Produced | Sohu Technology
Author | Song Wanxin
Edit｜ Yang Jin
After the traditional e-commerce of Taobao and Jingdong, and the social e-commerce of Pinduoduo, Douyin put forward a new concept-“interest e-commerce” at the recent e-commerce conference.
According to the explanation by Kang Zeyu, president of Douyin e-commerce, “interest e-commerce” is to tap the potential shopping needs of users based on the content ecology and recommendation algorithm of Douyin. If the traditional shelf-style e-commerce in the Taobao era is that users go shopping with their goals, then “interest e-commerce” is to use algorithms to recommend products that may be of interest to users when they have no purpose.
If you compare Taobao to a shopping mall, Douyin is more like a pedestrian street.
Another new concept was introduced, and the controversy about “whether it is a pseudo concept” also arises. From the perspective of implementation means, the essence of “interested e-commerce” is “commodity recommendation”, and this function is actually not absent on platforms such as Taobao and JD.com. But Chen Jun, a senior practitioner in the e-commerce industry, believes that Taobao does the most to match demand. He told Sohu Technology that the algorithm recommendation is to increase the conversion rate as much as possible, that is, to allow people at each level to get the consumption they need, so as to increase the conversion rate.
Regardless of how “interested e-commerce” is defined, Douyin has come up with algorithmic tools to tap the value of public domain traffic, convert more potential users to shopping live broadcast rooms, and then undertake with a brand with a certain degree of recognition and trust. , Guarantee retention and repurchase rate.
“The efficiency of the Douyin team is still very high. From the start of the e-commerce business to the present, it has output its own methodology in more than a year.” Wuyou Media CEO Lei Binyi told Sohu Technology.
A few days before the Douyin E-commerce Conference, Kuaishou also held a self-e-commerce conference. The live broadcast e-commerce methodology expounded by Kuaishou seems to be quite different from Douyin, but when you look closely, the two essentially have the same demands.
“Rely on public domain in the short-term and private domain in the long-term”, Kuaishou advocates that the promotion of transaction traffic comes from the follow page, so that the master and the merchant have the right to control the traffic. Although Kuaishou emphasized the “private domain” from the beginning to the end of the conference, one detail worth noting is that Simba, who has the strongest private domain traffic, did not appear in any promotional videos of the conference due to the “bird’s nest sale incident”. And the anchor case.
In fact, Kuaishou seems to be deliberately weakening family-style private domain traffic, and instead uses “private domain traffic” to attract mid-waist anchors and business self-broadcasts to balance the power of the family, and covertly transfer to the public domain under the crust of private domain.
With Kuaishou’s listing and TikTok approaching its listing, the two e-commerce businesses have also come to an interweaving point dramatically, that is, the competition for public domain traffic and brand owners. Douyin once again chose to start from the high line, and Kuaishou once again completed the low line and hit the high line from the low line. The short video war between the two sides once again repeated itself in the field of e-commerce.
It’s better to rely on the anchor than the brand
“The vibrato is a lesson learned from Taobao live broadcast and Kuaishou.” Chen Jun said.
In the field of e-commerce, although Douyin is a late player, it may be a smart and powerful opponent. More than a year after Douyin started its e-commerce business, the first e-commerce methodology that has attracted the attention of the outside world is the importance of Douyin e-commerce on brand self-broadcasting.
Since Luo Yonghao launched the first shot of Douyin live e-commerce last year, various celebrity artists have also appeared one by one, but while sales are refreshing high, the industry has also begun to talk about the platform ecology of “Douyin does not have a brother”. Compared with Kuaishou’s strong private domain traffic, Douyin’s public domain ecology is difficult to incubate a benchmark anchor, and it has almost blocked the idea of relying on anchors to bring goods to establish an industry image.
Xiaohulu big data shows that from April to December last year, among the top 100 master anchors in total sales on Taobao, Kuaishou, and Douyin, 45 were Kuaishou anchors, 40 were Taobao anchors, and only 15 were Douyin anchors. Among the top 10 sales talent anchors, 5 are Taobao anchors, 4 are Kuaishou anchors, and only Luo Yonghao is the Douyin anchor.
