Meituan Live actively seeks cooperation with MCN companies, but unexpectedly becomes a holy place for merchants to fake orders?

One year after the launch of the "God Coupon Festival", Meituan Live is facing the dual challenges of ecosystem construction and fake orders. This article deeply analyzes Meituan Live's subsidy policy, merchants' motivation to participate, and the practical operational difficulties of the live broadcast business, providing a comprehensive perspective for professionals who are concerned about live broadcast e-commerce and platform operation strategies.

On April 18, 2023, Meituan Live was officially launched during the "God Coupon Festival". A full year later, Meituan Live continued to increase its investment.

According to exclusive information from "Zi Quadrant", after Meituan launched the live broadcast of experts in December last year, it has recently been intensively seeking cooperation with local MCN companies and strengthening its subsidy policy: for corporate organizations cooperating with 100 accounts or more, a single account can enjoy a maximum subsidy of 6,000 yuan per account.

Subsidies are divided into three levels according to the number of fans: the first level is 3,000 fans, the second level is 5,000 fans, and the third level is 10,000 fans. Each time a level is reached, there will be a cash reward from Meituan. For talents under individuals or companies/institutions, bonuses can be accumulated up to three times, and a personal account can receive a maximum cash reward of 3,500 yuan, with no upper limit on the cash reward.

Source: Provided by the interviewee

Since the launch of Meituan Live, it has mainly been self-broadcasting, such as the "Sharpshooter Live Room" in takeout, and the Meituan Live entrance is also full of Meituan official live broadcast rooms. Now the real money subsidies are undoubtedly to support Meituan's internal Dabo ecosystem. Seeing that Meituan Live's forms are becoming more and more diverse, self-broadcasting, brand live broadcasting, and Dabo have been launched one after another, and as the ecosystem matures, the hidden worries behind it are gradually exposed.

"For all orders from the live broadcast room, Meituan only charges a commission of 0.6%, and the payment is received in T+3." Zhou Ruo, former BD of Meituan, told Zi Quadrant, "It is much more cost-effective than the original commission rate of 8% to 10% and the payment is received in 14 days." Smelling the scent of money, under Meituan's long-term high commission policy, merchants flocked in to place orders like vultures seeing rotten meat.

Zhou Ruo gave an example. If a merchant wants to swipe 1,000 yuan, the commission will only be deducted by 6 yuan. After three days of payment, the merchant can continue to swipe and swipe in a cycle with 994 yuan. In fact, it is common for new businesses to have low rates and no commissions, but the difference of Meituan is that the sales of live broadcasts will be included in the total sales of merchants, which will change the ranking of the merchant on the shelf page of group buying or takeaway and affect exposure. In order to vigorously promote new businesses, Meituan gave the best policies to the live broadcast room, but this move unexpectedly made the Meituan live broadcast room a holy place for merchants to swipe orders.

Although from the data dimension, Meituan Live has always performed well. According to 36Kr, in July last year, when the first-level entrance of live broadcast was just launched, the monthly GMV of Meituan Live was about 500-600 million, with a month-on-month growth rate of 20%, but it quickly rose to 1-1.2 billion in August, and live broadcast rooms with more than 100 million appeared one after another. By October, the monthly GMV exceeded 2 billion yuan. However, the behavior of merchants grouping together to brush orders will undoubtedly directly affect the GMV statistics of Meituan Live, and it is also difficult for the outside world to truly understand Meituan Live and how good it is now.

1. Meituan is aggressively “setting up the stage”

"Zi Quadrant" contacted Hu Rui (pseudonym), a Meituan service provider in Jiangsu. The other party said that the influencers who have settled in can apply for a part of the traffic opened by Meituan to service providers on the basis of their original traffic, including low-priced and high-quality resources of goods in the later stage.

New influencers can get newcomer rewards when they join the platform. The merchants provided by Meituan are mainly used for bringing goods, and influencers can choose by themselves. Currently, they mainly focus on home catering (takeout). In the first two months, influencers are not required to visit stores. After joining the platform, influencers can select goods from the official pool of goods provided by Meituan. The pool of goods is updated every day and is guaranteed to be the lowest price on the platform. However, there is currently no commission for bringing goods, only rewards for increasing fans. "The specific rules for sharing have not yet been announced, and it will probably have to wait until after May."

