#精品长文创作季#
Unbinding the strong link between e-commerce and content does not necessarily result in 1+1≥2.
Author: Wang Zhen Editor: Lv Xinyi
出品：零售商业财经 ID：Retail-Finance
The main ways to monetize Internet traffic are nothing more than e-commerce, gaming, advertising, and live streaming. Douyin, which has more than 700 million abundant traffic, has once again increased its e-commerce business and launched a comprehensive e-commerce platform - Douyin Mall version of the independent APP.
This is following the independent e-commerce app "Douyin Box", Douyin has once again launched an attack on independent e-commerce platforms.
The intention of this move is obvious: Douyin wants to change from interest e-commerce to the two-wheel drive model of "interest + shelf e-commerce", consolidate the concept of "global interest e-commerce", take interest e-commerce as the core differentiation, and gradually penetrate into shelf e-commerce, and share a piece of cake in the hands of Jingdong, Taobao, and Pinduoduo.
From the perspective of business logic, the Douyin Mall APP is more like a "masterpiece" obtained by Douyin after exploring the e-commerce business. In the first-level entrance of the APP, it not only retains the presentation method of traditional shelf e-commerce, but also integrates the core content section of interest e-commerce, and firmly grasps the two traffic entrances of active search and passive reception.
Today's scene is the result of three years of exploration in the e-commerce business of Douyin.
In the past three years, Douyin has repeatedly adjusted the location of the mall at the first-level or second-level entrance, trying to find a balance between traffic support and the content environment, not only protecting the content ecology of the original video platform, but also developing comprehensive e-commerce with the help of traffic.
After many attempts, the total turnover (GMV) really lived up to Douyin's efforts. According to relevant reports, in 2023, Douyin's e-commerce GMV will be close to 2.2 trillion yuan. In terms of volume, Douyin e-commerce is already equivalent to "half of Pinduoduo", but it is still difficult to achieve the GMV target of more than 3 trillion yuan in 2024 (reported later), so the comprehensive independent e-commerce platform carries the hope of rapid growth of Douyin's e-commerce business to a certain extent.
In fact, an independent e-commerce APP is not only competing for traffic, but also for payment tools, terminal distribution, merchant scale and other links, and is still waiting in line for Douyin to break through one by one.
It is not yet known whether the independent APP is a trick or a trick, but the competition of shelf e-commerce will be more exciting in the future.
01 Another "made" mall
In fact, Douyin's "ambition" to be an independent e-commerce app has been around for a long time.
In 2021, shortly after the Douyin store was upgraded to a mall, some merchants shared screenshots of the internal test, showing that the Douyin mall replaced the "same city" column at the first-level entrance. In March 2022, there were three more beta interfaces with different mall location layouts.
Figure: Comparison of the interface of Douyin Mall APP and Douyin APP Mall
The first-level entrance is the core position of an APP, which has the characteristics of low operating cost and large traffic tilt, so it has become a window for the outside world to peek into the focus of APP business. The mall's multiple adjustments at the first-level entrance all show that Douyin is exploring how to better integrate the e-commerce business.
In addition to the Douyin APP station, Douyin also launched an independent trend e-commerce platform "Douyin Box" in December 2021, focusing on the youth market, with content based on fashion trend elements such as clothing, trendy shoes, bags, beauty, and street photography, which can be compared to a combination of Xiaohongshu and Dewu to some extent.
The presentation of the Douyin box is somewhat similar to that of the Douyin Mall APP, mainly including "shopping" and "recommendation"Two major sections: among them, "shopping" is similar to Taobao, which is cut into the mode of shelf e-commerce, and "Recommended" is similar to Douyin, through short videos and other content modes, cutting into interest e-commerce for content planting.
Source: Douyin Box APP
When the Douyin box was first launched, it can be said that it was highly anticipated, but the news of the suspension of operation was reported before it was run for a year, although the APP can still be downloaded, but the homepage content update has stayed in 2022.
Looking back on the reasons for its failure, first of all, the function of Douyin box is highly overlapping with the main station of Douyin but the linkage is insufficient, and it is difficult to sustain the business cycle of relying only on subsidies to attract influencers and merchants.
Secondly, the positioning of Douyin box is too narrow, although it has begun to take the prototype of comprehensive e-commerce, but it focuses more on the concept of trend, focusing on the young market. In this part of the market, there are not only Xiaohongshu, a content platform favored by female users, but also Dewu, a trendy platform composed of the concept of "content + e-commerce" favored by young customers.