According to Tencent’s deep network citing people who ran Douyin e-commerce in the early days, 6 accounts were incubated on Douyin, with a total number of fans of about 100,000. However, according to his observation, the number of fans is not directly related to the amount of goods carried. 3 After the monthly explosion, sales have entered a stable period.
This problem is not uncovered within Douyin. At the conference, Douyin e-commerce put forward the “FACT model”, which represents the self-broadcasting of merchants, the talent matrix, marketing activities, and the big V of the head. The four horses are equally important to balance the forces of all parties.
In fact, before the official announcement, the Douyin e-commerce ecology had already formed a big environment where the brand was popular. In August last year, Xiao Dongyu, head of Weige’s MCN brand live broadcast service, told Sohu Technology that Douyin’s head anchors generally tend to work directly with the supply chain, with brand-specific shows accounting for the majority, while Taobao’s mixed broadcasting is the main focus.
“The FACT mode of Douyin deliberately avoids the potential hazards of Hengqiang on the head. There must be drawbacks to only grabbing one head in the private and public domains. The space in the waist really needs a platform to redistribute traffic. What I see is , Douyin is strengthening this transformation.” Wuyou Media CEO Lei Binyi told Sohu Technology.
Judging from the experience of Kuaishou and Taobao, the negative impact of strong top anchors is self-evident. Simba, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya gradually evolved from platform signs to platform ceilings and began to counterbalance the overall ecological health of the platform.
Take Simba’s return to his debut as an example. Although Simba has tried his best to keep a low profile, it is still difficult to conceal his influence. At the end of the whole live broadcast, Simba recommended a batch of newcomer anchors, and added fans to these newcomers’ accounts. Some of the anchors increased their fans at one time by more than one million orders. In a sense, Simba’s private control of traffic has been Beyond the platform.
Chen Jun said that the essence of Douyin’s support for brand self-broadcasting is to redistribute benefits and achieve a balance between all parties, instead of letting a certain character become fat, and other characters are sucked up.
Kang Zeyu, President of Tik Tok E-commerce, emphasized that Tik Tok attaches great importance to all levels. For Long Tail, Tik Tok will set up a selection alliance to make it easier for them to choose products. There may be some requests for brand cooperation in the middle waist, and Douyin will support it through mechanisms such as Douyin Link. On the head, there are more customization needs, such as building your own team and even brand.
In terms of revenue, Douyin e-commerce is similar to Taobao. Its revenue mainly consists of GMV rake and advertising. Brand merchants can contribute more stable GMV and traffic purchase costs. Moreover, mature top brands have a complete supply chain, which can make up for the incomplete Douyin stores. This all constitutes the reason why Douyin supports brand self-broadcasting.
But Douyin’s brand self-broadcasting is obviously still in its infancy. Xiaohulu big data shows that of the top 100 stores with total sales last year, 98 live rooms are from Taobao, and only 2 live rooms are from Douyin.
The hidden worries of large-scale anti-super fast hands and Taobao live broadcast
In the outside world’s perception of live e-commerce, Kuaishou e-commerce has a first-mover advantage and seems to be the best in terms of scale, but from the data point of view, facts and subjective feelings may be somewhat different.
According to a report from the financial media “LatePost”, Douyin’s live broadcast of e-commerce GMV exceeded 500 billion yuan last year. The Kuaishou financial report shows that last year, Kuaishou’s GMV was 381.2 billion yuan, and Taobao’s live broadcast exceeded 400 billion yuan. In terms of scale, Douyin has achieved a surpassing Taobao live broadcast and Kuaishou.
The Douyin e-commerce business plans to raise the GMV target this year to one trillion yuan, doubling the previous year. In contrast, Pinduoduo only broke through one trillion in 2019, compared with 1.6 trillion last year. In other words, if the goal is achieved, Douyin’s e-commerce business alone will surpass the scale of Pinduoduo in 2019.
According to Questmobile data, during the National Day last year, Douyin stores have basically become the only channel for live e-commerce on the platform, accounting for 96%, while Kuaishou stores only accounted for one-third of their revenue, and Taobao and Youzan each accounted for it. one third. From the data point of view, Douyin has basically formed a closed loop, and Kuaishou’s e-commerce revenue still has a high proportion of people making wedding dresses for others.
