How long will e-commerce remain low-key as video accounts have been promoted to the center of attention?

E-commerce platform restarts? What are the advantages of video accounts? This article uses the recent e-commerce trend platform - video accounts as a case study to explore the advantages and disadvantages of video accounts in e-commerce, dismantle the difficulties of video account e-commerce operations, and recommends reading for those who are interested in e-commerce operations and video accounts.

December is undoubtedly one of the busiest months for e-commerce professionals.

Double Eleven has just ended, and we are about to usher in the days of "Double Twelve in the front, Christmas and New Year's Day in the middle, and Chinese New Year's Festival in the back"... Although it is not as good as the big promotions of 618 and Double Eleven, the tight rhythm still makes Lillico, the head of e-commerce for a clothing brand, almost breathless.

Among these, what she is most concerned about is which platform can attract new users. "The traffic of Taobao is close to its ceiling, and the traffic of Douyin and Kuaishou relies on the performance of anchors. Video accounts are one of the few potential tracks." Lillico told Yiyuguancha .

At the beginning of this year, the brand she operated entered the video account and participated in the platform's 618 and Double 11 promotions. Although it did not achieve impressive sales of over 10 million, it still reached some new customer groups that had not been involved before. For Tencent, the video account has become an important incremental market for its commercialization.

On November 16, Tencent released its Q3 financial report, mentioning the increase in revenue from video account live broadcast services and music paid membership services. Tencent Chairman and CEO Ma Huateng also said: "We launched information flow advertising in video accounts, made breakthroughs in international game distribution, and refocused on core businesses through cost reduction and efficiency improvement measures to effectively control cost growth." Although Tencent has not released specific data related to video accounts, according to QuestMobile data, as of June 2022, the number of active users of video accounts has reached 813 million, ranking first in the short video track.

In addition, Li Hao, founder of Mars Culture, directly predicted that the GMV of Video Account is expected to reach 400 billion in 2023. Video Account has been online for testing since the beginning of 2020, and it has been nearly three years now. The e-commerce business bears the main commercial share. However, after experiencing multiple 618 and Double 11, Video Account still has no top anchors and live broadcast rooms that have gone viral. The market still ignores its name during these important "festivals". Compared with Douyin, which has stirred up Taobao's sense of crisis in one or two years, Video Account, which is still silent now, is it really worth the high expectations?

01 Keep a low profile, keep a low profile, and keep a low profile

Low-key is one of Lillico's most profound impressions of video account e-commerce. This is first reflected in the entrance of e-commerce live broadcast. Users need to click "live broadcast" and select "more" on the secondary page to see the shopping live broadcast room.

In addition, "live broadcast rooms selling goods will randomly appear in the information flow of the video account recommendation page. After our testing, 1-2 live broadcast rooms will randomly appear in every 10 short videos, and the frequency is not prominent enough," Lillico told Yiyuguancha , adding, "Although the video account has launched functions such as broadcast reminders and advance reservations, for us, the most effective way is to rely on social media promotion to attract private domain users to watch. We cannot take the public domain promotion route like Taobao, Douyin and Kuaishou."

WeChat screenshot

The low profile is also reflected in the public propaganda of the video account to the outside world. This November, Tmall and JD.com did not release specific data reports for the first time, but they mentioned words such as "steady and improving" and "achieving greater success" to stabilize the morale of the troops, or summarized the growth rate of the number of merchants and order volume. In contrast, the video account has neither released data reports nor disclosed the development of merchants and service providers on the site.

Lillico confirmed this phenomenon: "We are almost completely in the dark. Apart from asking familiar peers or video account managers for information, it is difficult for us to know the level of our store. Sometimes, even if the manager gives us a battle report, he will repeatedly emphasize that it should not be disclosed to the outside world. "

It is reported that the cumulative sales of the brand she is responsible for during the Double 11 period were close to one million yuan. For her, sales are not the most important thing. What is more important is to tap into 40-50 new customers in third- and fourth-tier cities. They are not familiar with traditional e-commerce platforms, but they are senior users of WeChat and can accept the transaction scenarios of video accounts more quickly.

