B Station e-commerce must pass three tests

Nowadays, all platforms are involved in e-commerce, and Bilibili is no exception. This article describes the situation and trends of Bilibili's e-commerce in recent years.

In 2024, Bilibili refreshed its presence at the live streaming e-commerce table.

On March 7, Bilibili submitted its fourth quarter and full-year financial report for 2023. The report showed that Bilibili achieved positive operating cash flow for the whole year of 2023, with a positive operating cash flow of 640 million in Q4. CEO Chen Rui officially set the key node for turning losses into profits as Q3 2024 during a conference call.

Over the past year, B Station has given priority to improving e-commerce infrastructure and incubating more UP hosts. Externally, B Station has reached a closer product pool cooperation with Maogoupin with a large open-loop strategy, and further opened up the permission to jump to Taobao live broadcast from within the station at the beginning of this year; internally, it upgraded the Huahuo platform and launched the "Supernova Plan" to pave the way for UP hosts to sell goods through live broadcasts.

From a content community to an e-commerce company, Bilibili is no longer hesitant and is working hard on the road to e-commerce. However, looking back at the platform's past business moves, Kas believes that if Bilibili wants to achieve the goal of turning losses into profits through e-commerce, it still has "three hurdles" to overcome.

01 Can good content create good business?

At the 2024 AD TALK conference, Li Ni, Vice Chairman and COO of Bilibili, said, "Investing in Bilibili is investing in young people, investing in new consumption power and new consumption growth, and investing in the present and the future."

To some extent, the high density of young people is indeed one of the characteristics that distinguishes Bilibili from other Internet communities. Data shows that the average age of Bilibili users is around 24 years old, and the coverage rate of Z+ generation users reaches 65%. Geographically, they are mainly distributed in first- and second-tier cities. This group of people has a higher level of education and a stronger willingness and ability to consume.

However, young and energetic users have brought a "double-edged sword" effect to Bilibili. On the one hand, among several mainstream communities, Bilibili is the platform with the highest requirements for content quality. Young users pursue content quality and are keen to express themselves, so you can see a lot of in-depth and professional content on Bilibili, and the comment area often sees high-quality interactions.

But on the other hand, users are easily "stubborn" because of the seriousness of the content. In the past few years, there have been many UPs that have "turned over" because of their content. The most typical case may be Director Ao. The reason is that in the process of rapid development, celebrities often do not use too rigorous content in order to realize cash and traffic. On other platforms, users may just muddle through, but on Bilibili, "eating rotten food" may bring the risk of "collapse" . For a long time, this has been one of the important reasons why Bilibili's business atmosphere is not strong and UP masters have difficulty in "monetizing".

On Bilibili, the connection between brand placement and content is much closer. Low-quality, overloaded marketing efforts not only fail to attract users' minds, but also easily cause resentment. If merchants want to achieve brand-effect integration on Bilibili, they must abandon the rule of "traffic first" and deeply bind products with influencers' personalities and content, turning business into content itself.

From the winning works of the B station "Fireworks Award", we can see the ideal business order form that the platform hopes for: in the video "Tom and Jerry 2.0" co-produced by the domestic pet food brand Honesty Yikou and the cute pet UP host @奶糕成精档案社, the UP host used "freeze-dried into spirits" as a creative point, accurately captured the pet's expression and movements, reproduced the famous scene of "Tom and Jerry", and filmed a drama in which milk cake and hamster competed for the right to keep the freeze-dried hamster. This high-quality business order eventually received 8.93 million views on the site and was listed as the 222nd weekly must-see on B station. Users commented that "Party A made a fortune."

Image source: UP @奶糕成精档案社

In terms of deeply reaching the minds of young consumers, Bilibili has its unique advantages, but as Li Hao, the founder of Kas, repeatedly emphasized in the "Global Growth Strategy Class", the content-heavy nature actually increases the difficulty for merchants to successfully market on Bilibili. In the ecological environment of Bilibili, brands compete not only with the advertisements of their competitors, but also with a large number of UP hosts who generate electricity for love.

This also means that if a merchant does not have strong enough strength, brand influence and budget, or is not sensitive to content, it will be difficult to do good marketing on Bilibili.

02 What are the new commercialization trends of Bilibili in the past year?

In the stock era, B station obviously hopes to become an incremental player in the industry. In the past year, B station has started the process of "finding gaps and filling them up" and made many adjustments to its business structure and profit model.

