Double 11 is “quiet”. After 14 years of twisting, it's finally stuck?
$Alibaba (BABA.US)$ The Double 11 Shopping Festival has been with us for 14 years. Unlike the lively “holiday” atmosphere of the Spring Festival Gala in previous years, there is no transaction data for the grand Double 11 Gala this year and the big digital screen scrolling transaction data.
Compared to previous years, this year's Double 11 seems to be much quieter!
However, every year, everyone pays special attention to GMV turnover, but this year the major e-commerce platforms chose not to disclose their actions in unison.
What is the record for the 14th year of Double Eleven?
After the “Double 11” came to an end, Taobao stated in a low-key manner that “it is stable, moderate and positive, and the transaction scale is the same as last year,” and did not publish specific data. JD, on the other hand, said that this year's results surpassed the industry's growth rate, set a new record, and the number of shopping users reached a new high.
Everyone is very tacitly in agreement. Together, we will never mention GMV.
The Double Eleven Shopping Festival began in 2009. Taobao turned what everyone called “Singles' Day” into a large-scale shopping and stocking festival once a year.
The first trial brought about a blowout in the number of users and transaction records, which gave Taobao a sweet taste.
The GMV of the first Double 11 Shopping Festival that year was only 52 million yuan. With the rapid development of e-commerce for more than 10 years, GMV reached 965.12 billion yuan by 2021, and the scale was approaching the trillion yuan mark, which can be described as a record high.
However, after reaching its peak, Double 11 also seemed to have hit its own ceiling. The GMV growth rate began to slow down, and even declined year by year.
Looking at the data for the first three years, the network-wide “Double 11” GMV growth rates in 2019, 2020, and 2021 were 51.8%, 43.3%, and 12.2%, respectively.
Taobao Shuang11 was initially able to become popular all over the Internet. One very important point is that it successfully achieved “low price” incentives for consumers.
However, over the years, it seems that Double 11 is gradually losing the preferential right to the “lowest price”.
In addition to Double 11, the number of e-commerce festivals throughout the year is also gradually increasing, and the intervals are getting closer and closer. The Double 12, 618, 818, 919, and New Year's Festival, which are named after time, have all become major e-commerce promotion points.
However, Ali was still not satisfied and created e-commerce festivals in various categories, such as the Home Improvement Festival, Car Festival, Family Festival, and Queen's Day.
Since then, the Double Eleven promotion, which once used to be scarce and expensive, is no longer the only choice for consumers, and it is to be expected that its appeal has begun to decline year by year.
Despite this year's efforts to turn the tide, it is difficult for Tmall Shuang11 to recreate the glory of that year.
Behind this, who actually stole the customer?
Taobao Double 11 is losing its lowest price
In everyone's impression, Taobao's previous Double Eleven editions were accompanied by various brain-burning preferential marketing routines. Consumers jokingly called it a “sea of questions tactic.”
Games such as discount coupons, full discounts, pre-sales, and final payment are dazzling. Staying up late at midnight to grab purchases has also become an inertial operation for everyone. If the internet speed and hand speed are poor, it will also disappoint hopes. So from one to double eleven, the whole nation began to get excited and nervous.
However, over the years, consumers have been deeply exhausted by the Double 11 promotion and have gradually become more rational and cautious, so it is becoming more and more difficult to follow a routine.
Every year, there are brands that have been bombarded because of their consumer routine. This year was no exception. Famous brands such as Shiseido, Bosideng, Uniqlo, L'Oreal, and Lululemon are all on the list.
The one that was scolded the most this time was Shiseido. At one point, due to a problem with setting a “minimum price” for products, Li Jiaqi and consumers had to be blacklisted at the same time.
This is how it happened. In the early morning of November 4, some consumers discovered that the Yue Wei water lotion set sold in the live broadcast room of Shiseido's official flagship store was only 888 yuan, while the price of the same product on the live broadcast room of Li Jiaqi, which was the first live broadcast, was 1,240 yuan.
In this situation, according to the price insurance rules of Taobao Double Eleven this year, consumers can request compensation for the price difference.
However, Shiseido officially explained the lowest price it sells as a temporary price anomaly caused by a “system failure.”
This insincere explanation has drawn a wave of criticism. In order to resolve the incident, Shiseido later stated that it would “uniformly process refunds and provide appropriate compensation” for abnormal orders.
Although some of these consumers were accepted to apply for an insured price and returned a set of giveaways with a full refund, other consumers who applied for insured prices a little later discovered that the purchase link had expired and were unable to enjoy the insured price service.
Li Jiaqi also “made a big mistake” this time. His forefoot just sold this product at the “lowest price” on the live broadcast room, and the brand's underfoot also secretly lowered the price on the official live broadcast room.
Not only was she fooled by Shiseido, but Li Jiaqi's live broadcast also showed that products such as Hisense TV and the Little Swan Tumble Washer and Dryer were higher than the discounted prices at the brand's flagship stores.
In addition to the price chaos in the live broadcast room, brands also played the game of “increase the price first, then cut the price”.
According to related news, as early as September, Ms. Li from Shanghai fell in love with a Bosideng down jacket. At the time, the price after the voucher was 979.28 yuan.
