It's like heaven and hell, why are the top anchors' reputations rising while their reputations are collapsing?

To a certain extent, it is inevitable for big anchors to "crash" and fail again and again.

Live streaming e-commerce seems to have fallen into a "vicious circle": when something goes wrong, they apologize, quit the Internet, and compensate, and then appear again at another opportunity, or expect "the new wave to replace the old wave", and the past of the old anchor is the present and future of the new anchor.

This year's Double Eleven came earlier than in previous years. On October 14, shopping enthusiasts had already started a rush to buy and red envelopes. Some people "grabbed Li Jiaqi's red envelopes for a whole day, and even bought for free"; some people were active in various live broadcast rooms, and grabbed more than 1,000 yuan in red envelopes alone...

Record-breaking figures show the rising enthusiasm of shopping experts. In Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room, the amount of pre-sale and additional purchases increased by more than 20% year-on-year; at 8 pm, Tmall Double 11 officially opened pre-sales, and Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room exceeded 100 million in seconds.

In addition, live broadcast rooms such as Bee Surprise Club, Mushrooms Are Coming, Chen Jie Kiki, Lieer Baby, and Hu Ke also announced that their sales exceeded 100 million in the first hour. The speed of breaking 100 million and the transaction amount in the first hour both exceeded last year.

Some emerging vertical live broadcast rooms have also won the favor of consumers. King, who started out as a snack food anchor, ranked among the top 3 food anchors in June this year. The pre-sale of Double 11 this year "quickly exceeded 10 million", and his partner Xiaodong excitedly wrote in the circle of friends: "This year's Double 11 is stable!"

In fact, "Double 11 is stable" may be the common voice of Taobao live broadcasters. When some top broadcasters were caught up in counterfeit disputes, fined, shut down, and quit the Internet, and the live broadcast e-commerce was in a cold mood, such a boom is not only a blessing for individual broadcasters and individual platforms, but also a blessing for live broadcast e-commerce.

With the decline in consumer willingness and the logic of traffic operation, live streaming e-commerce seems to have fallen into its darkest hour. However, the hot sales figures of Li Jiaqi and King brothers point out another way for them: with the cooperation of high-quality goods, anchors and platforms, quality live streaming still has unlimited potential.

Recently, the popularity of short video platforms has collapsed one after another, but the quality live broadcast rooms on Taobao Live are more popular than ever. In fact, Double 11 has become a watershed. The phenomenon of ice and fire behind it marks the official opening of the era of quality live broadcasts. Consumers and brand merchants are voting for the future of live e-commerce with real money.

01 Double 11 of Ice and Fire

This year's Double Eleven was a mixture of ice and fire.

The sad thing is that the industry has not yet recovered from the series of failures of big anchors. Some blocked live broadcast rooms took this opportunity to reopen, but the factors that caused their "failure" are still like leeches attached to their bones, casting a shadow on their future and making the industry and consumers somewhat hesitant.

"Hong Kong Meicheng Mooncakes" that are not produced in Hong Kong, sweet potato powder with zero sweet potato content, CSS olive essence suspected of false advertising... Last month was a "crash" month for top anchors. A series of counterfeit and shoddy products hit consumer confidence and once again cast live streaming e-commerce into doubt.

Fines, closure of live broadcast rooms, withdrawal from the Internet, compensation to consumers... These routine and subsequent measures have not warmed the hearts of consumers much because of the repeated failures.

What’s hot is that big anchors and big platforms have shown great enthusiasm for this Double Eleven, and consumers seem to be quite receptive to it. Take Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room as an example. From 8 am on October 14 to October 15, a total of 500 million yuan in red envelopes will be issued for two consecutive days, which will be used to purchase spot goods or pay the balance before October 24.

Before 8 a.m. on the 14th, more than 10 million people flocked to Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room to watch, and by 3 p.m., the cumulative number of viewers had reached nearly 350 million. At 8 p.m., the official sale started, and many products were sold out in seconds, including more than 600,000 pieces of Collagen Bar, more than 300,000 pieces of Cetaphil Whitening Jar, 10,000 pieces of Valentino Air Cushion, more than 40,000 pieces of L'Oreal Brightening Lotion, etc.

In addition, live broadcast rooms such as Bee Surprise Club and Mushrooms Are Coming were also very popular. Among them, the staff of Mushrooms Are Coming posted data on WeChat Moments: spot and pre-sales exceeded 1.2 billion yuan in three hours, ushering in a "good start".

