For a big manufacturer, how silent can an APP be taken down?

On Qimai data, the Koala Haigou APP shows that it has been removed from the shelves and the time for removal is March 31, 2025. It took more than a month before the media began to notice it one after another.

Picture description: Koala Haigou can't be searched on Qimai data at present

What more people are familiar with is its other name "NetEase Koala". Its former boss Ding Lei was once full of confidence in it. Behind the slogan of "buy imported koala", its advertisements in TV series and subway stations were once overwhelming.

In 2019, "NetEase Koala" was sold to Alibaba by NetEase and renamed "Koala Haigou". Six years later, Koala Haizhuang was removed from the shelves.

Now, on multiple platforms such as Apple App Store and Huawei App Store, Koala Haigou can no longer be searched for, Koala Haigou’s official website cannot be opened, and no one answered the official customer service phone number.

01 A "death" that will come sooner or later

Koala Haigou’s real offline time may be earlier.

Liu Yang, whose business is still close to Koala Haizhuang, once did not know that Koala Haizhuang had been removed from the shelves. He then looked through the work group on the Intranet, and the message sent by his technical colleague was "apply offline" on March 17. Compared with the time of removal shown on Qimai data, it is half a month earlier.

At this time, there were loyal users of Koala Haigou on the Internet who left a message on Koala Haigou’s official account, "Did you go bankrupt? Why can’t you find anything on the APP?" "You can’t download it anymore, where can you go to Haigou?"

Liu Yang told Phoenix Finance that many of his colleagues were transferred from Koala Haizhuang. Even old employees who had worked in this business line for a long time "didn't know when they were removed from the shelves."

Picture description: Koala Haigou official website can no longer be opened

But everyone seems to know the "death" that "koala sea shopping" will sooner or later.

It is also doing cross-border import business, and Koala Haizhuang and Tmall International in the business group have too high overlap.

In October 2021, Koala Ocean Shopping experienced a major sabbatical. At that time, the team was still a team of more than 400 people, and it was reduced to more than a dozen people, "only operations were left", Liu Yang recalled that the leaders at that time believed that there was no hope for the koala business and adjusted the personnel to the Tmall APP business line of the mobile phone.

This is a stage where Koala's ocean-based shopping business line has undergone a sharp contraction.

According to late reports, in October 2021, the Tmall Mobile Phone Business Unit and the Koala Haizhuang Division were merged into the FC Division. At this time, FC's core mission is to "do self-operated", that is, to open a self-operated flagship store of a big brand on Tmall. After that, Koala Haigou's resources began to be transferred, and its product technology and part of its operations turned to Tmall mobile phones, and the industry line also invested more in its own business "Maoxiang".

By the second half of 2022, the Koala App will be in a state of maintenance and its official operations will basically stagnate. On Douyin, the latest short video released by Koala Haigou’s official account was August 26, 2022.

The "Quarterly Monitoring Report on China's Cross-border Imported Retail E-commerce Market" released by iResearch Think Tank shows that in the third quarter of 2021, Tmall International's market share was 37.4%, and Koala Ocean Shopping was 26.0%. Tmall International surpassed Koala Ocean Shopping and ranked first.

According to the monitoring data of the "Dianshubao" e-commerce database of the Internet Economic and Economics Society, in July 2020, the monthly active users of Koala Haigou APP were 7.423 million. By September 2021, the monthly active users of Koala Haigou APP fell to 6.4408 million.

After 2022, Koala Haigou's product data will only be worse. In the "Top 100 Free Chinese AppStore (Shopping) in December 2024", Koala Haigou ranked 58th, and the APPs ranked ahead of it are called "Red Bolling" and "Ocean Wharf", which were previously not as well-known as it.

Changes in internal employees can also tear apart a corner of the change. Feng Guo was once an old employee of Koala Haigou. He told Phoenix Finance that he had been buying milk powder on his APP before. By 2023, he found that Tmall International was cheaper, so he switched to Tmall International.

02 Can't raise koala in the middle class?

Looking back at NetEase Koala's glorious moment, it is hard to help but sigh.

In January 2015, NetEase Koala was launched, and the dividends of cross-border e-commerce policy became the starting point for the industry's outbreak. The tax preferential policies for cross-border retail imports issued by the General Administration of Customs and other departments provided development opportunities. At the same time, NetEase Eco's internal channels such as NetEase Email and News Client have also saved it from customer acquisition costs.