I thought Double 11 would enjoy the biggest discount for the whole year. Surprisingly, during the Double Eleven pre-sale period, this down jacket first rose to 1,349 yuan, and then the price after issuing the ticket was 979 yuan. After this wave of operation, Double 11 is only 0.28 yuan cheaper than usual.
Recently, the new generation brand Lululemon, which is very popular, has also been revealed. A consumer claims that they bought a T-shirt priced at 220 yuan during the pre-sale period, but discovered that after the official launch of Double 11 on October 31, the product dropped to 200 yuan.
Consumers said they couldn't accept the merchant's routine, and the transition from pink to black has since dragged the brand into their shopping blacklist.
Over the years, the way platforms teamed up with brands has become more and more dazzling. Consumers are generally skeptical about the lowest price, so naturally they will become more rational and cautious.
This also has a lot to do with the general environment. Today's online e-commerce shopping platforms are no longer just about running alone; players such as JD, Vipshop, Pinduoduo, and Suning Tesco are on the rise.
JD is self-operated and has a strong logistics system. The delivery speed is super fast, and the 3C digital category is also an advantageous category; Vipshop focuses on brand discounts. Pinduoduo targets the sinking market, Suning Tesco focuses on household appliances, and Dangdang sells books online and enters the racetrack...
Each of these e-commerce platforms has its own differentiated style of play, so they have survived by getting a share of success.
In addition to e-commerce platform rivals, short video platforms, applet stores, major offline shopping malls, and brand-run live broadcast rooms have all joined the Double 11 scuffle to grab customers.
However, as the post-00s and post-90s began to become the main consumer force of the new generation, the level of culture of consumers is improving, and their ability to detect objects naturally also improved.
Say goodbye to “closing your eyes”. Young people know how to shop. Even in the face of highly inflammatory live broadcasts, it is necessary to “save” enough to convince them to place orders.
On the other hand, due to repeated epidemics, the income and consumption capacity of some households will also face greater pressure to grow, so a change in consumption attitudes is inevitable.
There is a passage that says, “Calligraphy, painting, piano, chess, poetry, and hops used to be inseparable from it; but now the Seven Things have changed even more, chai rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, and tea.”
It can be seen that the reckless shopping of Double Eleven is a thing of the past; now buying practical necessities is king.
Double 11 is clearly starting to get stuck, and Taobao has no choice but to begin to reflect and find other ways out.
E-commerce is seeking change, multi-platform live streaming is a fierce battle
E-commerce live streaming is a lifesaver that Taobao is paying close attention to. This year's Double Eleven highlight is none other than that.
Taobao wants to win back a game through live streaming, so of course, it has to compete for the top anchor.
However, the former “first sister” Via was absent, and “one brother” Li Jiaqi took on heavy burdens and led the way. Taobao's demand for high-quality leading anchors was clearly very urgent, so Taobao made a big move, directly stirring up the flow of anchor resources from all over the network.
A very interesting phenomenon this year is that anchors from various platforms are on the stage one after another, and Ali, Douyin, Kuaishou, and video channels dig each other's “feet”.
On the eve of Double 11, some leading anchors began entering Taobao ahead of schedule. Among them, there was no shortage of Luo Yonghao, Liu Yuhong, Cecilia Cheung, and Yu Minhong, who became popular on Douyin, and Mad Yang also went to Tencent's video channel to start a live broadcast.
Currently, Douyin's leading live streaming MCN agencies are popular, such as making friends, watching the Internet from afar, Worry-free Media, and Oriental Selection. Instead of making a splash with Double 11, these agencies wanted to take root and fight for a long time on live streaming.
After Taobao's efforts to turn the tide, in the e-commerce live streaming section, Double 11 finally achieved good results as desired.
Although Taobao and Tmall did not disclose the overall GMV this year, the data stars in live e-commerce are very impressive.
According to relevant data, in the first hour of Taobao Double 11 sales on October 31, Taobao live streaming increased 600% year over year, and the transaction volume of the waist anchor increased 250% year over year.
During the Double 11 period, the turnover of 62 Taobao live broadcast rooms exceeded 100 million yuan, and the turnover of 632 Taobao live broadcast rooms was over 10 million yuan.
Live streaming is not only a major sales trend for Taobao Double 11, but it is also a battle for major platforms to work hard. Other players are also catching up behind Taobao.
This year is the third time that Douyin e-commerce has participated in the Double 11 war since becoming a first-level division of the group in June 2020. This year, Double11 Double11 launched a series of e-commerce campaigns such as “Big Name Broadcast”, “Goodie Live”, and “National Team PK Contest.”
JD is also fully prepared for Double 11 and has joined forces with Kuaishou and Video. Before the big promotion, not only did Kuaishou open the external link of the JD League, but it also collaborated on live streaming with video accounts many times.
Meanwhile, the video channel, Station B, and Xiaohongshu are also in a hurry to get a share of the pie. They are also using live streaming to enter Double Eleven.
As early as mid-October, Station B began adding a “shopping” section under the live streaming section, and opened up live streaming rights to platform UP owners, officially opening a public domain entrance for Station B live e-commerce.
A number of live broadcasters participated in Double 11, covering categories including home appliances, furniture, etc. The most representative one is “Mr. Fanatic”, the owner of the home improvement category at Station B, which achieved a good result of 130 million GMV in the first live broadcast on Double 11. It can be said that it broke Station B's single-game delivery record, and even surpassed Station B's overall live delivery results at 618 o'clock.