It’s not just the live streaming rooms incubated from Taobao Live that are popular. Jiaogepengyou has entered platforms such as Douyin, Taobao Live, and JD Live, but this year’s Double 11 Luo Luo’s focus is on Taobao Tmall. On October 9, Jiaogepengyou team employees broke the news about Luo Luo’s Double 11 schedule on social media, revealing that he will be on Tmall almost all the time.

At 10 p.m. on the 14th, within two hours of the broadcast, the transaction amount in the Jiao Ge Pengyou live broadcast room reached 150 million yuan. Vice President Cui Dongsheng posted a picture of Tmall Double 11 in his circle of friends, with the caption: "This year, more people have been tossed around, and with the help of more brothers, the team has become more mature with each battle, so the effect is also better."

Overtly and covertly, this silent battle has already begun, between anchors, merchants, and platforms. Between ice and fire, the future of live e-commerce is becoming clearer.

02 Break out of the “rollover cycle”

"Taobao anchors have been replaced by one batch after another, and I am considered the oldest one." Li Jiaqi expressed such emotion on the first day of the Double Eleven live broadcast.

Since Taobao launched live streaming in 2016, live streaming e-commerce has a history of nearly ten years. It has gone through various ups and downs and changed into thousands of forms, but it has always been centered around the two main lines of "goods" and "market", which is in line with the two forms of e-commerce and live streaming. Different platform ecosystems and platform genes have given birth to different development logics of live streaming e-commerce.

Taobao Live started as an e-commerce platform. Driven by it, live e-commerce has generally developed along the main line of "goods". The anchors are "Taobao girls" who know clothes, such as Wei Ya and King who were merchants, and Li Jiaqi who was a cosmetics counter clerk. These anchors focus more on goods, such as cosmetic ingredients and styles.

Later, with the deepening of short video platforms, entertainment anchors and knowledge anchors emerged. Compared with the "goods", they put more energy on the "scene" to liven up the atmosphere of the live broadcast room. The product explanation may be briefly mentioned, but they spend more time on fancy things to promote transactions and increase conversions.

At one point, such live broadcasts also brought a lot of traffic and conversions, but the drawbacks gradually emerged. Data disclosed by the State Administration for Market Regulation show that in the past five years, the scale of the live broadcast e-commerce market has increased by 10.5 times, and the number of complaints and reports about live broadcasts has also increased year by year, with an increase of 47.1 times in five years.

In 2023, the national 12315 platform received 337,000 complaints and reports about livestreaming sales, a year-on-year increase of 52.5%. The top three issues were after-sales service, quality issues, and unfair competition. Products without quality assurance, inconsistent performance between the goods received and those displayed in the livestreaming room, and difficulty in returning or exchanging goods became the main issues reported by consumers.

To some extent, the "failure" or repeated "failure" of big anchors is inevitable. Under this development logic, live streaming e-commerce seems to have fallen into a "vicious circle": when something goes wrong, they apologize, quit the network, and compensate, and then reappear at the right time, or expect "the new generation will replace the old generation", and the past of the old anchor is the present and future of the new anchor.

Can they break out of this vicious circle? The persistence and popularity of Li Jiaqi and others may reveal the answer.

From his sudden emergence in 2018 to now, although Li Jiaqi has gone through ups and downs and has been subject to controversy, the controversy he has been involved in is not a typical live-streaming e-commerce controversy. After experiencing "Brother Who Overcomes Troubles" and the verification of this Double Eleven, Li Jiaqi's influence cannot be underestimated.

The sources of his influence:

First, the products are of high quality. On the first day of the Double 11 live broadcast on the 14th, participants included big European and American brands such as Estee Lauder and L'Oreal, as well as new domestic brands such as Shuangmei, Kefumei, and Proya. Relying on Taobao's brand ecosystem, Li Jiaqi can not only get authentic big brands, but also discover some domestic brands that are about to rise, achieving mutual success;

Secondly, it is professional enough. While clearly listing the prices and gifts, it also emphasizes the "dry skin" friendliness of Guerlain Restoring Honey and the phospholipid ingredient of SkinCeuticals AGE Cream.

Returning to the logic of focusing on "goods" has become the inevitable choice for live e-commerce to break out of the "rollover vicious circle". One relies on "goods" to survive; the other relies on personal IP and live broadcast atmosphere, focusing on "venue". It goes without saying which of the two is more sustainable and more resistant to risks.