Although the surface seems quiet, there are still undercurrents under the surface. According to Tech Planet, Estee Lauder's sales on Double 11 this year exceeded 8 million, the transaction volume of the video account on that day was 750,000, and the number of viewers reached more than 40,000. The total sales of the skin care brand Mojie's video account was 13.84 million, and the total sales of IQOO on Double 11 exceeded 8 million. The total transaction volume of the video account of the service provider Aiguang on Double 11 reached 530 million, and the live broadcast increased by 800% year-on-year, with a cumulative order volume of 1.38 million, 125 experts with transactions exceeding one million, and 91 merchants with transactions exceeding one million. However, these eye-catching data rarely appear in the public eye.

Alex, a video account service provider, revealed to Yiyuguancha that the official low-key move is to check and balance the top players, hoping to create a fair competition situation and prevent influencers and brands from gathering around the top service providers, thus creating a monopoly. For video accounts, this situation may achieve the low-key behavior that the platform hopes for, but for practitioners, the style of making money quietly also prompts them to rarely use video accounts as their main platform, which in turn affects the establishment of brand teams.

Lillico said frankly that although he was optimistic about the potential of the video account to attract new customers, the company obviously valued sales more. Therefore, it did not form a separate video account team, but called on stores to start broadcasting directly.

Invisibly, this has affected the operation strategy of top bloggers in video accounts to a certain extent. For example, the Douyin blogger "Crazy Xiao Yangge" with over 100 million fans has entered the video account as early as March 2021 and distributed videos simultaneously. Since then, he has also established the "Xiao Yang Zhenxuan" matrix video account and authorized the distribution of live broadcast room product slices.

On October 15 this year, the team behind "Crazy Little Brother Yang" conducted a trial broadcast on Video Account, but there has been no live streaming sales since then. At the same time, Video Account is also actively recruiting bloggers from various platforms to join and giving them traffic coupons as incentives.

But it is worth mentioning that, like public accounts, the homepage of video accounts does not display the number of fans, and the public cannot obtain information about the top bloggers on video accounts, which makes it inconvenient for brands to select cooperating influencers. Lillico said that because there is no public reference to the number of fans of bloggers, the team rarely considers cooperating with bloggers to bring goods, and instead chooses the form of brand self-broadcasting.

02 The advantages of private domains are not prominent, and the "gray industry chain" hinders professionalism

If Video Account chooses to be low-key because it hopes to make money quietly, then from another perspective, this is also closely related to the private domain attributes of Video Account. In July this year, Video Account launched the "Video Account Store" function to replace the "WeChat Store" application in Video Account. Later, at the end of October, Video Account tightened the use rights of third-party mini-programs for non-brand merchants and strengthened the systematic management of non-brand merchants.

In essence, these two functions are related to the video account "shopping cart", and are also the desire of the video account to establish a closed loop within the site. Long before the video account, Douyin and Kuaishou had similar actions of cutting off external links. However, although the action of "cutting off" external links is easy, how to avoid affecting the situation within the site is another difficult problem.

WeChat screenshot

Take Kuaishou e-commerce as an example. Before this year's Double 11, Kuaishou announced that it would fully open the product link direct access function of Taobao and JD.com. As for how long the restoration will take, it remains to be seen. Some media reported that after Kuaishou cut off external links, the SKUs of products on the site decreased, affecting the conversion rate and the increase in average order value.

In Kuaishou’s second quarter financial report, Kuaishou’s e-commerce GMV growth rate was 31.5%, which is significantly slower than the growth rate of over 100% in the same period last year. Perhaps due to the predicted chain reaction of cutting off external links, coupled with the fact that its status in the industry is not stable at this time, Video Account only cut off the external links of third-party mini-programs of non-brand merchants, and encouraged brand merchants to submit screenshots of their operations on third-party platforms such as Tmall and JD.com when they join the platform, which can speed up official review.