"Blue link to bring goods" is undoubtedly one of the new business trends of B station. Blue link refers to a blue link to bring goods that the UP host inserts and pins to the top of the business order video comment area, usually accompanied by a paragraph of UP host's recommendation copy, and users can jump to the product purchase page by clicking. This marketing tool is often used as a supporting facility for brands to place UP hosts. After the content is planted, the product is directly linked to the transaction scene, taking the path of "content + bringing goods" that B station is good at.

Since last year, many brands, even white-label ones, have linked their products with UP hosts with health benefits and health-related content, and grafted Blue Link onto Taobao or live streaming, thus achieving good results. Huoshaoyun data shows that in February this year, the number of products sold on B Station Blue Link was four times that of last year, exceeding 70,000, and the categories of products sold were concentrated in snacks and beverages, beauty and skin care, and health products.

When the brand power is not enough to "fight" with big brands, Bluechain has also become one of the channels for small and medium-sized brands to "rise to the top". Kas found that many functional and health products have achieved expansion on Bilibili through the "Bluechain + seeding and flow" method. For example, among the TOP3 brands with goods on Bilibili in February, Miaojie and Ruisi both used this combined delivery model. The former is an emerging massager brand that has carried out a "wide-net" delivery on Bilibili; the latter's main product is vitamins, and on the TOP50 list of the month, similar health products include Notland and Airenkang health products.

Exploring the model of "fast-tracking" health products on Bilibili, some cooperated with fitness and sports UP hosts, while others directly cultivated special advertising accounts and then invested heavily to increase exposure. For example, Airenkang's advertising on Bilibili used the experience of experts who successfully lost weight from a large base as material, and relied on investment to frequently appear in content recommendation positions to "force" user attention. With the help of investment tools, a video of Airenkang's grass-seeking video received 17 million views, but the user interaction rate was very low, with only more than 300 comments.

In addition to Bluechain, another business trend is live streaming. In 2023, B Station had a fashion UP host @鳥牡梨, who brought 50 million in sales in a single show. As a benchmark for verifying the consumption power of women on the station, @大物是也, who has broadcast three shows, has a single GMV of over 10.21 million.

Another live streaming sales expert in the fashion zone, @Coco敲敲_, achieved a GMV of over 17 million in a single session with 500,000 fans.

Image source: B station UP @Coco敲敲_

Looking back at Coco's success, one reason is that apparel is easier to sell. From Zhang Dayi and Xue Li in the era of Weibo and Taobao to the first batch of top sellers on Douyin and Xiaohongshu, it has been verified that when a platform starts live e-commerce, apparel is likely to be the best-selling category.

The high conversion rate of clothing is due to the fact that live broadcasts essentially need to produce content, and clothing itself is both a commodity and content, especially for fashion bloggers. Previously, there were many users who "asked for the same style" under the fashion videos, and when this scene was transferred to the live broadcast room, the user's decision-making link was greatly shortened, and conversion could be achieved as long as the blogger's outfit was good-looking.

On the other hand, it is because of the strong functionality of Coco's live broadcast . In the early days of entering the station, Coco targeted the women's clothing track, and the content focused on fashion wear and shopping sharing. In subsequent updates, she consciously combined her body characteristics and shared good things with keywords such as "covering flesh", "not showing fake hips", and "looking thin", hitting the consumption pain points of users with the same pear-shaped body. On Bilibili, Coco has accumulated 500,000 fans. Although the growth rate of fans is slow, the fans are very loyal and sticky.

In summary, the functionality of the account is greater than the content and fun, which is the main reason why Coco can sell well. This is slightly different from @鳥牡梨's "content-driven sales" path, but the commonality between the two is fan consumption, and fans first plant the seeds and then go to live broadcasts. Since the traffic of B station live broadcast is still shallow, the live broadcast rooms of influencers often rely on fans to "support the scene", so the high stickiness of fans is very important.

For B站, which has been in e-commerce for a year, the platform has not produced many benchmark cases, and some UP hosts have chosen to return to their comfort zone after trying live streaming due to poor results. However, B站’s determination to enable UP hosts to sell goods through live streaming is evident: in February this year, B站 launched live streaming investment promotion for home decoration, clothing and beauty. In April, it also launched investment promotion for key spring and summer content, covering multiple fields such as node marketing, large-scale events, documentaries, etc.

03 Bilibili e-commerce must pass three tests

For Bzhan, on the road to e-commerce, Kas believes that the platform still has "three hurdles" to solve.

