Text|Ah You
Edited by Chen Meixi
"No one can ignore the imaginative traffic on the Kuaishou platform, as well as the imaginative traffic monetization opportunities."
At 10 a.m. on May 15, the 2024 Kuaishou E-commerce Gravity Conference was held at the Wuzhen International Convention and Exhibition Center. Wang Jianwei, Senior Vice President of Kuaishou and Head of E-commerce Business Division and Commercialization Business Division, walked to the center of the stage to tell the new discoveries and prospects of Kuaishou e-commerce for the e-commerce practitioners and the media in the audience.
At the same time, in Hall 3 of the Convention and Exhibition Center, which is only a few hundred meters away from the main forum, a double election meeting is underway, with the booths of hundreds of brands and service providers standing in different areas, and the WeChat QR code of the contact person is usually placed in the most conspicuous place. The talent stops in front of the booth and looks at the products, and the merchants and service providers are busy enthusiastically introducing, and after the two sides add WeChat, they will receive the talent information or pallet documents sent from the opposite side within a few seconds.
Whether it is the speech scene of the main forum or the real business scene, it is an indisputable fact behind the lively atmosphere - Kuaishou takes content as a starting point and is going further and further on the road of content e-commerce.
According to the 2023 annual results disclosed by Kuaishou, in the past year, the GMV of Kuaishou e-commerce has reached 1.18 trillion, and the monthly active users of Kuaishou have exceeded 700 million, accounting for 60% of China's netizens, and the average user usage time exceeds 120 minutes, more than 10% of the total time spent on mobile Internet in China.
Obviously, 700 million monthly active users support the basic market of Kuaishou e-commerce. In the Internet era, traffic means that there is the possibility of monetization, but standing behind the traffic is an individual with independent judgment ability. With the drastic changes in the consumer market in recent years, users' behavioral preferences have become a key variable affecting the prospects of the e-commerce industry.
In the increasingly fierce competition, Kuaishou e-commerce, which is in a critical period of transformation, will have to rethink how to go further and more stable in the future.
A two-way rush between users and platforms
"From the old iron, to the old iron", is not a joke.
At this year's Gravity Conference, Wang Jianwei announced that Kuaishou E-commerce's platform strategy in 2024 will revolve around "user first". In fact, as early as the 2023 Kuaishou Investment Day in September last year, CEO Cheng Yixiao said frankly, "Kuaishou's big opportunity in the field of e-commerce is still because we have hundreds of millions of highly sticky old iron users." ”
This is an indisputable fact.
When Kuaishou first started as a content platform, it was ordinary users who were full of creativity who filled Kuaishou's content ecology and formed a community atmosphere with authenticity and diversity as the core. In 2018, when Kuaishou first entered the e-commerce field, it was also a group of highly sticky users who brought initial support and growth to Kuaishou e-commerce out of trust in the semi-acquaintance community.
Until September 2023, according to QuestMobile's data, about 40% of Kuaishou's user portrait is in first-tier, new first-tier and second-tier cities, and 60% is in lower-tier cities.
After more than 6 years of development, a trend that is hard to ignore is gradually becoming clear: there are more and more veterans who are willing to change from pure content users to platform consumers, and the tendency of users to buy goods on Kuaishou is increasing.
In addition to the fact that Kuaishou e-commerce's GMV will reach 1.18 trillion yuan in 2023 and successfully enter the "trillion GMV club", one of the evidences for the above conclusion is that "the average number of monthly buyers of Kuaishou e-commerce in the fourth quarter of last year exceeded 130 million"; The second piece of evidence is that "in the first quarter of 2024, Kuaishou e-commerce's pan-shelf GMV accounted for more than 20%, and the PV of e-commerce searches increased by more than 120% year-on-year".
In Wang's view, this means that a considerable number of users have "no longer relied on the traffic distribution of content farms, but will choose to use search to buy, or are accustomed to using shelves to buy".
Because for a long time in the past, the purchase behavior of traditional e-commerce platforms was based on the shelf e-commerce model of "people looking for goods", while the purchase behavior of short video e-commerce platforms was based on the "goods looking for people" model based on live streaming, so when users began to actively choose a platform for product search, the implicit behavior logic behind it was actually - users have regarded the platform as a mature and comprehensive e-commerce platform.
