"Second-hand products" are popular, and second-hand luxury merchants have created live broadcast rooms for popular products in batches

"It's not that I can't afford it in the counter, but second-hand is more cost-effective!" The second-hand circle is booming, and a new live broadcast track has emerged. Let's take a look~

"Don't ever buy GUGGI from a store, they'll sell it second-hand for more than half the price."

"The current public price of this bag is over 30,000 yuan, but today it only costs a few thousand yuan in the live broadcast room."

As the live streaming business on various platforms becomes increasingly prosperous, businesses from all walks of life have joined in one after another. Luxury players, as fashion "trendsetters", are no exception and have already "set up the stage" in the live streaming room.

However, due to the high brand positioning of luxury goods, most brands will not open stores or conduct live sales on third-party channels such as Douyin, so it is the third-party merchants who operate second-hand and used products that meet the consumption needs of Douyin users.

According to Kass’s observation, live streaming rooms for second-hand luxury goods have long been a regular on the attention lists of many users, especially during holidays, when they have made their presence felt to the fullest with their high intensity, long duration, and matrix . For example, during this year’s Spring Festival holiday, the second-hand luxury live streaming room @胖虎奢優選 not only did not interrupt the broadcast, but even extended the live broadcast time from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. the next day. The ultra-long standby time has successfully helped the merchants’ business to explode. According to third-party data, from the first to the third day of the first lunar month, @胖虎奢優選 was on the top 5 of the Douyin sales list of the day, with cumulative sales exceeding 20 million.

Amidst the grand occasion, we can’t help but wonder, when luxury goods, which stand at the top of the price contempt chain, enter the live broadcast room focusing on “low prices”, is the future really bright?

1. Second-hand luxury merchants "chasing the trend"

Being in an industry that relies on fashion and trends for its survival, it goes without saying that second-hand luxury merchants are extremely sensitive to opportunities and traffic. Basically, they can be seen wherever there is traffic.

As early as 2018, when Douyin had just entered its high-speed growth period, second-tier luxury platforms such as Feiyu and Panghu rushed in and started regular live broadcasts on the Douyin platform with the help of Douyin's "FEED flow" test. Some live broadcast rooms even adopted the "24-hour non-stop" live broadcast mode in the early trial stage, hoping to quickly attract users' attention.

In addition to the second-hand luxury goods e-commerce trading platform, there are also some offline second-hand stores opened in luxurious downtown areas, or institutions whose core business is to provide second-hand luxury goods identification, recycling, consignment, exchange, maintenance, etc., which have also joined the Douyin live broadcast team, not only broadening the customer acquisition, sales and supply channels, but also increasing brand awareness.

It is not difficult to understand why they chose to enter the live broadcast room early. On the one hand, the business model of second-hand luxury physical store merchants is "buy out and resell", which has great inventory pressure, but the customer coverage is very narrow. By promoting and trading in the live broadcast room, they can leverage more supply and demand and promote the acceleration of business processes.

On the other hand, the original pricing of luxury goods includes many brand premium factors. After leaving the counter, the price of the product will be greatly discounted. Second-hand merchants have a lot of room for operation, which is indeed very suitable for the slightly dramatic field of live broadcasting. One sentence after another of inflammatory words and seemingly "unconventional" prices are all stimulating the audience's desire to place orders in the live broadcasting room.

Screenshot of Douyin Ershe live broadcast room

In addition, with the changes in public aesthetics in recent years, many "old items" have hit the hearts of consumers again, and the concept of "second-hand products" has gradually become popular and accepted by more and more people. This undoubtedly adds fuel to the live broadcast of the second-hand luxury industry.

With the support of live streaming, many phenomenal cases that emerged at that time are still active in front of the public today, such as Zi'an of Feiyu, Dong Bowen of Xinshang, Xishao of Fat Tiger and others, who are still the top anchors in the second-hand luxury goods track of Douyin.

2. The “three tricks” of second-tier luxury players

Fast forward to 2024, the performance of the second-hand luxury track on Douyin can be said to be becoming more and more active.

According to the Douyin New Gravitation-2023 Douyin Luxury Industry White Paper, in the first half of 2023, the average monthly search volume of the Douyin luxury industry exceeded 140 million, the average monthly short video playback volume exceeded 11 billion, and the average monthly viewing of related live broadcast rooms exceeded 20 billion. More and more users are accustomed to browsing related content and consuming related products on Douyin.

