This year's Double Eleven, the post-00s were the "supporting actors" in the live broadcast room and earned 8,000 yuan a month

As the Double 11 shopping festival approaches, the "supporting role" of live broadcast e-commerce has also become popular. Nowadays, the "supporting role" of e-commerce seems to have become a standard feature of every live broadcast room. What role does he play in the live broadcast room? What does he do? Let's explore it together in this article.

Tianjin crosstalk is "dominating" the live e-commerce industry.

"That's right", "Yes I want it", "Here's the link"... On October 12, a live video of migrant workers' daily work went viral, bringing the "e-commerce supporting role" out of the circle.

The author of the video, Ning Meng, is from Xiaoshan, Hangzhou. She was born in 2001 and is a senior supporting actor. She has been working in the e-commerce industry since June this year and is a member of the "atmosphere control group" of a certain anchor. No one could have imagined that with just a few words, she could receive 16 million views and 251,000 likes, and successfully brought the topic of "Learn these two sentences and you won't be afraid to travel around Hangzhou" to the Douyin hot list.

▲ Screenshot of TikTok video

The topic of "e-commerce supporting actors" continued to ferment, and the supporting actors sitting outside the camera finally became the protagonists, and they all posted their "daily routines" honestly, never letting the host's words fall to the ground. For a time, Hangzhou replaced Tianjin and became the new generation of "supporting actors city".

Netizens were constantly imagining things, with some exclaiming, "Isn't this Zeng Yi in the live broadcast room?" Others dug out the high salary of the field control, "Three words of mantra, bring you a monthly income of 8,000"... Simple, high-paying, and interesting, e-commerce supporting role has become the most desired job for gossipmongers and college students.

However, as the saying goes, "three parts funny, seven parts supporting", it is not as easy as imagined to get the supporting role just right and smoothly connect the previous and the next part.

"Self-quadrant" found that nowadays "e-commerce supporting roles" seem to have become a standard feature of every live broadcast room. On the one hand, it can increase the atmosphere of the live broadcast room by interacting with the anchor; on the other hand, it can create a low-price and tense buying atmosphere, give consumers psychological hints, and accelerate transactions.

An e-commerce practitioner told "Zi Quadrant": "The e-commerce supporting role is not a position. Generally speaking, every live broadcast room will have a field control and a center control. The small anchor is both a field control and a center control, and will also serve as the atmosphere group."

The flapping of a butterfly's wings stirs up a storm. Behind the popularity of e-commerce live-streaming, the behind-the-scenes stories of thousands of live-streaming studios are beginning to come to the fore, and new stories are unfolding.

From the observation of the quadrant, Ning Meng, who became famous for her role as an "e-commerce supporting actor", was fired after that video. The reason behind this is very simple. An e-commerce supporting actor is like an "actor" cooperating with the anchor. It turns out that the so-called "last order" is all rhetoric. To be frank, the routines in the live broadcast room no longer work.

During Double Eleven, if users no longer fall for the tricks, the last layer of window paper for live streaming e-commerce will be broken.

1. How do e-commerce “supporting actors” force orders?

The general impression of e-commerce is that it is non-technical, simple and easy.

Many people think that just joining in a few sentences and creating atmosphere is no different from interrupting the teacher in class, and they don't understand why they can earn 8,000 yuan a month.

▲Image source: Screenshot from Boss Zhipin

But Xu Yan, a practitioner in live e-commerce, told "Zi Quadrant", "In a live broadcast, the supporting role is as important as the host, especially for ordinary hosts whose personal characteristics are not outstanding enough."

Xu Yan told us that the supporting actor has several important roles in the live broadcast room: setting the atmosphere, controlling the rhythm, and most importantly, forcing the audience to make a purchase.

Setting the stage for the atmosphere is easy to understand, which is to pick up the conversation. "If no one responds and the host is the only one talking to himself, it will make him look stupid," said Xu Yan.

Different live broadcast rooms have different configurations. In some large live broadcast rooms, the work of answering questions is done by the assistant, who is on the screen. In some small live broadcast rooms, the work of answering questions is also done by the field control or some operators behind the scenes due to the limited number of people. While answering questions, they may have to operate seven or eight mobile phones at the same time. When the anchor says to deduct "1" or asks questions such as "How many people haven't grabbed it yet", they will frantically post comments in the comment area.

