**
The homogenization of the supply chain is the core issue leading to the decline of social e-commerce platforms. It can be seen that in recent years, with the continuous rise of social e-commerce platforms, **the platform supply chain has not formed obvious advantages in categories, items, costs, prices, and overall brand differentiation, failing to build competitive barriers.**
Why does this phenomenon occur? Because most social e-commerce platforms are born out of the original WeChat business teams, and at the start, they basically rely on their own original brands.
Such products are often niche, or even products without competitors on the market, such as functional products with special effects or unique cosmetics.
But as users gradually increase and the channel grows larger, the platform needs sufficient product width to support sales in the channel and maintain the profitability requirements of registered channels.
Moreover, each product itself has a life cycle, and these issues point to the platform's development of new products. **However, platforms often do not meet market demand by launching more products, but rather by continuously recruiting more brand merchants to join.**
Over time, consumers weigh between different platforms, and with too many competitors, the platform's attractiveness is greatly weakened.
But conversely, if the platform does not introduce a large number of brands, relying on the high gross margin of its own brands can indeed sustain it and maintain some stickiness with end consumers, but the product width will definitely not keep up. As small B distributors leave, the platform will gradually degenerate into a brand-like role, creating a vicious cycle.
**2\. Midstream Platform: Efficiency and Experience**
From the perspective of the social e-commerce platform itself, the delivery carrier of e-commerce platforms mainly relies on express delivery. At this point, it is found that the 3-day delivery of traditional express cannot compare with the next-day delivery of JD's self-built logistics system, nor can it match the timeliness of same-city logistics in home-delivery e-commerce.
Secondly, in this fragmented era, a large amount of user time is captured by short videos. **In terms of product distribution efficiency and product reach, social e-commerce is far inferior to live-streaming e-commerce and video e-commerce.**
In the pursuit of product richness, it cannot compete with Taobao, and if it blindly pursues low prices, it is better to go to Pinduoduo.
**3\. Downstream Distributors: Come and Go in a Hurry**
For the small B side, there is a saying: attracted by profit, dispersed when profit is exhausted.
Social e-commerce platforms rely on small B for traffic, and the small B group comes and goes quickly. Although each platform has its own core distributors, the long-tail distributors often follow subsidies and have no loyalty. Once platform subsidies decrease, they will go to other platforms.
And the community group buying war, which has been widely discussed, with the burning of huge amounts of capital, has led a large number of distributors to flow to other platforms.
**4\. End Users: One Rises, Another Falls**
For Beidian's referral model, it has always been accompanied by "suspicion of pyramid schemes." According to Beidian's promotional materials, the commission for selling Beidian products is 10%-40%.
But earning product commissions is not Beidian's most profitable channel. Behind the widespread distribution of Beidian invitation codes by many Beidian store owners on various social platforms, **"charging per head" is Beidian's most profitable business.**
This model's "entry fees" and "recruiting people" have been widely criticized. But as regulation tightened, completely blocking the path of three-level fission, this model died.
In addition, in the plundering of C-end users, the last straw that broke the camel's back was the rise of community and live-streaming businesses, which had a fundamental impact on social e-commerce. The market size of these two areas has been growing two to three times, and users have been taken away. Distributors of social e-commerce platforms also cannot hold onto users and have turned to transformation.
The defeat of social e-commerce may have been inevitable from the start. The channel itself was built with a relatively obvious mentality of seeking quick success and instant benefits. The business model aimed at recruiting people rather than completing sales, putting the cart before the horse.
This ineffective traffic comes quickly and goes even faster, so social e-commerce has forced itself into a temporary channel form.
However, this model of developing small B to recruit people inevitably reminds one of the community group buying business, which is currently at the forefront. Like traditional social e-commerce platforms, what are they doing? Using social organizational methods to carry out centralized operations.
That is, using social resources like group leaders and distributors to build channels, and then harvesting traffic rights to become a centralized platform. This approach of coming from the masses but not returning to the masses is doomed to fail, so the early community group buying track also stalled halfway once.
Nowadays, community group buying is differentiating in two directions: one is empowering group leaders, organizing in a social way, and using tools to empower the sales efficiency of social teams, while the platform empowers supply chain selection.
In this, the platform hides its own brand, evolving into a tool provider or a unilateral provider of advantageous resources to obtain its due benefits.
The other major direction is de-group-leaderization, strengthening the platform's influence on users, no longer following the social logic, and building platform e-commerce.
If these issues are clearly seen, it becomes evident that Beidian's transformation to self-owned brand "Ximei" is inevitable because the original business logic no longer works.
But in self-owned brands, **if the products lack uniqueness, scarcity, high stickiness, and high gross margin, both buyers and sellers will eventually gradually sink into silence** , becoming dispensable, and finally die.
 _**-END-**_
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10 themed forums involve **new retail O2O, community group buying, short video live-streaming e-commerce, distributor transformation, rise of new consumer brands, new alcoholic beverage interpretation, distribution B2B supply chain, omnichannel marketing, B2B2C new technology applications** , etc., with operators from various segments bringing the latest case interpretations.
Some of the confirmed heavyweight guests so far include: **1. Tao Shiquan, founder of Jiangxiaobai; 2. Yao Xuhong, General Manager of Meiyijia Holdings Co., Ltd.; 3. Lu Xiuqiong, Global Expert Partner at Bain & Company and former Vice President of Marketing for Coca-Cola China; 4. Chen Xiaodong, Senior Vice President of Nestlé Greater China; 5. Zhang Fujun, President of Lee Kum Kee Sauce Group China; 6. Bi Chaojiao, General Manager of China Resources Snow Breweries (China) Marketing Center; 7. Yang Hongbin, Vice President of Junlebao Dairy Group; 8. Yang Shun, COO of Lipton Greater China; 9. Zhang Yipeng, General Manager of Kuaishou E-commerce SKA Brand Operations Center; 10. Li De, General Manager of E-commerce at Gold Hong Ye Paper Group...**
**A grand gathering for FMCG practitioners, you must be there!**
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