Therefore, the growth of Kuaishou e-commerce in pan-shelf GMV and e-commerce search PV reveals that more Kuaishou users have turned into consumers, and at the same time, it also reveals that users have become more mature in their e-commerce consumption on the Kuaishou platform.
From this point of view, if we look at the "user first" strategy proposed by Kuaishou, we will find that this is a two-way rush between users and the platform.
"Lao Tie" took practical actions to express its support and love for Kuaishou e-commerce; The platform has also keenly captured this point and kept up with it in a timely manner, striving to provide more targeted policies and services for "Lao Tie" that meet consumer needs.
For example, after Kuaishou's research and observation, the number of southern consumers and elderly consumers on the Kuaishou platform has increased in the past year, so they began to think about how to re-examine their user portraits and consider optimizing their platform governance and merchant services.
For another example, in the face of the increase in price-sensitive consumers and the substantial increase in the sales of products below the price band of 50 yuan, Kuaishou e-commerce has carried out in-depth cooperation with major industrial belts in a timely manner and introduced a large number of low- and medium-priced high-quality goods for consumers to choose.
"Only by practicing 'user first' can we jointly build an e-commerce market that satisfies consumers, especially in the context of increasingly fierce e-commerce competition, only by putting users first, can platforms and merchants achieve business development." At the gravitational conference, Wang Jianwei said firmly.
Broadened flow imagination
In the e-commerce ecosystem, if you want to achieve the goal of "user first", you must make simultaneous efforts on the merchant side, so that the supply and demand sides can achieve a long-term benign balance.
This is because, although Kuaishou's 700 million monthly active users provide a huge traffic base for the development of e-commerce business, in the context of many traditional e-commerce platforms gradually increasing content, merchants still have great uncertainty and anxiety about their own growth prospects.
Therefore, the premise of encouraging merchants to practice the "user first" strategy is that the platform should provide sufficient certainty for merchants, and let more merchants have the confidence to set up camp in Kuaishou by exploring more forms of traffic monetization channels.
In 2023, Kuaishou has launched a preliminary attempt to expand its business scope. In the fourth quarter of last year, Kuaishou e-commerce opened the traffic entrance of the pan-shelf scenario, and officially opened the mall tab page in December. At the same time, in the field of short video delivery, Kuaishou e-commerce has also spared no effort to give merchants traffic support.
The good news is that the data from the first quarter mentioned above has preliminarily verified the monetization capabilities of new fields such as pan-shelf, short video, and search in addition to live broadcast fields. Out of the single scene of live streaming, in more diverse fields, the traffic of Kuaishou users still has an imagination that has not been deeply explored.
In an environment where consumers are increasingly pursuing cost-effectiveness, new shopping scenarios and new marketing methods can not only stimulate consumers to rekindle their enthusiasm for shopping, but also provide a new curve for merchants' revenue growth.
The so-called "global operation" refers to the fact that businesses should not only operate in the fields they are familiar with, but also reach consumer groups in more fields and channels, so as to form a strong joint effect.
At the Kuaishou E-commerce Gravity Conference, Wang Jianwei mentioned: "In the three fields of short video, live broadcast, and shelf, the retention rate of merchants who can operate two fields at the same time has increased by more than 10pp compared with the retention rate of ordinary merchants, and the retention rate of merchants operating in three fields at the same time is 30pp higher than that of ordinary merchants." ”
Based on this, what Kuaishou, as a platform to do in the future, is, on the one hand, to provide inclusive traffic and full-link assistance for new merchants; On the other hand, it is necessary to provide more scientific marketing tools for single-field businesses that have not yet launched "global operation", and provide multi-field operation experience.
It is reported that in 2024, Kuaishou e-commerce will be committed to helping merchants improve their ability to operate in the whole region through measures such as building the capacity of fans, building the infrastructure of short-to-direct linkage (short video and live broadcast) products, and coordinating the Chuanliu plan.
