The video account "opened the floodgates" of local life, and I don't want to cross the river by touching Meituan Douyin

Source | Tech Planet

Text | Xi Rui

Local Life New Player Video has decided to take another step forward.

At the end of April, Channels released the relevant policies for local life merchants to settle in Channels stores. This means that Channels has fully opened up the entry of local life businesses, ending the testing phase of nearly a year.

In the past year, in the local life service market, Douyin and Meituan have been fighting fiercely, and Xiaohongshu and Kuaishou have continuously strengthened their layout, while the presence of local life in the video account is not strong. Except for the announcement in March last year that the local life component would be launched at the WeChat open class closed-door sharing meeting, the video account did not mention its attitude towards local life in public.

This time, the full opening of local life businesses means that the video number has increased again. Douyin's local life sales exceeded 100 billion yuan in the first quarter of this year, which is a model for reference. But the video account, which is also a short video platform, doesn't seem to want to follow the path of Douyin.

From internal testing to full liberalization

Channels has been exploring local life for a year.

In May last year, Channels began to test the local life business on a small scale, and only some big brand merchants entered the market. A source said that in the early days of the internal test, the test data of the video account was average, and only thirty or forty brand merchants participated in the test at that time.

It wasn't until around August that Channels began to introduce third-party service providers, such as Delicious Different, Enjoy Inventory, Gluttony Mall, Chen Ji Shiduo, etc. The merchant resources and content production capacity of these service providers have enabled Channels to take a step forward in their local life business, quickly expanding the local life sector of Channels to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Foshan, Shantou, Chengdu, Xi'an and other cities.

And the video account does not exclude Meituan's joining. Meituan has set up an account matrix in the video, including "Explosive Tuantuan", "Meituan Peripheral Tour", and "Meituan Outbound Tour".

The head service provider of Channels participated in the internal testing stage of the local life section of Channels "as soon as possible". Xia Heng, the founder of "First Time", told Tech Planet that in July and August last year, "First Time" was helping Meituan, Ele.me and other companies to operate live broadcast rooms on video accounts.

In the early testing stage, the verification process was relatively cumbersome for the various transaction links explored by Channels Local Life. If the frequency number tries to open up the transaction link with the mode of the applet + transaction component interface, the user will jump to the merchant's own mini program after clicking the link.

After that, a new transaction link is added to the Channels account, and the entire transaction link such as transaction, verification and evaluation is completed through the Channels store. Users can directly purchase group purchase products after entering the merchant's small store. This makes transactions simpler, faster, and more conducive to higher write-off rates.

At present, the local life business of Channels is more based on the product of Channels Store.

During the beta test, the video account will cover all categories as much as possible, such as catering, wine and tourism, beauty, education, home appliance maintenance, housekeeping, etc. However, when the full settlement was released, the video account only chose two categories: catering and wine and tourism.

Under the first-level category of catering, there are 6 second-level categories of meals, fast food, beverages, baked snacks, snack foods and fresh fruits, while there are only 3 second-level categories of accommodation, scenic spots and passenger transportation in wine and tourism.

Beauty is a high-margin category in local life, but the video account is not the first to open. Xia Heng said that this may be related to the strategy of the video account, and what we need to do now is to build infrastructure and ecology, "The video account needs to be the category with the largest consumption volume and the highest activity, not the most profitable." ”

Catering is an iconic category of local life, while the hospitality category is a category that has performed well in the internal testing stage. Xia Heng told Tech Planet that during the operation of New Century Hotel last year, each live broadcast could achieve 5~100,000, and the data was better than the data of flat broadcast in the official live broadcast room of other platforms.

In Xia Heng's view, after the local life of the video account has gone through the internal test, it can be regarded as basically figuring out a way to enter the 2.0 stage, and all links are smoother than the early stage of the internal test. However, some third-party local life service providers told Tech Planet that in the internal testing stage, their data performance on the video account was not particularly ideal, "The transaction volume can't run out, and they haven't done too much video accounts." ”

Who doesn't learn from the video number?

In addition to successively announcing announcements about local life, the video account did not announce any major moves in local life.

Douyin relies on huge traffic and low-price strategies to quickly increase the volume of local life business. Behind the scenes, Douyin's strong dominance and strong operation ideas are needed.

At present, Channels has not adopted a corresponding attraction strategy on the merchant side and the user side. A source said that Channels currently does not have a clear performance target for the local life business. In this regard, as of press time, the video account has not responded.

