The New Year's Festival has changed
In 2023's New Year Festival, the wind has changed. Unknowingly, the New Year Festival has become a "testing ground" for major e-commerce platforms to try new rules and carry out new business.
First of all, this year's New Year Festival even surpasses Double 11 in terms of the reform of gameplay.
Compared with e-commerce platforms such as Kuaishou, Douyin, Jingdong, and Pinduoduo, this year's Taobao New Year Festival is long overdue. But as soon as the rules for the New Year Festival were announced, Taobao couldn't wait to drop a bombshell.
Taobao said that this year's New Year Festival canceled cross-store full discounts, and all event goods adopted the official price reduction method. This means that this year's Taobao New Year Goods Festival, consumers do not need to make up orders, they can enjoy the preferential price of the event.
In addition, like Taobao, Vipshop has also cancelled the cross-store full reduction game, focusing on "one piece of instant reduction".
E-commerce promotion from complexity to simplification is a major trend, but the cancellation of cross-store full reduction is the first time in the history of e-commerce promotion. This New Year Festival is not only a New Year Festival with the simplest rules, but also an e-commerce promotion with the simplest rules.
Cross-store full reduction is a regular game used by e-commerce platforms for many years, and Taobao's choice of New Year Festival to change this promotion rule may also have more considerations.
The New Year Festival has the nature of a big promotion, and it is not more widely affected than 618 and Double 11. According to the general market fluctuations of the New Year Festival, it is a prudent practice to provide data reference for next year's strategy formulation.
Secondly, instant retail has become an important force for the New Year Festival.
Jingdong New Year Festival, aiming at instant retail in the same city, is the first to start. As early as December 16, the Jingdong Hourly New Year Shopping Festival began. Soon after, JD.com also fully opened the 2023 City Good Things Festival.
Recently, JD.com announced the opening of the 2023 City Good Things Festival in Beijing, and for the first time aggregated Jingdong hourly shopping, Jingdong in-store, JD car maintenance, Jingdong flowers and other pan-city businesses, and provided consumers with relevant services with tens of thousands of local stores of all categories.
In addition, JD.com opened individual sellers to settle in some time ago, which also pointed to retail in the same city. A large number of mom-and-pop shops and natural person operators cover the streets and alleys of the city, which is a crucial winning force for intra-city retail.
With the instant retail business as the entry point, Meituan's participation in e-commerce promotions has increased significantly. Even earlier than JD.com, Meituan began its two-month-long New Year Festival run on December 8.
In fact, the instant shopping scene of New Year shopping is very compatible with the service capability of instant retail. With the changes in both supply and demand, the form of instant purchase of New Year goods is becoming mainstream.
Finally, the power of Douyin and Kuaishou e-commerce is growing day by day, quietly becoming the "new catfish" of the New Year Festival.
A few days ago, the closing battle report of the Douyin New Year Festival was released. During the event, Douyin achieved a business explosion in the global position.
In the content scenario, the cumulative live broadcast time during the Douyin New Year Festival was 29.45 million hours, of which 187 live broadcast rooms exceeded 10 million. In the shelf scenario, the total exposure of Douyin Mall's products was 81.5 billion, of which 43 brands exceeded 10 million in transaction volume.
Coincidentally, Kuaishou also posted the closing battle report before this. Specifically, the number of short video orders for Kuaishou New Year Festival increased by 390% year-on-year, the search transaction volume increased by 68% year-on-year, and the GMV of brands and fast brands increased by 100% year-on-year.
In addition, innovative gameplay such as Douyin and Kuaishou as emerging forces has also injected different vitality into the New Year Festival.
The reborn New Year Festival is slowly growing into the next traffic center.
The New Year Festival, which becomes the year-end traffic center
At the end of each year, a new round of action breaks out at major factories to compete for the last wave of traffic. Double 12, New Year Goods Festival, Spring Festival red envelopes, etc. are all regular means for big manufacturers to attract new ones and promote revitalization.
In previous years, the New Year Festival was just a small supporting role.
Let's start with Double 12.
The importance of Double 12 to e-commerce is second only to Double 11 and 618. Other large and small marketing nodes, whether in volume or scale, can not be compared with Double 12. As of 2021, the turnover of the Double 12 Global Carnival season has reached 540.3 billion.
