Kuaishou Wang Beisi phenomenon: How short video creators can correctly seize the opportunity to sell goods through live streaming

Kuaishou Wang Beisi has rapidly increased his fans from 0 to 2 million in less than two years, and his sales performance in a single show is comparable to that of top anchors with sales of tens of millions. The author conducted an exclusive interview with Wang Beisi and analyzed the growth path and reasons for success of "Wang Beisi in Northeast China".

Is live streaming the end of the universe (traffic)? This seems to be a difficult question to answer.

In the crowded live e-commerce market filled with old faces, it is difficult to get long-term and stable income from live e-commerce by relying on temporary traffic popularity. But this does not mean that newcomers who are well prepared have no chance.

Kuaishou anchor "Wang Beisi in the Northeast" made his first live broadcast on May 8 and achieved results that impressed his peers - he achieved nearly 10 million GMV transactions in 13 hours of live broadcast, with a cumulative number of viewers exceeding 5.53 million and more than 290,000 orders.

Originally just a content creator, she has also set an example for short video creators to delve into e-commerce.

During her first live broadcast, she ranked second on Kuaishou’s live broadcast sales list that day. Although she has only more than 2 million fans, her sales performance in a single broadcast is comparable to that of top anchors with tens of millions of fans.

"Shen Xiang" recently conducted an exclusive interview with Wang Beisi, trying to understand how she quickly achieved the leap from 0 to 2 million fans in less than two years, and how she, as a content creator, accumulated strength in the private domain and successfully entered the live e-commerce track with the community ecological potential of Kuaishou.

1. The closed loop behind the 13-hour live broadcast with nearly 10 million GMV

From 12 noon to 1:07 am on May 8, Wang Beisi broadcasted for more than 13 hours in a row. His voice became hoarse, but he could not hide his excitement and repeatedly said that it was "far beyond expectations."

This is Wang Beisi's first live broadcast on the Internet. In her Kuaishou live broadcast room, Yichun forest black fungus, Yichun soybeans, Northeast barley, dried cranberries...all kinds of special agricultural products are piled up on the table. Wang Beisi still feels unsatisfied, so she simply sets up a big pot on the spot, rolls up her sleeves, and cooks beef sauce to show the real ingredients of the product more clearly.

According to the data from Feigua Kuaishu, Wang Beisi’s first live broadcast made it onto Kuaishou’s list of live streaming influencers, ranking second on the list of live streaming influencers on May 8. His GMV of nearly 10 million was second only to that of Mao Qiqi, an e-commerce anchor with more than 30 million fans on that day.

Wang Beisi said that she spent more than a month preparing for this live broadcast, and her main focus during the preparation period was on product selection. She sold 95 products in the live broadcast room, most of which were local agricultural products. For example, the beef sauce was developed by herself, and it took more than 20 times to finalize it. This beef sauce was also a hot product in the live broadcast that day, with a GMV of 1.67 million.

The first live broadcast he started immediately ranked the top two on Kuaishou’s sales list. In addition to 13 hours of non-stop live broadcast and more than a month of preparation in advance, the key word that really made Wang Beisi successful was accumulation of strength.

In fact, long before this live broadcast, Wang Beisi had already tried to explore the e-commerce path by promoting products through short videos and supplying goods to other influencers.

Take Yichun Forest Fungus, another popular product in this live broadcast, as an example. Wang Beisi has been purchasing high-quality fungus from local farmers for a long time. At the same time, he promotes the product in his daily short videos. Wang Beisi told "Shen Xiang": "Last year, the short video sales plus the previous promotion by Internet celebrities sold a total of more than 100,000 kilograms of fungus."

Based on the reputation and trust accumulated among fans through long-term promotion and short video sales, Wang Beisi upgraded the packaging design of the black fungus before the live broadcast and sold it at a lower price. The sales volume of black fungus in a single show reached 10,000 units, with a GMV of about 600,000.

Wang Beisi live broadcast room

"Shen Xiang" analyzed Wang Beisi's Kuaishou account and found that the success of this phenomenal premiere was not accidental. In addition to completing the closed loop from content precipitation to live broadcast through daily accumulation, Wang Beisi almost stepped on every step of the platform's favorable policy direction to help creators realize their value.