Compared to the shattering speed, although some UP owners on Station B have achieved good results, overall, the agitation of Double 11 is not very exciting, and users' demand for station B still favors high-quality entertainment content.
Although there are small orange cars in the live broadcast room, with the exception of a few self-operated products, most of them require clicking and then redirecting to Taobao to place an order. The steps are complicated, and it is easy for users to be impatient with the jump path, so it is not conducive to conversion.
The Xiaohongshu side is also frantically seeking to break the e-commerce game. There is a saying, “Xiaohongshu at the end of '22 was Douyin from '20.”
In October before Double Eleven, Xiaohongshu released a fashion anchor growth plan with the intention of focusing on supporting e-commerce live streaming during Double 11. The gameplay of “Double 11 Xiaohong Book Buying Festival” is simple and crude. There is no pre-sale session, and you can directly enjoy a full discount of 300-50 across stores.
On the other side, video channels began to make a big splash in live streaming at the end of 2021. This year's Double 11 is also coming menacingly. After all, it is supported by the WeChat ecosystem of “public account+mini-program+corporate WeChat”.
According to QuestMobile data, as of June of this year, the number of monthly active users of the video account has exceeded 800 million, successfully surpassing Douyin and Kuaishou, and the future prospects cannot be underestimated.
This year is the second year that the video channel participated in Double 11. Unlike other platforms that prefer to create live streaming by celebrities, the video channel has focused more on attracting brands and merchants to enter and launch broadcasts. In July, the video channel also officially connected to streaming advertisements and launched a small video store, further improving the platform's live streaming delivery ecosystem and preparing for Double 11.
During Double 11, various e-commerce platforms livestreamed the same competition, fighting a war without smoke.
E-commerce festivals should return to the essence of shopping
Why is the e-commerce live broadcast reviving Double 11 again?
Continued deployment of live e-commerce on all platforms is already one of the major trends of Double 11 in the future, and it is also the most important trend.
Looking at the current e-commerce live streaming market, Taoshu Express still occupies the top three positions in live e-commerce. From October 31 to November 12, 2022, these three live e-commerce platforms have created a total of over 100 million live streaming channels.
Among them, over 60 million live broadcasts appeared on Taobao Live alone. Douyin can be considered Taobao's biggest competitor in the live e-commerce circuit. Kuaishou, Video, Station B, and Xiaohongshu have sped up their siege of Taobao and Douyin.
This year, Taobao dug up the “wall” of Douyin, attracting quite a few top and waist Douyin Vs to the Taobao Double 11 live broadcast.
Why are the anchors not afraid to offend Douyin and have to join Taobao Live?
We can find out some facts from Lao Luo's words. Luo Yonghao can be described as a veteran in the e-commerce live streaming industry. Regarding his participation in Taobao Double 11 this time, he claimed that Taobao was able to access brands he couldn't reach on other platforms.
One word hits the point. This is indeed Taobao's irreplaceable advantage as the biggest brother in the e-commerce industry.
Years of e-commerce experience have enabled Taobao to accumulate massive merchant resources, and the brand system also tends to improve compared to pan-entertainment platforms such as Douyin. Naturally, anchors also have a wider range of product choices.
The essence of Taobao's connection between merchants and consumers is to sell goods. Consumers also enter the live broadcast room for shopping. Taobao itself has its own shopping scene, and of course, its conversion rate is also very high.
Unlike e-commerce, since Douyin proposed the e-commerce concept of interest in April 2021, it has mainly relied on live broadcasts and short videos to grow plants and deliver goods.
However, Douyin should also be aware of the conflict between content and commercialization, so it is constantly making changes. Currently, Douyin has begun to implement “global interest e-commerce”, using shelf e-commerce to point to different online shopping scenarios.
Shelf e-commerce is more biased towards user searches and shopping mall scenarios, with the intention of incorporating the “people looking for goods” model in addition to “goods looking for people”. Shelf e-commerce results are beginning to show during the Double 11 period, successfully driving the average daily sales volume of Douyin's live streaming to increase 156% year over year.
When it comes to live e-commerce, I have to mention JD, the “second best in the e-commerce industry.”
As one of the two major e-commerce platforms, JD's live streaming business has been left far behind by Taobao and has always been in a tepid state.
It's not too late for JD to start. As early as 2016, when Taobao began live streaming, JD also began live streaming.
By 2020, JD's live e-commerce had reached its peak. When Gree Dong Mingzhu teamed up with technology evaluation blogger Wang Ziru for a live broadcast, sales exceeded 700 million yuan, comparable to Gree's total sales for the whole year. That year's Double 11, JD live broadcast featured over 300 celebrities and over 500 live broadcasts by creative CEOs.
However, after the “highlight” of 2020, JD Live was almost lost in the market.
The reason for this is that, on the one hand, JD Live focuses more on the product itself and brand display, which makes it difficult for amateur anchors to break out of the ring.
Furthermore, JD's trump card is the 3C digital category, which has high customer unit prices, low repurchase rates, and a long selection period. This seems to be clearly at odds with the live broadcast room, which focuses on “low prices.”
In addition to Shake Fast and JD, other new players such as Station B, Xiaohongshu, and Video Network are testing the waters of e-commerce live streaming, which is also an inevitable trend. As for the rankings, the pattern has not yet completely formed.