Since the establishment of the first-level e-commerce department last year, in order to establish a closed-loop Douyin store, Douyin first broke off the third-party platform for live broadcast and delivery, and then launched Douyin payment. In addition, it has reached a cooperation with the big channel brand Suning to support various players. TikTok e-commerce closed loop was established quickly.
However, the construction of the Douyin store and the overall operating system is still relatively simple. After Douyin’s external link was broken last year, Li Jianfeng, the director of Roman e-commerce, once told Sohu Technology that Douyin stores are relatively immediacy, and merchants have not received clear guidance for long-term operations.
It is understandable that Douyin is an e-commerce company starting from its own strengths “recommendation algorithm”, but this also makes it difficult for the “recommended live broadcast” to meet the daily sales needs of businesses. In addition, merchants who have become accustomed to Taobao’s more complex operating rules cannot quickly build a similar operating system on Douyin, and the Douyin platform itself does not yet have a standardized product similar to Alimama to guide merchant operations.
At the product level, unlike Kuaishou and Taobao live broadcasts, Douyin’s e-commerce portal “Douyin Mall” is located on the personal homepage. There is no classification as a whole. Only the “Guess you like” part recommends products based on algorithms, designed as a double-row information stream, and In the information flow, live broadcast portals and commodity link portals are mixed.
This shows that “search-based e-commerce” currently does not have a high priority in Douyin e-commerce as a whole.
In addition to the differences in product design, Lei Binyi believes that if Douyin and Taobao are compared, because of their genetic differences, Taobao, as an e-commerce platform, converts traffic to live broadcasts, and the accuracy rate will be higher than that of Douyin.
QuestMobile’s data report in April last year showed that among the current major content platforms, the average conversion rates of Douyin and Kuaishou were 8.1% and 2.7%, respectively. However, there are still differences between sub-industries and brands of different sizes. A person familiar with the matter revealed to Sohu Technology that the conversion rate of Douyin stores is only 1.4% for the top brand in a certain vertical category. The flow of the department is coordinated”.
The greatest insecurity in Douyin’s public domain traffic distribution is reflected in the instability of sales conversion. In such an environment, the top brand can survive the cold start period more smoothly by virtue of a higher consumer awareness base.
Wu Lifeng, head of the e-commerce platform of Peacebird Live, told Sohu Technology that if 1 million people come in to watch the live broadcast during a live broadcast, and 150,000 people will eventually enter the store, the conversion rate can reach 15%, which is already a considerable benefit. From the perspective of the entire brand’s self-broadcasting, the launch traffic accounted for 30%, and the organic traffic accounted for about 70%.
Douyin has already begun to make attempts on private domains. In March of this year, Douyin quietly launched the test of the fan group chat function, and businesses can establish private domain communities on Douyin. For example, Luo Yonghao’s “Make Friends” Douyin fan group has reached 50.
On the other hand, in order to open up public domain and private domain traffic, Kuaishou began to test the e-commerce marketing platform Magnetic Taurus on March 31, and integrate Kuaishou Noodles + Xiaodiantong. As for the shortcomings of “brand self-broadcasting”, Kuaishou is also working hard to erase the prejudice of the outside world. Xiao Gu, the person in charge of Kuaishou e-commerce company, responded, “Many brands ask us whether I can do it in Kuaishou, and whether Kuaishou is suitable for branding. My response to everyone is that for a platform where 300 million people come every day, it must It’s suitable for brands, but the way of doing it is different. We encourage store broadcasting and self-broadcasting more.” He explained that if it is a flagship store, the content and trust of store-broadcasting are insufficient, but if self-broadcasting is done, as On the brand side, you can open an account to make the personality more interesting.
In the traffic war between private and public domains, the battle between Douyin, Kuaishou and Taobao Live has just begun.
Where is the channel dividend, where is the brand
In the past three years, live broadcast e-commerce has developed rapidly, but it has quickly reached a bottleneck. Among the three leading platforms of Douyin, Kuaishou, and Taobao Live, Douyin is still a newcomer, but it is also the only platform that is still on the rise. In e-commerce, an industry that has high customer acquisition costs and constant need for traffic access, it is the common understanding of merchants to seize Douyin, even if the future of Douyin e-commerce is still unclear.
