Wen 丨 e-commerce online, author 丨 Wang Yaqi, editor 丨 Si asked
“Big discount and free gifts！”
As Christmas and new year closes, the homepage of the Xuping Jewelry flagship store has been replaced with a new poster with a clear theme: on December 21 and 29, the store will open two live broadcasts, which will have "super discounts" and "free small gifts". It doesn't look special — if the anchor isn't a Russian girl and the audience isn't from overseas.
Compared with the mature business model in China, the battle situation of overseas live broadcasting with goods has just begun.
Since May last year, Xuping Jewelry has been broadcasting live on AliExpress with a frequency of 5-6 times a month. Du Pengfei, head of cross-border retail at Xuping Jewelry, told "E-commerce Online" that from the overall point of view, the proportion of sales brought by live broadcasting is not too high, but if there is a live broadcast arrangement on the same day, the number of orders in the live broadcast room will account for 60-70% of the day, exceeding the natural traffic of the store.
The homepage of Xuping store hangs a live broadcast preview, highlighting preferential discounts and free gifts
The efficient conversion of live streaming with goods has been verified, Taobao, Douyin, Kuaishou close-to-the-body hand-to-hand combat, and recently reported that B station is also about to launch shopping small yellow cars. According to the Alibaba Research Institute's "Live E-commerce Towards a Trillion Market" report, the scale of live e-commerce will exceed 2 trillion yuan in 2021 and will continue to maintain rapid growth in the next few years.
But it is easy to be overlooked that the upcoming year of 2021 is also a year when the "Chinese model" of live streaming with goods goes abroad. This trend became particularly pronounced in the second half of the year.
Youtube hosted a week-long "Youtube Holiday Stream and Shop" live shopping campaign ahead of Black Friday; around the same time, Facebook tested the "Creator Live Shopping" feature, and Instagram claimed it would run a series of live shopping events in the last two months of the year. Further ahead, Amazon launched an independent live streaming APP "Amazon Live Creat" in October - as of now, e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, shopee, lazada, social platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, and video platforms such as Youtube and tiktok have all opened the live streaming function.
The domestic high-quality supply chain and rich commodities, in a small live broadcast room, link to the broader consumer market on the other side of the ocean. When foreign giants also begin to "copy operations" to Chinese e-commerce, will overseas live streaming with goods become the next new outlet?
01, more than 60% of the sales from the live broadcast room
Before the epidemic, Xuping Jewelry was a traditional foreign trade company, with more than 95% of orders coming from abroad. It has three factories in Guangxi, designing and producing some popular jewelry, mainly sold to Eastern European countries such as Russia.
The decision to do live streaming overseas was no accident. "We have many large agents abroad, most of whom are B-end customers. But after the epidemic, we wanted to find new growth points, and we made two changes at that time. First, foreign trade to domestic demand, the current proportion of domestic and foreign sales has been almost flat; the second is to find new customers, live streaming with goods to bring a lot of C-end users. ”
At first, Du Pengfei's team did live streaming on AliExpress with the logic of xue traffic. "It's a new feature, a new free traffic channel on the platform." Later, I gradually realized that live streaming with goods is a kind of touch of the emotional link between merchants and consumers. "Foreign countries are not like domestic consumers have a wealth of channels and ways of communication, consumers can interact in the live broadcast, the willingness to participate is very high."
During the epidemic period, Xuping opened an offline store in Yiwu
Du Pengfei said that since May last year, they have accumulated stable popularity for the live broadcast room through live broadcasting. "Veterans will watch live broadcast trailers, squat in the live broadcast room, and urge us to get on the new model." In this year's live broadcast on the day of Double 12, Xuping's live broadcast reached 44,781 views in the AliExpress live broadcast room, the average stay time of users was 8 minutes, and the number of comments exceeded 10,795. In the end, 255 orders were brought in, resulting in sales of 1887 US dollars (the unit price of the jewelry customers is not high, basically below 10 US dollars).
