The traffic vultures behind the jitter

Image source @ Visual China

Wen 丨 新 entropy, Author 丨 白芨, Editor 丨 月見

The open and low-threshold e-commerce settlement policy of short video platforms is opening the door to the influx of non-sourcing merchants.

Nana is a non-sourcing e-commerce practitioner, she runs a number of small stores on Douyin, there is no inventory, or even no short video or live broadcast content, but has a lot of turnover. The backstage data nana showed to "New Entropy" showed that the weekly turnover of its stores was close to one million yuan. She said:

"It's not cost-effective to do the content yourself, you need a high traffic fee in the early stage, and the drainage of the talent is completely enough."

On Douyin and Kuaishou, similar cases have become the norm. This is different from the impression of short video e-commerce on the "traffic realization" of the outside world, in the actual game of the market, traffic and realization are independent of each other and interdependent. According to the "Photon Planet" report, a similar non-sourcing e-commerce model can account for more than 60% of the douyin e-commerce system.

Behind the shortcomings of the short video platform to run the e-commerce track, from traditional e-commerce, social e-commerce to interest e-commerce, capital tries to weaken the rationality of consumers' decision-making by various means, and also leaves potential profit space for speculators who grab traffic. Nana said: "Douyin is in the traffic dividend period, and our opportunities are given by the platform. ”

01, small with large goods

Non-sourcing stores are based on such a demand - the store owners themselves often operate part-time, with limited funds and time, unable to invest heavy costs in the online store, but hope to share the platform's organic traffic to obtain revenue. The specific operation is to use the selection tool to select the popular goods of the whole network to their own small shops to increase the price, these products often have the characteristics of eye-catching trendy, while covering a wide audience, but the popularity is not high, it is difficult for consumers to give an accurate valuation in the first time. After receiving the order, the merchant places an order from the upstream online store, and the delivery address is written as the customer address, thereby earning the intermediate price difference. Nana told "New Entropy": "Logistics is not a problem, the single amount is small, the direct shooting order, the single large amount is docked with the manufacturer's delivery." ”

About 2,000 years ago, the fierce offensive of the Han Dynasty forced the Huns to migrate westward, leaving the desert steppe where they lived. In the era of mobile Internet, the fierce involution of Taobao's e-commerce ecology has also contributed to the "westward migration" of Taobao's non-source merchants. In the eyes of merchants, the fierce competition in product search rankings has made Taobao a saturated market, with big brands and new stores without a place to stand.

Where is the unstocked store cluster going? Taobao is falling into the inner volume, emphasizing the branding of Jingdong merchants entry threshold is extremely high, Pinduoduo once became a new hot land, a non-source merchant said: "The platform manages whether you have goods, can contribute to the flow of water, just like why brushing orders is repeatedly prohibited, in the end, the platform opens a glance and closes a glance." "In 2019, during the pinduoduo traffic dividend period, the number of active merchants on the platform exceeded 5.1 million, and the non-source e-commerce once found a new hot land. However, in the context of Internet anti-monopoly, Pinduoduo's strength for brand merchants has increased significantly, and tens of billions of subsidies are also more inclined to brand merchants, which shows that Pinduoduo's inner volume is budding.

Short video e-commerce is becoming a new hot spot for non-sourcing online stores.

Whether in traditional e-commerce or social e-commerce platforms, non-sourcing merchants are similar to "scavengers" to survive - when the platform is in the traffic dividend period, consumer growth rate is extremely fast, and merchant growth is relatively slow, excess "organic traffic" will be distributed to non-sourcing stores. The amount of traffic depends on the development stage of the platform, and the more the early stage of growth of the lack of cake splitters, the more abundant the organic traffic that can be shared. From 2020 to 2021, Kuaishou and Douyin have successively released tens of billions of subsidy news to enter the e-commerce battlefield, which means that new traffic fields are waving for non-source merchants.

On the other hand, it is different from the traditional e-commerce model of search as the core traffic source. Whether it is the interest of Douyin e-commerce, or the trust of Kuaishou e-commerce, they all try to cut into e-commerce transactions from the perspective of traffic monetization, the former tries to feed stream recommended content as the main battlefield, and the latter takes the focus stream as the core, emphasizing that content is an important source of e-commerce traffic. This is just in line with the needs of non-sourcing e-commerce. Nana told "New Entropy": "The main source of Douyin Small Shop is the short video and live content of the talents, followed by organic traffic, and finally search traffic. The traffic of the store depends entirely on the ability of the talent to carry the goods. ”

For example, the backing of interested e-commerce is the recommendation algorithm. The "2021 Douyin E-commerce Merchant Business Methodology White Paper" mentions that the typical consumer path of interested e-commerce is "interest-demand-purchase", emphasizing the use expectations and emotional resonance of stimulating users. In contrast, the search price comparison behavior of users in traditional e-commerce has been diluted, which further provides room for non-source online stores to earn information difference profits.