The second trend of Double 11 in the future is that anchors are becoming more and more independent and will not be tied to a single platform.
For the anchor and the MCN company behind it, in order to resist the risk of relying on a single platform, “putting eggs in multiple baskets” can reduce the risk brought about by changing rules.
However, platforms similar to Douyin seem to have been “dug into the wall” by Taobao; in fact, they are also beneficial to the risk that the anchors on various platforms will collapse their houses.
You can refer to how much Kuaishou's live streaming image was lost in Simba's previous incident. This is because the platform is too deeply tied to the leading anchor.
As the third trend of Double 11 in the future, brand live broadcast rooms have also become a trend.
The ability of branded live broadcast rooms to operate on their own is constantly improving, and their dependence on anchors will gradually decrease.
This year, the number of viewers on the day of the Estée Lauder Tmall self-broadcast pre-sale was over 10.65 million. This figure can be said to be directly following the performance of the leading anchor.
This is not a bad thing. If brands can control more initiatives, they can not only bring steady growth in users to the brand, but also turn high pricing fees and marketing expenses into benefits for consumers.
The “coming to life” of Double 11 actually has a lot to do with not only the advent of the live streaming trend, but also the return of e-commerce festivals to the essence of shopping this year.
As the fourth trend of Double 11 in the future, platforms will place more and more emphasis on optimizing the customer experience rather than simply pursuing low price routines.
This year's Taobao Double 11 is clearly already moving closer to this trend, and other platforms are following suit.
Considering that consumers stayed up late at 11:00 in previous years to rush to buy products, this year's multi-platform pre-sale payment schedule is no longer at zero.
For example, Taobao Shuang11 had a total of 3 shopping spikes this year: the pre-sale period that began on October 24, the good start period on November 1-3, and the final sprint period on November 11.
The discount method does not use the difficult to understand “tactic of asking a sea of questions,” but instead removes the routine, simply and crudely gives “store coupons,” “full discount coupons,” and some aggressive specific discounts.
Taobao and Tmall launched a “triple discount” combined use: a group discount of nearly 17 million products; the entire store can use the entire store to get 50 coupons for every 300 purchased; 88VIP members can get another 820 yuan high-value voucher.
JD's full reduction policy is similar to Taobao's. Every 299 yuan is reduced by 50 yuan, and every 1,000 yuan is reduced by 100 yuan. Vipshop and Pinduoduo are compared to Buddhist wait-and-see. Vipshop launched “Consumers don't need to round up orders,” while Pinduoduo does not engage in pre-sales or final payment.
The ultra-long version of the price guarantee service is also one of the highlights of Double 11 this year. Merchants guarantee “one-click price insurance” for expensive purchases, and the promised maximum price guarantee period has been extended from 15 days to 27-34 days.
In terms of delivery, logistics, and delivery, Taobao has also made many detailed upgrades, enabling services such as shopping cart expansion, multi-address consolidated order placement, and door-to-door delivery at Cainiao Station.
This annual national carnival shopping festival will inevitably break out of the limitations of pursuing GMV, open up more possibilities and shoulder greater responsibilities.
In this year's Double 11, the number of domestic brands entering e-commerce platforms ushered in a significant increase.
According to relevant data, on October 31, the first wave of sales on Tmall Shuang11 was only 1 hour away. Of the 102 brands with a turnover exceeding 100 million, domestic brands accounted for half.
In the past, big names owned by foreign capital with fair marketing expenses dominated many brand exposure channels mainly in traditional mainstream media.
However, in today's Internet environment, consumers have more channels to learn about niche products through e-commerce platforms. A stage like Double Eleven has become an opportunity to focus on showcasing the strength of domestic goods.
According to Taobao and Tmall related data, in the past year alone, Taobao and Tmall had a net increase of nearly 1.2 million merchants, an increase of more than 10% over the previous year.
With a series of support and incentives from the platform, before the Double 11 promotion, a large number of brands successfully settled in. Among them, there was no shortage of young businessmen who participated in Double 11 for the first time.
Double 11, which no longer plays with deep-seated routines, is actually a win-win situation for consumers and merchants.
Merchants use the cost of buying large amounts of traffic in the past to increase concessions to benefit consumers, which can further stimulate consumption and also help attract consumers to bind to membership and increase later repurchases.
Consumers no longer blindly buy and buy, then regret large returns after “chopping hands”, but instead buy rationally as needed.
Will Double 11 disappear in the future? It won't necessarily disappear, but it will “transform” and even evolve into a new species over time.
Some industry insiders have analyzed that this year's Double Eleven is becoming an inflection point. After more than ten years of transformation, today's Double Eleven has finally reached a stage of rapid qualitative change “from traffic to retention.”
Whether it's e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Tmall, JD, and Douyin, or brand merchants big and small, only by struggling out of the strange circle that focuses on GMV in terms of turnover can we truly push the entire e-commerce industry one step forward.
After all, good-looking GMV data is just a bright and beautiful appearance, but good-looking may not necessarily relieve the hunger and hunger of the face.
The thrill of staring at the rising GMV on the big screen at the Double Eleven Gala is nothing more than a form of self-indulgence for the platform and brand.