In terms of helping merchants open the sales volume of the pan-shelf field, according to Wang Wenbo, the person in charge of the business of Kuaishou e-commerce mall, Kuaishou Mall has launched the sales hosting function, including two modes: brand product commission hosting and white-label product pricing hosting, which can reduce the difficulty of merchant operation and improve sales certainty.
In addition, Kuaishou will also make efforts in marketing tools, providing merchants with a large number of scientific marketing products, activities and free AI digital human live broadcast functions.
In terms of products, Kuaishou has launched a system based on the conversion of commodity purchasing power, so that merchants can easily grasp the trend of high-conversion products and the trend of explosive products in the live broadcast room, and at the same time optimize the small yellow car system to realize personalized recommendations of interested products in the live broadcast room; At a big promotion event like 618, Kuaishou will help merchants create a shopping atmosphere of "shopping mall" in the live broadcast room to achieve more efficient shopping conversion.
Good content, good products, and good experience are multiple closed loops
The distinctive features of a platform that distinguish it from others are often the significant advantages of a platform.
As a content e-commerce platform, Kuaishou has the dual attributes of "content platform" and "e-commerce platform", which is the core difference between it and traditional shelf e-commerce, and to some extent, it is also a huge advantage in the process of "global operation".
At Kuaishou, the deep integration of content and e-commerce provides the platform with the wings that form a commercial flywheel.
As Wang Jianwei said: "We hope that merchants with good products will continue to develop and grow in Kuaishou, and learn to do a good job in content; At the same time, we also hope that more and more merchants with good content can bring good products. Only in this way can we realize the coordinated development of Kuaishou e-commerce's 'good content x good goods'. ”
One of the typical cases is the Kuaishou creator "Wang Beisi in the Northeast".
Wang Beisi is a content creator who shares real rural life on Kuaishou, and has gained the attention of more than 2 million fans by posting content on rural food life.
On May 8 this year, Wang Beisi opened the first live broadcast with goods, and through careful cooperation and product selection with the team, platform, and operation, he created nearly 10 million GMV for the first time with e-commerce delivery, with a cumulative number of viewers of 5.53 million, an increase of 150,000 fans, and an order volume of more than 290,000 orders.
The story of Wang Beisi's transformation from a creator to an e-commerce anchor reflects the Kuaishou platform's ability to link users, creators, talents, and merchants.
First of all, Kuaishou has a large number of excellent content creators like Wang Beisi in the production of "good content", who can establish a relatively close trust relationship with users through content interaction, forming an innate foundation for planting good products for users; Secondly, Kuaishou has also gathered a large number of high-quality goods that meet the consumption needs of users through the resources of its own platform and the "Kuaishou Preferred" hosting commodity model.
On this basis, the multi-field operation encouraged by Kuaishou not only makes the connection between "good content" and "good goods" more diverse, but also makes the flywheel of "content" and "business" between creators, talents, and merchants turn faster and faster, realizing the closed loop from good content to good goods.
However, Kuaishou e-commerce did not stop there, but further put forward higher requirements for optimizing the consumer experience, trying to add a "good experience" in addition to good content and good products. Specific to the actual measures, Kuaishou has launched functions such as "multi-piece multi-folding", short video hierarchical distribution, use first, pay later, installment payment, etc., and is gradually optimizing the free shipping ratio of logistics services. At the end of March this year, Kuaishou e-commerce launched the "Northwest Container Transportation" service to support free shipping of orders in Xinjiang, which has driven the number of new buyers in Xinjiang to increase by more than 70%.
In addition, the Kuaishou platform also works with brands and service providers to provide consumers with the "trade-in" service of 3C home appliances. In the Kuaishou 618 promotion that has been launched on May 20, Kuaishou has launched a series of low-cost products with the theme of "618 every day, and the subsidy of big brands is better than the whole network".
"A good life can be not expensive" is the belief that Kuaishou e-commerce has been adhering to in the past few years, and in the future, Kuaishou e-commerce will still adhere to the user first, and on the premise of meeting the certainty of business operation and the monetization needs of creators and talents, it will focus on the experience of 700 million monthly active "old iron".
After all, by remembering where you're coming from, you know better where you're going.