02、 Traffic "Vulture"

For non-sourcing merchants, it seems that all problems can be solved through outsourcing. Through the fast distribution and Douyin selection alliance, merchants can choose to live stream goods, so as to avoid the high traffic costs of personal account growth; through outsourcing customer service, merchants can solve the problem of large-scale orders that cannot be digested. However, limited to the identity of "rubbing explosive models", it is difficult for non-source merchants to get rid of the role of "scavengers" after all, and once the platform's e-commerce infrastructure construction is perfect, the non-source merchants who cannot afford higher marketing costs will also be eliminated by the platform first.

At the same time, short video masters are also playing a game with unproductive merchants. An e-commerce practitioner told "New Entropy" that in live streaming with goods, brands and anchors are always in a two-way choice relationship, and brands tend to choose anchors with high viewing numbers and good conversion rates; anchors also tend to find goods with better historical sales and higher ratings in Taobao stores or other live broadcast rooms. This means that if the difference in price that merchants reserve for themselves is higher, the reacher will also bear the risk of hurting their personal credibility when they bring the goods.

This also drives merchants to seek to put their eggs in more baskets. In addition to monetizing with the help of the talent system, non-sourcing merchants are also using the short video platform to search for organic traffic in the scene. In the product column of the search results page of Douyin and Kuaishou, users will find the same type of store - the number of products is tens of thousands, the total sales are in the thousands, but the operation account has no short video creation and live broadcast records, even no personal avatar, and the number of fans does not exceed 100.

Search has increasingly become a corner overlooked by short video e-commerce. Although Kuaishou and Douyin have fought a publicity war on search products, when developing e-commerce business, both short video platforms have chosen to avoid the search scene in order to avoid the traditional e-commerce model of Taobao and JD.com relying on search.

Search is becoming the weak link of short video e-commerce - there is a lack of private domain traffic and trust relationships, and there is also a lack of strong perception of users by interest tags, and only a slightly chaotic order of goods hastily undertakes the precise needs of users. The traffic conversion emphasized by the platform is not valid here - there are a large number of products that do not have relevant content correspondence, and the short video content behind some male products is a female selfie. In the search results of popular categories on traditional e-commerce platforms, long-tail merchants have no living space in the front row, but on short video platforms, by binding popular keywords, related products are sharing search traffic with head brands.

03, short video re-walk the Taobao road

In Nana's view, as long as the merchant does a good job of pre-sales and after-sales service, the non-source e-commerce model will have more advantages than disadvantages for the industry. For the platform, the non-source e-commerce fills the platform's commodity library and makes up for the disadvantages of the early supply chain; for consumers, the non-source store provides consumers with high-quality goods.

But this does not explain the related actions of short video platforms. At the end of 2021, Kuaishou upgraded the Good Things Alliance to "fast distribution", followed by the reform of the distributor's product evaluation algorithm - the platform divides the goods into six levels through the dimensions of brand, sales, price, service and distribution, and provides weighted traffic recommendations, subsidies and priority matching rights for the highest level of goods.

In contrast, the layout of Douyin in the field of e-commerce is faster and later, and it is not impossible to reproduce the reform of fast distribution. The reason is that the non-sourcing merchants undertake the work of first-level distributors on the short video platform, and outsource the content operation to the talents through the selection of alliance channels and commission sharing. However, for the platform, the suppression of non-source merchants in the future is difficult to avoid, for the following reasons:

1. Merchants without source of goods use the free traffic of the platform and do not contribute marketing costs to the platform. "New Entropy" saw in a tutorial purchased by a non-sourcing merchant that the traffic of Douyin Small Shop mainly comes from selected alliance talents, keyword search pages, and product recommendation pages, all of which are free traffic, while Douyin's transaction deduction point for new stores is only 1%, which means extremely low traffic fees. As Douyin e-commerce enters a mature period, the increase in platform fees is inevitable, and the traffic costs and transaction costs of non-source merchants will rise.

2. The employees of non-source businesses are mainly part-time workers, mothers and other groups, and lack sufficient marketing budgets. The cost of opening a store is only about 5,000 yuan of store deposit, and the working capital used to supplement the payment is often ranging from thousands of yuan to tens of thousands of yuan. In the natural traffic scenario of daily transactions, merchants without sources of goods can generally achieve the normal circulation of goods and payments, and once they enter the super traffic stage such as shopping festivals and large-scale subsidies on the platform, the weak financial ability of merchants without sources will drag down the GMV impulse of the whole platform.

3. In fact, the merchants without supply actually earn the information difference between the short video platform and the e-commerce platform, which is not conducive to the promotion of the concept of "cheap and good things" of the short video platform, nor is it conducive to the cultivation of user trust and repurchase behavior. Judging from the experience of live e-commerce development, after being among the heads, the talents often seek cross-platform insulation of goods with goods, that is, to ensure that the prices of their goods are low enough to maintain their market competitiveness. The same is true of the short video platform, after the volume is opened, the search for a higher quality, lower price supply chain will become the next goal of the platform.

Judging from Taobao's experience, the adjustment of search ranking rules has cut off the traffic source of non-sourcing merchants on a large scale. For short video platforms, scenes such as video, live broadcasting, search, and recommendation together constitute rich organic traffic, which is also doomed to be more difficult to "go middleman" than traditional e-commerce. Whether you can control the distribution of organic traffic to high-quality merchants will determine how much cake Kuaishou and Douyin can share in front of traditional e-commerce.