Image source @ Visual China
Text | Kasumitsu Society, author | Han Xia, Editor | Magi
"Eyes closed and closed, the cross-border e-commerce women's clothing independent station Dmonstudio launched by Byte is gone." However, this may not have much impact on the overall layout of byte overseas e-commerce.
Recently, ByteDance's women's independent website, Dmonstudio, issued an announcement that the website operation will be shut down from February 11, which has triggered a hot discussion on social media.
Dmonstudio was once seen as a product of benchmarking Shein, highlighting the ambition of cross-border e-commerce in byte layout.
However, Byte's ambitions for cross-border e-commerce go far beyond that. Overseas, Byte has been using TikTok as a position in recent years to gradually expand its e-commerce territory.
Since 2021, TikTok has entered a stage of rapid development, sweeping more than 150 countries and regions around the world. In September last year, TikTok officially announced that the number of monthly active users worldwide exceeded 1 billion, making it the seventh member of the billion-user club.
Stable and rapid growth of users, for TikTok e-commerce has accumulated a large number of native interest e-commerce consumer groups, but also for the follow-up development of TikTok e-commerce, pressed the "fast forward button".
How is TikTok e-commerce developing? Who are the competitors overseas? What do Chinese sellers who are engaged in TikTok live e-commerce need to pay attention to?
01 bytes of overseas e-commerce attack
At the end of 2020, as one of the channels for overseas revenue growth, cross-border e-commerce was identified by Byte as an important new business direction.
According to the late Late Post report, Zhang Yiming mentioned in his internal goals that in 2021, he will focus on further exploration in the three new business directions of cross-border e-commerce, To B (enterprise services) and LKP (office hardware suite).
Looking back at byte's cross-border e-commerce, the main implementation of a two-step strategy.
One is a stand-alone project, currently known as Damonstudio and Fanno. The two independent projects were launched in November last year.
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Dmonstudio's positioning is a women's fashion shopping website, whether in the web function module, design style, or commodity category, you can see the shadow of imitating SHEIN. After more than 3 months of operation, Dmonstudio was suddenly shut down.
Screenshot of the Dmonstudio website
Fanno is more extensive, focusing on cost-effective products in comprehensive categories, quite "overseas version of Pinduoduo", and is currently mainly facing the European market.
The second is to build an e-commerce ecosystem around TikTok. This plays a crucial role in the commercialization process of Byte Overseas.
For Byte, Douyin, which has more than 600 million daily active users, is close to the growth ceiling, and the growth rate of domestic advertising revenue has also begun to slow down. TikTok already has huge traffic, and accelerating TikTok's e-commerce business has become a key part of its monetization.
In the second half of 2020, TikTok established cooperation with independent sites such as third-party e-commerce platform Shopify, merchants channeled traffic for the website by placing information flow ads in TikTok, and users' transaction purchases were mainly completed on third-party platforms.
In September 2021, TikTok officially launched TikTok Shopping, which mainly includes TikTok Shop (Douyin Small Shop) and TikTok Storefront (cooperative store) two models.
In fact, as early as the beginning of 2021, TikTok Shop has been launched in the UK and Indonesia, merchants can directly open TikTok Shop, and through the small yellow car to link third-party e-commerce platforms, and TikTok Shop is responsible for managing all aspects from sales to logistics.
TikTok Storefront is mainly for the US market. From the perspective of cooperation, TikTok Storefront is only responsible for commodity synchronization and front-end drainage, while e-commerce back-end links such as collection and logistics delivery are responsible for third-party independent station partners such as Shopify.
Like the domestic Douyin e-commerce, live streaming with goods is also the core play of TikTok e-commerce. Compared with the development of domestic live streaming with goods in full swing, this game is still in its infancy in overseas markets.
Taking the United States as an example, as the world's largest consumer market, in 2020, the total sales of live e-commerce in the United States was 6 billion US dollars (about 38.1 billion yuan), while the size of China's live e-commerce market exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan in the same period.
TikTok has also tested the waters in the United States to live stream with goods. In December 2020, TikTok partnered with Walmart to invite 10 celebrities to sell Walmart Mall merchandise live, and the peak number of people in the whole live broadcast exceeded 20,000. Three months later, the two sides cooperated for the second time.
Screenshot of Walmart Live Streaming
However, although TikTok has tested the water in the United States several times to live stream goods, so far, TikTok has not yet fully opened live streaming in the US market, and it is quite cautious. At present, the mainstream way of carrying goods is still a short video hanging external commodity link to divert traffic to third-party platform merchants.
This is not only the reason for the low conversion rate, but also related to the low age of TikTok users in the United States and local regulatory policies. In the face of Amazon, Walmart and other domestic retail giants in the United States, TikTok is not willing to touch the basic disk of these giants at the moment.
Unlike the caution of the United States, TikTok's development in Southeast Asia can be described as a high-flying progress.
According to a survey by Google and Bain, the six major countries in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand) have an Internet population penetration rate of more than 75%, the number of users has reached 450 million, and the penetration rate of smartphones has reached 100%.
Under the popularity of mobile Internet, people have become accustomed to placing orders on mobile phones. According to research, as of February 2019, mobile traffic accounted for 72% of all e-commerce traffic in Southeast Asia.
Coupled with the cultural background and geographical location of Southeast Asian countries, it is naturally closer to China, and TikTok is more comfortable in promoting live streaming in the region.