However, when the tide recedes, time will always tell who is swimming naked. $BABA-W (09988.HK)$ $Meituan ADR (MPNGY.US)$
Compared to previous years, this year's Double 11 seems to be much quieter!
However, every year, everyone pays special attention to GMV turnover, but this year the major e-commerce platforms chose not to disclose their actions in unison.
What is the record for the 14th year of Double Eleven?
After the “Double 11” came to an end, Taobao stated in a low-key manner that “it is stable, moderate and positive, and the transaction scale is the same as last year,” and did not publish specific data. JD, on the other hand, said that this year's results surpassed the industry's growth rate, set a new record, and the number of shopping users reached a new high.
Everyone is very tacitly in agreement. Together, we will never mention GMV.
The Double Eleven Shopping Festival began in 2009. Taobao turned what everyone called “Singles' Day” into a large-scale shopping and stocking festival once a year.
The first trial brought about a blowout in the number of users and transaction records, which gave Taobao a sweet taste.
The GMV of the first Double 11 Shopping Festival that year was only 52 million yuan. With the rapid development of e-commerce for more than 10 years, GMV reached 965.12 billion yuan by 2021, and the scale was approaching the trillion yuan mark, which can be described as a record high.
However, after reaching its peak, Double 11 also seemed to have hit its own ceiling. The GMV growth rate began to slow down, and even declined year by year.
Looking at the data for the first three years, the network-wide “Double 11” GMV growth rates in 2019, 2020, and 2021 were 51.8%, 43.3%, and 12.2%, respectively.
Taobao Shuang11 was initially able to become popular all over the Internet. One very important point is that it successfully achieved “low price” incentives for consumers.
However, over the years, it seems that Double 11 is gradually losing the preferential right to the “lowest price”.
In addition to Double 11, the number of e-commerce festivals throughout the year is also gradually increasing, and the intervals are getting closer and closer. The Double 12, 618, 818, 919, and New Year's Festival, which are named after time, have all become major e-commerce promotion points.
However, Ali was still not satisfied and created e-commerce festivals in various categories, such as the Home Improvement Festival, Car Festival, Family Festival, and Queen's Day.
Since then, the Double Eleven promotion, which once used to be scarce and expensive, is no longer the only choice for consumers, and it is to be expected that its appeal has begun to decline year by year.
Despite this year's efforts to turn the tide, it is difficult for Tmall Shuang11 to recreate the glory of that year.
Behind this, who actually stole the customer?
Taobao Double 11 is losing its lowest price
In everyone's impression, Taobao's previous Double Eleven editions were accompanied by various brain-burning preferential marketing routines. Consumers jokingly called it a “sea of questions tactic.”
Games such as discount coupons, full discounts, pre-sales, and final payment are dazzling. Staying up late at midnight to grab purchases has also become an inertial operation for everyone. If the internet speed and hand speed are poor, it will also disappoint hopes. So from one to double eleven, the whole nation began to get excited and nervous.
However, over the years, consumers have been deeply exhausted by the Double 11 promotion and have gradually become more rational and cautious, so it is becoming more and more difficult to follow a routine.
Every year, there are brands that have been bombarded because of their consumer routine. This year was no exception. Famous brands such as Shiseido, Bosideng, Uniqlo, L'Oreal, and Lululemon are all on the list.
The one that was scolded the most this time was Shiseido. At one point, due to a problem with setting a “minimum price” for products, Li Jiaqi and consumers had to be blacklisted at the same time.
This is how it happened. In the early morning of November 4, some consumers discovered that the Yue Wei water lotion set sold in the live broadcast room of Shiseido's official flagship store was only 888 yuan, while the price of the same product on the live broadcast room of Li Jiaqi, which was the first live broadcast, was 1,240 yuan.
In this situation, according to the price insurance rules of Taobao Double Eleven this year, consumers can request compensation for the price difference.
However, Shiseido officially explained the lowest price it sells as a temporary price anomaly caused by a “system failure.”
This insincere explanation has drawn a wave of criticism. In order to resolve the incident, Shiseido later stated that it would “uniformly process refunds and provide appropriate compensation” for abnormal orders.
Although some of these consumers were accepted to apply for an insured price and returned a set of giveaways with a full refund, other consumers who applied for insured prices a little later discovered that the purchase link had expired and were unable to enjoy the insured price service.
Li Jiaqi also “made a big mistake” this time. His forefoot just sold this product at the “lowest price” on the live broadcast room, and the brand's underfoot also secretly lowered the price on the official live broadcast room.
Not only was she fooled by Shiseido, but Li Jiaqi's live broadcast also showed that products such as Hisense TV and the Little Swan Tumble Washer and Dryer were higher than the discounted prices at the brand's flagship stores.
In addition to the price chaos in the live broadcast room, brands also played the game of “increase the price first, then cut the price”.
According to related news, as early as September, Ms. Li from Shanghai fell in love with a Bosideng down jacket. At the time, the price after the voucher was 979.28 yuan.
I thought Double 11 would enjoy the biggest discount for the whole year. Surprisingly, during the Double Eleven pre-sale period, this down jacket first rose to 1,349 yuan, and then the price after issuing the ticket was 979 yuan. After this wave of operation, Double 11 is only 0.28 yuan cheaper than usual.