On the day of the opening of the live broadcast, the sales volume of the live broadcast room will account for more than 60% of the day, exceeding the natural traffic of the store. In foreign live broadcast with goods, each Chinese different words, how to find the right anchor? The time difference between the regions, how is the time of live broadcasting arranged? What kind of live content is more attractive to foreign customers? These are no-man's-lands that merchants need to travel through.
The anchor of the asahira live broadcast room is a foreign employee of the company, a young Russian girl Maria. "Mariia can speak Russian, and most people in Eastern Europe can understand Russian, which greatly reduces the difficulty of our live broadcast. Our main target customers are in Russia and Ukraine, so there is a 5-hour time difference based on the local time in Moscow. We start broadcasting around 2 p.m. and are generally available to customers in the morning. Du Pengfei said.
Double 12 day live replay
After interviewing a number of industry insiders, we found that compared with domestic live broadcasting, the difference between overseas live broadcasting is:
1, live streaming with goods is more back to the essence, it is more like a sales means to serve the merchants. However, compared with the social media and search engine delivery methods commonly used by foreign trade merchants such as Instagram and Google, the input-output ratio of live streaming with goods is higher. An industry insider revealed that because the overall overseas live broadcast market is still developing, most platforms do not take points at merchants at present.
2, the overseas market is more dispersed, the long-tail value of live broadcasting will be higher, because of the time difference in various regions, merchants will often choose a suitable live broadcast time, and some users who cannot watch instantly can also watch through playback. Driving the continuous growth of playback viewing data between live broadcasts, a live broadcast will usually continue to issue orders within half a month of the end;
3, most of the foreign users for rational consumption, more attention to whether the need for this product, the quality of the goods, such a simple anchor influence to drive the purchase of buying and buying is rare in China. Du Pengfei told "E-commerce Online" that foreign live broadcasts, the product mentality is stronger than the live broadcast itself, consumers are mainly enjoying the interactive process. Unless it is a very influential person, there will be a certain celebrity effect.
02, silicon valley giants of live melee
Turning back the time to 4-5 years ago, the situation of overseas live broadcasting today is very similar to the early stage of the development of domestic live broadcasting with goods.
At present, there are three main forces in overseas live streaming: e-commerce platforms represented by Amazon, AliExpress, shopee, and lazada; video platforms represented by Youtube and tiktok, as well as social platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. There is a delicate relationship of cooperation and competition between the parties, but no matter which side, they enter the live broadcast with goods, they want to break the original e-commerce pattern, compete for the share of e-commerce, and open up this most efficient monetization model.
The overseas version of Tiktok, which reserves a large amount of traffic with algorithms and content ecology. However, content and commercialization have always been difficult to balance, and the lack of goods supply chains, warehousing, logistics and other fulfillment capabilities of content platforms will be further magnified in unfamiliar overseas markets. At the end of last year, on Christmas Eve in the United States, Walmart opened the first shopping live broadcast room on TikTok, which was also the first time that TikTok held a shopping live event in the United States.
Around the overseas live broadcast business, Tiktok chose to lay out in the form of a group with the local platform. In March and April, the small shop function was launched in Indonesia and the United Kingdom respectively. However, in the United States, where e-commerce is developed, tiktok cooperates with Shopify (a platform that assists merchants to build independent websites) to attract independent station merchants and put the latter's products on the shelves through Shopify to small stores - in essence, it is not an independent e-commerce system in the station, but still the logic of distribution.
The e-commerce layout of each platform, e-commerce online according to public information collation
Last October, Youtube's parent company, Google, announced that it would make Youtube a one-stop shopping platform that would allow creators to tag items in videos and link to Google's analytics and shopping tools to string together a library of products with video content.
Youtube is the world's largest video sharing website, the platform mature advertising sharing mechanism, gathered a huge number of Internet celebrity resources, planting grass atmosphere is strong. Customized videos, unboxing videos, and reviews of products are common on the platform. Youtube began a week-long live shopping campaign on November 15, with merchandise mainly from retailers such as Walmart and Samsung, but it is still more like a field of planting and distribution than a complete on-site e-commerce system.