"After reading the barrage, people usually shout to the host, 'There are 20 people who didn't get a ticket!' This is not shouted to the host, but to the audience in front of the screen. The purpose is to create a sense of tension among the audience that many people are scrambling for the ticket. This is the same as offline milk tea shops paying people to queue up," said Xu Yan.

In addition to creating a lively atmosphere in the live broadcast room, another role of the supporting actor is to control the rhythm of consumers in the live broadcast room.

▲Image source: Internet

The supporting actor always repeats "1, 2, 3, go to the link", "Everyone please click on the little red heart on the screen", "Everyone can get the lucky bag in the upper left corner", "Everyone please click on the attention button in the upper left corner"...

"You will find that after entering the live broadcast room, all behaviors are guided." Xu Yan said: "If the audience enters the live broadcast room and has nothing to do, they will quit due to lack of participation. Guiding the audience to do these actions will help retention and generate interaction, and will also create inertia, allowing you to get into his rhythm, so that you will not hesitate to place an order in the end."

"Our supporting roles have fixed rhetoric and rhythm, which can be repeated over and over like a set of punches, ensuring that no matter when the audience comes in, they can get into the rhythm as quickly as possible under the guidance of this rhetoric."

When the user follows the rhythm of the live broadcast room, watches the product, and listens to the host’s introduction, he or she enters the final and most important stage of forcing the purchase.

"Forcing orders" is accomplished by many roles in the live broadcast room. For example, the host will repeatedly emphasize key words such as lowest price, limited inventory, and price increase after sales to create an atmosphere of urgency.

The supporting actor will usually echo the host's "keywords" at this time, such as "Is there any stock? Almost gone; Is it cheap? Very cheap; How is the quality? Guaranteed..." While strengthening the audience's cognition, they also urge the audience to place an order through dialogue.

“Forcing customers to buy something means giving them all kinds of reasons to buy it after it’s on the shelves, such as comparing prices with peers and holding limited-time events to promote transactions,” said An Xu and Zi Quadrant, who are also engaged in live streaming e-commerce. “The core is to take advantage of the audience’s impulse to buy.”

Of course, from the perspective of the operation of the entire live broadcast room, from the host introducing the product to how to hold orders and kick orders, all the speech frameworks have been carefully designed.

▲Image source: Internet

"The formula is very simple: pain point + solution (product introduction) + pricing mechanism + forced order," An Xu introduced.

"When we write copy, we usually emphasize user thinking. For example, we have many selling points, but what are the core pain points of consumers? How does our product solve them? Why must you buy mine? Why must you buy it today? And so on."

When all these things are integrated together, in fact, before forcing a sale, the live broadcast room has already done a lot of product value creation for the audience through the anchor, assistants and supporting actors, and forcing a sale is just the final push to close the deal.

So, from the earliest "family members" to the later "all girls", live streaming with goods has now formed a very perfect logic, starting from various details to jointly promote consumers' transactions, and the supporting actor is just one of the links.

However, this kind of "routine" is not the first to be created by live streaming e-commerce. It is actually also involved in traditional offline supermarkets and retailers.

For example, in supermarkets, the customer flow, product display, promotional displays, and even the color of the lights and the background music played every day are strictly designed. A careful observation will reveal that necessities such as fresh snacks are usually placed at the back, and to buy these things, you have to go through the various daily chemicals and electrical appliances display areas in front; chewing gum, batteries, and family planning products are usually placed near the cash register to facilitate customers to "buy more" when checking out.

From this perspective, all shopping is actually full of "scheming" and "design", it's just that now it's the turn of live streaming e-commerce.

2. Who is forcing the order? Whose order is being forced?

But when the routine was moved to the live broadcast room and was amplified exponentially, it resulted in "there are many routines in the live broadcast room, and users are being treated like leeks."

Malaysia, who often places orders in the Douyin live broadcast room, saw her own "clear stupidity" like a college student through the live broadcast.

“Every time the supporting actor calls out 10 orders, 5 orders, and the last order, I feel that if I don’t grab it now it will be gone. I don’t consider whether I need it or not, I just buy it first and talk about it later,” Malaysia lamented to “Self-Quadrant”: “I was completely stunned by this combination of punches.”