Earlier, many merchants told Sohu Technology that Douyin’s disconnection of external links last year did cause them a relatively large turmoil in the short term. Originally, there was no plan to open a small store on Douyin, but considering that Taobao has not too many Incremental space, just to be on the safe side, still cannot give up the market of Douyin.
“We are indeed investing more operational energy in Douyin now, because relatively speaking, Taobao’s live broadcast pattern has been more solidified.” Lei Binyi told Sohu Technology. He observed that even if it is Taobao’s head anchor, Spending a lot of money to advertise outside the site, such as WeChat’s Guangdiantong and various other channels.
Recently, Tmall has rarely lowered the threshold for merchants to enter. After April 19, newly opened stores can become official Tmall stores only by passing the 7-month trial operation capability assessment. This is the first time that Tmall has revised its store opening rules since its establishment in 2009.
Where the channel dividend is, where is the brand owner. Its own bottleneck and Douyin Kuaishou’s plundering of merchant resources are increasing the sense of crisis on Taobao and Tmall.
In fact, the Taobao brand has already worked hard in the field of self-broadcasting, and it has become a standard for Taobao live broadcast. However, Lei Binyi pointed out that Taobao’s live broadcast mechanism has defects in store self-broadcasting. “Taobao’s service fee for proxy broadcasts is paid by the hour. Paid, that is, how much is an hour, but Douyin is a cost model of CPS (charged by actual sales volume), which is obviously more effective in motivating anchors.”
QuestMobile’s live e-commerce report in October last year showed that as of September 2020, the proportion of users watching live broadcasts on Kuaishou and Douyin platforms has reached around 80%, and the user habits of live e-commerce have basically formed. However, it is worth noting that the proportion of Kuaishou head KOLs participating in live broadcast is 58.5%, and the proportion of carrying goods is 36.6%. In contrast, the proportion of Douyin head KOLs participating in live broadcast is about 27.5%, and the proportion of carrying goods is 51.2%.
In other words, although Kuaishou has created its image as the “first platform for live streaming e-commerce”, Kuaishou still dominates live entertainment. And more than half of the anchors on Douyin who started live broadcasts for the purpose of bringing goods.
Under the influence of head anchors such as Simba, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, Hengqiang, the waist and tail anchors began to test the waters in many ways. The person in charge of MCN once told Sohu Technology, “The anchors are studying how to drain traffic more accurately. Taobao does not The method is to provide traffic to the live broadcast room, but Douyin can. The two sides have very different operating methods for the anchors. Therefore, many mid-waist anchors can only test the water in many ways, and a small proportion of them are “out of the country”.”
E-commerce anchors are fleeing Kuaishou and Taobao, and the agency service providers are also seeing the dividends of Douyin.
Chen Jun told Sohu Technology that the service provider of TikTok Lining’s official account used to be mainly engaged in content marketing, but only transformed into an e-commerce agency operation in August last year. “Originally, the company was almost unable to sustain it. After the transformation, it is now one month later. The transaction turnover is about 50 million.” He said that the general trend of brand self-broadcasting will drive the rapid growth of the entire agency operation industry.
On the whole, the basic ideas of Douyin e-commerce, the overall framework of the store, the basic disks of the top merchants and users are all in place. The next decision is whether the wild growth of GMV can last or not, which is the most critical user experience. , And whether internal management can keep up with the speed of business expansion.
An insider of Douyin revealed to Sohu Technology that the two e-commerce departments within Byte are trying to integrate. One is the e-commerce department of the group established in June last year. Before this department was established, Douyin already had one of its subordinates. E-commerce department. And BYTE hopes to put the old e-commerce department under Douyin into the commercialization group, that is, Zhang Lidong’s subordinates.
“This year Douyin is going to engage in e-commerce.” The insider said. After Douyin catches up on the scale of GMV, whether it can reverse the live broadcast e-commerce landscape and carry the imagination of going public, perhaps there will be an answer within the year.
(At the request of the interviewee, Chen Jun is a pseudonym)
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