Wen | Chen Xining
Editor| Qiao Qian
“5，4，3，2，1！ It's on the shelves! What clothes do you want to see in a moment? I'll share! In front of the camera, the hanger next to the female anchor hangs a different color of women's down jacket. At this moment, there is an audience on the screen shouting "Boy! When the information was almost brushed across the screen, the staff handed the men's sweatshirt to the screen, and the female anchor skillfully began the next wave of introductions.
If such a scene occurs in the live broadcast room of Taobao and Douyin, you must be no stranger. But now, all of the above scenes have been replaced by English, and the anchor has also been replaced by the faces of foreigners.
TikTok e-commerce live room
Every night from 12:00 to 8:00 a.m. Beijing time, which is when most people in the East Eighth District are asleep, more and more people are turning their biological clock upside down towards TikTok, which is the overseas version of Douyin. This month, the giant app, which has more than 1 billion active users, has successfully folded time and space, and also given new hope to many people who expect to find the next traffic depression.
The packed meeting was a testament to the enthusiasm.
At a cross-border e-commerce sub-forum of the Overseas Theme Summit in the autumn of 2021, Wang Baiqi is telling the current marketing cases of Chinese brands on TikTok and the TikTok shop gameplay similar to the Jitter store. She is the head of TikTok's overseas e-commerce advertising product strategy and operations.
This is already the last half day of the summit, and unlike many summits in the last half day of the door, practitioners have filled the conference hall. Almost since Wang Baiqi took the stage, everyone brushed out their mobile phones to shoot her speech PPT, and with each page turn of her, people would raise their mobile phones again.
Starting from 2021, the TikTok team has begun to see more in the domestic vertical summit. Sometimes, the TikTok team will even arrange different staff members to give lectures in various forums of the same summit, and most of the speeches will encourage brands to choose it as a marketing channel or directly try its e-commerce business through cases. Whenever the speech is over, it is more common for the speaker to be surrounded by practitioners and add WeChat.
A staff member who connected with the TikTok team told 36Kr: "The feeling I got from the contact was that they wanted more people to pay attention to TikTok, but they were a little afraid that they were too red. ”
TikTok is aimed at live e-commerce
In fact, it is not new to do live e-commerce overseas, and Amazon and AliExpress have made such attempts before. But no shopping platform has taken up users' time as wildly as TikTok.
Since the beginning of 2019, many MCN companies and short video marketing companies have shifted their markets overseas and quietly launched a test of TikTok. By the middle of 2021, Amazon's suspension of accounts will shake the industry, and more new consumer brands and traditional cross-border e-commerce people who are interested in going overseas will also pour into TikTok live streaming.
For ByteDance, Douyin, which has a daily active activity of more than 600 million, has touched the growth ceiling, and domestic advertising revenue has also begun to slow down. And its offshore weapon TikTok has already had huge traffic, and accelerating TikTok's e-commerce business has become a key part of its monetization.
In December 2021, nearly a year after the beta of the feature, TikTok announced the opening of TikTok Shop (functionally similar to Douyin Xiaodian) registration qualifications. This "opening up" is an invitation letter to the cross-border e-commerce industry issued to domestic practitioners who are familiar with the douyin game.
The most sensitive sense of smell and the first influx are MCN companies, which provide operators and merchants with daigou accounts and live streaming services. Witnessing or personally participating in the traffic feast of Douyin, they are extremely sensitive to the wind and grass of traffic.
"Everyone was asking about the feedback, and some people asked why not enough supplies and brands were provided. I wondered at the time, I have been a cross-border e-commerce seller for so many years, I have always selected my own products. Later, I learned that in addition to me, there were not many cross-border sellers in the meeting, many of whom were previously operating institutions, and even did not do cross-border e-commerce. After attending the official TikTok head seller closed-door meeting, Alex, who was once a cross-border e-commerce seller, told 36Kr.
The meeting, which was attended by only a dozen people, was arranged after the TikTok e-commerce team announced the full opening of the TikTok shop registration qualification in Guangzhou. Alex-owned company Sea Rabbit Technology was invited to participate because of the excellent GMV of its store. At this meeting, the TikTok e-commerce team carefully wrote down the feedback from the sellers and promoted iteration.
At the same time, in order to better serve the needs of overseas e-commerce, TikTok has also established a number of warehousing centers in China. In the UK, which previously tested the opening of the TikTok shop function, TikTok even provided sellers with free shipping activities under certain conditions. At present, cross-border freight costs account for almost 30%-50% of the unit price of products, which is undoubtedly a very attractive preferential policy.
