With so many players competing for supremacy in the local life sector, can Video Account catch up?

In addition to the "big brother" Meituan, from Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, to the current video account, the competition in the local life track is becoming more and more fierce. Can the video account disrupt the local life and catch up with the "latecomers"?

Finally, the video account has come to disrupt local life.

On April 23, Video Account officially released the "Video Account Store - [Store Opening] Guidelines - Local Life Industry", and merchants in the local life industry can apply to settle in, which means that the Video Account local life service industry is fully launched to the public.

In May last year, it was reported that Video Account was testing local life services, and it was not officially opened until nearly a year later. Xinbochang also learned that in addition to group buying and local delivery services, Video Account was also rumored to be planning to launch food delivery services.

In addition to the "big brother" Meituan, from Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, to today's Video Account, the competition in the local life track is becoming increasingly fierce.

01 Video accounts add to local life

“Only 17.9, available in all stores nationwide.”

On the afternoon of April 29, the "Discovering the Surroundings" app sold McDonald's group-buying coupons on the video account. The products included single items and set meals, which were much cheaper than the prices on the McDonald's mini program. At around 4 p.m., the live broadcast room showed that there were more than 3,000 viewers.

The anchor also said in the live broadcast room that if you don’t know how to use it, you can click on the account homepage, which has a detailed tutorial on how to use the video account store coupons. The video was released on February 22 this year.

Xinbochang discovered that "Discover the Surroundings" was the first to release many store exploration videos, and began selling group purchase coupons for major restaurant brands such as KFC, McDonald's, and Starbucks on February 26.

Previously, only big-name merchants like these could open video account group purchases. Now, ordinary merchants can also apply to join.

Recently, the official Video Account announced that merchants in the local life industry can apply to settle in the Video Account store of the "local life" business type, and support both single stores and chain stores.

It is understood that the local life business of Video Account is still in the stage of investment promotion, and the window rules are also in the stage of soliciting opinions. However, according to the information that has been released, Video Account currently only opens two first-level categories: catering and hotel travel. Among them, catering merchants must be chain stores, while hotels, scenic spots, passenger transport and other hotel travel categories support single stores.

On the video account platform, "Local Life" is located at the secondary entrance under the "Shopping" column. At present, in addition to store exploration accounts such as "Discover the Surroundings", most of them are brand merchants, such as Wallace, Haidilao, Tongcheng Travel and other official catering and hotel and travel accounts.

However, probably because it has just been opened, there are not many local life businesses currently live streaming, and most of them are tourism-related. The new broadcast field also found multiple Meituan accounts, such as Meituan Outbound Travel, Meituan Nearby Travel, Meituan Sichuan and Chongqing Nearby Travel, and other related accounts.

As early as May last year, it was reported that Video Account had been testing local life services and launched local life components. Leading merchant brands, including Burger King China, have successfully launched group purchase vouchers in Video Account live broadcast rooms. Video Account has realized the construction of local life infrastructure such as voucher transactions, in-store ordering, and home delivery.

Afterwards, according to relevant reports, merchants have gradually received invitations to internal testing of the local life business of Video Account.

Now, after nearly a year of internal testing, Video Account is finally open for users and has officially entered the local life market.

02 Should merchants join the game?

Video accounts’ attitude towards local life does not seem to be very clear.

Before the opening of local life stores, the three first-level categories of Video Account Showcase - travel and leisure, life services, and travel and transportation - stopped opening new merchants to Video Account Stores and Mini Program Video Account transaction component merchants. These three categories contain a total of 15 second-level categories and 44 third-level categories, all of which are related to local life services. This action was also interpreted as Video Account pressing the pause button on local life services.

However, a week later, Video Account opened up to local life businesses such as catering, hotels and tourism.

At a Tencent analyst conference call on March 20, Martin Lau said that local services are not the current focus, and that the focus is more on providing content to help partners such as Meituan promote their local life businesses.

