The 2024 Double 11 will start a month in advance. How will Tmall perform this year?

Tmall's Double 11 event will start on October 14. This year's event will be more powerful, including 30 billion consumer voucher subsidies, Taobao live broadcast red envelopes, and expanded scope of application of 88VIP consumer vouchers. At the same time, the event simplifies the preferential mechanism and improves user experience.

Introduction: With a massive subsidy of 30 billion, Taobao stores are included in the scope of consumer vouchers for the first time.

E-commerce has officially entered the Double 11 cycle.

Recently, major e-commerce companies have announced the start time of Double 11. It is reported that this year's Tmall Double 11 will start at 8 pm on October 14. Today (October 12), Tmall held a Double 11 media communication meeting and synchronized the new gameplay of this year's Double 11 with the outside world.

Compared with previous years, Yilan Business summarizes four differences:

First, Tmall has increased its subsidies. Compared with previous years, this year's Double 11 will provide an additional 30 billion yuan in consumer coupons and red envelopes on top of the official 15% discount or 50 yuan discount for every 300 yuan spent across stores.

Secondly, in Taobao live broadcast room, on October 14, 100 live broadcast rooms will be opened at the same time and 1 billion red envelopes will be distributed. It is reported that each consumer can receive up to 30 red envelopes per day in a single live broadcast room, with a single red envelope amount of up to 888 yuan, and a maximum of 1,500 yuan per person per day.

Again, on this year's Double 11, some Taobao stores will be included in the scope of application of 88VIP consumer coupons for the first time. Alibaba's latest financial report shows that the platform's 88VIP members have increased from 35 million last year to 42 million this year, becoming an important force driving the growth of the platform's GMV.

In the past, 88VIP coupons were only used in Tmall stores. Connecting them to some Taobao stores will make it more convenient for consumers to place orders and allow for more diverse usage scenarios.

Finally, the government’s trade-in subsidy can be combined with the Double 11 discount for the first time. With the government’s 20% subsidy + Tmall category coupons + brand official 15% discount, home appliances can be discounted as low as 40%.

Thousands of big brands including Midea, Haier, Gree, TCL, Hisense, AUX, Panasonic, Siemens and over 30,000 home appliances participated in the event.

In recent years, the complicated gameplay mechanism and the math requirement for placing a large order to get a discount have become a topic of criticism among consumers. This year, Tmall has also optimized this issue.

Yilan Business learned that there are only two prices on Tmall’s Double 11 product interface this year: the price before discount, and the final price after adding various discounts.

In the merchant test, Taobao conveyed a clear attitude to the outside world during this year's Double 11: low prices are only a part of price power. Based on this strategy, it adjusted the traffic distribution mechanism, loosened the "refund only" policy, and launched the "return treasure".

It is worth noting that this year’s Tmall Double 11 no longer emphasizes absolute low prices.

At the media communication meeting, Chu Duan, Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Taobao Platform Division, pointed out that Taobao's price power refers to the competitiveness of the price range of categories. Price is a competitive factor, but not the only factor. The competitiveness of the price range is composed of price, product quality, and merchant services.

In the past year, the e-commerce industry has been competing on low prices. Taobao even created its own "five-star price power" to allocate search weights. Under this mechanism, the lower the price of the product, the higher the traffic will be, thereby encouraging merchants to exchange lower prices for higher order volumes.

In May this year, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued the "Interim Provisions on Anti-Unfair Competition on the Internet", which comprehensively sorted out unfair competition behaviors on the Internet, such as automatic price following, refund only, price breaking, etc., and clarified the legal responsibilities of operators and platforms. The regulations will be implemented on September 1.

The meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee on July 30 also clearly proposed the need to strengthen industry self-discipline and prevent "involutionary" vicious competition.

The endless pursuit of low prices will only lead to bad money driving out good money and harm the interests of consumers. Therefore, Taotian has readjusted its traffic distribution mechanism. After the 618 shopping festival ended this year, Taotian Group held a closed-door meeting with merchants to weaken the absolute low-price strategy and redistribute traffic based on GMV.

As a tool to connect natural traffic and paid traffic, full-site promotion also brings more traffic weighting to merchants in this Double 11 hot-selling product recruitment plan.

Specifically, paid traffic can further leverage the natural traffic in the search and push field. As long as merchants put out products with the "traffic boost" logo, they can enjoy additional weighted search and push traffic benefits, which will make the merchant's weight in this field higher than other products.

