After eight years of trial and error, Feifan.com is finally offline. When will Wang Jianlin’s e-commerce dream come true again?

Wang Jianlin has ambitiously said before that Wanda will build the world's largest commercial O2O platform. Wanda's most valuable sector in the future is Feifan, which will have a profit of over 10 billion yuan and go public in 2020.

Ironically, in 2020, Wanda finally bid farewell to the word "e-commerce", and its dream of going public became a bubble.

On June 9, according to Jiemian News, Wanda's e-commerce platform Shanghai Xinfeifan E-Commerce Co., Ltd. is planning to cancel its registration and is doing the final debt settlement.

It is worth noting that in 2018, New Feifan announced the end of its five-year exploration with a round of layoffs. After Bingsheng Technology was established, New Feifan merged its core technology and most of its employees into it, and Feifan.com became an empty shell without a physical entity.

In February this year, Wang Sicong resigned from the position of director of Shanghai New Feifan E-Commerce Co., Ltd., the operating entity of Feifan.com, and Feifan.com eventually became a bubble.

Some netizens also joked: "I only knew about this e-commerce company after it went bankrupt."

There was a hint of surprise and regret in his words, but the ending of Feifan might have been doomed from the beginning, and Wang Jianlin had already anticipated it.

As early as 2017, Wang Jianlin admitted Feifan’s failure:

Feifan's original direction was off. In the past, it always wanted to expand its business. If it had only developed for Wanda Plaza and tourist resorts from the beginning, it might have become famous long ago.

Wang Jianlin's implication not only acknowledged the confusion in Feifan's past positioning, but also revealed the ending of Feifan.

Wang Jianlin was prepared to pay the tuition, but he didn't expect it would take eight years.

In 2012, Wanda began to get involved in e-commerce, which was a turbulent period for China's e-commerce industry: although Alibaba's Double Eleven sales reached 19.1 billion, problems such as false shipments, fake orders, and difficulty for small and medium-sized merchants to make profits were frequent; JD.com had not yet gone public, and although it completed a $400 million financing at the end of the year, it was said that its valuation had further decreased, and the high investment in logistics had not shown any return; Suning, which also transformed from offline, was in the pain period of transformation; Vipshop was described by the media as a bloody listing.

Wanda did not choose to follow, but placed its e-commerce dream on O2O , and established an e-commerce working group, appointing Qu Dejun as the head of the e-commerce working group. This year, Feifan also welcomed its first CEO Gong Yitao, the former technical director of Alibaba International Transaction.

In 2013, Wanda E-commerce launched Wanhui.com, which mainly serves Wanda Plaza and establishes a membership system based on points.

In order to build an O2O platform and realize the Internetization of offline business, Wanda also showed its “no shortage of money” side, upgrading and renovating Wi-Fi for Wanda Plazas across the country for free and paying for the informatization of shopping malls. It seems that everything is going in an orderly manner.

But Wang Jianlin was not satisfied, and eventually, Wanhui.com was abandoned. The strategic direction changed from empowering Wanda Plaza to empowering all business formats of Wanda Group.

In 2014, Wanda announced that it would jointly invest 5 billion yuan with Tencent and Baidu to build the e-commerce platform "Feifan.com", and planned to increase the investment to 20 billion yuan in the next five years to build the world's largest O2O e-commerce company. The outside world called this combination Tencent Baiwan. According to the cooperation agreement between Tencent Baiwan and the three companies, the three giants will connect their members, establish a universal points alliance, and integrate big data, in order to divert members from Tencent and Baidu to form a huge ecosystem.

However, Feifan’s members have only been able to register using their mobile phone numbers, and the synergy between Tencent and Baidu has not been demonstrated.

At the same time, Dong Ce was appointed as the second CEO successor of Wanda E-commerce. Under the command of the new CEO Dong Ce, the main goal of Wanda E-commerce management became the construction of smart plazas.

In 2015, Feifan.com was officially launched. From the perspective of its website structure, it is mainly divided into catering, movies, finance and other sectors, basically covering the business scope of Wanda Plaza. On this website, consumers can obtain various services including movies, catering, etc. At this time, the strategic direction focused on making the e-commerce business profitable and focusing on making money. However, only three months after the new official took office, the second CEO Dong Ce left quickly.

In 2016, Tencent Baiwan also announced its dissolution, and Wanda split off to form the Internet Technology Group, whose businesses include Feifan, Kuaiqian, online credit, credit reporting, and online data centers, etc. Qu Dejun was appointed as the president of Wanda Internet Technology.