The construction of warehousing centers and the flow support and logistics support for entrants in the embryonic period cover almost all aspects of cross-border sellers' concerns.
TikTok wants to tell the outside world that it is serious about doing e-commerce.
It is not difficult to make a number, but it is difficult to close a transaction
The rules of doing content e-commerce business, domestic institutions have long been familiar with it.
The first step is to build a number. In the early days, coming to TikTok for "placeholders" was seen as something important. One investor unabashedly told 36Kr: "After the people who entered the platform in the early days occupied the position, basically the big pattern was fixed." ”
ByteDance acquired musical.ly at the end of 2017, and the "lip-syncing" game has encircled a group of overseas young people for the latter. Since 2018, after the merger of TikTok and musical.ly and the algorithm was fully connected, TikTok data began to soar.
In 2019, MCN, which transformed from Douyin MCN, took over orders for Alibaba's cross-border e-commerce platform business and helped several of its platforms operate TikTok accounts. During the platform traffic dividend period, Whale Eat MCN helped it to start an account matrix, operating hundreds of accounts at the same time at the most, of which the account with the largest number of fans had more than 6 million subscriptions, which was already the head account on the TikTok platform at that time.
At that time, because the TikTok algorithm is not yet perfect, short videos such as handling and remaking domestic vibrato have become the main means of building numbers and absorbing powder.
Orange, an institution that also transformed from the Douyin system MCN, even developed an automatic script editor to split, reorganize, and innovate existing videos, and mass-produce new short videos, which can generate tens of thousands of messages a day at most. After the footage is edited, the video is automatically distributed to overseas mobile phones and other devices for timed release through its self-developed global cloud control system. With this efficiency, as of June 2021, Orange Has incubated more than 700 accounts on TikTok in one year, with a total of nearly 100 million fans.
"Many foreign Internet celebrities are really UGC logic output content, many people do Internet celebrities just want a 'respect', but most of the domestic PGC, from the beginning of the commercialization, do have some advantages in doing content." Li Shuhao, the founder of TikTok's first-level agent Titanium Technology, commented on the way domestic short video institutions play.
Therefore, new starting numbers and traffic trading records continue to appear in the domestic sea circle, and new billion-level traffic traders will be born in three or five times.
For the operation experts who have run out of the fierce competition in the domestic short video industry, it is not difficult at all to go to a short video platform that does not lack users and do things that have been done thousands of times in the past. But the difficult thing is behind: after having 100,000 or million-level fan accounts, how to monetize?
Many people have found that monetization on TikTok is far from the logic of domestic short video marketing and live streaming. Cultural differences, sensitivity to low prices, and the acceptance of Chinese faces are all problems, not to mention the algorithmic logic of TikTok.
On the one hand, there is a fiery placeholder and a passion for building a number, while on the other hand, it is a less easy deal to do. The stormtroopers who entered the game early had already sensed this double heaven of ice and fire.
"Look at it now, but all the numbers that start particularly quickly also die very quickly." After the platform began to supervise this part of the content, the remake number was not working. Su Wen told 36Kr. She is responsible for overseas live broadcasting business at Youdao Ads (the overseas team under NetEase Youdao), a marketing company.
The change will begin in the second half of 2021. When Su Wen operated the account, she gradually found that the platform algorithm had changed, and when the platform detected duplicate content or remake content of an account, it would limit its flow.
In this context, Su Wen's subordinates only operate 4-5 accounts in a refined way, and are mainly original - unboxing videos for 3C products and product display videos for life care.
However, Su Wen's attempt to bring goods on TikTok live broadcast was not very smooth.
"Frankly, the first game we tried in the UK area didn't close. The second game was also not very satisfactory. In the market environment at that time, a game of 100 pounds was already a good result. Su Wen concluded.
Youdao Ads began its first UK live broadcast in April 2021, because there was no dedicated line, the live broadcast appeared more stuttered, and the configuration of one anchor also lacked interactivity. By the time of the second live broadcast, users from all over the world came in, but there were not many local users in the UK, and the final order was not ideal.
After folding in the British quarter, Youdao Ads turned its destination to the Indonesian market, and Su Wen gradually found a feeling. During the Black Friday in 2021, Youdao Ads set up a local team, talked about two local Influencers, built a local live broadcast room, and made a live broadcast to the brand side. According to Su Wen, the live broadcast traffic on the day was good, and the overall meeting was expected.