As early as 2022, Kuaishou began to support merchants and influencers to promote products through short videos. In June 2023, Kuaishou E-commerce released the "Short Video Promotion Store Management Rules", announcing that short videos support the installation of stores, realizing the full connection between content and shelves. Starting in July of that year, Wang Beisi also posted his own store and popular products such as black fungus in his daily short video works.

Kuaishou's Q4 2023 financial report shows that the total transaction volume of short video e-commerce products increased by more than 100% year-on-year, mainly due to the rich supply of short videos and the continuous improvement of content quality. According to "Shen Xiang", Kuaishou's e-commerce short video orders and GMV in 2023 increased by more than three digits year-on-year.

The connection between the content domain and the shelf market has brought more new blue ocean business opportunities to Wang Beisi and others, and also accumulated more private domain traffic and high-quality goods before they switched to live streaming e-commerce.

2. Private domain creates a phenomenal example of short video creators’ transformation

Why did he choose the agriculture, rural areas and farmers sector? Why did he achieve a breakthrough in transformation at Kuaishou? These two questions should be discussed from Wang Beisi’s initial attempts.

Wang Beisi, who married to Northeast China from Sichuan, did not intend to sell goods when she started making short videos, and she admitted that she had taken some detours.

In 2021, Wang Beisi returned to her husband's hometown of Yichun after ending her life in Beijing, and wanted to "find something to do". She found that many local people were using Kuaishou in their spare time, and creators from all over the world were also recording rural life on Kuaishou. Wang Beisi then started her Kuaishou journey.

However, making short videos is not as easy as imagined. Wang Beisi initially aimed to "increase followers" by mainly doing short videos about rural life and agriculture, which increased followers quickly and generated high traffic, but she soon realized that it was difficult to produce such content continuously. "Although I made some popular videos at the beginning, the traffic was not stable." Wang Beisi said that after doing it for a while, she realized that the direction of chasing popular videos based on her intuition was not right. After watching many short videos about rural life, she felt good and began to transform.

Starting from October 2022, Wang Beisi reopened his account "Wang Beisi in Northeast China" on Kuaishou, and then further refined the positioning of the account, specializing in rural food. Yichun has abundant local specialty agricultural products, and some are materials. These food contents are equipped with agricultural products from Northeast China and are highly exposed at the same time, which not only has interesting content but also huge commercial value.

Relying on his intuition and constant attempts, Wang Beisi's account became more and more successful, and in less than two years, he gained 2.17 million followers. The data from the live broadcast room also confirmed from another perspective that Wang Beisi's initial intuition of not blindly chasing hot products was correct.

According to the data from Feigua Kuaishu, in Wang Beisi's first live broadcast, 62.9% of the audience were female, and the largest age group was women aged 31 to 40, accounting for 37%, which is highly consistent with the fan profile of her daily short videos. "Shen Xiang" learned that among Wang Beisi's 2.17 million fans, women accounted for 57.18%, and the fan group was also mostly women aged 31 to 40, accounting for 30.74%.

In the view of e-commerce industry practitioners, many creators who have become popular through social events or explosive content have tried to get involved in live streaming e-commerce. However, since the fan portraits and demand for products may not be highly matched, although "the end of traffic is live streaming e-commerce", most of them find it difficult to maintain stable income.

An important point in Wang Beisi's success is that the short video content she created and the products she promoted and live-streamed are all aimed at the same consumer group.

The private domain is Kuaishou's advantage and a long-term high-quality asset for every Kuaishou creator, while agriculture, rural areas and farmers are Kuaishou's traditional advantage and characteristic vertical category. Wang Beisi's growth model is a microcosm of thousands of Kuaishou short video creators, and their rise is inseparable from the fertile soil of the Kuaishou ecosystem.

