The secrets of second-hand e-commerce platforms are hidden in Xianyu’s live streaming

In the second-hand market, Xianyu, a seafood market, is already very familiar to everyone. Recently, they have also started live streaming, showing some niche, novel, and low-priced products. In this era of live streaming, how is Xianyu live streaming different? What is the landscape of the second-hand e-commerce market? In this article, we try to analyze it.

"I'm a college student, can you give me a discount?" "I'm a student, can you give me a gift?" These common jokes in the comment section come from the weird buyers on Xianyu, and have also formed a stereotype of Xianyu. Although Xianyu is always criticized by netizens, it still plays an important role in the second-hand e-commerce market.

Recently, Xianyu disclosed the latest data, showing that the average daily transaction volume of Xianyu has exceeded 1 billion, the number of active sellers has exceeded 100 million in the past year, and 4 million idle items are posted on Xianyu every day.

As a leading player in the second-hand e-commerce market, what is the platform ecology of Xianyu? What are the characteristics of live broadcasts on Xianyu? What is the market structure of second-hand e-commerce?

1. What is the difference between Xianyu Live Streaming and Xianyu Live Streaming?

Niche, novel and low-priced are the distinctive features of Xianyu Live.

In Xianyu's live broadcast room, there are no exquisite backgrounds, no carefully designed scripts, and in some live broadcast rooms the host hardly appears on screen, and users can only hear the host's voice. It is this rough live broadcast style that has formed the unique temperament of Xianyu's live broadcast.

In terms of the types of live broadcast rooms, Xianyu Live not only sells second-hand goods, but also sells handmade cultural relics, jewelry and jade, clearance of unique items, creative design, game gifts, etc. Among the second-hand live broadcast rooms that best reflect the characteristics of Xianyu, @胖子学长精品笔记 is one of the better ones.

Image source: Xianyu screenshot

As a physical store owner of second-hand laptops, @胖子学长精品笔记 has a high reputation on Xianyu. Not only does its homepage have the official certification of "Buyer's Credit is Excellent", it has also received numerous positive reviews, with a positive review rate of 96%.

Currently @胖子学长精品笔记 has 5,084 fans, has sold 594 items, and has 89 items on sale.

Image source: Xianyu screenshot

Second-hand computers are mostly unique products. During the live broadcast, the anchor did not explain the product links one by one, but asked the budget of interested users and recommended suitable products according to their needs. In the yellow cart below the live broadcast room, you can see products from multiple brands such as Shenzhou Ares, Naruto Kong, Thor, Lenovo, and Mechanic, with prices ranging from 1,000 to 5,000.

In the official live broadcast room @闲鱼特卖選, the low-price nature of 闲鱼 was revealed. In the live broadcast room, two anchors explained low-priced snacks, and special offers were sliding below the live broadcast room, including Fuji apples at 2.5 yuan per pound, 6 bottles of small Coke at 6.9 yuan, and 20 packs of Ai Shang Mimi shrimp strips at 3.8 yuan...

Image source: Xianyu screenshot

Crowley observed that the number of products in the @闲鱼特售精选直播室 is more than 80, most of which are not sold in supermarkets, but in mini packages, and there are also some expiring products. For example, 8.6 yuan for 2 boxes of 40g Oreo Mini Cocoa Cookies, 22.9 yuan for 1296g Qia Qia Nuts Combination (expiring in July), 9.9 yuan for 6 bottles of 348ml Baisuishan Mineral Water... With many low-priced products, the live broadcast room attracted more than 35,000 viewers, becoming the most popular live broadcast room on Xianyu.

At present, Xianyu Live has not yet formed a certain scale. There are only a few live broadcast rooms with thousands of viewers, and the number of sellers broadcasting at the same time is also limited. The "No more live broadcasts" prompt at the bottom of the live broadcast page will soon appear.

Although Xianyu's live streaming traffic is low and there are few orders, there are still sellers willing to broadcast on Xianyu, and @庫存小小白 is one of them. In the live chat, he said that Xianyu had saved his business from a desperate situation, and he also wanted to give back to the platform with gratitude.

