Tik Tok e-commerce is quite a gimmick, tearing down thresholds and smashing ceilings

There is nothing wrong with starting a business, but many people fail because they fail to find the real "trend". Through his own experience and observation, the author emphasizes that in the current era, the business model that can eliminate landlords and self-acquire traffic is the real trend.

1

I have written a lot of content to discourage entrepreneurs in the past, such as how pitfalls it is to open a milk tea shop, how pitfalls it is to open a coffee shop or a fried chicken shop, and how pitfalls it is to open a board game store or a restaurant.

Some of them are experiences of friends around me, and I invested money in them.

Some of them I actually did and lost a lot of money, and turned the anger in my wallet into motivation to write.

As for these so-called popular entrepreneurial projects, I have basically experienced all of them, either directly or indirectly.

It can be said that my current fatness is due to being beaten and swollen by society.

Of course, I am not against starting a business.

There is nothing wrong with starting a business, and some people have indeed made money.

But the prerequisite is that you have to find the right outlet.

Otherwise, it is better to just work honestly. Even staying at home and relying on your parents is better than opening a random shop.

It's better to live a simple life than to be in debt, right?

Some people may say, that’s not right, wasn’t it very popular to open a milk tea shop or a coffee shop a few years ago?

"White-collar worker quits his job to open XX store and earns XX million a month" has become a fixed combination in hot searches.

This requires explaining a common misunderstanding: fire ≠ wind outlet, these are two different things.

Considering that most people who open stores lose so much money because of rent, we can even say that:

In this era, as long as you still have to pay rent to the landlord, nothing you do will work out.

At best, it is a [crater].

It’s hot enough, but the result of jumping in is unlikely to be takeoff.

But become acquaintances.

2

What is a vent?

The one who can get rid of the landlord and obtain traffic on his own is the vent.

The former is very easy to understand. It is a place where you can do e-commerce.

But in recent years, those working in e-commerce have become very successful. They used to make a few dollars per order, then it became a few cents per order, and now they don’t make any money at all, they just enjoy the pleasure of sending out one order after another.

I even saw a joke in a group some time ago, saying that a certain online store lost money on every order it placed because the platform traffic was too expensive and the operating costs were high.

In the end, the boss could only make money by stuffing game activation cards into packages and turned losses into profits by distributing flyers to game companies.

At this time you will find a problem: e-commerce is not the key, the key is where the traffic comes from.

If you must buy from the platform, the essence has not changed, it's just that working for the landlord has changed to working for the platform.

But if you open a Douyin store, you can create your own content and gain traffic through content.

This means that as long as you have content capabilities, your traffic costs will become very low.

When competing with those big stores, you don’t have to rely on spending money to win, but there are many opportunities to overtake them.

For example, a hit collaboration video, a prediction of a traffic hotspot, a marketing campaign that goes beyond the circle...

Therefore, Douyin e-commerce has created so many counterattacks for small and medium-sized businesses.

Small and medium-sized businesses certainly can’t beat the big players in terms of money, but content is not something that can be created by just throwing money at it; it requires talent, time and even luck.

Even if you just react fast enough to catch up with the hot spots, you can still make a success by taking advantage of the opportunities brought by this wave of hot spots.

Among these Douyin stores, there is a store that sells cultural and creative mobile phone cases, called [Jiangzi Mobile Phone Cases], and its founders are a pair of brothers born after 1995.

Last summer, the animated film "Three Thousand Miles of Chang'an" was released. The two of them didn't even sleep, and stayed up all night designing new products and making videos. They released them when the discussion on the site was the highest, and they achieved a surge in sales overnight.

At that time, they were not a big store, just a small business run by two brothers.

But it doesn’t matter, as long as your sense of smell is sharp enough, your prediction is accurate enough, and the video can be sent out quickly enough.

Then this traffic is for you to consume, and this money is for you to earn.

3

Moreover, this kind of thing has become commonplace in Douyin e-commerce.

On traditional e-commerce platforms, it is hard to imagine that an ordinary online store will have a boom in sales just because the videos it posts are interesting enough.

Users neither have the expectation to see the content nor come across your channel.

Even if you put ten poems written by Li Bai that have not been discovered by the world on the homepage of your store, as long as you don't raise prices or buy traffic, no one will come in.

But for Douyin stores, content and e-commerce can be inseparable.

You are not only a merchant but also a creator. You can create content yourself or collaborate with experts on the platform.

As long as a video goes viral, it is possible to lay the foundation for a large store with a GMV of tens of millions in the future.

The key is that it doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything at the beginning. Douyin e-commerce even has an e-commerce learning center that can systematically teach you how to use Douyin traffic...

This is not an exaggeration. There are too many such cases in Douyin stores. You can find several real stories just by counting them.

The owner of the Panxie flagship store, which sells electronic educational products, had been severely criticized by society many times before he opened his Douyin store. When he first started using Douyin, he posted short videos that no one watched.

While he was figuring it out on his own, he also followed the operations of the Douyin e-commerce learning center, and soon he had his first collaborative video that became a hit.

And the video going viral is just the beginning, the resulting business growth is the highlight:

Twenty thousand new orders were placed that day, and in the following week the number of orders per day remained stable at around 40,000 to 50,000.

With this favorable wind, the Panxie flagship store took off and today has become a leading store with an annual GMV exceeding 50 million.