Malaysia said that her shopping habits have shifted from Taobao to Douyin, and she would "passionately place orders" every day after watching Douyin live broadcasts. She has no resistance to factory stores and discounted brands, but after receiving the goods, she found that the price-performance ratio was not as high as she had imagined, and the return rate was as high as 30%.

There are many people who have the same experience as Malaysia. It is precisely because of the many routines that the return rate of Douyin live broadcast rooms is much higher than that of other platforms. After combining the data statistics of multiple merchants, "Zi Quadrant" found that the return rate of women's clothing on the Douyin platform is around 50%-60%, higher than the 10%-20% on the Taobao platform. According to the "2020 China Live E-commerce Industry Research Report", the average return rate of live e-commerce is 30%-50%, higher than the 10%-15% return rate of traditional e-commerce.

Knowing that the return rate is high, why do the anchors still take risks to force orders?

Zhang Jia, the e-commerce practitioner mentioned above, told "Self-quadrant": "Using tricks in the live broadcast room is also forced. The big anchors take away 80% of the traffic and transaction volume. If small and medium-sized anchors want to survive and don't want to perform exaggerated dramas such as 'kneeling' (which can easily lead to account blocking), they can only play some 'little tricks'."

The uneven distribution of the live broadcast industry can be seen from the anchor income data. According to public data, as of the end of 2022, there were more than 150 million anchor accounts in the live broadcast industry. Among the anchors who used live broadcasting as their main source of income, 95.2% had a monthly income of less than 5,000 yuan, and only 0.4% had a monthly income of more than 100,000 yuan.

"E-commerce supporting roles" have become a standard feature of live broadcast rooms, which indirectly confirms that e-commerce live broadcasting has entered the red ocean competition stage. If it is not surprising and innovative, it will be even more difficult to stand out under the strong pressure of big anchors and in the vast ocean of small and medium-sized anchors.

Chen Chen, an analyst of live streaming sales, believes that "a gentleman can be deceived by tricks. The key lies in whether the product quality is up to standard and whether the service is good, not in how the transaction is completed."

Chen Chen said that chasing orders, forcing orders, and holding back orders in live broadcast rooms are now a consensus in the industry. Every e-commerce training school and institution will offer special courses on speaking skills and methodology. For example, there are "welfare products" and "profit products" in every live broadcast room. First, open a few "welfare products" that are almost unprofitable to increase traffic and transaction volume. When the data is growing rapidly, cooperate with investment flow, and then use profit products to force orders, so that the chance of transaction will be greater.

Nowadays, the development of forcing orders has also begun to become "refined". Different categories and different selling points have formed their own set of methodologies in each live broadcast room. For example, for low-priced products, the atmosphere and benefits are emphasized, and the selling points are ignored. They target price-sensitive people, quickly promote orders and close deals, and the explanation time for a single product does not exceed 3 minutes; while for high-priced products, the value (combined with the scene), scarcity (combined with inventory), and marketing are emphasized, such as bird's nest products, and they focus on selling points, pain points, and benefits, without excessive marketing.

To this end, "Zi Quadrant" contacted an e-commerce training institution to ask about the teaching of "forcing orders". In this regard, the other party did not shy away from it, but also emphasized that forcing orders and holding back orders are abilities and skills that many novice and junior anchors need to learn, and holding back prices is a high-level ability that an anchor needs to cultivate. For example, some anchors and central control will adjust prices at any time and dynamically according to the situation on the scene.

“If there are more ‘1’s’ and the willingness to buy is strong, the anchor’s pricing will increase and red envelopes will be distributed in the live broadcast room. Although the transaction price for the user in this field remains unchanged, the transaction price in the future may be further increased, generating long-tail benefits.” The e-commerce training institution responded.

It is visible to the naked eye that the live broadcast room is no longer a simple "buying and selling transaction", but has become a huge Shura field, from the anchor in front of the camera to various positions outside the camera. Live broadcast e-commerce seems to be coming to an end.

Author: Cheng Xin, Editor: Zhou You

Source public account: Zixiangxian (ID: zixiangxian), between the squares, there is a quadrant. Care about science and technology, economy, humanities, and life.