He mentioned that before the epidemic, he was engaged in toy inventory wholesale, but the irregular lockdowns during the epidemic made his business difficult. The retail model on Xianyu brought a turning point to his business and solved his urgent needs. The entire team is very grateful to Xianyu.

Now they are engaged in export ceramics and furniture business. Every member of the team has opened an Xianyu account to sell products, hoping to do a good job on Xianyu. He sells slightly flawed export ceramics in his live broadcast room, priced at 6 yuan per catty, and 5 catties are free shipping. He revealed that in the second live broadcast on May 26, more than 7,000 people watched it and about 10 orders were placed.

Image source: Xianyu screenshot

From the few live broadcast rooms, we can see that Xianyu's business model is constantly enriching. In the past, Xianyu held high the banner of C2C, and the official even stepped in to suppress professional sellers. Now, there are multiple business models such as C2B, B2C, and C2B2C in the live broadcast rooms, and a large number of merchants and intermediaries gather here. Xianyu's business model has gradually shifted to "C2X".

2. Xianyu also has a community dream

The live streaming business is a microcosm of Xianyu’s efforts in building a content community.

In fact, Xianyu tried its hand at live streaming in 2019, when live streaming became popular. At that time, Xianyu App added a "Player Live Streaming" portal on the homepage and connected it with Taobao Live, covering four sections: handmade cultural relics, digital trends, home fashion, and dimensional culture.

At that time, Xianyu also invited a large number of celebrities, experts and Taobao anchors to join, and Li Jiaqi and Li Ziqi all opened accounts on Xianyu. Perhaps the effect was not ideal, and later the "Player Live" entrance was removed, and there was no live entrance for the time being.

However, Xianyu has not given up on the live streaming business, but has been constantly exploring new ways to play. On the one hand, Xianyu officials personally took action. In August last year, Xianyu opened two official live streaming accounts for selling goods, "Xianyu Chaoshe Official Account" and "Xianyu Mobile Phone and Digital Official Account". Currently, "Xianyu Chaoshe Official Account" can no longer be searched, and "Xianyu Mobile Phone and Digital Official Account" shows that Xianyu was visited 245 days ago.

Image source: Xianyu screenshot

On the other hand, Xianyu has also begun to focus on content-based live broadcasts, bringing immersive, quiet and stress-relieving slow live broadcasts to Xianyu users. During the same period last year, more than a dozen experts in different fields started live broadcasts on Xianyu, including making doll houses, carving square seals, petting cats, and painting Chinese paintings, which continued to attract users' attention. Among them, the live broadcast room of Yun Petting Cats had more than 54,000 people watching cats dozing off and eating cat food online.

Image source: China Daily

It is understood that the live broadcast operation team is affiliated to the Xianyu expert ecosystem business. The anchors are all native interest experts on the Xianyu platform. The main content includes interest display and professional knowledge answers, etc. At the same time, Xianyu has also created exclusive new scene and customized gameplay such as live broadcast and fan lottery for experts. By upgrading the user small court mechanism, it continuously optimizes the management ability of experts and further ensures the orderly operation of user transactions.

In addition to the live broadcast business, Xianyu has also launched a community section called "Seafood Market", which provides users with a hot topic list and Xianyu special discussion area. On the "Seafood Hot List", you can see topics such as "The Fish Entertainment Circle is on, my sister is here", "Sharing my ten-year story with Xianyu", and "My 618 encounter". At the bottom of the page, there are multiple super-topic discussion areas such as "Students, come in! Low prices for digital equipment", "Four pit exchange team", and "Second-hand game equipment trading".

Image source: Xianyu screenshot

In addition, Xianyu's "Good at Playing" column provides a content display area for influencers, helping them to better establish close relationships with users. Currently, the "Good at Playing" section includes multiple categories such as digital, model figures, cute pets, cultural relics, and cars, allowing more influencers' posts to be seen. However, the number of fans of these influencers is generally not high, basically one or two thousand or a few hundred, and Xianyu is also working hard to help influencers increase their number of fans.

At the 2023 product upgrade conference, Xianyu announced the "Star Plan": the goal is to incubate 100,000 influencers with 10,000 fans, 10,000 influencers with 1 million transactions, and 100 influencers with 100,000 fans and 1 million transactions, to further enrich the community content ecology.