At the same time, as long as merchants choose the ROI recommended by the platform, they can get a 10%-30% traffic boost. If the consumption of target products meets the standards and they continue to be launched during the Double 11 period, they can also enjoy a 20-40% search & traffic weighting.

On the other hand, in the after-sales scenario, merchants no longer have to worry about "refund only". Previously, Taobao took the lead in loosening the restrictions on "refund only", reducing after-sales intervention on high-quality service merchants and strengthening the identification of abnormal behavior. Currently, Taobao intercepts more than 400,000 unreasonable "refund only" transactions on average every day.

In addition, Taobao launched the "Return Treasure" in early September, which helped merchants reduce their return and exchange costs by up to 58% during the Double 11 period. In the one month since the launch of the "Return Treasure", nearly 1 million merchants have subscribed to it, and data from the past week showed that merchants' return shipping costs have dropped by 23% overall.

Yilan Business found that all e-commerce platforms have restarted the pre-sale system for Double 11 this year and moved forward the start time of Double 11.

Tmall Double 11 will start pre-sale on October 14, and will officially go on sale on October 21. The official start time is 3 days earlier than 2023.

JD.com has significantly advanced the start of its Double 11 spot sales to October 17, and the official promotion will start on October 31, which is one week earlier than last year.

Douyin's "Double 11 Good Things Festival" will enter the pre-sale period on October 8 and the official promotion period on October 18. In 2023, Douyin's pre-sale will start on October 15. In other words, this year's Douyin Double 11 pre-sale node is earlier than last year's official promotion period.

Kuaishou E-commerce announced that the platform will enter the Double 11 warm-up period on October 16 and officially start sales on October 18. Compared with last year, Kuaishou's Double 11 pre-sale and official sales started 3 days earlier.

Why is pre-sale coming again? Double 11 nodes are moved forward again?

Yilan Business learned that there are currently two forms of pre-sales, one is the spot price pre-sale, the other is the advance purchase pre-sale of futures. The former is to use complex pricing rules to lock in a part of consumers' wallets in advance, and the latter is an advance pre-sale by merchants who are out of stock in order to prepare for stock.

Pre-sales have their own benefits for both the platform and merchants.

For merchants, pre-sales can help them know orders in advance, allowing for accurate production, reducing the risk of inventory backlogs and facilitating capital turnover.

For the platform, pre-sales can release prices in advance and lock in consumers’ wallets, gain market share, and concentrate sales on a certain day, thereby improving overall efficiency.

During this year's 618 shopping festival, many platforms including Tmall and JD.com cancelled pre-sales. Yilan Business reported that this was mostly based on user experience considerations.

For some categories with higher return rates, merchants will adopt the approach of pre-sale quantities greater than actual production quantities. Through excessively long pre-sales and delayed delivery, the returns from the previous batch of customers will be sent to the next batch, transferring business risks to consumers. The above operations also lead to a poor user experience.

The demand for pre-sales from merchants may be the main reason why multiple platforms restarted the pre-sales system for Double 11 this year. Chu Duan also admitted at the media communication meeting, "We have done research, and many merchants have reported that pre-sales are very important to them."

As for the Double 11 time being moved forward again, Yilan Business believes that this is because user consumption has returned to rationality and traffic costs have become higher. The platform needs to give merchants more time to accumulate traffic in the early stages to increase the possibility of an eventual business boom.

Simply put, under fierce competition in the industry, e-commerce platforms have to "grab traffic" by extending the cycle.

In addition to extending the Double 11 period to grab traffic, platforms are also expanding the traffic pool through interconnection.

In September this year, Taotian Group announced that it would add the WeChat payment function, and WeChat payment will be fully integrated during this year's Double 11. In early October, Taobao and Tmall officially connected to JD Logistics, and JD is also expected to officially connect to Alipay payment on the eve of Double 11.

Overall, on this year's Double 11, e-commerce platforms placed users and merchants in a more balanced position, and successively drove the sustainability of business by optimizing the business environment, returning from leveraging traffic at low prices to a more rational way of allocating traffic.

However, with the existing market competition, can this year's Double 11 trigger business growth again? Yilan Business will continue to pay attention.

Li Yan | Author Mu Yu | Editor Yilan Business | Produced by This article is written by the operator [Yilan Business], WeChat public account: [Yilan Business], original/authorized to be published in Operation Party, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

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