Whether it is the pure content side or the attributes of shelf e-commerce, Douyin Box is slightly less competitive than Xiaohongshu and Dewu. All in all, the whole is too similar to Douyin, and there is a well-deserved subdivision head platform in the subdivision characteristics that has become an obstacle. Therefore, Douyin box has never been able to reproduce the glory of Douyin back then.
Perhaps bypassing the detour of the Douyin box, the positioning of the Douyin Mall APP is clearer, highlighting the concept of the whole category, and superimposing the "price power" feature.
At present, the most eye-catching of the pages of the Douyin Mall APP is the "video" at the bottom and the "low-price seckill" section on the homepage.
The bottom video is presented in the form of an information stream, which is almost the same as the Douyin APP, and the account that publishes the content in the mall can be linked with the Douyin APP account, and will synchronize the user's reprint, comment, like, and favorite videos or live broadcasts in Douyin.
In addition, there are also content recommendations such as video delivery and live streaming to further reduce user operation costs and increase sales through active recommendation. From this point of view, Douyin Mall has initially gone through the closed loop of diversion from the user side of Douyin APP.
The low-price spike is arranged in the most obvious position on the homepage, and the product price of 1.8 yuan and 0.01 yuan is enough to attract the attention of users. Judging from the key information presented, it is not difficult to find that "low price" is the biggest adjustment of the Douyin Mall APP. In fact, this is also the highest-priority project of Douyin e-commerce in 2024.
When Douyin mainly promotes the price, it means that the more cost-effective products will get more traffic tilt, and it also shows that the core opponent of the current Douyin mall is Pinduoduo.
Whether it is the entrance of the mall in the Douyin station, or the Douyin box and the current Douyin mall. No matter how Douyin turns its posture, it is interpreting the same proposition - the hard bone of e-commerce, and Douyin vows to gnaw it down.
02 In addition to interest, we must also do global e-commerce
When Douyin moves frequently on the shelf e-commerce side, people can't help but think, why does Douyin have to enter the game?
It is undeniable that Douyin's achievements as an interest e-commerce are remarkable. After the concept of "interest e-commerce" was first mentioned at the first ecological conference of Douyin e-commerce in April 2021, the GMV of Douyin Mall increased by more than 6 times in the second year.
Source: Internet
However, if Douyin only stays at interest e-commerce (goods looking for people), its limitations are also obvious. With the help of the sales model of video content, usually only one product is recommended in a video, and a limited number of products can only be displayed in the live broadcast room. This is in stark contrast to shelf e-commerce (people looking for goods) that can provide a rich selection of products and multiple product order operations. On the one hand, there are a large number of homogeneous explosive products, and on the other hand, there are a large number of potential products that have not been fully explored and promoted.
In addition, the underlying logic of interest e-commerce is passive recommendation, and users will stimulate their desire to buy after swiping the content. The active purchase desire generated by the user itself needs to be undertaken by the search entrance and the shelf field, which is the guarantee of a high repurchase rate and an important starting point for cultivating the user's mind.
In addition to the limited commodity capacity and repurchase rate, live streaming has grown savagely so far, and it has gradually approached the growth ceiling.
According to the "2023 China Live E-commerce Industry Research Report" released by iResearch, the market size of China's live broadcast e-commerce has reached 4.9 trillion yuan, with an annual growth rate of 35.2%. However, this figure shows that the growth rate of the industry has slowed compared to the early growth rate of the industry.
Douyin, feeling the crisis, needed to find new growth, so it aimed at shelf e-commerce.
Wei Wenwen, president of Douyin e-commerce, once revealed that in 2022, in the field of shelf e-commerce, Douyin Mall GMV increased by 277% year-on-year, e-commerce search GMV increased by 159% year-on-year, and shelf scene GMV accounted for more than 30% of the platform GMV.
The independent operation of the Douyin Mall APP, from an idealistic point of view, can indeed allow the content side and the e-commerce side to achieve a more benign development in effective separation and relative collaboration.
On the one hand, Douyin is able to more accurately identify user groups with clear shopping intentions, and gradually guide these users from the Douyin app to a dedicated mall platform. Provide a more focused and optimized shopping environment for users with stronger purchase motivation, enhance the user experience, increase the conversion rate, and increase the GMV of the platform.
On the other hand, setting up a separate mall APP can reduce the density of commercial content in the Douyin APP, avoid users from feeling too much shopping promotion information in the process of use, and maintain the entertainment of the content platform and the purity of the user experience.