Kuaishou's Q4 2023 financial report shows that the supply of short videos by active creators with more than 10,000 fans in the "Three Rural Areas" category of Kuaishou has increased by more than 30% year-on-year, and the average daily playback volume of "Three Rural Areas" videos has increased by 20% year-on-year, and more and more rural creators are being seen on Kuaishou. At the same time, Kuaishou has also provided a variety of monetization channels for "Three Rural Areas" creators, resulting in a year-on-year increase of more than 30% in the number of "Three Rural Areas" creators with more than 10,000 fans who earned income through the commercial ecosystem in the fourth quarter.

According to the "2023 Kuaishou Agriculture, Rural Areas and Farmers Ecological Data Report", in 2023, the number of Kuaishou users with interests in agriculture, rural areas and farmers will be 330 million, the average annual income of creators with 10,000 fans will exceed 30,000 yuan, and the transaction amount of short videos of agriculture, rural areas and farmers e-commerce experts will increase by 301% year-on-year.

With the support of Kuaishou's community ecosystem and the careful cultivation of private domains, content and commercial consumption have achieved a two-way positive cycle. It is not surprising that Wang Beisi and others have successfully transformed from short video creators to live e-commerce.

3. Is there still room for new growth in the crowded live e-commerce market?

For some time, the live streaming e-commerce track has been slightly crowded, and the top anchors have continued to grow bigger and stronger. Whether there is still room for growth for new forces has also become a topic of concern in the industry.

The emergence of Kuaishou's Wang Beisi has brought another possibility to the industry.

Analyzing the growth path of "Wang Beisi in Northeast China", in addition to the accurate insight into the platform's policy direction and meticulous operation of private fans, the user consumption potential that has not yet been fully tapped from the Kuaishou platform has also become the basis for Wang Beisi's rise.

According to Kuaishou's financial report for Q4 2023, the penetration rate of Kuaishou's monthly active e-commerce users has increased to 18.6%. While the number of monthly paying users has reached a new high of over 130 million, compared with the community data of 700 million old friends on the Kuaishou platform, the e-commerce penetration rate still has a lot of room for growth. For the creators and merchants on the platform, this also means that the 700 million old friends still have huge consumption potential.

How to meet and stimulate the deterministic consumption needs of platform users has become the focus of Kuaishou e-commerce's thinking after it exceeded the trillion-yuan GMV scale.

In the past live broadcast e-commerce model, merchants and influencers broadcast live for a maximum of more than ten hours a day, and consumers cannot meet all their needs with the products they see in the live broadcast room. The deterministic demand overflowing from the live broadcast field needs to be taken up by the pan-shelf scene. This is also the intuitive reason why Douyin and Kuaishou are focusing on shelf e-commerce.

Kuaishou started to build the pan-shelf field in 2023, and now has integrated multiple scenarios such as recommendation, mall, search, and store, which not only meets the diverse purchasing needs of consumers, but also provides more opportunities for short video creators who intend to get involved in the e-commerce field to meet consumer needs. It enables them to run businesses in the context of short video content, and with such a foundation between consumers and creators, planting grass and pulling grass can be done in one go.

As the Internet has developed to this day, both content platforms and e-commerce platforms are shifting their strategic focus: from simply focusing on user growth to focusing on user retention, user vitality, user lifetime value and other indicators. These indicators all point to the ecological value of the community.

For Kuaishou, a rich ecosystem also means a complex ecosystem. Only by deeply integrating the originally relatively independent closed-loop content ecosystem and business ecosystem in the construction of the community ecosystem and opening up the connection between different scenarios can we further amplify the advantage of "connection" between people in Kuaishou's genes.

Users gather because of their interest in content and stay because of trust in transactions. Only when the entire community ecosystem is fully connected can new business logic and opportunities be born. A community ecosystem that organically unifies content value and commercial value will provide a strong endogenous driving force for platforms, creators, and consumers to achieve a win-win situation.

Wang Beisi's success is not just the success of a short video creator transforming into a live e-commerce platform. The GMV of the first broadcast was nearly 10 million, which is just one of the many content creators on the Kuaishou platform who have transformed. The significance of Wang Beisi's example is that in the 3.0 era of live e-commerce, creators who rely on the platform's ecological capabilities and focus on creation and operation still have great potential.

Author: He Wen, WeChat public account: Shen Xiang