On the merchant side, Channels currently only has the policy of reducing the technical service rate. In 2024, Channels will reduce the technical service fee rate for categories under the local life industry to 0.6%, compared to 2.5%-5% for catering, hospitality and tourism.

Douyin's landmark event in the local life business is the first test to launch the POI (Point Of Interest) function, which helps merchants display store address, contact number, business hours, group purchase packages and other relevant information by adding geographic location information to the video.

Based on the POI function, the platform will help merchants accurately reach target users and allocate accurate local traffic based on the distance between people and stores. Douyin continuously pushes group buying videos to users within kilometers of the store, and only with huge and accurate traffic can the performance of exploding orders in a single store.

However, the POI function has not yet been opened on the video account. Currently, when publishing video content on Channels, merchants or influencers can add a store address, but it will only show the map location and will not be associated with store-related information. In the eyes of local life practitioners, from the perspective of the industry, this is not an open POI function, just a location marker.

This means that the Channels traffic distribution mechanism is not optimized for local life. At present, Channels does not plan to tilt too much accurate traffic to local life. Some local life practitioners said that the development of POI functions needs more technical support, and for the current video account, it is not yet enough to change the traffic distribution mechanism of the entire ecosystem for the sake of local life business.

And that's why Channels focuses more on chain brand stores. In the internal testing stage, Luckin, Cudi, and Burger King are thousands of stores across the country, and the absolute accuracy of traffic does not have to be particularly high. If it is an individual single-store merchant, in the absence of an accurate push mechanism, the traffic conversion rate will be very low.

In the recent announcement, the catering category does not support single-store entry for the time being, and is more aimed at businesses with a chain multi-store model. On the other hand, the reason why a single store has not been opened is also because the current team size of the local life of the video account cannot support the docking of a large number of single store merchants.

A source said that at present, in terms of organizational structure, Channels Local Life has not established an independent department for the time being, and it belongs to the live broadcast and delivery section of Channels. In the beta phase, the employees in charge of local life are mainly from Channels. At present, some employees are from the two major teams of WeChat Pay and Tencent Advertising. The overall staff size is not large, and these employees are not full-time employees living in the local area. Regarding the above information, as of press time, the official video account has not responded.

Douyin explores the path of local life, and the video account does not seem to want to copy. In the matter of local life, WeChat still seems to want to follow its own product thinking.

What are the chances of a video account?

"There is no merchant who is not interested in the video number", Xia Heng said, but everyone does not know how the video account operates. "Douyin's gameplay and experience are not applicable to the video account, as soon as you come up, you want to stream, and it is ineffective to scale up, and the video account relies more on content and pallets."

At present, Channels is one of the few traffic fields with incremental increments. The potential of Channels in live streaming will also allow merchants to enter the local life track.

However, for big brand merchants, Channels has not yet reflected its explosive power in local life.

There are brands that have tried it in the internal testing stage, and they no longer plan to continue to invest in video accounts. Although the data in the internal testing stage is not bad in the video account, a live broadcast can sell about 300,000. However, in the eyes of brands, the cost of building an anchor team is high, and the input-output ratio of the video account is not ideal. Its agency operation service provider told Tech Planet that the merchant already has a team that may be suitable for making a video account, because there is no longer an additional cost.

At present, the infrastructure of local life on Channels is not perfect enough. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the traffic distribution mechanism itself is not skewed towards local life. A person close to Channels said that there are too many things to do for the Channels team, and local life is not a top priority business at the moment.

Compared with other platforms, Channels has the advantage of a differentiated ecosystem. And if you want to get a piece of the pie in local life, you need to differentiate.

In Xia Heng's view, the logic of the video account is to use the content ecology to stimulate the users in the original mini program and official account ecology, and the functions originally realized with the mini program are now used to undertake part of the video number store, and the short video and live broadcast are to attract customers. The differentiated advantage of Channels lies in the private domain, "Official Accounts, Mini Programs, Communities and other components have precipitated the private domain traffic of merchants and brands, and now it is more convenient to reach private domain users through short video content to increase repurchase." ”

Although it is backed by Tencent, Channels that have always adopted the style of small team operations are far inferior to Meituan and Douyin in terms of manpower and resources in local life business.

The exploration of local life on the video account is more like "crossing the river by feeling the stones". The full opening of the settlement marks a new stage in the local life business of Channels, and Channels may continue to trial and error in the future.