Image source @ Visual China
Text | Chopped pepper TMT, the author | wonderful
In recent months, all kinds of ultra-low-price group purchases have almost exploded vibrato and kuaishou, however, many shopkeepers have encountered a problem that they never thought of - being owed wages.
It is not Douyin and Kuaishou that owe wages, but a number of third-party platforms that cooperate with them. In the mouths of the celebrities, platforms such as enjoying the library and foodism have all been in arrears.
It is with their help that Jitter quickly completed the expansion and settlement of offline stores.
A master who had been owed commissions told TMT: "I am on Douyin through the library to help merchants with group purchase links, I can not see the number of write-offs on my side, need to check through the library, but the library has not replied positively to me, what materials need to be provided do not inform, has been dragging this money not to me, communication is not smooth." ”
"Later, I contacted the official intervention of Douyin to help me get money." The man said. On the Byte Mini Program, there are also problems of not paying after the group purchase package with foodism.
Most of the third-party platforms that are frantically pouring in are "service providers" who are trembling, and they are also favored by capital under the "outlet".
In 2021, platforms such as Xiangku Life, Foodism, and Renren Have received tens of millions of financing. At the beginning of 2022, the local life new consumption platform "Big Event" also received tens of millions of pre-A round of financing.
In the local living market of nearly 20 trillion yuan, more and more entrants are entering the market. But under the wind outlet, opportunities and chaos coexist.
01
Hundreds of service providers poured into the Tandian market, another "Hundred Regiments War"?
"Now there are one or two hundred platforms for doing local life." This judgment comes from Zhang Zhizhi, vice president of Lianlian Peripheral Travel.
The threshold for wanting to become a third-party service provider of Douyin is not high, and it can be seen from the Byte Mini Program that if you want to list a local life Mini Program on Douyin, you only need to provide a business license consistent with the main body of the Mini Program.
The settlement procedure of Douyin group purchase is that after the group purchase link is verified, the commission will first go to Douyin, then return to the third-party platform, and then settle by the third-party platform to the host. Once the refund of Douyin is delayed, some small platforms are prone to break the capital chain, or even directly close down.
A talent was owed a commission by Xiangku for three months, and finally got the money back through the Douyin official.
Douyin took the lead in developing local life from 2020, and when it initially laid out local life, it was a single fight, and it took a lot of effort but did not have obvious results.
Later, Douyin introduced third-party service providers such as Lianlian Peripheral Tours, which brought merchants after settling in, and at the same time arranged for talents to drain and bring goods. It can be said that it is a third-party platform to help Douyin's local life from a desert to take root.
A shop expert in Beijing revealed that in Beijing alone, Douyin has laid out 200 BDs, and even so, it still needs a lot of cooperation with third-party service providers.
Some service providers have also taken this opportunity to develop rapidly. Taking the food doctrine established in 2020 as an example, it has grown almost in tandem with Douyin's local life business, and its official website introduction is "Douyin Kuaishou directly connected local life service e-commerce, the country's leading local life Internet celebrity service e-commerce." ”
The way for service providers to absorb merchants is to help merchants undertake online and offline, such as online packages on Douyin for merchants who do not know how to operate, and find talents to do Douyin promotion.
According to reports, at present, foodism has developed 100,000 local life business owners, and cooperated with more than 6,000 local life Internet celebrities. The talent model is also the operating model of most local life platforms.
Nowadays, Kuaishou is also catching up and has reached a cooperation with Meituan, the largest local life platform.
According to reports, Meituan will launch the Meituan Mini Program on the Kuaishou Open Platform, providing Meituan merchants with complete service capabilities such as packages, vouchers, reservations and other commodity displays, online transactions and after-sales service, and Kuaishou users will be able to directly access through the Meituan Mini Program.
In the view of some service providers, Kuaishou has just begun to enter the local life, and the role of joining hands with Meituan is nothing more than allowing users to buy Meituan's group purchase on Kuaishou. But this does not help Kuaishou quickly catch up with Douyin, what Kuaishou needs to solve is how to attract users to place orders under Kuaishou, rather than directly going to the US group to place orders.
The talent model of the third-party service provider can just help Kuaishou revitalize the situation, through the talent to bring goods, so that users can "eat in Kuaishou".
02
Is there a talent who "visits the store at home"? Explore the shop, the water is a little deep.
The traffic of the short video platform is tilted, tens of thousands of people are pouring in, and there are also several "complications" behind the prosperity of the store.
"When I went to the store to shoot, the merchant stopped me and didn't let me go, because I didn't use professional equipment." Xiao Fan, a TikTok shop expert, said, "At that time, this matter was quite big, and almost all the shop experts in beijing circles knew about it. ”
Two months ago, Xiaofan received a shop visit cooperation from the group buying platform, inviting her to experience the merchant's package and shoot a video of the store to bring goods for the merchant. Because Xiaofan used a mobile phone to shoot during the shooting, the merchant questioned that she did not use SLR, lighting and other equipment, "may be to deceive food and drink", so he stopped Xiaofan and let her pay for it herself.
After trying to leave, Xiaofan contacted the explosive coupons to solve, but got the cold treatment of the platform. A week later, Xiaofan contacted hundreds of shop experts to boycott the platform in the official group of Douyin, and finally got an apology letter and 1,000 yuan of lost work.