Orange Yi, who once relied on the rapid remake of the number to start doing content steadily, the current account is mainly in North America, they began to try to monetize through short videos jumping to the e-commerce independent station; the whale eating MCN, which takes the operation of the agent and the marketing of the red person as the main income, after having multiple 100,000 and million-level fan accounts, the next step will be to establish TikTok live operation centers in various parts of the country, hoping to assist cross-border sellers in the off-site drainage.
But when asked about the timing of the next live broadcast, the attitude of the institutions became hesitant again. "When the brand side has demand, we will open the live broadcast again, otherwise the cost of one time is too large, and the current data needs to be verified."
How much data needs to be verified?
According to the background data provided by a seller whose daily sales volume in Tichoo is stable in the top ten stores in the UK, it has been broadcast for three months, although the sales of a single game have increased by nearly 20 times, but under the rapid growth, its highest single sales record has only reached more than 1800 pounds, which is a hundred times worse than the sales of the first ten domestic Douyin e-commerce companies that can reach the level of one million yuan.
Even if compared with the revenue of the crystal category stores that currently rank in the top three in the UK, its estimated sales in the first 30 days on Tichoo are also about 300,000-400,000 US dollars, which is placed in the domestic head vibrato live broadcast room, and may not even catch up with the sales of one day.
The vision is beautiful, but the reality is quite bone-chilling.
Tichoo Store Week rankings, the current main store sales products are still dominated by low-priced products within 10 pounds
Game with algorithms
One headache for sellers is that to do business well on TikTok, they have to figure out its algorithms.
In October 2021, Alex's team began to do TikTok e-commerce live broadcasting, with the past cross-border e-commerce explosive logic experience, after several months of hard work, his big live broadcast room has been able to stabilize in the top ten sales of TikTok UK.
"It's really lucky to be so good, but we still spend a lot of money on testing." Alex said.
As a content-based company, ByteDance is a layman in the e-commerce business. Since the introduction of Luo Yonghao's live e-commerce in April 2020, it has been less than two years, and it is undoubtedly more difficult to promote cross-border e-commerce business with the help of TikTok.
Therefore, the new sellers are also testers of TikTok's algorithm in a large sense, which in itself is easy to aggravate the instability of the business - the push algorithm will change at any time, and the user attributes entering the live broadcast room are not stable enough.
What kind of thing can be successfully sold to a completely different culture and region, and can afford the large cost of logistics and shipping? "The low-price logic may still work, but it's more important to choose." Alex said to 36Kr.
Alex started selling goods with explosive logic, 3C, toys, and tried. In August 2021, he successfully hit a hit order through TikTok short video marketing, and it became a common thing to open 500 orders a day on the independent station, and they were very excited to win the first battle.
In September, Alex began to diversify from the direction of TikTok short video marketing and formed a live broadcast room team. At the time, live streams were selling toys, and he found that even if a show had 1 million viewers, no one might have placed an order.
The problem of "applauding or not calling" continues. "At that time, the entry data of the 0-fan account and the 1 million-fan Internet celebrity launch at the beginning were similar." Alex said bluntly.
The reason is simple, short video content is aimed at global users, but live e-commerce is only aimed at local users, and the large number of fans accumulated through the former is ineffective for the latter.
Since then, he has begun to re-set up an account for the broadcast of the live broadcast room, and "wash the powder" - his target users in the British region, through the operation of accurately targeted content, he will gradually "wash" 95% of the fans into the British users, and then the live broadcast data gradually improved.
Alex also revealed that he can feel that in the live broadcast, the platform's algorithm is even accurate to the volume detection of the live broadcast every hour, and if the transaction volume is lower than a certain amount, the number of users who pour into the live broadcast room will also become less. At this stage, what he can do is to continue to drain the stream and keep the heat and GMV of his live broadcast room, so as to maintain the ranking and keep the audience sent to him by the platform under the strict algorithm.
One of the live broadcast rooms of Sea Rabbit Technology
The conventional play of cross-border e-commerce still works, such as selling genuine electronic products at low prices to attract users in, and then selling them other products. Walking into Alex's 3C live broadcast room, in addition to some products for sale, there are also "diversion goods" such as SWITCH and Apple mobile phones on the shelves.
But the "marketing grammar" of cross-border e-commerce roi-only theory no longer works.
"Maybe in September and October, our business is slightly profitable, and after expanding the scale, it is definitely a loss now." But in order to keep the live room rankings, we will definitely continue to do so. Alex said. From 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. Beijing time every day, in his company in Bao'an, Shenzhen, employees began a normalized shift live broadcast.