Recently, the new generation brand Lululemon, which is very popular, has also been revealed. A consumer claims that they bought a T-shirt priced at 220 yuan during the pre-sale period, but discovered that after the official launch of Double 11 on October 31, the product dropped to 200 yuan.
Consumers said they couldn't accept the merchant's routine, and the transition from pink to black has since dragged the brand into their shopping blacklist.
Over the years, the way platforms teamed up with brands has become more and more dazzling. Consumers are generally skeptical about the lowest price, so naturally they will become more rational and cautious.
This also has a lot to do with the general environment. Today's online e-commerce shopping platforms are no longer just about running alone; players such as JD, Vipshop, Pinduoduo, and Suning Tesco are on the rise.
JD is self-operated and has a strong logistics system. The delivery speed is super fast, and the 3C digital category is also an advantageous category; Vipshop focuses on brand discounts. Pinduoduo targets the sinking market, Suning Tesco focuses on household appliances, and Dangdang sells books online and enters the racetrack...
Each of these e-commerce platforms has its own differentiated style of play, so they have survived by getting a share of success.
In addition to e-commerce platform rivals, short video platforms, applet stores, major offline shopping malls, and brand-run live broadcast rooms have all joined the Double 11 scuffle to grab customers.
However, as the post-00s and post-90s began to become the main consumer force of the new generation, the level of culture of consumers is improving, and their ability to detect objects naturally also improved.
Say goodbye to “closing your eyes”. Young people know how to shop. Even in the face of highly inflammatory live broadcasts, it is necessary to “save” enough to convince them to place orders.
On the other hand, due to repeated epidemics, the income and consumption capacity of some households will also face greater pressure to grow, so a change in consumption attitudes is inevitable.
There is a passage that says, “Calligraphy, painting, piano, chess, poetry, and hops used to be inseparable from it; but now the Seven Things have changed even more, chai rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, and tea.”
It can be seen that the reckless shopping of Double Eleven is a thing of the past; now buying practical necessities is king.
Double 11 is clearly starting to get stuck, and Taobao has no choice but to begin to reflect and find other ways out.
E-commerce is seeking change, multi-platform live streaming is a fierce battle
E-commerce live streaming is a lifesaver that Taobao is paying close attention to. This year's Double Eleven highlight is none other than that.
Taobao wants to win back a game through live streaming, so of course, it has to compete for the top anchor.
However, the former “first sister” Via was absent, and “one brother” Li Jiaqi took on heavy burdens and led the way. Taobao's demand for high-quality leading anchors was clearly very urgent, so Taobao made a big move, directly stirring up the flow of anchor resources from all over the network.
A very interesting phenomenon this year is that anchors from various platforms are on the stage one after another, and Ali, Douyin, Kuaishou, and video channels dig each other's “feet”.
On the eve of Double 11, some leading anchors began entering Taobao ahead of schedule. Among them, there was no shortage of Luo Yonghao, Liu Yuhong, Cecilia Cheung, and Yu Minhong, who became popular on Douyin, and Mad Yang also went to Tencent's video channel to start a live broadcast.
Currently, Douyin's leading live streaming MCN agencies are popular, such as making friends, watching the Internet from afar, Worry-free Media, and Oriental Selection. Instead of making a splash with Double 11, these agencies wanted to take root and fight for a long time on live streaming.
After Taobao's efforts to turn the tide, in the e-commerce live streaming section, Double 11 finally achieved good results as desired.
Although Taobao and Tmall did not disclose the overall GMV this year, the data stars in live e-commerce are very impressive.
According to relevant data, in the first hour of Taobao Double 11 sales on October 31, Taobao live streaming increased 600% year over year, and the transaction volume of the waist anchor increased 250% year over year.
During the Double 11 period, the turnover of 62 Taobao live broadcast rooms exceeded 100 million yuan, and the turnover of 632 Taobao live broadcast rooms was over 10 million yuan.
Live streaming is not only a major sales trend for Taobao Double 11, but it is also a battle for major platforms to work hard. Other players are also catching up behind Taobao.
This year is the third time that Douyin e-commerce has participated in the Double 11 war since becoming a first-level division of the group in June 2020. This year, Double11 Double11 launched a series of e-commerce campaigns such as “Big Name Broadcast”, “Goodie Live”, and “National Team PK Contest.”
JD is also fully prepared for Double 11 and has joined forces with Kuaishou and Video. Before the big promotion, not only did Kuaishou open the external link of the JD League, but it also collaborated on live streaming with video accounts many times.
Meanwhile, the video channel, Station B, and Xiaohongshu are also in a hurry to get a share of the pie. They are also using live streaming to enter Double Eleven.
As early as mid-October, Station B began adding a “shopping” section under the live streaming section, and opened up live streaming rights to platform UP owners, officially opening a public domain entrance for Station B live e-commerce.
A number of live broadcasters participated in Double 11, covering categories including home appliances, furniture, etc. The most representative one is “Mr. Fanatic”, the owner of the home improvement category at Station B, which achieved a good result of 130 million GMV in the first live broadcast on Double 11. It can be said that it broke Station B's single-game delivery record, and even surpassed Station B's overall live delivery results at 618 o'clock.
Compared to the shattering speed, although some UP owners on Station B have achieved good results, overall, the agitation of Double 11 is not very exciting, and users' demand for station B still favors high-quality entertainment content.