NetEase Koala takes "self-operated direct procurement" as its core model, which is more heavy, but it once gained trust and endorsement, ensuring that the supply chain is controllable. This strategy also made its own products account for far exceeding Tmall International, which was mainly based on the third-party model at that time.

According to iMedia data, in the first half of 2019, NetEase Koala ranked first with a market share of 27.7%, and has won the 10th consecutive quarter. Tmall International and JD International have global shares of 25.1% and 13.3% respectively.

With the shrinking of Koala's offshore shopping business, there is a view that this category is destined to be difficult to exist independently.

Feng Guo recalled that after Koala Haizhuang was acquired, the group organized a meeting between some of Koala's employees and the big leaders. There were less than 30 people in the venue, and he was one of them. During the exchange session, Feng Guo asked a question, which was the general idea: Nowadays, many overseas hot products will soon be replaced with domestic generation and copying capabilities. In this case, will Koala Haizhuang's future products become less competitive?

The leader believes that there is no need to worry about this issue. There will be unique new hot products overseas, and Koala needs to discover these products.

At that time, everyone seemed to have expectations for NetEase Koala. However, in later work experience, Feng Guo still witnessed the problem of difficult new hot products.

He introduced that Koala Haigou was able to do it at the beginning, and it directly took over the big part of the purchasing agency business. "For example, milk powder, diapers, cosmetics, and health products, this is the main force of Haigou's business, but after these main products, few new things have come out." Feng Guo said that Haigou's product structure has not been continuously promoted, and most of the categories purchased by everyone are concentrated in the above four types, which makes the business insufficiently grow.

In 2022, the shutdown of imported maternal and infant e-commerce "Miya" seems to prove this view. Cross-border imported e-commerce was once considered a phased product, and the vertical e-commerce platform was too small and eventually became a business on the comprehensive e-commerce platform.

Feng Guo also believed in this view for a time until Sam appeared. Relying on supply chain capabilities, product selection capabilities and quality control capabilities, Sam's membership store has been very successful in China, and the imported goods it provides account for a considerable proportion of its total volume, which is its competitiveness. These advantages make Sam's membership store a money tree for Walmart in China.

The purchasing power of the middle class can support Sam, "This also shows that independent overseas shopping is not without a way out," said Feng Guo.

03 The dilemma of koala sea shopping

Feng Guo mentioned that in fact, Koala Hai Purchase has always been awkward from the acquisition to the end of the final position. During the NetEase period, Koala Ocean Shopping was an independent Ocean Shopping business, but after it was acquired, it conflicted with Tmall International's business and had more overlap in goods and services.

Although Liu Peng, the CEO of Koala Haigou, then general manager of Tmall Import and Export Business Group, once publicly stated that although the two independent consumer brands are interconnected, there are differences. In terms of model, Tmall focuses on platform and self-operated as supplement, while Koala is the opposite.

But in fact, "many commodities have both prices and prices, and there is not much difference in prices," said Feng Guo.

The product differences are not large enough, and at the same time, the cost of Koala Haizhuang promotion is higher than that of Tmall International.

The way they obtain traffic is mainly marketing promotion and traffic diversion for Taobao. Tmall's international business is built into the Taobao APP, which attracts traffic here and does not need to jump when using it. Koala Haigou is an independent APP, and jumping brings a natural obstacle.

"If consumers are imported from Taobao to Koala Haigou, it is to import consumers from a high-frequency consumption scenario to a low-frequency consumption scenario. User retention rate and user consumption frequency must be considered. It is not that they have been guided like this. The relevant person in charge cannot obtain the traffic of Taobao and Alipay, but unfortunately the effect is not good after importing," said Feng Guo.

The reason for the poor import effect is not only the problem of lower frequency consumption scenarios of vertical APPs, but also the source of the problem of insufficient differences between Koala Haigou and Tmall International.

According to a late report, in 2021, a business team of more than 400 people operated Koala Haizhuang, which has less than 1 million people opened every day and has an annual transaction volume of less than 3 billion yuan. For comparison, Tmall International, which also does cross-border import business, has a GMV of more than 60 billion yuan in 2021.

"It depends not only on profits, but also on profit efficiency. It is obvious that Tmall International's profit will be higher than Koala Haizhuang," said Feng Guo. All these factors determine the final outcome of Koala's seafood purchase.

(Feng Guo and Liu Yang are pseudonyms in the article.)