When the live broadcast room has not yet formed a stickiness with the user, the entrant must be more patient.
Will the next "Li Jiaqi" appear?
"From the current point of view, it is nothing more than waiting for the next Li Jiaqi, when three Li Jiaqi come out, everyone will know that the height of this industry is there, and the times call for such heroes." Li Shuhao told 36Kr. He decided to spend 10-20 million US dollars for incubation and investment in MCN institutions to wait for the birth of "Li Jiaqi".
But will there really be the next "Li Jiaqi"?
In addition to the test of the personal sales quality of the super head anchor, Li Jiaqi's success is the decisive factor in "knocking down" the price of the big brand. Blame only China's e-commerce industry is too rolled, and offline competition, and peer competition, super anchors grow out of the super platform, brands have to cooperate with it, let go of profits.
However, in the years that Li Shuhao has been dealing with overseas markets, in overseas markets, especially in developed markets, it is no longer so easy to "beat down" the price of big brands, and the offline retail industry that has been in the market for a long time is not easy to be shaken.
"Many CEOs of overseas companies are professional managers, and there are consortiums behind large companies. Compared with the competition between sales volume and ROI, professional managers 'don't do wrong' are sometimes the first demand. Li Shuhao said.
Su Wen, who has been deeply involved in the Southeast Asian market for a period of time, has a different view. She found that as long as the supply chain is really moved to the Southeast Asian market, it is possible to "beat the price down". In her live broadcast room, a set of makeup tools only sells for 5 yuan. Such a low-price strategy is very popular in the local area, and thanks to the local supply chain, avoiding rising freight rates, the market space still has potential.
Live rooms that support multiplayer live streaming
Alex believes that the logic of relying on super heads to do live e-commerce is not healthy. In order to prevent the company from falling into this situation, even in the smallest live broadcast room of Sea Rabbit Technology, he will send multiple people to rotate live broadcasts every night, on the one hand, to cultivate and reserve more live broadcast talents, on the other hand, it may also be a kind of prevention.
His anchor can open his own trumpet, or he can do live broadcasting. He is not worried about the cultivated anchors taking away resources, because in the cross-border field, the right to speak, brand cooperation and selection ability between live broadcasts are not immediately copied by personal forces.
TikTok officially announced that in 2022, more countries and regions will be newly opened to e-commerce services, which means that cross-border e-commerce will also have a larger traffic pool.
Will the next Li Jiaqi appear? With domestic experience reference, MCN institutions that started in the live broadcast room will seriously consider this problem. The answer is uncertain, the only thing that is certain is that if it will, the super anchor is not necessarily Chinese.
"I know that even if we keep rankings, we may be second-rate live broadcasts in the future. Because now stars like Ladygaga are entering TikTok. Cultural differences cannot be spelled out for the time being. Alex added.
The lively live broadcast room of overseas anchor celebrities
The day after the full liberalization of the TikTok shop registration qualification policy took effect, Alex told 36Kr that the platform's traffic to the live broadcast room has also been relaxed with the policy, but the competitors have also increased - the previous night their live room traffic increased by 20%, but the volume fell slightly, but this data has been able to relax him a little. With the adjustment, since then, his live broadcast room GMV has once again broken through the past sales record, and he has also begun to open an additional ACCOUNT in the United States to test the feedback of live e-commerce.
Some practitioners believe that by the end of 2022, TikTok's e-commerce format may give birth to hundreds of millions of GMV enterprises, and it is likely that there will be more than one. TikTok's e-commerce team has also said in public that it will enter the world's major mainstream markets in the next 5 years.
In that closed-door meeting where TikTok head sellers gathered, sellers sat around each other, and Alex was excited to see the brands of each family, which was the first time he saw a real person, the opponent he used to race on the leaderboard with him, now sitting next to him. At that time, there was a live broadcast room selling crystals that always ranked in the top three sales in the UK, and when the head of the agency was introduced, he and his peers around him involuntarily applauded.
At this moment, the competitive relationship was weakened, and the unique national pride in the sea circle spontaneously emerged. As the TikTok e-commerce team posted in the TSP service group: "Congratulations to the following TSP institutions for their excellent performance, and they have gone one step further in the process of selling Chinese good things to the world."
The Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger is approaching, and Alex asks all the Chinese employees in the company to go back for the New Year's leave, while he and the foreign employees stay behind to continue broadcasting.
What is certain is that this year, more people will voluntarily abandon the opportunity to sleep in the dark and enter this war.