More importantly, at present, Douyin still has more new businesses that need to be supported by first-level entrance traffic, and at this time, relatively large-scale e-commerce companies naturally have to make room for new businesses.
After unbinding the strong relationship between e-commerce and content, it can effectively alleviate the instability brought by content traffic to suppliers and the dependence on anchors with goods, so that full-time shopping and self-service ordering become the norm, and finally form an e-commerce system that can operate independently.
At the 2023 Douyin E-commerce Conference, Wei Wenwen, President of Douyin E-commerce, proposed: The vision of Douyin E-commerce is to realize the seamless integration of content scenarios and shelf scenes, and to form a flywheel growth model for the overall global operation by promoting the interaction between content and product traffic between the two scenarios.
The Douyin Mall APP is the implementation of this "both want and want" vision.
03 Practice is doubtful, good hand or stupid trick?
Whether it is the user's mind or the platform positioning, Douyin is still positioned as a content platform, and its e-commerce business has always been based on the logic and foundation of the content platform. Separating content from e-commerce and diverting existing users will have to face the risk of imbalance after it is difficult to achieve both.
In the field of e-commerce, the top players have been fighting for a long time, and their platform positioning, brand image and even users' minds have long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. Douyin has long entered the game, and as a "rookie in the industry", it has not yet formed a differentiated competitiveness.
In addition, at a time when low prices have become the mainstream trend of e-commerce, although Douyin has clarified the importance of price power, it has a small chance of winning in the face of the situation of leading e-commerce companies focusing on low prices. In terms of quality and logistics, it can't compete with Jingdong, and it can't compete with Pinduoduo in terms of low price, and the user inertia is not as good as Taobao.
Secondly, the e-commerce track is no longer competing with the price and product scale presented to users at the front-end, but the back-end payment tools and distribution system, which is the ultimate test for an e-commerce platform. With Alipay as the endorsement, Taotian, which is "far ahead" at the level of payment tools, has been gradually accessing the entrance of WeChat payment to further provide convenience for users.
JD.com's consolidated logistics territory for more than 20 years has made it a benchmark in the e-commerce logistics industry, and it is also one of the core reasons why users choose JD.com; Taotian focuses on rookies, gives full play to the advantages of smart logistics, and takes rookie stations as the terminal scene to solve the pain points of e-commerce distribution "last mile"; Pinduoduo and J&T's business contacts are getting closer and closer, and more cost-effective distribution links are more in line with Pinduoduo's business demands.
It can be seen that in the real internal strength, Douyin is still a little insufficient.
Since the rapid growth of Douyin e-commerce mainly relies on content-driven traffic, the construction of the after-sales system is relatively neglected, and problems such as unstable service quality, slow response speed, and complex return and exchange processes have also caused consumer dissatisfaction.
Source: Little Red Book
Although Douyin e-commerce has significant advantages in terms of content ecology and user traffic, when it comes to supply chain management, compared with senior shelf e-commerce, Douyin Mall still has a gap in the breadth of high-quality supply chain resources and the perfection of the supply chain system. The problem of unsourced merchants, which has been repeatedly exposed but has not been properly resolved, is a direct example of Douyin's supply chain problems.
As a latecomer in the field of e-commerce, Douyin e-commerce does not have a first-mover advantage in cooperation with well-known brand merchants, so it has to establish more cooperative relations with "white label" distributors or manufacturers, but at the same time, it is also because of the proliferation of "white label" products The reputation and product quality problems of merchants implicated in the future development of Douyin e-commerce are restricted.
According to the latest news, Douyin e-commerce has launched a more inclusive support plan for merchants in the industrial belt on the basis of policies such as traffic incentives, designated channel subsidies (such as low-price spike official coupons), freight insurance subsidies, advertising rebates (Qianchuan coupons) and marketing activities (gold origin plan to create a business card of origin), such as direct GMV cashback for some merchants, with a proportion of up to 50%.
Such attractive support reveals Douyin's intention to rely on industrial belt merchants to consolidate the supply of low-cost goods on the platform. But the first problem facing Douyin is how to convince users to download a brand new app and spend time browsing a lot of product content on it.
From a broader industry perspective, when major platforms are building moats, although Douyin has taken a key step to broaden the profit model and undertake user traffic with shelf scenarios, with the fierce competition in the industry, it remains to be seen whether it is a smart move to make the mall independent of Douyin.