Although there are small orange cars in the live broadcast room, with the exception of a few self-operated products, most of them require clicking and then redirecting to Taobao to place an order. The steps are complicated, and it is easy for users to be impatient with the jump path, so it is not conducive to conversion.
The Xiaohongshu side is also frantically seeking to break the e-commerce game. There is a saying, “Xiaohongshu at the end of '22 was Douyin from '20.”
In October before Double Eleven, Xiaohongshu released a fashion anchor growth plan with the intention of focusing on supporting e-commerce live streaming during Double 11. The gameplay of “Double 11 Xiaohong Book Buying Festival” is simple and crude. There is no pre-sale session, and you can directly enjoy a full discount of 300-50 across stores.
On the other side, video channels began to make a big splash in live streaming at the end of 2021. This year's Double 11 is also coming menacingly. After all, it is supported by the WeChat ecosystem of “public account+mini-program+corporate WeChat”.
According to QuestMobile data, as of June of this year, the number of monthly active users of the video account has exceeded 800 million, successfully surpassing Douyin and Kuaishou, and the future prospects cannot be underestimated.
This year is the second year that the video channel participated in Double 11. Unlike other platforms that prefer to create live streaming by celebrities, the video channel has focused more on attracting brands and merchants to enter and launch broadcasts. In July, the video channel also officially connected to streaming advertisements and launched a small video store, further improving the platform's live streaming delivery ecosystem and preparing for Double 11.
During Double 11, various e-commerce platforms livestreamed the same competition, fighting a war without smoke.
E-commerce festivals should return to the essence of shopping
Why is the e-commerce live broadcast reviving Double 11 again?
Continued deployment of live e-commerce on all platforms is already one of the major trends of Double 11 in the future, and it is also the most important trend.
Looking at the current e-commerce live streaming market, Taoshu Express still occupies the top three positions in live e-commerce. From October 31 to November 12, 2022, these three live e-commerce platforms have created a total of over 100 million live streaming channels.
Among them, over 60 million live broadcasts appeared on Taobao Live alone. Douyin can be considered Taobao's biggest competitor in the live e-commerce circuit. Kuaishou, Video, Station B, and Xiaohongshu have sped up their siege of Taobao and Douyin.
This year, Taobao dug up the “wall” of Douyin, attracting quite a few top and waist Douyin Vs to the Taobao Double 11 live broadcast.
Why are the anchors not afraid to offend Douyin and have to join Taobao Live?
We can find out some facts from Lao Luo's words. Luo Yonghao can be described as a veteran in the e-commerce live streaming industry. Regarding his participation in Taobao Double 11 this time, he claimed that Taobao was able to access brands he couldn't reach on other platforms.
One word hits the point. This is indeed Taobao's irreplaceable advantage as the biggest brother in the e-commerce industry.
Years of e-commerce experience have enabled Taobao to accumulate massive merchant resources, and the brand system also tends to improve compared to pan-entertainment platforms such as Douyin. Naturally, anchors also have a wider range of product choices.
The essence of Taobao's connection between merchants and consumers is to sell goods. Consumers also enter the live broadcast room for shopping. Taobao itself has its own shopping scene, and of course, its conversion rate is also very high.
Unlike e-commerce, since Douyin proposed the e-commerce concept of interest in April 2021, it has mainly relied on live broadcasts and short videos to grow plants and deliver goods.
However, Douyin should also be aware of the conflict between content and commercialization, so it is constantly making changes. Currently, Douyin has begun to implement “global interest e-commerce”, using shelf e-commerce to point to different online shopping scenarios.
Shelf e-commerce is more biased towards user searches and shopping mall scenarios, with the intention of incorporating the “people looking for goods” model in addition to “goods looking for people”. Shelf e-commerce results are beginning to show during the Double 11 period, successfully driving the average daily sales volume of Douyin's live streaming to increase 156% year over year.
When it comes to live e-commerce, I have to mention JD, the “second best in the e-commerce industry.”
As one of the two major e-commerce platforms, JD's live streaming business has been left far behind by Taobao and has always been in a tepid state.
It's not too late for JD to start. As early as 2016, when Taobao began live streaming, JD also began live streaming.
By 2020, JD's live e-commerce had reached its peak. When Gree Dong Mingzhu teamed up with technology evaluation blogger Wang Ziru for a live broadcast, sales exceeded 700 million yuan, comparable to Gree's total sales for the whole year. That year's Double 11, JD live broadcast featured over 300 celebrities and over 500 live broadcasts by creative CEOs.
However, after the “highlight” of 2020, JD Live was almost lost in the market.
The reason for this is that, on the one hand, JD Live focuses more on the product itself and brand display, which makes it difficult for amateur anchors to break out of the ring.
Furthermore, JD's trump card is the 3C digital category, which has high customer unit prices, low repurchase rates, and a long selection period. This seems to be clearly at odds with the live broadcast room, which focuses on “low prices.”
In addition to Shake Fast and JD, other new players such as Station B, Xiaohongshu, and Video Network are testing the waters of e-commerce live streaming, which is also an inevitable trend. As for the rankings, the pattern has not yet completely formed.
The second trend of Double 11 in the future is that anchors are becoming more and more independent and will not be tied to a single platform.
