How is the video account live streaming sales? Merchants: Not so competitive, very similar to Douyin in 2020

Live streaming with goods on video accounts has become a highly-watched marketing method, but merchants say it is not that popular yet. This article will delve into the current status of live streaming with goods on video accounts and the views of merchants, revealing the advantages and challenges of this emerging marketing method.

Video accounts have made a new move, this time launching the "Hourly Ranking of Live Streaming". Enter any live streaming room that sells goods, and you can see the ranking of live streaming rooms of different categories through the list.

Some service providers stated that launching the hourly sales rankings online is, to a certain extent, a process in the development of the video account; some practitioners also believe that this means that merchants have a public domain traffic entrance and can get more exposure opportunities.

Since the second half of last year, Video Account has become the focus of the live e-commerce industry. Many businesses have flocked in to open up new business positions. Some people bluntly said that "Compared to Douyin, Video Account is not so popular and traffic is not so expensive."

So, as we enter 2024, what new opportunities and challenges will Video Account have?

01 Video account launches “Hourly Sales Ranking”

There is finally a ranking list for video account e-commerce players!

On February 19, the video account launched the hourly ranking of goods sold, which is divided into the overall ranking, brand ranking and industry ranking. The industry ranking is divided into 9 categories, namely fashion apparel, food and fresh produce, fashion and beauty, household daily necessities, jewelry and collectibles, digital home appliances, pet gardening, books and audio-visual, and maternal and infant toys.

In the live broadcast room, you can see that the hourly ranking of goods sold is ranked according to the heat value. According to the official introduction of the video account, the ranking is comprehensively ranked based on four indicators, including the sales power, attention power, interaction power, and attractiveness of the goods sold in the live broadcast room, and is settled every 4 hours.

Among them, "sales power" considers the sales ability of the live broadcast room, "attention power" considers the attention management and private domain management capabilities of the live broadcast room, "interaction power" considers the interactive atmosphere of the live broadcast room, and "attractiveness" considers the ability to attract new users to purchase and place orders.

At 5 pm on February 20, Xinbochang saw on the list that the top seven in the overall list of the "previous stage" were all clothing live broadcast rooms, and the top three were "yiyi is me", "MY show high-end women's clothing store No. 1" and "Lafite custom women's clothing 1". Among them, the heat value of the top one reached more than 70 million, far ahead of the second place.

Regarding the news that the video account has launched the hourly sales ranking, W, the e-commerce service provider of the video account, told Xinbochang that the video account is currently in the stage of gradual improvement, and the hourly sales ranking is to a certain extent a process of its development.

"For merchants, this means more public domain entrances and more exposure opportunities; for new players who want to enter the market, they can also intuitively see which video accounts' live streaming rooms are doing well and have samples to learn from." Xiao C, a practitioner in the live streaming e-commerce industry, said.

02 Accelerate the pace of live e-commerce

Since the second half of last year, there has been increasing attention and discussion on video accounts within the live e-commerce industry.

In the second half of 2023, Video Accounts vigorously introduced external platform influencers, and there were cases of top influencers selling goods. According to media reports, in March 2023, lifestyle blogger "Guo Yiyi" started live streaming to sell goods on Video Accounts. In September, the monthly GMV exceeded 50 million yuan.

On the brand self-broadcasting side, in 2023, the number of video account brands increased by 281%, GMV increased by 226%, and the number of brand stores with more than 10 million increased by more than 860%.

These impressive data have begun to attract more and more businesses and influencers to turn their attention to video accounts.

A merchant in the jewelry and cultural relics category told Xinbochang that their original main battlefield was Douyin, but they came to Video Account before the New Year and plan to invest heavily this year. He said that after coming to Video Account, judging from the results, he felt that the scale of this industry was second only to Douyin, but the profit was higher than Douyin.

"TikTok's traffic is expensive, refunds are high, and the industry is seriously inward-looking. We in the vertical industry also feel that traffic has become more general, and the number and quality of mid- to high-end users are declining." The merchant said that this is probably closely related to the platform's order volume or low-price strategy.

In addition, Video Account itself is also accelerating the pace of live e-commerce.

On January 9, WeChat Moments can promote video live broadcast rooms. The advertising style is close to the information flow style of WeChat Moments. Users can jump to the video live broadcast room by clicking on the main material, and can directly pull up the shopping cart product list of the live broadcast room by clicking on the secondary material (if there is no shopping cart in the live broadcast room, you can only enter the live broadcast room). WeChat Advertising said that some advertisers’ tests showed that the click-through rate of window ads was 40% higher than that of historical delivery styles, and the conversion rate was 7% higher.

On January 11, at the "2024 WeChat Open Class PRO", Tencent released a set of data on the video account e-commerce business. In 2023, the GMV of the video account increased nearly 3 times, the number of video account orders increased by more than 244%, and the number of commodity supplies increased by about 300%.

On January 29, Ma Huateng delivered a speech at the annual meeting, confirming that live streaming e-commerce will be the direction that WeChat Video Account will focus on this year. Video Account will provide high-quality content through influencers, focus on polishing new tools, improve traffic efficiency and scale, and provide merchants with greater traffic support.

Xinbochang also learned that the video account currently has corresponding incentive policies for off-site anchors and brand merchants, including "expert/merchant cold start support policy", "expert/merchant growth support policy" and "expert/merchant benchmark case support". Different amounts of traffic coupons are given based on the GMV scale outside the site, the GMV of the video account, etc.

According to Yibang Power, the main KPIs of Video Account in 2024 are merchant introduction and GMV. In the first half of the year, Video Account, WeChat Pay and Tencent Advertising will continue to improve the underlying infrastructure, and commercialization will be carried out in the second half of 2024, and the speed may be accelerated in 2025.

03 New opportunities or new challenges?

Video accounts continue to release positive signals, making them a new e-commerce platform favored by more and more brand merchants, and are considered to be a new opportunity for live streaming e-commerce this year.

The person in charge of a liquor brand merchant told Xinbochang that they had previously mainly operated offline stores, but this year they plan to focus on online platforms, and the platform they are considering is Video Account. He said that Douyin's traffic is getting more and more expensive, and Video Account live e-commerce is still in its early stages compared to Douyin. Whether it is creating an account or finding influencers to cooperate with, the cost-effectiveness is higher and it is not so competitive.

However, the new opportunities are real, and it is also a consensus that the current video account is indeed not perfect enough.

W, an e-commerce service provider for video accounts, believes that today's video accounts are very similar to Douyin between 2020 and 2021.

In his opinion, there are three main points: first, the complete commercial traffic system of Video Account has not yet been formed; second, the entire traffic promotion mechanism of Video Account is not yet perfect, including crowd screening, character tags and other aspects; third, although Video Account has a certain scale, it cannot be fully released in some tracks, and the current rules and mechanisms are still stricter than Douyin.

"For example, we set the lowest selling price for some special categories or personal products, and we are also very strict with the sales pitch," he said.

In addition, W also believes that the challenges facing video accounts include user growth. "Now the entire video account ecosystem has increased, but in terms of users, it is still consuming previous e-commerce users. There may still be challenges in how to break through the bottleneck of user growth."

However, both merchants and service providers generally believe that since the signal that Video Account is accelerating live e-commerce is so obvious, there will inevitably be a bonus period in the process of slowly promoting ecological construction.

Therefore, for the live streaming e-commerce industry, video accounts are an important variable worthy of attention. However, whether video accounts can play the role of a "solid grip" as Ma Huateng said still requires follow-up attention, and we also look forward to the emergence of more benchmark cases.

Author: Field sister

Source: WeChat official account: "New Broadcasting Field (ID: New_bc)"