Attracting merchants and live streaming competition, this Double 11 starts to win the platform

From early promotions to live streaming competitions, from huge subsidies to optimized merchant policies, this year's Double 11 is not only a shopping carnival for consumers, but also a battlefield for fierce competition among e-commerce platforms. This article will take you to an in-depth understanding of the new trends of this year's Double 11, including how platforms attract merchants, the new trend of live streaming e-commerce, and how consumers can find the best deals in this shopping feast.

With the sound of "go to the link", many netizens have become the first batch of "final payment people" last night. The first battle report was also issued this evening.

According to Tmall's Double 11 report, in the first hour of the event, the overall sales of large home appliances soared 765% year-on-year compared with the same period of last year's Double 11 pre-sales. In just four hours after the sale started, the sales of home appliance brands such as Robam, TCL, Siemens, Fotile, and Xiaomi doubled, and a total of 471 home appliance brands doubled their sales.

The Double 11 battle in 2024 will come earlier and be more fierce than in previous years.

At 8 o'clock last night, Taobao Tmall, JD.com, and Pinduoduo launched the Double Eleven promotion, marking the beginning of the longest Double Eleven in history. "Getting a head start" has become a key word in the industry this year.

Double Eleven has been held for sixteen years, and the changes in the shopping festival launch conference are still fresh in my memory.

From the earliest Singles' Day, to the ritual of "buy, buy, buy", to hosting one star-studded gala after another, a large number of reporters were pulled to the Alibaba headquarters that year, staring at the big screen from 0:00 onwards, and the wildly jumping sales volume made people's blood boil... Merchants have given too many consumer meanings to November 11th.

In recent years, the Double Eleven party has shifted from traditional e-commerce to Douyin and Kuaishou, and Tmall’s own Double Eleven launch meeting has become more "formal" and more official.

Starting from 2022, Tmall will no longer hold Double Eleven Galas with TV stations, and the corresponding e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Pinduoduo will not hold traditional galas. As short video platforms join the Double Eleven carnival, Douyin has taken over the baton of the gala. Last week, Douyin held the "Sparkling Night", which seemed to continue the glory of Double Eleven.

The traditional Double Eleven Gala went from being held and continuously expanding in scale to gradually disappearing, and then to Douyin and Kuaishou taking over the baton... What this reflects is the changes in consumer consumption habits.

The changes in duration and launch conference are just a small part of the domestic e-commerce melee. Users and merchants can visibly perceive the new changes in this Double 11: extending the period to increase promotions, supporting merchants and quality live broadcasts.

For example, Taobao not only proposed 30 billion yuan in user subsidies, but also completed the interconnection with WeChat before Double 11. WeChat users can open the Taobao product links shared in the WeChat chat box and directly complete product selection, ordering and payment.

For example, major platforms have abandoned the strategy of blindly selling at low prices, and the much-criticized "refund only" policy has been optimized. At the same time, platforms have begun to "favor" merchants, taking into account the interests of merchants and introducing favorable terms that can help merchants expand traffic and reduce costs. Taobao even shouted the slogan of "Do Double 11 again."

Now that Double 11 is in its 16th year, what changes have taken place?

1. Double 11 rush and fierce competition

On October 14, Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo chose to launch Double 11 on the same day.

Douyin, which focuses on content e-commerce, took the lead and started warming up a week in advance on the 8th. Together with the return period, it is expected to last until November 30th, once again refreshing the "longest shopping cycle on Double 11".

The main gameplay of this year's Double 11 is not very innovative, and it still revolves around "full discount" and coupons. The difference is that for the first time, government subsidies can be superimposed on the platform's Double 11 discounts, and the subsidy is as high as 20%. The pre-sale system that was previously stopped during 618 was restarted again, and live e-commerce has become the main battlefield for pre-sales.

Taotian keywords: 30 billion subsidies, 88VIP special coupons

According to current public information, low price is still the keyword for Taobao's Double 11. This year, consumer discount red envelopes will be nearly 30 billion yuan. On the basis of direct reduction and full reduction, 88VIP large coupons will be issued; 2 billion yuan of live broadcast room red envelopes, each person can receive up to 1,500 yuan per day.

Compared with previous years, this year's 88VIP large coupons have a new gameplay, with the number of coupons doubled, and the number of coupons that each person can receive has increased from 2 to 4. Consumers can receive a total of 4 large coupons with denominations of "over 3,000-240" and "over 7,000-560". At the same time, Tmall has also superimposed large consumer coupons and subsidies issued by local governments.