For the anchor and the MCN company behind it, in order to resist the risk of relying on a single platform, “putting eggs in multiple baskets” can reduce the risk brought about by changing rules.
However, platforms similar to Douyin seem to have been “dug into the wall” by Taobao; in fact, they are also beneficial to the risk that the anchors on various platforms will collapse their houses.
You can refer to how much Kuaishou's live streaming image was lost in Simba's previous incident. This is because the platform is too deeply tied to the leading anchor.
As the third trend of Double 11 in the future, brand live broadcast rooms have also become a trend.
The ability of branded live broadcast rooms to operate on their own is constantly improving, and their dependence on anchors will gradually decrease.
This year, the number of viewers on the day of the Estée Lauder Tmall self-broadcast pre-sale was over 10.65 million. This figure can be said to be directly following the performance of the leading anchor.
This is not a bad thing. If brands can control more initiatives, they can not only bring steady growth in users to the brand, but also turn high pricing fees and marketing expenses into benefits for consumers.
The “coming to life” of Double 11 actually has a lot to do with not only the advent of the live streaming trend, but also the return of e-commerce festivals to the essence of shopping this year.
As the fourth trend of Double 11 in the future, platforms will place more and more emphasis on optimizing the customer experience rather than simply pursuing low price routines.
This year's Taobao Double 11 is clearly already moving closer to this trend, and other platforms are following suit.
Considering that consumers stayed up late at 11:00 in previous years to rush to buy products, this year's multi-platform pre-sale payment schedule is no longer at zero.
For example, Taobao Shuang11 had a total of 3 shopping spikes this year: the pre-sale period that began on October 24, the good start period on November 1-3, and the final sprint period on November 11.
The discount method does not use the difficult to understand “tactic of asking a sea of questions,” but instead removes the routine, simply and crudely gives “store coupons,” “full discount coupons,” and some aggressive specific discounts.
Taobao and Tmall launched a “triple discount” combined use: a group discount of nearly 17 million products; the entire store can use the entire store to get 50 coupons for every 300 purchased; 88VIP members can get another 820 yuan high-value voucher.
JD's full reduction policy is similar to Taobao's. Every 299 yuan is reduced by 50 yuan, and every 1,000 yuan is reduced by 100 yuan. Vipshop and Pinduoduo are compared to Buddhist wait-and-see. Vipshop launched “Consumers don't need to round up orders,” while Pinduoduo does not engage in pre-sales or final payment.
The ultra-long version of the price guarantee service is also one of the highlights of Double 11 this year. Merchants guarantee “one-click price insurance” for expensive purchases, and the promised maximum price guarantee period has been extended from 15 days to 27-34 days.
In terms of delivery, logistics, and delivery, Taobao has also made many detailed upgrades, enabling services such as shopping cart expansion, multi-address consolidated order placement, and door-to-door delivery at Cainiao Station.
This annual national carnival shopping festival will inevitably break out of the limitations of pursuing GMV, open up more possibilities and shoulder greater responsibilities.
In this year's Double 11, the number of domestic brands entering e-commerce platforms ushered in a significant increase.
According to relevant data, on October 31, the first wave of sales on Tmall Shuang11 was only 1 hour away. Of the 102 brands with a turnover exceeding 100 million, domestic brands accounted for half.
In the past, big names owned by foreign capital with fair marketing expenses dominated many brand exposure channels mainly in traditional mainstream media.
However, in today's Internet environment, consumers have more channels to learn about niche products through e-commerce platforms. A stage like Double Eleven has become an opportunity to focus on showcasing the strength of domestic goods.
According to Taobao and Tmall related data, in the past year alone, Taobao and Tmall had a net increase of nearly 1.2 million merchants, an increase of more than 10% over the previous year.
With a series of support and incentives from the platform, before the Double 11 promotion, a large number of brands successfully settled in. Among them, there was no shortage of young businessmen who participated in Double 11 for the first time.
Double 11, which no longer plays with deep-seated routines, is actually a win-win situation for consumers and merchants.
Merchants use the cost of buying large amounts of traffic in the past to increase concessions to benefit consumers, which can further stimulate consumption and also help attract consumers to bind to membership and increase later repurchases.
Consumers no longer blindly buy and buy, then regret large returns after “chopping hands”, but instead buy rationally as needed.
Will Double 11 disappear in the future? It won't necessarily disappear, but it will “transform” and even evolve into a new species over time.
Some industry insiders have analyzed that this year's Double Eleven is becoming an inflection point. After more than ten years of transformation, today's Double Eleven has finally reached a stage of rapid qualitative change “from traffic to retention.”
Whether it's e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Tmall, JD, and Douyin, or brand merchants big and small, only by struggling out of the strange circle that focuses on GMV in terms of turnover can we truly push the entire e-commerce industry one step forward.
After all, good-looking GMV data is just a bright and beautiful appearance, but good-looking may not necessarily relieve the hunger and hunger of the face.
The thrill of staring at the rising GMV on the big screen at the Double Eleven Gala is nothing more than a form of self-indulgence for the platform and brand.
However, when the tide recedes, time will always tell who is swimming naked. $BABA-W (09988.HK)$ $Meituan ADR (MPNGY.US)$
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mimu : How can people spend money if they don't make money in prison at home? Then every day to buy express delivery also do not go, when people's basic life is not satisfied, there will be no desire for shopping