But all this started from the Douyin store that insisted on creating content back then.

The rules of the game for Douyin e-commerce are to give opportunities to all players.

At this time, you must first figure out your position.

If you are a big player and you just want to enjoy the pleasure of throwing money at people, then you can go anywhere.

But if you are a small or medium-sized business, you want to have your own day to shine.

Then you can’t miss Douyin Store.

4

The key is that you may not even have a chance if you [do Douyin], after all, short videos have become so complicated now.

But now there happens to be a new opportunity to [open a Douyin store].

Note that this is a [new] opportunity, a turning point that has just emerged.

Therefore, there is no question of whether it will be too late to enter the Douyin e-commerce market in 2024, but it is better to arrive at the right time than to arrive early.

The first new opportunity is that over the past few years, Douyin has gradually cultivated users' consumption habits of buying things directly in Douyin stores.

In the past, the main complaint about Douyin was that it had a lot of traffic but was not valuable. But if you open a Douyin store now, you will find that the user conversion rate is actually very good.

Moreover, once interest-based e-commerce is truly successful, user stickiness will be higher than that of traditional e-commerce, because users have emotional appeals to you.

If you just want to buy something, then really you can buy it anywhere.

But if they like the videos you post and have feelings for your account and store, this bond cannot be broken easily.

The second new opportunity is the two new e-commerce policies released by Douyin E-commerce, namely [deposit reduction] and [opening multiple stores with one license].

When these two policies came out, small and medium-sized businesses went completely crazy:

Douyin e-commerce first broke down their threshold and then removed the ceiling.

5

The so-called deposit is actually a sum of money that merchants must pay to the platform when opening a store on the platform to ensure that they will abide by the platform rules and guarantee the quality of goods and services.

You can also understand this as a deposit, but for small and medium-sized businesses it is more than just a deposit.

Even more stressful.

They didn't have much start-up capital, and many of them were starting a business for the first time.

Even if they are willing to run the business well, they still need a chance to open the store first, right?

Douyin e-commerce's reduction of the deposit is essentially lowering the threshold for entrepreneurship, alleviating the financial burden on merchants, and enhancing the risk resistance of merchants, especially small and medium-sized merchants.

This time, the scope of the deposit reduction not only covers nearly 70% of the merchants on Douyin e-commerce, but also more than 90% of the corporate store categories have a deposit reduction of greater than or equal to 50%. Even most of the merchants in the categories can participate in the [0 yuan entry] trial operation.

The ultimate goal is to achieve [painless store opening] on Douyin e-commerce.

Anyone who has played MOBA games knows that the game economy has a snowball effect.

Every little extra money you spend early on can have a huge impact later on.

The same principle applies to e-commerce.

Now you are a startup businessman, and your family is not particularly wealthy to provide you with much support, so the money you have is not much.

A large portion of the funds is taken up by the deposit, and there is actually very little money left for actual operations.

The money freed up by Douyin e-commerce’s reduction in deposit may become your winning hand.

6

The essence of opening multiple stores with one license is that Douyin e-commerce is removing obstacles to the growth and progress of small and medium-sized businesses.

In the past, Douyin e-commerce could only open one store with one business license, but with the opening of the policy of opening multiple stores with one license, the same entity will be able to open multiple stores very smoothly in the future.

Although there are still corresponding quantity restrictions, with no more than 5 flagship stores, specialty stores, franchise stores, and corporate stores, and no more than 3 individual stores, it is already much more convenient than in the past.

Jiangzi Mobile Phone Case has grown from a small store with only a computer as its entire asset to a large store with sales of tens of millions. The Panxie flagship store posted short videos but no one paid attention to them in the beginning, but now it is making great strides in the electronic education industry.

Small and medium-sized businesses will not always be small and medium-sized businesses.

You can conquer the world with one hit product at the beginning, but after that you must diversify your products and even create a store matrix.

At this time, if you can open multiple stores with one license, it means that your future will be smooth from the moment you open the first store.

7

One of the core advantages that the e-commerce industry has always talked about is the nearly unlimited selection of products.

Endless small and medium-sized businesses can exert tremendous subjective initiative to fully meet the various needs of huge numbers of consumers.

These are exactly the capabilities that Douyin e-commerce urgently needs to build.

Why did Douyin e-commerce launch these two new policies that are extremely beneficial to small and medium-sized businesses?

In essence, it realizes the importance of small and medium-sized businesses to e-commerce platforms and is ready to make efforts to win the support of more small and medium-sized businesses.

Only those who win the small and medium-sized businesses can win the war in the e-commerce industry.

Douyin's e-commerce vision cannot be separated from the power of small and medium-sized businesses.

From this perspective, the interests of the Douyin e-commerce platform and small and medium-sized businesses are actually completely consistent.

You don’t need to believe that Douyin E-commerce is truly doing good for you. You just need to believe that Douyin E-commerce will work hard to solve the various problems that small and medium-sized businesses may face, even for its own sake.

The two new policies of lowering the deposit and opening multiple stores with one license are evidence of this.

The former is not to hold back the runner, and the latter is not to put shackles on the winner.

You only need to consider how to make your store bigger and stronger, and don’t need to worry about any other issues.

As long as you are on Douyin e-commerce, there is nothing to worry about and just focus on running the business.