In addition to attracting users in third- and fourth-tier cities by connecting to WeChat Pay, 88VIP is mentioned more frequently on Alibaba Taobao.

At the Double 11 launch conference, Xiuxun, general manager of 88VIP business of Taotian Group, mentioned that "more than half of the business of top brands is driven by 88VIP." Therefore, the scale of top merchants cooperating with 88VIP has tripled this year compared with last year.

In addition to 88VIP, this year's Taobao's 10 billion yuan subsidy not only enriched the merchandise and supplemented the supply of categories with relatively fast growth rates such as apparel, outdoor, home furnishings, mother and baby, but also increased traffic support and enriched traffic paths.

For example, the 10 Billion Subsidy app will combine users’ historical browsing and search behaviors to directly recommend products that users want and have searched for; as well as launch upgraded gameplay such as 10,000-person groups and multi-person groups for the entire family.

JD.com keywords: cheap and good.

In addition to yesterday's "Super Flash Sale Day" for spot sales, JD.com will also launch the "10 Billion Subsidy Day" and "Peak 28 Hours" at 8 pm on October 31 and November 10 respectively.

Offline, JD Seven Fresh Supermarket will bring benefits such as "bargain-price" products on hundreds of products and 1 yuan per second for JD grocery shopping products; JD Seconds Delivery will join forces with over 600,000 stores across the country to provide tens of thousands of products as low as 9.9 yuan per piece with free shipping. Enjoy the good products immediately and get them to you in as fast as 9 minutes.

Over the past year, JD.com has continued to increase its low-price initiatives, and the number of products participating in JD.com's 10 billion yuan subsidy has increased by more than 4 times year-on-year, especially increasing investment in apparel and beauty categories; JD.com launched the "10 billion yuan subsidy for factory goods" for good products in industrial belts; the number of products on JD.com's 9.9 free shipping channel has increased by more than 2 times year-on-year, and Jingxi's self-operated business has established stable cooperation with many core industrial belts; and it continues to promote the "10 billion yuan agricultural subsidy" and so on.

JD Little Magic Cube brings over 1 billion new products this time, with billions of subsidies for big-name products starting as low as 11 yuan. On a dark and windy night, big-name products can be grabbed for 1 yuan at 8 pm every night. There are also talk show actors coming to JD's procurement and sales live broadcast room to give out benefits and share the 1 billion yuan subsidy red envelopes.

In addition, this year's JD.com 11.11 strongly supports old-for-new consumption. The "old-for-new" government subsidies cover multiple categories. Buying home appliances and computers on JD.com can enjoy a 20% discount on government subsidies, with a maximum discount of 2,000 yuan for a single item, and a subsidy of 500 yuan for electric bicycles.

Douyin keywords: content "preemptive"

As this year's early-start champion, Douyin has designated October 8th to October 17th as the Double Eleven advance period, and October 18th to November 11th as the official period.

During this Double 11, Douyin still focuses on price advantage, with the core gameplay being official 15% discount, direct price reduction, and mixed-fund coupons (super-value surprise coupons) jointly funded by the platform and merchants. On top of this, consumers can also stack special coupons for various industry categories, live broadcast room/mall shopping red envelopes, consumer coupons, etc.

During this year's Double 11, Douyin still emphasized the influence of good content and launched a number of marketing IPs, such as the Double 11 "Super Shopping Plan", the #一花一新世界 campaign aimed at promoting content from flower talents, and the "Golden Flower Award for Short Dramas" in collaboration with short drama talents.

In addition to Douyin, the number of platform players is also increasing.

This year, Xiaohongshu ushered in its first Double 11, the "once-a-year shopping carnival", which will officially start on October 12 and last until November 11. The carnival will launch innovative online theme blocks. Users can enter the "blocks" through search and notes, and collect stamps to redeem goodies while browsing live broadcasts.

It is worth noting that just before Double 11, foreign media broke the news about Xiaohongshu’s revenue in the first quarter, which was suspected to be a “call” for Double 11.

According to leaked data, Xiaohongshu's sales in the first quarter of this year were slightly over US$1 billion (approximately RMB 7.085 billion), up 67% year-on-year, and its net profit reached US$200 million (currently approximately RMB 1.417 billion), up 400% year-on-year.