Why do second-hand luxury live broadcast rooms frequently produce hits? By observing multiple popular second-hand luxury accounts on the platform, Kas summarized the "three tricks" of second-hand luxury merchants.

First of all, in terms of the design of the account itself, most of these merchants show the characteristics of "focusing on personality and neglecting content", and the more mature second-hand luxury brands are expanding their influence by building an account matrix.

For example, @桔夕静文 is one of the top accounts in the second-hand luxury industry on Douyin, and is also one of the accounts in the Orange Xi luxury product matrix. According to Kas’s observation, this account broadcasts live 6 times a week, starting at 8 a.m., with a single live broadcast duration of 3-4 hours, a single-game sales of 1 million to 2.5 million, and a monthly sales of 2.5 million to 5 million. Overall, the results are very impressive.

Observing the operation of the account in detail, the four lines of words on the personal introduction on the homepage describe the identity, characteristics and broadcast time of the anchor. It is worth noting that she emphasizes that she can bring "a shopping experience full of professionalism and affinity". With the smiling head portrait and banner on the homepage, her personal image becomes more vivid, making the account more personalized, and users' trust in her will continue to increase.

@桔夕静文 account screenshot

Judging from the short videos she has released, most of the content is Jingwen sitting in front of the camera and sharing some knowledge about luxury goods, including prices, brand stories, applicable scenarios, etc. The scope is very wide, but the video duration is mostly around 30-40 seconds, and a lot of information is just "just a brief introduction". The introduction of the content is not very in-depth, and the data performance of the video is not good. The update frequency of her short videos is maintained at 2-3 per week, which is slower than other bloggers.

It is not difficult to see from this information that the team's positioning of the account is live streaming, and they do not want to invest heavily in content. The purpose of making short videos is actually to establish a rich and reliable personal image for the anchor.

In addition to Jingwen, Juxi also has a series of "human" accounts such as @桔夕三万精选, @桔夕甄選泽, and @桔夕佳佳. Different accounts create different personalities to meet the needs and preferences of different users.

In addition to Jiexi, many more mature second-tier luxury merchants such as Feiyu, Panghu, Xinshang, and Angeli have adopted the method of building a matrix to expand their live broadcast teams and influence.

Screenshot of Douyin related matrix account

Secondly, judging from the live broadcast that second- hand luxury merchants pay the most attention to, most of them are adhering to normal store broadcasts while further enriching the subjects participating in live broadcast sales. "Store broadcast + (own) personal account live broadcast + top/celebrity influencer sales" has become a common choice.

In the live broadcast room, merchants have designed many tricks and ways of playing for the audience. At present, there are two main styles of mainstream second-hand luxury live broadcast rooms on the platform:

The first type is that the anchor plays the role of a shopping guide in an offline store, waiting for the audience to order and select bags in the live broadcast room, and attracting the audience to place orders through professional and detailed explanations and demonstrations. This type of live broadcast room is obviously different from other vertical live broadcast rooms. It looks much more "deserted" and does not deliberately create a strong atmosphere for placing orders.

This may be related to the positioning of the products in the live broadcast room. The users screened out with high average order value are higher than the basic user base of the platform. Facing such a group of people, if the environment is made very noisy, it will bring a sense of cheapness and being disturbed, causing the audience to question the professionalism of the live broadcast room, thereby reducing their desire to buy.

In addition, the goods in the live broadcast room are mainly from mainstream luxury brands such as Chanel and LV. Some popular items that are hard to buy in counters are also put on the shelves to attract users to go to the shopping cart to choose.

Screenshot of Douyin related matrix account

The anchors in the second type of live broadcast room are not much different from those in regular live broadcast rooms. They will stand in front of the camera and talk about a bag in half a minute, and remind the audience to place an order as soon as possible with the sound of "three, two, one, link up". If they are late, they can only "pat their thighs".

Interestingly, the second type of "flow-type hot-selling live broadcast room" performs better in various data, and almost all of the top ten second-luxury live broadcast rooms on the platform last month are of this type. The key point is that the goods in this type of live broadcast room often come from MCM, COACH and other niche light luxury brands, mixed with some big-name unpopular bags. Such a plate of goods is much more affordable in terms of price , and the stock of single items is more sufficient, which is conducive to the anchor to increase the GMV of the live broadcast room.