First, the premise of ecological establishment is infrastructure, and the e-commerce infrastructure of Bilibili is not yet perfect. Having stayed in the two-dimensional community for too long, Bilibili does not yet have mature e-commerce genes. Therefore, when Xiaohongshu blew the horn of "buyer e-commerce", the platform was still struggling to improve its e-commerce infrastructure. Based on the special community ecology, Bilibili could not "copy" the mature e-commerce model of Douyin and Kuaishou.

The immaturity of infrastructure is more reflected in the immaturity of the live streaming mechanism in terms of UP hosts’ live streaming sales. UP hosts and their teams lack experience in live streaming sales, and they also need to work with Taobao merchants. The smooth “uploading link” process of Douyin and Kuaishou is a difficult problem for Bilibili, which is just trying out live streaming e-commerce. For example, @Coco敲敲_’s live streaming room also had discount mechanisms and link bugs, which resulted in users’ order prices not matching the live streaming prices.

From the platform level, since it is difficult for Bilibili to provide UP hosts with a sufficient pool of goods, the platform has chosen a large open-loop strategy that is closely integrated with traditional e-commerce platforms such as Maogoupin. In 2024, Bilibili will further deepen its ties with Taobao, and users can jump to Taobao live broadcast rooms with one click from the site.

However, the open-loop strategy also means that in addition to the traffic loss caused by the long conversion link, Bilibili also faces multiple challenges such as platform competitiveness and product after-sales service. To attract more merchants and brands, Bilibili must provide a more intelligent expert matching mechanism, lower the threshold for cooperation with UP masters, and improve the product for measuring the effect of planting grass, so as to dispel the concerns of merchants with strong conversion data.

Bilibili is also accelerating the process of filling the gap in ecological infrastructure. In 2023, Bilibili launched the "Spark Plan" and "Beijing Fire Plan" to provide advertisers with crowd insight data and post-investment effect analysis, including the collection, search, browsing, and repurchase data of Bilibili users on the platform.

Secondly, even the most extreme content may not necessarily lead to ideal sales. In the case of economic downturn, brand marketing budgets also decline. In the past, brands would pay more attention to the concept of "brand effect", talk about brand concepts and content on Bilibili, and settle the minds of young people. However, in recent years, more and more brands have begun to pay attention to ROI, and "whether they can bring goods" has become their primary concern. The problem facing UP hosts is that even if the content has been perfected, "conversion" is still a mystery. Some people will "thank Party A" for bringing goods to UP hosts, while others will choose to pull the progress bar.

Also, traffic is expensive. Expensive traffic is a common problem faced by all platforms, but the impact on Bilibili may be greater. Since most of the popular content on the site is long videos, the video production cycle of UP masters is longer and the content cost is also increased. This makes the unit price of UP masters' commercial cooperation videos actually higher than short videos. In the case of uncertainty in traffic and sales, the brand's trial and error expectations and costs are also increased.

At present, the live streaming of goods on Bilibili has become verticalized and segmented, such as @大物是也, which specializes in personal care, @Mr迷登, which is in the home track, and @鹰兀梨, which is in the fashion track. However, not all products can run smoothly on Bilibili. A typical case is that the top UP host in the fashion area, Bao Jiansao, live streamed beauty products, but did not receive the expected feedback. Although there are reasons for the decline in traffic dividends in the beauty area and the involution of experts, it is also because the price mechanism obtained by the UP host is not competitive. Since most beauty products are large-scale products, users have developed a mature consumer mentality and will subconsciously compare prices across the entire network. On Bilibili, the TOP1 beauty blogger does not get as many goods as Li Jiaqi.

How to help UP hosts find suitable goods is also a problem that Bilibili needs to solve on the road to e-commerce.

It is difficult for a general product like a 9.9 yuan garbage bag to be popular on the platform. Users obviously hope that UP hosts will combine their own vertical categories and professional selection of products; for example, fresh fruits, which have high requirements for the supply chain, are not suitable for most UP hosts, and @王师傅与小毛毛’s failure is a precedent.

In addition, large-scale standard products need to fight price wars. When external platforms have already developed their own advantageous categories, the product selection of Bilibili will only become narrower and narrower. Relatively speaking, home furnishing, fashion, personal care, and digital products are relatively easy to monetize, but in these areas, Bilibili still needs more benchmarks.

In short, both the product and the UP host are indispensable. Now that Bilibili has decided to move into live streaming e-commerce, the next question the platform needs to answer is: How can the UP host support Bilibili's e-commerce ambitions?

Author: Chao Guan

Source: WeChat public account "CaasData (ID: caasdata6)"