Xianyu is constantly moving towards the direction of a content community with the aim of mobilizing the enthusiasm of platform users, thereby promoting transaction conversion and ultimately achieving commercialization. After all, transactions are the essence of Xianyu.

3. Xianyu’s second-hand e-commerce business is not doing well

At the end of 2018, Xianyu founder Chen Weiye said: "It is inconvenient to disclose the specific profit model of Xianyu, but we will definitely not charge transaction commissions."

At that time, Xianyu had the support of Alibaba, enjoyed the traffic provided by the Taobao ecosystem, and could also use Taobao to endorse the source of second-hand goods, strengthen user awareness, and quickly became a leading player in the industry. Xianyu naturally had the confidence not to charge commissions in the absence of revenue pressure.

In contrast, other players in the second-hand e-commerce track do not have the support of giants behind them. Under the pressure of operations, they have to find their own way to survive. Zhuan Zhuan is one of them.

At the beginning, Zhuan Zhuan and Xianyu were both based on the C2C model. Under the competition from Xianyu, which did not charge commissions, Zhuan Zhuan began to turn to the C2B2C model and tried to occupy the vertical second-hand market. After many attempts, Zhuan Zhuan finally focused on the digital 3C field, perfecting the closed loop of platform inspection, recycling, and self-operation, and exploring the path of monetization step by step.

Xianyu has been sitting back and relaxing for many years with Alibaba behind it, but changes in the external environment have also changed Xianyu's situation. In March 2023, Alibaba's "1+6+N" organizational structure adjustment was implemented, and the six major business groups operated independently and were responsible for their own profits and losses. Against this background, Xianyu, which belongs to Taotian Group, needs to seriously consider its own business model and profitability, and can no longer continue to "lie flat".

Under heavy pressure, Xianyu had to break its promise of "never charging transaction commissions". In June last year, Xianyu announced a charging policy for certain merchants: once a user completes more than 10 orders in a month and the cumulative transaction amount exceeds 10,000 yuan, the excess amount will be charged a service fee of 1% of the actual transaction amount of each order.

Compared with other platforms’ commission rates of more than 10%, although Xianyu’s service fee is not high, it is a heavy blow to professional sellers in the platform ecosystem. Professional sellers act as intermediaries. They take goods from one user and sell them to another user, earning a little hard work fee from the price difference between the two.

The existence of professional sellers not only reduces the communication costs of users, but also improves transaction efficiency, and also activates the soil for second-hand transactions on Xianyu. However, Xianyu's action of charging commissions not only hits important roles within the platform, but also destroys the balance of the ecosystem to a certain extent, which is further away from the goal of profitability.

With the entry of new players such as Douyin and Kuaishou, Xianyu's situation has become even more embarrassing. At the end of 2020, Kuaishou E-commerce launched its second-hand business, which attracted more than 1,000 professional anchors in just three months, with cumulative orders exceeding 630,000. In March 2021, Kuaishou E-commerce officially announced its entry into the second-hand e-commerce track and proposed the goal of reconstructing the second-hand trading market with "trust + fun".

Douyin launched the "Second-hand Luxury Goods Festival" in 2020, targeting second-hand luxury goods transactions. Last year, Douyin Mall launched the "Second-hand Goods" channel and launched the "Recycling and Consignment" service, providing consumers with a channel for second-hand goods transactions and starting to consider the second-hand e-commerce market.

In addition, Xianyu also has to face its two old rivals, Aihuishou and Zhuanzhuan, as well as Huishoubao and Shanhuishou, which are backed by vivo and Xiaomi. Panghu, Feiyu and Hongbulin, which focus on the second-hand luxury goods market, are also a considerable pressure on Xianyu.

With years of accumulation, Xianyu's position as the industry leader is still relatively stable for the time being. Under the pressure of revenue, can Xianyu find a feasible way to make profits? And can Xianyu do a good job in content community? These are all worth paying attention to.

References:

1. Xianyu is no longer comfortable｜Photon Planet

2. Xianyu also does live streaming? Nowadays, even second-hand e-commerce is so popular｜E-commerce News Pro

3. The live streaming industry is booming. Xianyu, Meituan, and Pinduoduo are making a comeback and embarking on the road to breakthrough｜Hurun Report