外刊精读20210423 – 如何做好自己的网店 3

阿里巴巴代运营知识 Don’t Let Platforms Commoditize Your Business 3（本文摘自哈佛商业评论 5 月 6 月期）阅读亮点：4 开展公共关系和游说活动。网店运营者可以利用目前政府和媒体对于大平台的批评来使自己和大平台的博弈更有利。比如之前的 Epic Games 游戏公司和苹果公司产生了纠纷，关于是否 App Store 的 30%佣金是合理的。Epic Games 不但发布了一个广告来模仿并嘲笑苹果公司 1984 年的经典广告，还起诉了苹果公司，更联合 Spotify，Match Group 和其它安卓和 iOS 的开发者组成了一个联盟，游说管理者注意公平性。网店运营者还可以注意大平台的那些操作容易违规。目前最容易投诉成功的大平台操作是过度控制网店运营者的自由。比如说苹果不允许开发者不经过 App Store 或者要求网店生意只能在本平台运作，还有一些对于价格的限制，要求网店零售商不得设置更低的价格在别的渠道上。还有一种能够被投诉的操作，就是平台根据数据，推动自己的产品。哪一种产品热门，平台就给自己的相关产品导流。Wage Public Relations and Lobbying CampaignsThe intense scrutiny and criticism of large MSPs by regulators, researchers, and the media creates opportunities for sellers large and small to drum up public support for their causes and to push back against practices that commoditize their businesses.Sellers can employ numerous tactics to that end, including negotiating more aggressively, taking to social media, bringing complaints to antitrust authorities or the courts, and joining with other participants to fight specific MSP practices. Epic Games—publisher of the wildly popular Fortnite—has made good use of all those tactics in its ongoing dispute with Apple. The disagreement is mainly over Apple’s requirement that payments for purchases of digital items within iOS games go through its App Store so that it can collect a 30% commission. In addition to demanding lower fees, Epic released a parody of Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial, which riffed on George Orwell’s dystopian novel as it introduced the Macintosh personal computer, to enlist support for its cause. It also filed an antitrust suit and, with Spotify, Match Group, and other Android and iOS developers, created the Coalition for App Fairness to lobby regulators. Those efforts caused Apple to relent on some policies—for example, by streamlining the process for approving app updates. In November 2020 it also announced that it would halve its commission for app developers with annual revenues below $1 million.Going forward, it may be useful for sellers to know which MSP practices are likely to raise regulatory and antitrust concerns; that knowledge can point them toward the types of complaints that are most likely to succeed. Today, the easiest targets are restrictions on what sellers can do outside the MSPs they’re on. Those include requirements we mentioned earlier, such as the ones Apple has used to prevent developers from bypassing its App Store, along with exclusivity clauses that prohibit sellers from operating on other platforms. Alibaba is under investigation in China for its exclusivity clauses, and Grab has been banned from imposing them on drivers in Singapore. Other promising targets include the contract restrictions we’ve described—so-called price-parity and most-favored-nation clauses—that are widely used by hotel-booking and other price-comparison MSPs to prevent sellers from setting lower prices in competing channels. Some of those restrictions have been lifted in Europe in response to regulatory pressure, and Amazon quietly removed its most-favored-nation clause from contracts with third-party sellers in the United States in 2019 (as it had done in Europe six years earlier).Sellers can also push back against unfair competition from MSPs. Some platforms have used proprietary data generated by third-party sellers to launch competing products (both Amazon and Apple have been accused of doing so), and some engage in “self-preferencing,” treating their own offerings more favorably in search and ranking algorithms than those of third-party sellers (as Amazon and Google have been accused of).The recent Digital Markets Act in Europe provides further guidance on which MSP practices are likely to raise regulatory concerns. Most relevant to sellers, in addition to the practices just described, are attempts to prevent them from promoting their offerings directly to users obtained through the MSP, attempts to make them purchase services linked to the MSP’s core offering, and restrictions on their ability to access and port the data they generate through the MSP.AS NEW TOOLS and technologies enable sellers of all sizes to take more control of their destinies, and as new regulations reduce the risk of being held up by large MSPs, sellers can build powerful businesses on top of those platforms with greater confidence. We will see more of them leverage MSPs to reach large scale and financial success, as Anker and Thrasio did with Amazon. And the intriguing possibility exists that some sellers could turn the tables on their MSPs and at least partly commoditize them. For instance, the legal battle between Epic and Apple might well result in Apple’s losing its ability to exclude rival app stores and payment systems from the iPhone. If that happens, some developers will almost cer- tainly offer their own specialized app stores; it’s not hard to imagine an Epic store for games or a Spotify store for music. More generally, we expect the emergence of new sellers that will create new types of platforms on top of iOS and Android platforms. The large MSPs of tomorrow could well be built by the MSP sellers of today.