It should be mutually beneficial, so why is the relationship between the talent and the merchant so tense now?
On the one hand, it is because in recent years, with the support of platforms such as Douyin, the number of shop talents has soared, and due to the low entry threshold, the quality of the talents is uneven and mixed. Many people go to the store to eat the overlord meal in the name of the store, which has caused the merchants to distrust the shopkeepers.
On the other hand, the cooperation between the third-party platform and the merchants and the talents is that when the merchants are invited to enter the platform, the platform will promise to drain the merchants, that is, to invite the shoppers to experience the store.
Most of the fans are content-oriented, and their videos mainly rely on explaining the food and describing the taste to achieve the effect of planting grass, and the fans attracted are also "gourmet" fans. These fans care more about the price than the price. The quotation of such talents is relatively high, and the account that does the content to bring the group purchase link cannot be guaranteed.
"I have 200,000 fans on Douyin, and the offer of a shooting is at least 3,000, and the merchant will also have psychological expectations, such as requiring at least 100 write-offs, if it is not achieved, the dissatisfaction of the merchants with the talents and the platform will gradually accumulate." A shopkeeper said.
And some new talents with small fans, despite the low cost per time. However, these talents have no fan base, and the effect of bringing goods is worse, and the platform will choose "volume". A batch of talents ate the package, but the business traffic has not been significantly improved, the title of "shop master" began to be equated with "eating the overlord meal".
"At the beginning of the platform to discuss the package with us, said that the price is set a little lower, the platform will find a talent to drain, we do not have to spend extra money, to provide a free package can be." In this way, even if the profit is low, the amount is large, and the amount can earn money. Later, the platform did find a lot of people to eat and shoot videos, but the package sold generally, and exaggeratedly, it may not be enough to return the cost. A merchant said.
Merchants, talents, and platforms are caught in a vicious circle, which is caused by such a situation, which is ultimately because the cost is too high and the profit is too low. Merchants need to provide packages, and the travel, shooting, and post-production of the talents are all costs.
As a result, some MCN agencies have begun to shift their thinking and let celebrities "visit the store at home.".
A person in charge of an MCN agency explained that the so-called home visit to the store is that the MCN agency sends photographers to the business to shoot a large number of materials and upload them to the cloud, and the masters only need to select the materials from them for secondary creation. On the copywriting of the shop, the agency will also provide templates to turn script creation into fill-in-the-blank questions.
"I think this is the biggest pit, in fact, the commission for the goods of the talents itself is not much, so the commission of the talents cannot actually feed the company." The head of the MCN agency said,
Recently, many platforms have experienced difficulties in settlement, which is the highlight of the disease. Surviving and re-developing has become the most urgent issue for local life platforms.
03
After the "dividend period", will the service provider become a "discarded son" of trembling?
Cooperation with these platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou can bring huge traffic and benefits in the short term, but it is conceivable that in the future, Douyin and Kuaishou will do their own local life business.
After inviting merchants to settle in through third-party platforms, the next step is to develop merchants into their own direct-operated merchants, and third-party platforms have become "outcasts", at this time, how should these platforms survive?
Zhang Zhizhi, vice president of Lianlian Peripheral Tourism, believes that compared with the public domain platforms that rely on Douyin and Kuaishou, private domain traffic is the long-term way to survive, and relying too much on the public domain will affect the independence of the brand.
Founded in 2017, Lianlian Peripheral Tour has taken the WeChat terminal as the starting point to spread through private domain traffic and enhance user stickiness.
At that time, the local life market was almost occupied by several giants such as Meituan, Dianping, and Word-of-Mouth, and the reason why it was able to grab users had a lot to do with the "low-cost route" of Lianlian. The price of the two-person package in the same store is 221 on the Meituan, while it is only 118 yuan on the Lianlian Mini Program.
Zhang Zhizhi shared the low-cost secret of Lianlian - explosive thinking. When inviting merchants to settle in, the federation evaluates merchants from multiple dimensions such as word of mouth, dish quality and brand awareness, and cooperates with merchants with explosive packages.
The Federation will use its own talent matrix to help merchants launch explosive packages, at which time Lianlian can further build trust with merchants and persuade merchants to launch low-cost packages. "At present, Lianlian already has 300,000 sticky merchants, and the pressure will be much less to develop new merchants on this basis."
After Douyin and Kuaishou began to do group purchases, Lianlian took the initiative to contact the platform party to become a third-party service provider, but for Lianlian, Jitter is only the expansion of Lianlian's business line, and the focus of operation is still on its own APP and Mini Program.
On the other hand, sinking more than the platform may be the future opportunity for service providers.
At present, the layout of Douyin and Kuaishou focuses on first- and second-tier cities. Previously, Douyin has developed dozens of municipalities and provincial capitals such as Beijing and Shanghai as directly operated cities, and when Kuaishou launched the entrance to the same city in the middle of last year, it also started from the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and there is still a lot of room for development in third- and fourth-tier cities.
For example, in the "big event" that has just received tens of millions of financing, the sites of its gluttonous shopping malls are mainly concentrated in the southern coastal cities, in addition to first-tier cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen, there are stations in Foshan, Panyu, Dongguan and other cities.
In the future, if you want to expand from top to bottom, you still need to rely on the help of third-party platforms around the world.