"In the early stage, the traffic was large, there were few influencers, it was easy to increase the number of fans, and you could earn a lot by taking subsidies," said Hu Rui. Judging from the traffic entrances currently provided by Meituan, there are three main locations for live broadcast pushes. The first is a small live broadcast window on the Meituan homepage, which can be clicked to enter the Guess the Happiness Square. The second is the information flow on the homepage. The third is in the secondary column of Meituan's subdivided business, which has a corresponding live broadcast entrance.

Source: Provided by the interviewee

Hu Rui told "Zi Quadrant" that Meituan had been doing incentive plans before, but the subsidies were very small. For example, in April, individual talents only received a few hundred yuan in subsidies, and corporate talents only received one or two thousand yuan. However, starting in May, Meituan's subsidies have increased significantly. Judging from the amount of the reward, Meituan is quite determined this time. This reward amount is like a pie in the sky drawn by the boss. There is only a big number after completion, but how to complete it and whether it can be completed are all question marks.

At present, service providers such as Hu Rui do not understand the link logic and techniques of Meituan Live. They are almost all here for the high rewards, or even just want to complete a one-time contract transaction. When asked about the traffic performance of the signed influencers, Hu Rui said that he was not aware of it and was only responsible for signing the contract. The huge subsidies may eventually go into the pockets of service providers, and together with the influencers, they have taken advantage of Meituan. In fact, in order to improve the live broadcast ecosystem, Meituan has set up a platform for live broadcasts.

From March last year to now, Meituan Live has tried the process from local live broadcast room - official live broadcast - store broadcast - Da broadcast, repeatedly exploring the live broadcast path.

The first stage is the regional live broadcast room, which started intensive live broadcasts in March last year, targeting third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities, such as Ji'an, Bazhong, Yichun, etc. Users can enter by searching for "takeout live broadcast" on the takeout page. Only cities that have opened live broadcast services will have this entrance on the takeout page.

Soon, this model came to an end because the short video model divided by region, unlike the interest recommendations embedded in the short video content, essentially still requires consumers to actively reach the live broadcast room and consume purposefully, and cannot make up for the incremental interest recommendations like Douyin's local life.

This kind of front-end backend logic is still the logic of the shelf "I sell you what I have" instead of the logic of interest recommendation, "I guess what you want and I sell it to you."

This problem accompanies the entire process of Meituan Live's transformation.

In the second phase of official live broadcasts, live broadcast rooms such as Baotuantuan and Sharpshooter negotiated low-priced goods with merchants, and then used official purchases to gather traffic, attract consumers to watch, and lure consumers in with low prices. In today's talent ecosystem, it is not easy to copy the path of Sharpshooter and Baotuantuan.

First of all, Meituan does not have an ecosystem where experts and fans can work together, and live broadcasts of food coupons are not good content. Even on Douyin, local life content is just a kind of traffic consumption content, embedded in many information flow contents, and cannot be loaded too much.

Source: Provided by the interviewee

Secondly, Meituan does not have a service provider to support influencers, nor does it have data on push and transaction paths, so the stage for this troupe is still in a precarious state.

Without training rules, service providers can only rely on the "military order" given by Meituan. "As long as the influencer is good enough, the platform will definitely give you the traffic and give you a live broadcast room." Sometimes, they will even switch sides. "We will also talk to some institutional influencers, because the rules change almost once a month. If we wait, there may be greater subsidies in June."

At present, what the platform gives to influencers is an OKR O. As for how to split and set KR, it seems to be left to the influencers themselves to think about. The platform hopes to motivate influencers by spending money and reshape a set of live broadcast policies suitable for Meituan.

2. Is it all BD’s fault for not “performing”?

The fundamental reason why service providers are inexperienced is that Meituan Live is inexperienced. More than one BD reported to "Self-quadrant" that they were once called upon to save the day in a live broadcast room.

Meituan has always relied on first-tier BDs to develop merchants. Under the original centralized home delivery + store delivery model, Meituan has long condensed its unique secrets from the battle of thousands of groups, but these first-tier iron soldiers failed to work when they encountered live broadcast business. Song Qing, a BD in the comprehensive business, told Zi Quadrant, "The platform hardly gave us specific live broadcast processes and live broadcast skills, and even the anchors were forced to join the BDs."