Screenshot of the live broadcast room of the second luxury account ranked high on Douyin

Of course, no matter which category, there are more or less some "little routines" in the second-hand luxury live broadcast rooms: for example, the anchor will guide the customers during the live broadcast, "If you want to see the detailed pictures of the quality, you can take a picture of the goods first and send a private message to the assistant to prevent them from being snatched away by others"; or give "benefits" to fans in the live broadcast room, promising to meet certain data and then use the price of 1999 or 2999 to buy a popular model of a big brand for the audience... These operations may cause the same item to be bought multiple times, and the customer will be contacted for a refund after the live broadcast, but the enthusiasm and sales when they grab the items are "real" left in the live broadcast room.

In addition, because the consumer group of luxury goods is relatively fixed, although the total number of consumers is small, the repurchase rate is very high, which requires merchants to pay more attention to the operation of private domains. Therefore, many merchants on Douyin will guide users to add their WeChat fan groups by promising to send cash back red envelopes, lifelong care and other discounts and services in the live broadcast room, and then promote various new products and activities in the group to transfer the core user group to their own private domain operations.

3. Is there a future for selling second-hand luxury goods on new traffic platforms?

The prosperity of various new traffic platforms has undoubtedly become a powerful weapon to help the second-hand luxury industry open up a larger market.

In addition to Douyin, many second-hand luxury merchants have appeared on platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, and Video Account. Merchants have combined their own realities with the characteristics of different platforms to find business strategies that suit them and usher in rapid growth. Among them, Xiaohongshu, which is known for its exquisiteness, has the strongest momentum.

According to Kas's observation, the business logic of second-hand luxury merchants on Xiaohongshu is very different from that on Douyin, because the browsing habits of users on the two platforms are very different. Merchants on Xiaohongshu are better at using short video content as their entry point.

For example, @青奢汇奢回收借售中心 is a popular second-hand luxury account on the platform. The person on the account, Qingjie, is a small boss who owns a physical second-hand luxury store in Chengdu. Her works focus on her daily work, and she films the stories that happen between her and different sellers in reality into jokes, and introduces some luxury market conditions and her own views on various products.

In her videos, you can really see a lot of "disparities in the world": there is a 19-year-old rich second-generation who was given a classic brand-name bag by his mother, but he felt it was not distinctive, so he decided to sell it and get a colorful but useless bag in the eyes of the public; there is a "lucky guy" who used the house payment to buy a bag three years ago, and now wants to sell it to buy a house, but finds that the money lost from the bag and the money from the depreciation of the house are almost the same; there is also a "casual sister" who wanted to challenge herself to buy an Hermès bag to match her newly bought coat without spending any money, but finally sold the coat together to make up the number... All kinds of humorous plots have really attracted a lot of fans for Qing Jie. At present, the account has accumulated 602,000 fans on Xiaohongshu, and the data performance of daily works is also very impressive.

Screenshot of Qingjie's Xiaohongshu video

It is worth noting that according to observations, after using short videos to attract interested users, most Xiaohongshu merchants will subsequently direct traffic into their own private domain for in-depth operations by establishing groups.

It is obvious that the development of the second-hand luxury industry on the new traffic platform is not bad, but the challenges it faces are still severe: on the one hand, second-hand goods cannot avoid the judgment of authenticity and defects, but different people have different judgment standards, and disputes are easy to arise between buyers and sellers. The only way to solve this problem is to introduce a definite industry standard as soon as possible, but from a practical point of view, this operation is quite difficult;

On the other hand, as the number of second-hand luxury accounts on various platforms continues to increase, competition in the track is becoming increasingly fierce, resulting in rising traffic costs and declining gross profit margins for merchants. It is likely that they will no longer be able to make money simply by relying on online live broadcasts. However , it is not only difficult to convert public domain users into their own private domains, but the platform itself is also unwilling to see this situation. How can we complete the closed loop of traffic? This may be a question that second-hand luxury merchants need to think about seriously.

Author: Jiang Bei; WeChat public account: Kas Data