In addition, around the e-commerce business, Byte is also stepping up the layout of the supply chain and cross-border logistics system.
In August 2021, Byte also established two logistics technology subsidiaries, namely Shanghai Daoquyue Animal Flow Technology Co., Ltd. and Starfish Starfish Yuedong Supply Chain Management Co., Ltd., whose business covers customs supervision of goods warehousing services, supply chain management services, etc.
Prior to this, Byte also invested in a number of logistics technology companies such as Syrius Juxing, Jiazhi Technology, Future Robot, Zongteng Group, iMle, covering warehousing, supply chain, cross-border logistics, logistics technology, electronic face sheets and other industries. In 2021, Byte also invested heavily in cross-border e-commerce sellers Such as Patoson and Star Link.
In more than a year, byte's new cross-border e-commerce system has been initially completed, and TikTok e-commerce is the highlight of it.
02 Global Internet giants are "involved" in the e-commerce map
In the process of TikTok's gradual expansion of its e-commerce territory, it has also encountered challenges from foreign Internet giants. Among them, in the field of live e-commerce alone, there are Internet giants such as Amazon, Meta, and Google that have successively increased their size.
Inspired by China's live e-commerce, Amazon officially launched amazon live shopping service Amazon Live in February 2019 after two years of testing the water with goods in a small range of live broadcasts.
However, until now, the development of Amazon live streaming is still very slow. At present, its average daily active number does not exceed 1,000, while the daily number of domestic Taobao live broadcasts in 2019 has reached 10 million.
Amazon Live Room
In 2021, many Chinese sellers on Amazon suffered a ban storm, but the number of new Chinese sellers on the platform still maintained double-digit growth, and the number of Chinese sellers with sales of more than $1 million increased by more than 50% year-on-year.
If this part of the Chinese sellers who are well versed in live streaming with goods collectively join Amazon's live broadcast platform, it may be a strong pull for Amazon's future live e-commerce business.
In addition to Amazon, there are also e-commerce platforms such as AliExpress, Shopee, and Lazada, which provide sellers with live broadcast entrances and traffic recommendation mechanisms.
In addition to platforms specializing in cross-border e-commerce business, foreign social giants have also entered the market, regarding e-commerce business as a magic weapon for their traffic monetization. We are familiar with Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter and other social platforms, have successively opened the live streaming with goods function. Merchant self-broadcasting and talent anchors have almost become the common play of the platform.
From the current development, the development of live streaming on these social platforms can only be regarded as relatively rudimentary. However, considering its huge capital and company strength, the follow-up with TikTok live e-commerce may be a battle.
03 Chinese sellers enter TikTok live e-commerce
With the spread of TikTok e-commerce around the world, many merchants, talents and even MCN at home and abroad have also accelerated their entry into TikTok e-commerce, trying to replicate the success of Douyin e-commerce in more overseas regions.
From the perspective of the form of carrying goods, the live streaming of TikTok e-commerce is not much different from that in China. Of course, if Chinese sellers want to be anchors in TikTok, English speaking skills must be possessed.
On the domestic douyin, the talents and merchants engaged in live streaming with goods come from all walks of life, film and television stars, Internet celebrities, brand merchants, county governor secretaries, etc., and even virtual people live streaming goods.
In contrast, the anchors who do live streaming with goods on TikTok are basically mainly merchants, Internet celebrities, and celebrities, and they are not as full of flowers as the domestic Douyin live streaming with goods.
Guangzhou girl Yan Guanghua is a TikTok live streamer with goods. Previously, because she sold goods live in English throughout the TikTok, her live broadcast clip became popular on domestic social media, and netizens commented that she was "a migrant girl who hangs white-collar workers in fluent English".
Yan Guanghua is selling goods on TikTok live
Before engaging in TikTok with goods, Yan Guanghua worked as an English speaking teacher in the education and training industry. Later, due to the impact of the policy, she resigned to enter the e-commerce agency, relying on a fluent English, to become a TikTok e-commerce anchor.
With the TikTok live video clip released on Douyin, Yan Guanghua also gained 41,000 followers on Douyin.
For Chinese sellers, in addition to the need to have the most basic spoken English skills, in the selection and promotion of live broadcasts, we must also pay attention to abandoning Chinese thinking, do a good job in preliminary research, and understand the local customs and culture and language environment.
In order to encourage more merchants to enter TikTok live streaming with goods, TikTok officials have also launched a series of activity policies, including carrying out chart-breaking activities, providing price subsidies, commission-free and freight, etc.
However, TikTok's daily GMV is not high at present, and the turnover of a live broadcast may only range from a few hundred to a thousand dollars. The biggest reason is that foreign users have not yet undergone full education in the market, are not familiar with the matter of live shopping, and lack consumption habits and minds.
Coupled with the fact that TikTok has problems such as rough user tags and inaccurate streaming at this stage, ROI is difficult to have a definite number. As a result, many merchants still take a wait-and-see attitude towards TikTok.
But it has to be admitted that overseas live streaming is still a blue ocean.
According to research firm Coresight Research, the live streaming market in the U.S. will reach $11 billion in 2021 and grow to about $25 billion by 2023. It can be seen that the revenue potential of the overseas live streaming market is huge.
If in 2021, the platforms are more testing the waters of overseas live broadcasting, then 2022 may be the first year of the prosperity of overseas live broadcasting with goods.