From this, we can see that even with its proud private domain advantages, Video Account has to compromise with more powerful traditional e-commerce platforms. If we compare the e-commerce progress of Douyin and Kuaishou next door, Video Account may not have an equal advantage even if it has more users. Not only has the private domain closed loop not been fully established, but Video Account also has a certain gap with Douyin and Kuaishou in terms of traffic investment.

It is reported that in the first half of this year, Video Account introduced a traffic voucher mechanism, through which bloggers or service providers can obtain traffic vouchers by completing official designated goals and invest in their short videos or live broadcast rooms.

Video Account Polaris Project

At the same time, Video Account introduced a model of exchanging private domain for public domain, that is, "for every private domain user that the merchant guides into the live broadcast room, the platform will incentivize at least one public domain user to the merchant", which means that Video Account encourages merchants to focus on private domain operations. Since traffic coupons are not currently supported for sale through official channels, platform incentives have become a form of obtaining traffic coupons, and a gray production chain has also emerged.

According to Xinbochang, after some MCNs obtained traffic coupons by inviting influencers to join, they were willing to pay out of their own pockets to provide cash incentives to the influencers, thereby reselling the more valuable traffic coupons awarded by the official video account. It is understood that the demand for video account traffic coupons is very high, and most of the customers are sellers. This gray production chain began to sprout in April this year, and it was not until November 22 that the video account formulated new regulations that it was restricted. This also made practitioners lament that "the video account team is not professional enough."

03 Is it "development" or "appearance"

When it was first launched in 2020, Video Account had a fantastic start. Many content creators who missed the opportunities of Douyin and Kuaishou rushed to it, hoping to recreate the miracle of WeChat Official Account. However, due to the incomplete product functions, Video Account gradually showed a trend of decline. Afterwards, the concert plan of Video Account once swept the circle of friends, giving creators hope again, but it is still some distance away from commercialization.

When the World Cup started this year, a number of big Vs lamented that Video Account and even the entire Tencent system failed to obtain the World Cup copyright and missed this popular topic that attracted national attention.

But even if the copyright can be obtained, how much impact can it have on the video account? In the final analysis, the video account still lacks original and exclusive content from creators , just like Douyin has "Crazy Little Yang Ge", Kuaishou has "Simba", and Bilibili has "Luo Xiang". The root cause of the video account is the lack of a native content ecosystem.

Even if there are concerts, sports events, news events and other content that can arouse public discussion, Video Account still relies on the WeChat ecosystem such as Moments and WeChat group chats, and cannot be self-sufficient. This also indirectly affects the development of Video Account e-commerce. Obviously, Video Account e-commerce does not follow the traditional shelf e-commerce model of Taobao and JD.com, but tends to follow the short video e-commerce path of Douyin and Kuaishou.

However, the lack of content ecology has led to the lack of representative bloggers on video accounts. Whether it is the market-oriented top anchors such as Crazy Xiao Yangge and Dongfang Zhenxuan, or first-line MCN agencies such as Yaowang, they all use the statement of opening accounts to recognize the potential of video accounts, but no one has stayed for a long time and started professional operations. It can be seen that the public’s traffic difficulties for video accounts are not limited to this.

On the road of brand self-broadcasting, video accounts have not yet established a sound supply chain . On the Black Cat Complaints, there have been cases where customers said that no one responded to the video account backstage. "Low-key" is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can hide its edge and "grow" in secret, but on the other hand, it will also affect the public's attention to it and lack in cultivating user minds. Standing at the two ends of the scale of "growth" and "appearance", the video account has little time left to make a decision. *Lillico and Alex in this article are both anonymous.

Author: Thick Code

Source: Yiyuguancha (ID: yiyuguancha), the telescope and sonar of the pan-entertainment industry.