Let's talk about the Spring Festival red envelope war.
The specific attention of the people of the whole country to the Spring Festival has destined the Spring Festival Gala to be a huge traffic feast. Driven by traffic, Tencent, Ali, Baidu, Kuaishou, Douyin, Jingdong and other companies have all become the leaders of the Spring Festival Gala red envelope war.
(Sponsoring brands of the Spring Festival Gala in each year)
However, this situation has quietly changed.
This year's Double 12, the most discussed by the major media is not the various preferential activities of the Double 12 Carnival, nor the overwhelming linkage publicity, but "this Double 12 quietly" deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. The day before the official opening of the Double 12 event, most consumers were still in a state of confusion.
Although it is a consensus that e-commerce promotions are cold, this year coincides with the stagnation of express delivery, which has made the already unpopular Double 12 worse.
On the day of Double 12, #SF collapsed #rushed to the hot search, and just three days ago SF just had a hot search because of the same problem. SF is a leading enterprise in the express delivery industry, and the problems of SF can peek into the transportation capacity problems of the entire express delivery industry.
In addition, the noisy red envelope war in previous years has also slowly extinguished. So far, the response from most platforms has been muted. In addition to Kuaishou officially announcing 2 billion Spring Festival red envelopes early, Jingdong Spring Festival red envelopes are only 1 billion, Baidu Extreme Edition 800 million...
In addition, there is less than half a month before the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, but as of now, there is still no publicity about the exclusive interactive partners of the Spring Festival Gala.
Even the most active Kuaishou has the smallest amount of red envelopes this year in three years.
All these prove that the Internet red envelope wars that have set off countless bloody storms in the past few years are no longer so fragrant.
With the approach of the Spring Festival holiday, the importance of the New Year Festival has increased layer by layer. Compared with the quiet Double 12 and Spring Festival red envelope wars, the New Year Goods Festival stood on the traffic center of major factories and successfully counterattacked. The publicity focus of Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, Pinduoduo and other apps is currently mainly the New Year Festival.
After the Internet dividend period has passed, the role that Spring Festival red envelopes can play has become limited, and the situation of Double 12 has become more and more embarrassing.
According to the current development trend, we have reason to believe that one day Double 12 will be completely replaced by the New Year Festival.
The express delivery industry retains people with high salaries and fully supports the New Year Festival
The New Year Festival goes into the spotlight and carries the beams. In the face of more severe tests, the e-commerce industry has felt the pressure brought by logistics performance.
Some time ago, many distribution centers had a large backlog of couriers. At present, these couriers have not been fully digested. Coupled with the upcoming Spring Festival, consumers' shopping demand has surged, and the volume of e-commerce business has risen rapidly.
The express brother is obviously not enough, and the supply and demand are out of balance.
Under such circumstances, express companies such as Shentong Express, Deppon Express, SF, Zhongtong, Cainiao, and JD Logistics have said that this year's Spring Festival will not close.
Not only that, many express delivery companies offer triple salaries and high salaries to recruit people, and the treatment level is close to Double 11, hoping to ease the pressure of employment.
In addition, major express delivery companies have also introduced large subsidies to retain couriers.
On January 4, SF announced that it will reward employees on duty during the Spring Festival with 400 million yuan, of which 200 million yuan will be a special incentive package for the Spring Festival and another 200 million yuan will provide warm care activities for the duty personnel.
Cainiao has launched a Spring Festival left-behind red envelope, and those who stay behind during the Spring Festival are expected to receive an additional subsidy of 2,000 yuan per person.
Many regions have also prepared job stabilization subsidies for couriers, such as Shanghai, which provides a subsidy of 150 yuan per person per day for front-line personnel who work during the New Year's Day and Spring Festival.
It is the peak consumption of the New Year Festival, and it is precisely because of the strong help of express delivery companies that e-commerce platforms can shout the slogan of not closing for the Spring Festival without worries.
JD Logistics said that consumers in 366 cities and about 1,700 districts and counties across the country can place orders normally even on the first day of the Chinese New Year's Eve and the New Year.
However, unlike previous years, this year's New Year Festival, home delivery has become a new challenge.
Author | Moonfall