Member anxiety in Douyin e-commerce

There are new rules on the Douyin platform. What impact will this have on Douyin e-commerce? What are Douyin members? Read this article to learn more.

If you do not join the membership system, you will be expelled next month.

Before the 618 promotion, Douyin e-commerce issued a new rule: merchants who have opened a membership system for more than half a year but have not configured any membership rights in the past 90 days will be cleared out by the platform. Starting from June 27, the platform will officially clear out merchants that have not met the standards in the past, and will continue to clear out merchants that do not meet the standards at the end of each month starting in July.

For a platform with more than 600 million daily active users, any small change may bring changes to the business ecology. The introduction of this new regulation is aimed at some merchants who do not pay enough attention to the membership operation system of the Douyin e-commerce platform.

As an operational tool to increase consumer stickiness and consumption depth, membership has always been valued by major e-commerce platforms. The same is true for Douyin e-commerce.

In May 2021, Douyin launched the merchant membership product function. Three months later, during the 818 New Trendy Goods Festival, Douyin e-commerce launched functions such as Doudian membership, points, member lottery purchases, and user asset dashboard tools. With the cooperation of the big promotion nodes, the growth rate of merchant membership increased tenfold.

In 2022, Douyin's e-commerce platform upgraded from interest-based e-commerce to global interest-based e-commerce. In addition to short videos and live broadcasts, it focused on shopping malls and searches. This year, Douyin's e-commerce once again increased its private domain services, and internally tested functional entrances including "shopping", "e-commerce membership", "re-purchase coupons" and "my frequently purchased items".

Among them, "Shopping" is equivalent to Taobao's "Subscription", creating a merchant version of the circle of friends; e-commerce membership becomes a tag function under "My Wallet", helping users quickly find member merchants, and at the same time enabling the "Recommend for You" function to help non-member consumers discover high-quality membership service merchants and high-quality rights and interests.

Under a series of complete merchant membership operation systems, according to Douyin's official 2022 e-commerce merchant membership plan, it is necessary to cultivate 10,000 entry-level merchants for membership operations, help merchants recruit more than 10 members per day on average, and achieve a member GMV share of more than 5%.

However, judging from the current stricter withdrawal mechanism for merchant members, the extensive management stage that only pursued the number of merchants participating in membership management without paying attention to the quality of management has ended. Under the stricter withdrawal mechanism, Douyin wants to achieve both quantitative and qualitative growth in the membership system.

However, this is not easy. Take Tmall's merchant membership ecosystem construction as an example. In the early days of the e-commerce membership system in 2017, all customers could join the membership for "0 yuan". The platform also hoped that more merchants would participate in membership operations, attract more new customers to join the membership, and increase the number of merchants' own members.

During this stage, the platform was mainly based on the scale of merchants participating in membership operations. However, as the number of member-operated merchants increased, the drawbacks of extensive operations began to emerge.

First, as major merchants have opened memberships one after another, the overall effect of merchants attracting new customers has begun to decline. After all, no matter how patient consumers are, they will not register dozens or even hundreds of memberships. Once the novelty wears off, they will become tired and bored. Second, even if there is free membership privileges, many merchants do not operate them much, which wastes official resources and causes a bad customer experience.

Finally, in 2021, Tmall began to further stratify and grade "Tmall Merchant Member Operations". Based on multiple dimensions of assessment, merchants with different operating levels can enjoy different official privileges. The most obvious point is that only "high-quality merchants" can have the right to "join for free".

However, while wanting to achieve "fine management" of merchant membership operations, a very high threshold has been formed invisibly. For small and medium-sized merchants operating memberships, because the effect of attracting new customers is already declining and the merchants themselves do not have much traffic, the membership operations of small and medium-sized merchants are even more bleak, which ultimately forms a membership ecosystem for brand merchants.

The same problem applies to Douyin. In addition to implementing a stricter withdrawal mechanism, how to provide merchants with more accurate membership traffic is the key to whether merchants can operate a membership system on the platform for a long time.

Therefore, while building a membership management mechanism for the B-side, Douyin launched a platform membership - "Douyin Mall Gold Card" on Double 11 in 2022. This so-called gold card is similar to JD Plus membership and Taobao 88vip, allowing consumers to enjoy real discounts during the promotion period.

However, at present, Douyin has not made much noise in building a membership system for the C-end.

Taobao, JD.com, and Meituan have all upgraded their membership systems, and membership has become the new C position in the e-commerce war in 2024. How to further catch up with the membership system of predecessors has also become a concern for whether Douyin can take a step further in the shelf e-commerce platform.

Author: Gu Gan

WeChat public account: New Entropy