Original debut | Golden Horn Finance
Author | Little Dick
Edit | Weekly sledgehammer
The myth in the live room did not continue.
The myth occurred on October 20, the first day of Singles' Day, Li Jiaqi's live broadcast GMV reached 10.653 billion yuan, and the GMV of Weiya's live broadcast room was 8.252 billion yuan, the former increased by 246% compared with last year's Double Eleven first day GMV, and the latter increased by 179%.
Five days later, on the fifth day of Tmall Double Eleven, the transaction volume (GMV) and views (PV) between Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya live broadcast fell back to the pre-double eleven level, and Wei Ya live broadcast room dropped 10.6226 million fans on this day, exceeding the number of fans that have increased in the past month.
Wei Ya's fan number changes (source: Xiao Hulu Big Data)
This gap is also happening to Ali.
Although the data of Double Eleven is constantly refreshing every year, since 2015, Ali's market share has been declining from 78%, and this year, Ali's market share has reached 51%, almost losing the 50% mark.
In April this year, the anti-monopoly hammer against Ali was smashed, ending the model of relying on traffic to force merchants to "choose one of the two" in the past.
Before this "e-commerce equality" was given legal significance, the departure of traffic, the rise of opponents, the subversion of user shopping habits, and the lurking crisis have long been exposed.
The e-commerce pattern has long ceased to be the same.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="25" > "one super and many strong", which is difficult to be bossed</h1>
E-commerce - the giants of the warriors must fight for the place.
Compared with domestic Internet companies and foreign countries, there is a significant feature, in all kinds of platforms, the need to accumulate traffic, whether it is to do news websites, do social networking, do short videos, in the end become e-commerce.
Many participants also always want to reverse the original market pattern of China's e-commerce and create a new market ecology.
But this time, under the hustle and bustle, the old e-commerce order is quietly undergoing drastic changes.
According to Alibaba's 2021 fiscal year annual report, in the year from March 31, 2020 to March 31, 2021, Alibaba's consumer-oriented commercial business GMV reached 8.12 trillion yuan, and its annual revenue was 717.289 billion yuan. In the 2020 fiscal year before this, Taobao Tmall's annual GMV was 7.053 trillion yuan, exceeding $1 trillion for the first time, surpassing Amazon to rank first in the world, with annual revenue of 509.711 billion yuan.
The vertical comparison data is still stable, but under the horizontal comparison, Ali's hidden worries are undoubtedly highlighted.
The GMV in Alibaba's financial report is the total amount of transactions in its ecosystem, including not only B2C's retail business, but also its 1688 wholesale business. According to research institute eMarketer, Alibaba's market share in China's retail e-commerce market fell from 78% in 2015 to 51% in 2021.
At the same time, the market share of the new e-commerce retail giants represented by JD.com, Pinduoduo, and Suning, and the "interested e-commerce" upstarts represented by Kuaishou and Douyin, are climbing step by step.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the domestic online retail transaction volume from 2018 to the first half of 2021 was 9.0 trillion, 10.6 trillion, 11.76 trillion and 6.11 trillion, respectively, based on this, we can see the changes in the retail e-commerce industry in the past three years.
It can be seen that the market share of JD.com, the second oldest in the industry, has been stable and rising in the past three years, and its number of users exceeded 500 million in the first quarter of this year. According to JD.com's semi-annual report this year, its local retail format JD.com has increased its GMV by 77% in one year, supporting the growth of transaction volume within the JD retail ecosystem this year; Pinduoduo, which began to take off in 2018, relies on the "social e-commerce" model and the continuous development of the sinking market, and its market share has maintained an annual growth of 5% in recent years.
Since Kuaishou started its e-commerce business in 2018, the GMV has increased by 4,000 times in three years, and its market share has reached 3.2%, surpassing Vipshop and catching up with Suning Tesco.
Douyin, which began to improve the layout of e-commerce in the second half of last year, created 500 billion GMV last year. This year, Douyin set a trillion GMV target. But now it seems that this goal seems to be somewhat conservative, this year's e-commerce service provider ecological conference, Mu Qing, vice president of Douyin e-commerce, said that the Douyin e-commerce GMV increased by 7.9 times in the first nine months of this year.
This trade-off actually means that the monopoly built by Ali in the e-commerce field in the past is being dismantled by more and more latecomers, the biggest reason for which is the change of user buying habits.
The so-called interest in e-commerce is based on short videos and other content, with the anchor himself as the starting point, to attract the attention of fans, form a private domain traffic pool, and then monetize traffic through live streaming. The content has brought more traffic entrances to the live broadcast, and has also cultivated a group of fans with high stickiness and high repurchase rate. According to Kuaishou's financial report, the average repurchase rate of its e-commerce business in 2020 increased from 45% in 2019 to 65%.
Two days ago, the Douyin Internet celebrity "Guangdong Couple" held the first live broadcast of Double Eleven this year, setting a GMV of 200 million yuan, and real-time data showed that 23% of the viewers in the live broadcast room came from video recommendations.