In the same year, the third CEO Li Jinling took office.

At this time, according to Wang Jianlin's plan, Wanda e-commerce began to expand externally and become a platform-level e-commerce. Wanda e-commerce is no longer an e-commerce or O2O that sells goods, or even a smart plaza, but has transformed into a technology provider that provides a complete set of "Internet +" solutions for shopping malls. According to internal interpretation, Wanda's e-commerce system will be more responsible for providing information transformation for Wanda Plaza merchants in the future, thereby completing the overall intelligent upgrade of data and plazas.

One year after taking office, Li Jinling also announced his resignation and Liu Yun took over.

However, Wanda E-commerce faced greater challenges in 2017. The shrinking of overseas investments and the failure to return to the A-share market put the Wanda Group as a whole into a passive position and put its capital chain to great test. At the same time, Wanda Internet Technology was also caught up in a layoff storm. It was said that the number of Internet Technology employees had been reduced from 6,000 to 300, and the remaining employees would join the new company, Bingsheng Technology.

In 2018, with the successive withdrawal of directors, Feifan.com seemed to be defunct in name only.

Looking back at Wanda’s exploration in the e-commerce field over the past eight years, the vacillation in strategy and the confusion in development direction have made Wanda e-commerce pay an expensive learning price.

After eight years of trial and error, Feifan.com finally collapsed. In addition to Wang Jianlin's unclear understanding of the business logic of e-commerce, another very important reason behind this was that Wanda lacked e-commerce genes.

Wanda has built a huge business empire with commercial real estate and cultural industries as its main business through nearly 30 years of hard work. With such huge resources, it seems not difficult for outsiders to do a good job in e-commerce business, but it is precisely the past successful experience and the established genes that have constrained the "newborn" e-commerce.

Wang Jianlin is also aware of this drawback. As early as 2014, Wang Jianlin publicly stated that Wanda e-commerce does not have Internet genes and lacks Internet thinking. In August of that year, he reviewed at an internal seminar that all Wanda systems must be reviewed to see whether they truly have Internet thinking. In this era, if you don't use Internet thinking, you will be eliminated.

Having said that, it is not easy to shake a big tree.

E-commerce is different from traditional industries in that innovation is very important. Wanda, founded by Wang Jianlin, a former soldier, has the characteristics of a group army, with modular node-based management, which played a key role in the rapid expansion of Wanda Plaza. However, in Internet projects and startups, individual creativity is extremely important, which is something that Wanda does not have in its genes.

According to Jiemian News, several managers interviewed said that being a leader at Feifan.com was a tough job and they had no decision-making power. How Wanda's e-commerce business should develop? How should it develop? All of it was decided by Wang Jianlin. Wanda's e-commerce CEO had to report business progress to Wang Jianlin no matter how big or small the matter was. He would put forward specific modification suggestions and make the final decision.

Therefore, Wanda e-commerce CEOs who need Wang Jianlin's approval on everything can only keep reporting their Wanda e-commerce plans to Wang Jianlin. The implementation of this plan depends entirely on Wang Jianlin's understanding, but Wang Jianlin has publicly said that he does not understand e-commerce. This is nothing more than empty talk, so Feifan.com has never been implemented.

Due to the huge gap between ideal and current situation, Feifan.com even had cases of data falsification.

According to a previous report by Jiemian News, Wang Jianlin's confidence in Feifan actually came from the "watered-down reports" submitted by his subordinates, who claimed that their 200 million active users and tens of millions of daily active users actually meant 200 million mobile phone numbers.

In addition, Bloomberg also reported on the problem of Feifan's user numbers. According to Questmobile data, as of December 2015, Feifan's user numbers reached 5.13 million, while in February 2016, Feifan's user numbers dropped 84% to a low of 824,000. Bloomberg said at the time that Feifan's user numbers were far behind Dianping's 43.3 million users, not to mention its competitor Baidu Nuomi's 192 million users.

Multiple changes of leadership, unclear positioning and lack of Internet genes finally exhausted Wang Jianlin's patience. Feifan.com completely withdrew from the e-commerce stage, and Wang Jianlin's e-commerce dream was shattered.

But from an objective perspective, "cross-border" development is meant to find new business growth points, and failure is the most common outcome. But for Wang Jianlin, there are more business dreams waiting for him to realize.