Song Qing recalled the first time he and his colleagues did a live broadcast. There was no professional anchor team and no prior training. "The company just said that it would be live broadcasting next month and what policies it could provide to merchants. Then we went to talk to the merchants. After the merchants agreed, we had to do it ourselves because we didn't have an anchor." Although he had no experience in front of cameras, Song Qing said he was not nervous. After all, although there were 7,000 people online, there were only about 50 active people, including all the "relatives and friends" and merchants. "They were all our own people."

He Jun, another BD of the home delivery business, mentioned that Meituan issued live broadcast tasks to BDs, requiring live broadcasts in a single city to reach a certain GMV, and after completion, there will be team bonuses. In order to achieve the live broadcast performance, He Jun's city initially put on the shelves a flash sale item worth tens of yuan, "selling while brushing", and later turned it into a service product worth thousands of yuan, "purely brushing to boost performance."

"When we were doing live broadcasts, we didn't really pay much attention to it." In contrast, the bulk of BDs' salaries still come from commissions from newly signed merchants. According to He Jun's calculations, the bonus that Meituan gives to BDs for completing live broadcast GMV is very small.

"Bonuses are distributed based on the city group dimension, and when it comes to individuals, it's only a tiny fraction of their daily salary. If we don't complete the task, we won't be deducted any money."

Sure enough, the world is a huge grass-roots team. In several financial reports of Meituan last year, the key role of live broadcasting in its business growth was repeatedly mentioned, but now it seems that the execution level does not seem to feel this "urgency" and importance. There are even cases where BD and merchants "brushed orders" together.

“The Beauty section requires a high GMV, so they will look for some professional anchor teams. But for many other categories, such as medical beauty and skin care, they just use an OBS system, put group meals on the shelves, tell merchants to start live streaming, and then they start to brush orders, and then it stays like this all day long.” The BDs turned a blind eye and opened channels for merchants to brush orders, creating a false prosperity for the platform.

An interesting point here is that merchants who use live streaming to increase orders have once again proved the importance of Meituan’s shelf platform. With every order they place, the merchants hope to gain more exposure on the shelves and achieve more stable transactions.

However, some merchants have expectations for Meituan Live. Generally, after the live broadcast, there should be corresponding data for merchants as a basis for feedback and subsequent adjustments. He Jun mentioned, "At that time, a customer kept asking me for data," so He Jun asked his superiors, but the answer he got was "Not yet."

Strangely, the BDs consulted by "Self-quadrant" have not even received the corresponding data. At the beginning, merchants still thought that Meituan Live was interesting, with low commissions, fast returns, and the ability to boost sales. But later, the BDs communicated with merchants every month in similar forms and welfare policies, and it became increasingly difficult. Song Qing explained that no matter how low the commission is, it is essentially still fleecing merchants. "At the time, the minimum single transaction requirement was 50,000 yuan, which was equivalent to a commission of 300 yuan. Later, the task of live broadcast GMV became heavier, and no merchants wanted to play with us."

Conclusion

At 10 a.m. on August 18, 2020, a sudden rainstorm had just washed over Beijing. In Baiziwan outside the East Fourth Ring Road, Zhang Liang (pseudonym) began a day of "ground promotion". He parked his motorcycle next to the stall of two delivery boys, with a large box of gifts on the pedal. Every time a user places an order or spends 8 yuan to register for a three-month membership, they can get a box of yogurt or eggs. He picked nearly 10 boxes of eggs and 10 boxes of yogurt and put them in a plastic bag, and rushed into the clean office building with a large bag of things.

Zhang Liang has set himself the performance goal of getting 20 people who have never registered for the Meituan Grocery APP to download the app, complete the registration, and make their first online purchase. During the community group buying food basket war, one "Zhang Liang" after another "ran his legs off" to open up the situation for Meituan Grocery and laid the foundation for today.

Looking back at the current Meituan live broadcast, it is indeed a cause for concern. But back to Meituan live broadcast, we don't seem to see this kind of momentum and ruthlessness. It seems more like a stage set up for the sake of excitement. As for whether there is lip-syncing or audience, it may no longer be important. Looking back at the current Meituan live broadcast, it is indeed a cause for concern. Meituan's local promoters once stepped out the future of Meituan step by step. The determination and perseverance of "being able to endure hardships" are the reasons for Meituan's success over the years. Looking back at the current Meituan live broadcast, it is indeed a cause for concern.

Author: Xue Li; Editor: Cheng Xin; Source public account: Self-quadrant (ID: 1086937)

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