Behind Li Jiaqi and others' comeback against all odds and their "good start", they and Taobao Live, which has always advocated "goods" first, are ushering in a new era, the era of quality live streaming.

03 The future of live streaming e-commerce

It is imperative for live streaming e-commerce to re-clarify its path forward.

On the one hand, consumer trust needs to be restored. After a series of "turnarounds", consumers' trust in live e-commerce has declined. In a poll on live streaming sales initiated by a certain media, more than half of the people chose "strengthening supervision and severely punishing anchors' violations", and nearly a quarter of the people expressed "strong opposition".

On the other hand, supervision has become stricter. Since the beginning of this year, the requirements for live e-commerce have become stricter. For example, the "Regulations on the Implementation of the Consumer Rights Protection Law" implemented in July particularly emphasized the transparency requirements for live streaming sales, and clearly stipulated that the anchor must clearly explain to consumers "who is selling goods" and "whose goods are being sold."

Judging from this year's Double 11, brands, platforms, anchors, and consumers have reached a "consensus" on the development of live e-commerce: anchors and platforms with "good" products and "professional" content will become the common choice of brands and consumers. In a nutshell, quality live streaming is gradually becoming a "four-party consensus" among platforms, brands, anchors, and consumers.

1. For brand owners, quality live streaming brings not only sales growth but also brand promotion.

On October 13, a status chart of 60+ brand owners in "All Girls' Offers" was exposed and sparked heated discussions on the Internet. Behind this, brand owners are voting with their feet. According to incomplete statistics from industry media, among the 374 beauty brands listed in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room on the 14th, international brands accounted for 61.7%, and domestic beauty brands accounted for 38.2%.

As one netizen analyzed, "In fact, many businesses hold promotional activities to focus on market share and future development. What they give up is the market operation expenses of marketing costs." Relying on high-quality live broadcast rooms to increase popularity has been proven to be the development path of many domestic beauty products.

2. For consumers, the current consumption attitude is more cautious. Emotional consumption determined by the atmosphere of the live broadcast room has decreased, while rational consumption after sufficient understanding of the goods, prices, and services has increased, and they are more willing to choose quality live broadcast rooms.

"In the past, people paid more attention to traffic, but now they pay more attention to whether they can form a stable interactive relationship with consumers and stable purchase visits," an anchor revealed. To form a stable interaction with consumers, it depends on the construction of a sincere "place". The selection of "goods" also depends on whether there is sufficient understanding of the goods and whether the explanation and introduction are professional.

3. For anchors, the change in consumer shopping logic has made them pay more attention to the platform's bottom-up capabilities. On the one hand, the bottom-up capabilities are an ecological mechanism to reduce disputes with consumers, and on the other hand, it is the supply chain capabilities. After all, it is quite difficult for anchors to build a complete and sound supply chain from scratch.

There were actually early signs that Jiao Ge Pengyou would be betting big on Taobao live streaming during the Double Eleven. Cui Dongsheng once publicly talked about the difficulties of Jiao Ge Pengyou in building its own product inventory: most merchants in the industrial belt do not have the ability to directly provide services to the C-end; even if they have a large investment promotion and quality control team, it is almost an impossible task to visit manufacturers one by one.

When quality live streaming becomes a consensus, the ultimate competition of live streaming e-commerce has changed from a pure competition for traffic to a comprehensive test of the coordination ability of goods, anchors, and platforms. Among them, anchors are shopping guides, and "goods" are the "primary productive force"; the platform undertakes the two major tasks of providing quality goods and a full-cycle consumer protection mechanism. The platform ecology and capabilities determine the foundation and height of quality live streaming.

In this new live streaming era led by Taobao Live, the key words are no longer just traffic and price, but also quality and service.

04 Conclusion

E-commerce has already entered a new normal of inventory. After all kinds of exploration, the current e-commerce industry has finally returned to the right track. Even on Double Eleven, eye-catching words such as cost-effectiveness and lowest price have almost disappeared, and more people are talking about reducing the burden on merchants and protecting consumer services and rights.

Similarly, the development of live e-commerce has returned to the right track. Taobao quality live broadcasts represented by "goods", "professionalism" and "platform services" have once again become the mainstream of live e-commerce development. History is a spiral upward, and live e-commerce is crossing a spiral and entering the next cycle.

Author: Xia Yu Editor: Qiu Yun This article is written by the author of Operation School [Yi Dian Finance Editorial Department], WeChat public account: [Yi Dian Finance], original/authorized to be published on Operation School, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.