Douyin deeply lays out personal small stores, and giants increase shelf e-commerce

Personal stores have become the new favorite of the platform

Douyin e-commerce has further lowered the threshold for opening stores. E-commerce attempts, represented by "personal stores", are sweeping the industry.

Since March this year, on the Douyin platform, individuals only need to provide ID cards that meet the requirements and pass real-name authentication, and they can register a "Douyin shop" on Douyin e-commerce to become a merchant, "0 yuan to open the sale, the fastest 1 hour to open the store".

According to the latest data officially disclosed by Douyin, more than 300,000 merchants in 700+ categories have joined Douyin e-commerce personal stores.

It's not just Douyin e-commerce that has entered the market. At the beginning of this year, Jingxi platform, a subsidiary of JD.com, opened individual stores, focusing on "0 yuan trial operation, 0 cost settlement", and the corresponding enterprise stores will be launched in April. Similar to Douyin, Jingxi's policies for merchants show a relaxed and liberal tendency, and there are no restrictions on the types of merchants settled.

This business used to be Taobao's way to achieve rapid expansion in the grassy rivers and lakes: by significantly lowering the entry threshold for merchants, attracting merchants to settle in, and then increasing the richness of categories and products.

"There is only what you can't think of on Taobao, nothing you can't buy", such reviews have helped Taobao successfully seize the minds of users and win the market with a long-tail effect.

However, as e-commerce becomes more and more standardized, some shortcomings of the C2C e-commerce model are gradually reflected, and the two giants of Ali and Jingdong have begun to compete with brand merchant resources, and the B2C model with official and genuine products as prominent features has become the mainstream of the industry.

Why did the fragmented, complex and low-margin business of the past suddenly make the head platforms willing to overcome the difficulties of supervision and operation, and rush to test the waters?

The last piece of the puzzle of Douyin e-commerce

For ByteDance, Douyin e-commerce has become the most important backbone business of Cosmos Factory. TikTok's overseas business is facing various uncertainties, and the relatively stable e-commerce business has supported the valuation of bytes and is regarded as the hope of the whole village.

However, compared with the three giants of Ali, Jingdong and Pinduoduo, Douyin, which started with live streaming e-commerce, is more than one step inferior in terms of volume and business maturity.

With content drainage, live streaming e-commerce has sprung up in the era of peak traffic. However, as a latecomer to the industry, interest e-commerce has inherent deficiencies in business model. Whether it is a platform, a business, or a consumer, they have clearly experienced this matter:

Merchants who operate multiple e-commerce platforms at the same time know best that compared with traditional shelf e-commerce platforms, the sales of jitter fast products lack stability. If the corresponding short video or live broadcast is popular, the sales will be significantly increased.

However, under the black-box mechanism of unstable content output and traffic distribution, video is not popular is the norm for operations. This also means that merchant inventory is difficult to digest and has a cascade of effects.

Even if the video becomes popular, it is not necessarily a perfect good thing: the surge in shipments, after-sales, and return pressure is extremely testing the operational ability of merchants, and may not even be able to make up for losses in gross profit.

For users, the increasingly commercialized Douyin content has affected the casual experience. After swiping a few videos, if you want to find the same product again, there is almost no way to find it. This restricts the completion of consumer behavior.

So Douyin launched the "Douyin Mall" in August 2021 to make up for its shortcomings by embracing shelf e-commerce. This time, Douyin opened the "Douyin small store", also adhering to the same logic: complete the product layout of "all categories" and move towards a comprehensive e-commerce platform.

But why is it that new growth hopes are placed on individual small shops and small and medium-sized businesses?

It is reported that the number of small and medium-sized businesses accounts for nearly 70% of Douyin's e-commerce mobile sales merchants, and contributes about 40% of GMV. Although the head brand merchants are more mature in operation and supply chain, they can also leverage more resources and even empower the platform, but in order to win over these head merchants in the hands of Tmall and JD.com, the price to pay is definitely not low.

Considering factors such as brand tonality, many big-name merchants have always held a wait-and-see attitude towards entering platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou and Pinduoduo.

With the total number of short video users in China exceeding 1 billion, Douyin's monthly active users hovering at the 700 million mark, and the growth of Douyin e-commerce has also hit a ceiling.

At the same time, the battle for brand merchant resources is over, and small merchants have become the new favorite of the platform. The entry of new merchants may break the deadlock.

Douyin small shop is aimed at "experienced e-commerce practitioners, who have a source of goods but no e-commerce operation experience, and plan to do side jobs in their spare time."

The participation of these subjects may enrich the shelves of Douyin as never before. In the face of a Douyin mall with more complete categories and richer varieties, the user's purchase experience will be further improved. "Content field" drainage, "shelf field" consumption, in this sense, Douyin is completing the last piece of the puzzle on its comprehensive e-commerce map.

Changes in industry trends

But this move is not without risk.

The ability of individual stores to deploy people and goods yards is at the lower level of the industry. How the platform should support these newly settled personal small stores is a question worth considering.

On the one hand, Douyin officials said that in order to help merchants quickly start cold, "the platform has prepared 0 yuan for new merchants to open stores with one click, deposit time-limited deferral, platform traffic support, free training courses and other limited-time store opening gifts." ”

Under the low threshold, how to ensure the formality of small shops, and how to invest in human operation, supervision and governance of the platform after the influx of massive merchants remains to be answered.

On the other hand, brand merchants who are also on the platform will not be willing to thin the traffic with new players. Influencers, brand merchants, personal stores, the more players in the same traffic pool, the more difficult it is to balance the relationship.

Alibaba's approach is to distinguish Taobao from Tmall, and differentiate in major e-commerce activities and traffic gameplay rules. Whether latecomers such as Douyin can forge a path of their own is unknown.

In fact, even giants with rich e-commerce experience like JD.com are novices in the C2C model. In 2014, JD.com took over Paipai from Tencent, an early C2C e-commerce trading platform that was active on the Internet, but fell into loneliness a year later. JD.com's subsequent C2C business attempts have not received much sound.

Since November last year, Liu Qiangdong has returned to the front of the curtain strongly, emphasizing the decisive role of low prices: "Low prices are the most important weapon for our success in the past, and they will be the only basic weapons in the future!" Without the low-price advantage, all other so-called competitive advantages will go to zero."

This attempt at Jingdong's small store should also be seen as part of the low-price strategy. As traffic acquisition becomes harder and more expensive, low price has become the most intuitive and effective drainage label.

Whether it is Douyin Kuaishou or JD.com, these leading e-commerce platforms have begun to develop personal small stores and march into the hinterland of Taobao, reflecting the changes in the general trend of the industry after the peak of traffic and merchant resources.

Author | Wu Xin