But I feel like O2O is just another fancy marketing term. Packaging what we know as common sense into a fancy term. If Uber was started in China, guys would call it O2O taxi call center: you request for a cab online and get a cab offline. Same for Airbnb. You request for a short-term rental online and get a place offline. We just don’t call it O2O in the states because it is a very very very extremely generic term. Any IT company that is not a pure software or internet company can be classified as an O2O business.

And many of these O2O are just search and discovery, which combines existing things, reorganizing them, and returning to users. Little value is added in this process. And I can tell you why this is happening. Because most of these “entrepreneurs” have no tech background or cannot code. So they make businesses that don’t require a lot of technology input, just an app. Search for an event, search for a restaurant, search for some resources. It’s so easy to replicate their business models. You can literally buy a coding template online for 90 bucks and spend about a week to tweak some parts and draw more buttons to make it your app. There’s a reason why many of these O2O startups failed and are going to fail.