This Double Eleven, few businesses seem to be looking forward to it

The enthusiasm of merchants for the Double 11 Shopping Festival has cooled down. The promotion activities that started in advance have prolonged the battle line, and the preferential policies of the platform do not seem to have raised the expectations of brands. Merchants are cautious about sales this year and are increasingly dissatisfied with the platform policies.

Starting tomorrow, October 14, multiple platforms will usher in the Double 11 shopping festival. Taobao and JD.com both chose this day to start their Double 11 shopping festival. However, TikTok started its Double 11 shopping festival on October 8.

Although it is Double Eleven, the actual start date has even been brought forward to early October. This extremely long tug-of-war seems to be wearing out the patience of consumers and merchants.

During discussions with Jianshi, we found that many brands did not seem to have much expectations for this year's Double Eleven.

01 Double 11 activities are coming earlier and earlier

Compared to last year, many platforms started about a week earlier, and Douyin even started its activities on the 8th. This forced merchants to enter a tense state directly after returning from the National Day holiday. The battle line was lengthened, which was a test of patience for both buyers and sellers.

This year, Xiaohongshu also joined the Double Eleven competition team for the first time. Its approach is still closely aligned with its own business logic, focusing on store live broadcasts and buyer live broadcasts.

The time and stages of Double 11 activities on different e-commerce platforms are as follows:

02 The platform’s Double 11 is more “pleasing” to merchants than 618

Compared with the extremely low prices during the 618 shopping festival, which made merchants complain bitterly, the platform was much calmer during this Double Eleven shopping festival than during the 618 shopping festival. At the same time, it also introduced a number of policies that benefit merchants, preparing for price protection for merchants during Double Eleven shopping festival.

After comparing the policies of multiple platforms, Jianshishi found three major favorable trends:

1. Return and exchange are more secure:

Taobao and Tmall started a wave of "intercepting unreasonable refunds only" governance as early as August. Recent data shows that Taobao intercepts more than 400,000 unreasonable "refunds only" transactions per day, and the unreasonable "refunds only" phenomenon has been rectified on the Taobao platform.

This governance result was released before the start of the Double Eleven promotion, which is also a shot in the arm for merchants.

In addition, a few days ago, Pinduoduo also launched logistics interception technical support services for merchants, and the platform currently does not charge any fees for logistics interception technical support services.

All these policies seem to be patches for the past "refund only" strategy, and are also an important measure to show sincerity to merchants before Double Eleven.

2. Multi-platform interconnection:

Just then, Jianshi discovered that the WeChat port can be used to directly place orders and pay for Taobao products through the H5 page. Not only that, by opening the Taobao product link on WeChat, you can directly jump to Taobao with one click. At the same time, you can also use WeChat payment directly on the Taobao page.

In addition to the connection between Taobao and WeChat, JD Logistics and Taobao have also achieved interoperability.

This kind of interconnection between platforms has a significant impact on users, merchants and the entire e-commerce ecosystem. It is also a positive measure for the Double Eleven transactions.

3. Strive to reduce costs for merchants:

As early as the beginning of September, Taobao Live began to release favorable news, offering a one-year waiver of live broadcast technical service fees from September 1, 2024 to August 31, 2025.

Taobao internal staff said that this move is to reduce the operating costs of small and medium-sized businesses, so that small and medium-sized businesses will have more positive confidence when facing live streaming as a sales explosion channel, and reduce the burden on businesses.

Before the Double 11 Shopping Festival, Pinduoduo has launched a number of "10 billion yuan exemption" policies, including exemption from technical service fees, lowering deposits, and assuming logistics transit costs, etc., aiming to further reduce the operating burden on merchants.

In addition, the platform has also launched the "10 billion consumption vouchers" campaign, investing huge amounts of funds and resources in subsidies, especially supporting brand merchants.

To this end, Pinduoduo provided big promotion brand packages and exclusive pages, and injected a large amount of traffic into these merchants.

The same is true for other platforms, which aim to reduce costs further for merchants.

03 The platform’s flattery cannot arouse the brand’s enthusiasm

If 618 is mainly for the peak summer and 3C new products, then Double Eleven is to eliminate the whole year's inventory, especially for the apparel industry, which has an annual cycle. In this regard, some partners said that the current industry summit of apparel fast-moving consumer goods brands is not ideal, and they can only pin their hopes on the National Day holiday and Double Eleven.

But this Double 11, brands have clearly lowered their expectations. Although merchants are busy preparing for Double 11, they are gradually losing interest in it, but there is always a lack of passion.

“The activities are too tiring” is the most common phrase we heard when we asked brands about it.

Previously, the person in charge of a private beauty equipment company mentioned that the preparations for Double Eleven started in mid-to-late September and would be implemented after the National Day holiday. Some even started the preparations in August, and the long battle line always makes people a little tired.

A person in charge of the home furnishing industry told Jianshi that compared with last year's Double Eleven, he had a feeling that the average order value of this year's Double Eleven could not be raised. In addition, the company's KPI set for Double Eleven was also adjusted downward. The main reason for the reduction in KPI was the overall environment this year.

As for the macro-environmental issues, some brands and companies had already responded to them during the 618 promotion period, saying that orders had dropped and consumers were no longer willing to pay. However, as the end of the year approaches, this pessimistic tone has not been shaken off and seems to have become even more pronounced.

In the first four months of 2024, the number of orders placed by users dropped by at least 30% compared with the same period last year. The best month is worse than the worst month in the second half of last year. Xu Zhibin, WeChat official account: Jianshi This year's 618 has a more tragic color

The head of another clothing brand also has a very similar view to the head of the furniture brand. He said that the mentality of the big promotion has weakened, and the performance forecast year-on-year growth will slow down, and the time will be brought forward earlier, and the arrangement will be more urgent.

Many merchants are not convinced by the new policy, and many voices are more like a dislike for big promotions such as Double Eleven: long battle lines, low profits, many mechanisms, etc. Some merchants have been heartbroken by the platform because of unreasonable refunds in the past.

For a while, there was a sense of pessimism that came before Double Eleven even arrived.

What do you think of this Double Eleven? Feel free to express your views in the comments section.