User composition of the Guangdong couple live broadcast room (Source: Gray Dolphin Data)
Some third-party institutions predict that by 2023, the domestic interested e-commerce GMV represented by Douyin and Kuaishou will exceed 9.5 trillion, which exceeds the turnover created by Ali's whole ecology last year.
The original traffic tilted to the short video platform, and Ali's position as a traffic monopoly was threatened, which made it have to change. Benchmarking each opponent, its own ecology is also quietly adjusting.
Interest in e-commerce, at the end of last year, the mobile phone Taobao online "Taobao shopping", the main planting grass. On August 30 this year, Taobao officially launched the new slogan "Too good to shop".
In the live broadcast business, Ali is also frequent action - in August, the mobile phone Taobao home page added a live broadcast level entrance, and further ahead, Ali after the Jiang Fan incident, once again invested in the first share of Internet celebrities Such as Han, recently, there is a virtual anchor plan with Ali Damo Academy and BlueFocus.
Taobao "shopping" entrance
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="184" > a lengthy punch-in game</h1>
The e-commerce controversy tends to be white-hot, and under the big promotion, the "inner volume" of e-commerce is at a glance.
The giants bump into each other, first more creative than whom, and then longer than whom.
Here is a brief history of big promotions.
In 2003, under the influence of SARS, Liu Qiangdong from the offline retail to the front, in June 2008, in order to celebrate the performance of Jingdong in the middle of the year, Jingdong decided to start online user remuneration on the birthday of Jingdong, so that consumers can benefit, 618 thus fixed, which can almost be called the first large-scale e-commerce promotion in China.
In 2009, Alibaba transformed Singles' Day from a youth subculture into a shopping festival.
In order to create momentum and form differentiation and cultivate user consumption habits, almost every platform used to have its own promotional festival - Suning's 418 and 818, Vipshop's 616 mid-year sale and 419 promotion, Lefeng's "Peach Blossom Festival", Jumei Youpin's "June Famous Products Festival"...
On this day, the platform released low prices to attract user consumption, in order to drain the flow, some platforms did not hesitate to spend a lot of money to create a party.
Jiangsu Satellite TV Tmall 618 "Super Late" Party
According to incomplete statistics, at present, there are more than 100 shopping festivals in the field of e-commerce, in addition to the double eleven, double twelve, six eleven, eight one eight, more platform shopping festivals, almost no splash.
Festivals have no patents, and such things as festivals are planted by predecessors and cooled off by future generations. In order to seize the opportunity of fixed traffic, the promotion festival between platforms has changed from a separate battle to a scuffle of June 18 and year-end Double Eleven.
Birthdays are robbed, which is really a bit unkind. In 2014, at the 618 preparation meeting, Xu Lei, the current CEO of Jingdong Retail Group, proposed that "don't rectify the red June anymore, highlight the theme of 618, and the promotion can be done for 20 days to form a consumption symbol, that is, Jingdong's 618." ”
Last year, when other platforms set the pre-sale time around May 24, Suning began the June 18 promotion on May 15, with a promotion cycle of up to 34 days; after that, Ali advanced the pre-sale time of Singles' Day to 0:00 a.m. on October 21, and the duration changed from a night of carnival in the past to a 20-day "punch card game".
On this year's Double Eleven, in order to "prevent consumers from staying up late", Ali advanced the pre-sale time by 4 hours to 8 p.m. on October 20, and Li Jiaqi no longer had to ring the gong to wake up all the girls.
In addition, the end time is not fixed, this year's June 18, Tmall changed the previous 0 o'clock to open the practice, from May 24 on the same day at 8 pm pre-sale, the end time is June 20.
However, the endless stretching of the battle line, and the influx of live broadcasts of giants, are eating back against big promotions.
More and more, longer and longer promotional festivals are also desensitizing consumers. As mentioned earlier, the GMV between Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya live broadcast fell back to the previous level after October 20, the first day of the pre-sale, and this phenomenon also exists on other platforms.
In the long-term shopping festival, the influence is being overdrawn, and the stimulating effect on consumers is weakening.
In fact, the shopping festival that lengthens the front line is more like a kind of staggered shopping, and the underlying logic is that his founder has lost confidence in his competitiveness and has lost confidence in this festival.
Li Jiaqiweiya's double eleven preview in the live broadcast room
The meaning of the shopping festival is in the concentration of discounts and price reductions, but today, Singles' Day has lost this value.
Because the fiery live broadcast room is normalizing the low price, it is also dissolving the meaning of the shopping festival itself.
Judging from the price of Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room, in the double eleven live broadcast on October 20, the price of the regular Estée Lauder fist product eye cream was 1060 yuan 30ml to send 30ml and 15ml face cream, and in fact, this product was li Jiaqi became a "self-use eye cream", in the past live broadcast, 510 yuan to buy a bottle of 15ml formal dress, will be accompanied by a 15ml sample.