Youtuber Monthly Revenue Ranking (Source: Purple Moon Promotional Products)
In contrast, Facebook, which changed its name this year, is more interested in e-commerce, including its Instagram, which launched both Facebook Shop and Instagram Shop last year and built e-commerce on the site. Some merchants with celebrities as the core, personal original brands, attract consumers who pursue individuality. The brand is the account owner, who can directly share the goods with the customer's private message, bringing the value of private domain traffic. The problem at hand is that the shopping mentality of social platforms is not strong.
According to eMarketer, only 18.3 percent of U.S. adults have shopped on Facebook in the past year, compared with 11.1 percent on Instagram. 70.4% of respondents said they had not purchased anything through any social platforms during the month.
Foreign content platforms and social platforms do live e-commerce and domestic Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Weibo and even WeChat are similar, and the three elements of the core of e-commerce are often only one of them. Amazon, which made its fortune as an e-commerce merchant, has also made a defensive posture faster: Amazon launched an independent live streaming APP "Amazon Live Creat" in October this year. Judging from the current live broadcast situation of various platforms, Amazon is also the only platform that opens the interface at any time and has anchors in the live broadcast, although the number of viewers is not stable, but from a shopping mall to draw a live broadcast with the entrance of goods, it will not disturb users, and the experience is smoother.
03, how to "copy Chinese operations"
In the past, domestic was often the advanced business model of copying abroad, and after the birth of Uber, Didi appeared in China. Good business models and business opportunities will always be copied quickly.
In the e-commerce space, change is happening – tech companies and VCs from Silicon Valley are excited about China's live streaming model, not only the existing giants, but also some emerging live streaming companies. In February and September, U.S. startups Newness and Whatnot, the former beauty live streaming platform led by Sequoia Capital, received a $3.5 million and $150 million funding round, respectively, and Whatnot, a player collectibles live shopping platform.
But it is not easy for the live streaming model to flourish overseas. The data shows that more than 95% of the transaction volume of Chinese e-commerce comes from e-commerce platforms, but more than 50% of the transaction volume in the United States or other markets comes from the brand's official website, or online platforms such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour. The consumption traces of overseas consumers are relatively scattered, and it is difficult to have a concentrated consumption outbreak.
Image source: Whatnot.com
Silver Ash, head of AliExpress's live broadcast business, told "E-commerce Online" that the user's mind is a problem that all overseas platforms need to face when doing live streaming with goods. "Overseas consumers are more accustomed to shopping with active search, and live streaming is a new shopping guide model, which is a relatively passive acceptance process." This requires the market to educate, many overseas consumers do not know that live shopping can also be shopping, they do not know that live shopping will often have better discounts. ”
The market, which has not yet been fully reclaimed, requires the platform to invest more energy to grope forward. Taking Amazon as an example, its investment in live streaming is not small, but the effect is not satisfactory. Some insiders explained that this is mainly because it is difficult for brands to equip them with suitable anchors for live streaming, and Amazon cannot provide relevant support for them.
"For e-commerce platforms, anchors often determine the lower limit of live streaming with goods, and commodities determine the upper limit." The anchor does not necessarily have to be a star or internet celebrity, but at least has a certain professional ability to explain the product clearly. "Silver Ash said that overseas live streaming goods have also derived peripheral industrial chains such as agencies, but the volume is still very small." Taking AliExpress as an example, at present, on the platform, the number of self-broadcasts and live broadcasts of celebrities is almost the same. Among them, in the live broadcast of talents, two-thirds of the anchors are basically signed with institutions. ”
From imitation, learning to innovation out of their own path, China's e-commerce has only taken 20 years.
In the eyes of domestic brands and merchants, overseas markets still have extraordinary attraction. Du Pengfei said that as a Supplier of China, overseas live streaming will definitely bring them more opportunities in the future. "Foreign consumers like our goods, which is a visible consumer demand. In this context, the new model is being promoted from home to abroad, and with the high attention and high participation spontaneously generated by foreign giants, it will surely become more and more mature. And before that, what we need to do for overseas consumers is to give them enough time to get used to and fall in love with our live room. ”