In addition, Bilibili is also making efforts on Double 11. Yesterday, Bilibili launched the "Bi star" live streaming sales recruitment plan, linked with Taobao Alliance, invested 3 billion traffic for the first time to support high-quality content creators, and customized live streaming sales incentive plans for potential UP hosts who meet the rules inside and outside the station.

At the same time, Bilibili will also launch a new style exclusive to "Double 11" during the promotion period, which will drive clicks and improve the effectiveness of merchants' advertising through visual effects and price points; a new advertising video soaring list will be added to help merchants grasp the first-hand hot information on the site in a timely manner, and provide merchants with a clearer Bilibili "Double 11" guide.

2. Platforms try their best to show favor to merchants

It can be seen from the Double Eleven launch conferences of Alibaba and JD.com that in addition to increasing user mindset, merchant mindset is also a focus of the platform this year.

Words such as lowest price and breakthrough price have disappeared, and have been replaced by a series of burden-reducing strategies for merchants, including reducing service fees, relaxing refund-only policies, quick payment collection, subsidizing shipping costs and other different means.

Over the past year, merchants have been suffering from low prices and high commissions, and "only refunds" and "the bitter tears of e-commerce people" have become hot searches on major social platforms.

From this year's merchant policies, we can see that e-commerce has returned to the essence of business, that is, a win-win situation for the platform, merchants and users. From multiple dimensions such as "facilitating transactions, expanding customer flow, and reducing costs", the goal is to regain the confidence of merchants.

This year, Tmall announced that it will invest 10 billion yuan to help merchants reduce operating costs, especially small and medium-sized merchants on Taobao. In addition, merchants will enjoy commission-free benefits during the Double 11 period. This means that merchants can use the saved money for more precise marketing, increase advertising spending, or directly give consumers greater discounts.

Before Double 11, Taobao and Tmall platforms have fully launched the return service, reducing the return costs for merchants by about 20% to 30%; the platform will 100% refund the Tmall commission for products participating in the "10 billion subsidy"; during the Tmall Double 11 period, Taobao merchants will fully implement commission-free big promotions and commission-free store broadcasts, and will also unbind freight insurance for Taobao merchants.

In terms of marketing, this time Alimama brought a deterministic product - a new upgrade of the whole-site promotion. This means that it can bring greater certainty to merchants' traffic leverage and product sales.

Yuan Mu, general manager of Taobao Group's Alimama Commercial Product Center, said, "With the integration of payment and free shipping, the promotion capabilities of the entire site have been upgraded, and the additional promotion plan has been added, allowing the platform mechanism to achieve a great result with little effort."

It is understood that the full-site promotion will be upgraded from the three dimensions of delivery, volume acquisition and optimization. Merchants can also participate in the full-site promotion hot product recruitment plan and get up to 40% more natural traffic. Not only that, the "Search Traffic Acceleration Plan" launched by Alimama not long ago also helps merchants get up to 30% more natural search traffic from the store dimension.

In addition, Tmall will invest 10 billion yuan to purchase traffic during Double 11, and cooperate with more than 200 Internet platforms to expand customer traffic for merchants. Before the Double 11 this year, Taobao and Tmall will officially support multiple payment methods such as Alipay and WeChat.

In addition to Taotian, JD.com has also upgraded the "Spring Dawn Plan" to increase support for third-party sellers from three dimensions: traffic support, AI technology efficiency improvement, and ultra-light asset operation. In the field of live streaming, JD.com has invested up to 1 billion yuan in resources to support and provide free experience of JD.com digital people, return and exchange guarantees and other rights.

For example, JD.com launched a policy of supporting hundreds of billions of traffic for merchants, helping white-label products and factory-direct products to obtain more traffic and price subsidies, and launched an advertising reward pool for merchants; it provided merchants with 20 AI tools for free, covering product operations, order management, customer service reception and other aspects; JD Logistics provided platform merchants with warehousing service fee coupons, business warehouse new signing discounts and other policies, and provided special freight insurance subsidies for low-profit orders.

In addition, Pinduoduo, which has always favored consumers, has lowered the withdrawal threshold for merchants' payment accounts from 100 yuan to 1 yuan, exempted merchants from logistics transit fees for orders in remote areas, and reduced the technical fee rate for all pay-later orders from 1% to 0.6%.