This can also explain why Video Account started testing the local life scene not too late, but has only opened up to users today; and it can also explain why there are so many Meituan-related accounts under the local life section today.

A Cheng (pseudonym), the head of a local life service provider on platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, said that they are currently helping businesses to enter the video account. "It is mainly because the businesses we serve have demand. What they like about the video account is that it is easier to spread."

However, according to Acheng, there are currently no local life service providers for Video Account.

Acheng started to participate in the local life business of Video Account last year, mainly businesses like hourly delivery and local delivery.

"It's not quite the same as takeout. It's mainly for delivery in a certain area, mainly to supermarkets and department stores." He said that after they tried it for a while, they found that the data was still quite impressive, with probably several hundred or thousands of orders a day.

Regarding the fact that Video Account has begun to focus on local life, he believes that the advantage of Video Account lies in its strong private domain. For example, the reservation value plus the entire effective private domain traffic can leverage public domain traffic, so relatively speaking, the fission and push will be more complete, which is conducive to merchants to accumulate and continue operations in the later stage.

However, in his opinion, since the local life of video accounts has just started, the streaming mechanism and commercialization are not perfect, and many people have not figured out how to do it.

"At present, most merchants entering the video account market still hold the idea of ​​having a chance to occupy the market first, and they don't know what the effect will be after entering." He finally said.

In addition to local delivery and group buying businesses, institutional personnel have revealed to Xinbochang that Video Account plans to launch food delivery live streaming, similar to Meituan’s “Sharpshooter”, but there has been no further news.

03 The battle for local life is in full swing

Nowadays, the local life track has long been a battleground for supremacy with smoke of war everywhere.

According to media reports, in March this year, there was a major adjustment in the structure of Douyin's life service department. The original three parts of in-store catering, in-store comprehensive and hotel and tourism departments were divided into the North, Central, South regions and NKA department according to their regions.

According to Douyin's official report, the total transaction volume of Douyin's life service platform increased by 256% in 2023, and its stores covered more than 370 cities. According to Haitong International's research report data, Douyin's local life GTV (total transaction volume) accounted for about one-third of Meituan in 2023, close to 200 billion yuan.

According to LatePost, Douyin's sales in the life service sector in the first quarter of 2024 have exceeded 100 billion yuan, an increase of more than 100% over the same period last year.

Kuaishou also continues to focus on local life, and at the Juli Conference in March this year, it shouted the slogan "All group purchases are worth redoing on Kuaishou."

Xiao Gu, senior vice president of Kuaishou and head of the local life business unit, revealed that in Q4 2023, the number of users who placed orders for local life on Kuaishou increased by 23 times year-on-year, and GMV increased by 25 times year-on-year. The average monthly shopping amount of users who placed orders on the Kuaishou platform exceeded 1,000 yuan, and the average daily usage time of active daily users exceeded 2 hours.

Meituan, the big brother of local life, entered the live short video track after feeling the threat from the short video live streaming platform: it opened a first-level entrance for live streaming and launched a "video" label in the center of the menu bar at the bottom of the homepage, thereby grabbing user time and enhancing user stickiness by providing content supply.

Another new entrant is Xiaohongshu.

In May 2023, Xiaohongshu launched the group buying function; in July, Xiaohongshu launched the store exploration cooperation center and launched the "100 Store Exploration Plan"; in September, Xiaohongshu announced the local life MCN incentive and support plan; in December, Xiaohongshu added two first-level entrances, "Nearby" and "Spring Festival", to the top bar of the APP homepage to promote the exploration of local life.

In addition, according to 36Kr, Xiaohongshu Local Life has established three major development strategies in 2024, involving three aspects: city layout, track selection, and marketing strategy.

Indeed, from Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu to Video Account, wherever there is traffic, there is business. The local life, which relies on offline big cake, can not only bring new business models to the platform, but also bring new traffic growth possibilities.