When every day is Double Eleven, what is the meaning of Double Eleven?
But a reality that has to be admitted is that Ali can't give up this traffic entrance, and it is inseparable from those head anchors who don't belong to it and can't control it.
Although this is a spear of oneself, a shield of oneself.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="185" > power relations on shelves</h1>
What really broke Ali's monopoly was a paper ticket.
In April this year, china's Market Supervision Bureau found that Alibaba Group had abused its domestic market dominance since 2015 to impose a "two-or" requirement for merchants on the platform, prohibiting them from setting up stores on other platforms or participating in promotional activities, violating the Anti-Monopoly Law and imposing a fine of 18.228 billion yuan. It is also by far the biggest fine against internet platforms.
This ticket hurt Ali's vitality. According to Alibaba's financial report for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, Alibaba achieved a net loss attributable to common shareholders of RMB5.479 billion and a net loss of RMB7.654 billion in the quarter. This is the first time that Ali has faced a loss since its listing.
Ali explained in its earnings report that the quarterly loss was mainly due to the fine imposed by the State Administration for Market Regulation on China's anti-monopoly law of 18.228 billion yuan.
Previously, monopoly meant pricing power, the loss of market share and the hammer of the law, depriving Ali of his dictatorship over prices.
However, after the "two alternatives" became history, the pricing power did not return from the platform to the hands of the merchant.
Some insiders said that e-commerce platforms such as Pinduoduo hold the right to traffic distribution, and the platform determines the frequency and location of the merchant's advertisements in various traffic entrances, and the standard is whether you can give a low enough price.
Yes, low prices are another battlefield for the giants.
According to Alibaba's 2019 financial report, 77% of Alibaba's new users from February 2018 to March 2019 came from the sinking market. Also in 2018, the main sinking market pinduoduo ushered in explosive growth, the annual active users came to 344 million people, catching up with Jingdong, in June 2019, under the impetus of the "10 billion subsidies" strategy, Pinduoduo users soared again, and in the Spring Festival of 2020, daily active more than the boss Taobao, in March of that year, Pinduoduo disclosed in the financial report that the annual active users reached 788 million people, and successfully surpassed Taobao in terms of user scale.
The sinking market is lost, which really makes Ali feel panicked.
In order to resist the impact from Pinduoduo, Taobao restarted the Juhuasuan business, and also took the road of tens of billions of subsidies, in March last year, Taobao special price APP after a year of public beta launch, and in May this year changed its name to "Taote".
Also in 2019, "N billion subsidies" began to become the most common word for users in various platforms, and the dispute over e-commerce platforms began to be lower than the lower limit.
Comparison of 2019 and 2020 Singles' Day Activities of Various Platforms (Source: Ping An Securities)
In a country where 600 million people earn only 1,000 yuan a month, the absolute low price means a vast sinking market.
In fact, ten years ago, the industry was like this - around 2012, JD.com broke through the siege of Dangdang and Suning with two price wars, and became the second largest e-commerce platform in China.
Traffic is the most expensive intangible asset of our time, and it is also a bargaining and a right of choice. The business of exchanging money for traffic seems to be extremely cost-effective at any time.
Jingdong called Tmall Suning
However, this right is now in the hands of the anchor to a certain extent.
When the live broadcast room becomes a new traffic password and more customers pour in from the live broadcast room, which brands can enter the live broadcast room, how much bargaining space... The representation of traffic rights in the live broadcast room is more complex.
For small and medium-sized brands, the live broadcast room may be a way to miss the publicity, and the big promotion is also a window period for obtaining traffic, but the top traffic is often 20% of the commission and millions of pit fees, making small and medium-sized brands prohibitive.
Small and medium-sized brands are being abandoned by the live broadcast room. In the past, with the popularity of live broadcasting, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya's live broadcast room came out of new domestic brands such as Huaxizi, Perfect Diary, colorkey, etc., but today in the live broadcast room of the two top streams, it is difficult to see the new domestic products.
The international big brand itself has both popularity and brand effect, the big name helps the anchor to raise the value, get a stable and guaranteed source of customers, coupled with the high unit price, GMV is not a problem, why not.
However, the traffic behind the anchor may also slip back into the hands of the platform that has a lot of money and controls the traffic entrance. Just as Ali is gradually relying on diversion and editing, it has formed its own live broadcast ecology.
More merchants, after accumulating traffic in the live broadcast room, also choose to return to the platform and open live broadcasts themselves.
Li Jiaqi live broadcast room brand distribution (source: Xiaohulu big data)
The fine of 18.228 billion yuan kicked off the second half of the e-commerce dispute, when the market is more equal, which is destined to be a more "volume", but also a more exciting competition.
In 2015, Wu Xiaobo said: Maybe November 11 this year will still be recorded and full of fireworks, but it may also be the last battle of "Double Eleven".
After that, Singles' Day still repeatedly created miracles.
But no one can guarantee that the next double eleven is not an inflection point.