At the same time, Pinduoduo also allows merchants to appeal against abnormal orders, malicious complaint orders, etc. If the merchant's appeal is successful, the platform will compensate for the relevant orders and will no longer limit the number of times the merchant can appeal.

During last year's big promotion, more small and medium-sized businesses emerged on Douyin. This year, Douyin is further lowering the threshold for small and medium-sized businesses to participate, lowering the deposit, and providing reduced or no commissions and tiered traffic packages.

Generally speaking, the platform optimizes the business environment by reducing the burden on merchants and increasing their revenue as much as possible.

3. Live e-commerce returns to quality

In addition to specific merchant and user policies, live streaming e-commerce is also a focus of attention.

Meng Xin, general manager of Taobao Live Store, pointed out the future trend of live e-commerce: from the entertainment celebrity model to the new stage of "quality live broadcast". In the future, the quality live broadcast model with professional anchors, branded goods, and platform quality service guarantee will become the mainstream of the industry.

With the recent failure of popular anchors including "Xiao Yang Ge" and "Dongbei Yu Jie", quality live streaming has become the biggest change in this year's "Double 11".

Yuan Yuan, general manager of Taobao Live Store Broadcast, said that the high-quality live broadcast model that combines professional anchors, brand products, and platform high-quality service guarantees has become the mainstream in the industry.

At present, Taobao Live continues to grow with high quality, with QAC increasing by 56% year-on-year, GMV increasing by 25% year-on-year, and the average daily number of super-explosive products increasing by 300% year-on-year.

For JD.com, in addition to the purchasing and sales live broadcast room which is still the main promotion direction during this year's Double Eleven, and the newly added "live broadcast limited time price", the free trial of JD Cloud Yanxi Digital Human has also become a highlight of JD.com's live broadcast with goods.

At the press conference, JD.com stated that a number of AI products, including the JD Cloud Yanxi digital human, will be open to brand merchants for free trial, and will also jointly launch the JD.com live broadcast digital human "President Price" event.

JD.com demonstrated for the first time at the press conference a product display video generated by the Yanxi video big model. This feature is expected to help brand merchants significantly improve the production efficiency of video content and meet the needs of image videoization, product recommendation, short drama marketing, etc.

In fact, the layout strategies of live streaming e-commerce on traditional platforms and Douyin are different. This is essentially because the logic of traditional shelf e-commerce and content e-commerce is different. Douyin and Taobao are two completely different live streaming systems.

Traditional shelf-based e-commerce follows the shopping logic of “people looking for goods”, where consumers search for products when they have needs. However, content e-commerce follows the shopping logic of “goods looking for people”, where the platform attracts consumers by pushing content that users are interested in, and then recommends related products, ultimately attracting consumers to place orders.

Douyin e-commerce is also moving towards quality live streaming. During the warm-up period from October 8 to October 11, Douyin e-commerce had 21 live streaming sessions with over 30 million transactions, indirectly driving Douyin e-commerce to become the first explosive business position during Double 11.

A person in charge of a platform operating company who wishes to remain anonymous told Business Data that this year's Double Eleven, Douyin returned to content. It did not clearly distinguish between content and e-commerce as before, and it no longer mentioned "breaking the bottom price" to merchants.

“Douyin seems to know its ceiling, and recently big anchors have frequently encountered problems. They are now optimistic about those who are good at content or have a strong supply chain. Those shelf e-commerce companies can only produce content but cannot control the supply chain, so they sell their traffic to Taobao and Tmall to earn advertising fees.” said the above person in charge.

Cui Dongsheng, general manager of the Taobao business unit of Jiaogepengyou, once said in an interview that the two platforms of Taobao and Douyin are like the difference between a shopping mall and an amusement park. Taobao stores can be operated like a shopping mall, focusing on meeting consumer needs to improve consumers' shopping experience, shopping feelings, user management, etc., with the proportion of goods being greater than the proportion of content; while the Douyin platform is mainly driven by goods to obtain traffic, because Douyin distributes traffic in the form of crowd tags. Under this platform rule, Jiaogepengyou focuses on creating concentrated hot products on Douyin.

Generally speaking, live streaming e-commerce is still a standard feature of mainstream platforms, but it is obvious that everyone is no longer blindly following big anchors, but has found their own live streaming tone.

Text丨Guo Mengyi This article is written by the author of Operation Pai [Business Data Pai], WeChat public account: [Business Data Pai], original/authorized to be published on Operation Pai, and reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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