Looking at 618, the five major platforms’ gameplay preview

This article summarizes the 618 promotion trends and highlights of platforms such as Douyin, Tmall, and Xiaohongshu, showing that major merchants are trying to reverse the previous downturn this year. Today, when customers have learned to "consume rationally", perhaps a sincere promotion mentality and high-quality products will break through the siege.

Can this year’s 618 break away from last year’s calmness and downturn?

Last year, under the influence of objective factors such as the economic environment and the epidemic, the 618 e-commerce festival, which was once "grand", was labeled as the "coldest in history". The voices about discounts and promotions on major platforms were relatively small, and users also returned to rational consumption, with relatively restrained consumption behavior.

However, as the overall environment gradually recovers, major platforms seem to have new confidence in 2023's 618, and have released different policies and signals. In such an environment, will this year's 618 fall into fierce competition and rivalry? What kind of discounts and policies have the major platforms brought to consumers and brands?

We have collected and compiled the 618 policies and related information currently disclosed by various platforms through various channels. Let’s take a look at what new activities and gameplay this year’s 618 platform has brought.

01 Taobao Tmall - With content as the core, alleviating the traffic anxiety of small and medium-sized businesses

On May 10, Taotian Group held the 2023 618 Merchant Conference. Dai Shan, CEO of Taotian Group, said at the conference that this year's 618, Taobao and Tmall will make a historic and huge investment in user scale. This year, the scale of merchants and products participating in Tmall 618 has reached a new high. It is expected that 60 million products will participate in discounts, 3 million new products will be launched on 618, and 1.45 million merchants will participate.

This year, one of the core directions of Taobao and Tmall is to reduce traffic and operating costs for merchants. Alimama will provide a total of 2.3 billion red envelopes to bring tens of billions of traffic support to more than 1 million merchants. In addition, there are also cost-reduction measures such as freight insurance discounts, supply chain subsidies, credit loan interest rate discounts, and quick payment without handling fees.

In addition, this year Taobao will launch a marketing product exclusively for small and medium-sized businesses during 618 - 618 Good Price Festival. This is the first time that the platform has launched a 10-day exclusive marketing channel for small and medium-sized businesses during 618. During these ten days, Taobao will provide three new support policies for small and medium-sized businesses, including advertising subsidy plan, AI intelligent efficiency improvement plan and business guarantee plan, to alleviate the traffic anxiety of small and medium-sized businesses.

Since last year, the hot topics during the 618 shopping festival are no longer related to pre-sales, discounts, final payments, etc., but more about the impact on users' consumption behavior at the content level. According to data released by Dai Shan, CEO of Taotian Group, the content track has become an increasingly important source of growth for merchants. The number of short video users has increased by 37%, the total time of short video consumption has increased by 18%, the number of live broadcast users has increased by 70%, and the number of people guided into stores by live broadcasts has increased by 100%.

Because of this, "content power" remains the focus of Taobao and Tmall's efforts this year.

According to Future Consumption, during the 618 shopping event this year, more than 50,000 new anchors will debut on Taobao and Tmall, and four special columns will be launched during the event, including new encyclopedias of life, new culture of interests, new scenes of characteristics, and new lifestyles. At the same time, for high-quality content from experts, the platform will also provide traffic support in the information flow, shopping, venues, and outside the site.

Overall, the series of policies launched by Taobao and Tmall this year are all aimed at reducing merchants' operating costs and enabling merchants to achieve certain growth by serving users through content.

02 Douyin e-commerce - increasing content dissemination and selecting key products

On May 11, the Douyin 618 Good Goods Festival Merchants Conference was officially held. The conference officially announced the core gameplay and rhythm of the Douyin e-commerce 618 Good Goods Festival, the promotion access rules, and brought a huge amount of Qianchuan 618 related strategies to merchants.

According to Yan Yuxin, the director of Douyin e-commerce activities, the core of this year's Douyin 618 Good Products Festival is to provide a full driving force for merchants' business through marketing, users, business, financial subsidies and other multi-dimensional gameplay. It is reported that Douyin e-commerce will launch deposit pre-sales, cross-store discounts (invested by merchants), brand mixed capital newcomer gifts, good product live broadcast rooms, 618 short video search and ranking competitions, and selected alliance 618 product selection specials during the 618 period.

From the perspective of commodities, the platform will select key commodities based on commodity transactions, users, services and other performances, and help commodities to explode through zero slot fees, hundreds of millions of traffic incentives, multiple price subsidies, global exposure, and full coverage of traffic diversion, undertaking and conversion. Through the attraction of good prices and good products, it provides merchants with high-quality traffic import and subsidy support to create popular products. "618 Theme Day" and store red envelopes "" will focus on category theme day discounts and store red envelope rights, respectively, and increase the order conversion rate by distributing user benefits.

Focusing on content gameplay, the "Goods Live Room" will provide traffic and product subsidies to merchants and influencers. The "Selected Alliance Category Day" will achieve efficient matchmaking of merchants through multiple resource positions in the Selected Alliance Selection Plaza. The "DouKe 10,000 Orders Plan" will catalyze the birth of merchants' hot products through the large-scale exposure of content inside and outside the site.

In addition, the "Brand Pavilion" and "Brand Carnival" will help merchants realize the revitalization and accumulation of crowd assets through public domain traffic diversion. The "Brand Member Carnival" and "Brand Member Private Domain Game" can accumulate new store members and activate old store members through multiple member rights, laying a solid foundation for the long-term operation of the store.

On the side of Juliang Qianchuan, merchants can get large Juliang Qianchuan red envelope rewards by participating in Juliang Qianchuan's 618 event, and can also get brand advertising and marketing refueling packages through the "Star Plan". At the same time, the co-creation of influencers will provide brands with opportunities to cooperate with top influencers and build resources together, thereby amplifying the dissemination effect of content.

Overall, Douyin e-commerce’s 618 gameplay mainly revolves around traffic incentives and content dissemination, thereby helping merchants achieve short-chain growth and overall efficiency improvement.

03 Kuaishou - Completing shelf scenarios and accurately meeting needs

At the Kuaishou Gravity Conference that just ended, Kuaishou announced new upgrades in four areas: content venues, shelf venues, business tools, and marketing systems, in order to help Kuaishou merchants to detonate their 618 shopping festival.

From the perspective of content, during the 618 Shopping Festival, Kuaishou E-commerce will invest 10 billion platform traffic and 1 billion commodity subsidies, and optimize the rules for traffic distribution, taking low-priced goods, caring services, and high-quality content as the underlying keywords for traffic distribution. The five major traffic support policies, including the Chuanliu Plan, short-term and direct linkage, new business cold start, high-quality talent support, and vertical industry support, can more effectively help merchants seize public domain traffic, and the support intensity is also inclined towards high-quality content.

At the same time, in terms of live broadcast content, Kuaishou E-commerce will also launch live broadcast room big brand subsidies, product pre-sales, live broadcast room consumption gold and other gameplay to help merchants seize the key window period of big promotion competition.

From the perspective of the shelf field, Kuaishou will expand the traffic entrance for independent mall pages, thereby bringing more additional exposure to goods, and shelf recommendations will also "amway" and push products that users like. Merchants can also attract consumer attention and retention by exclusively decorating and upgrading their own store scenes. This upgrade of the shelf field not only meets the needs of cargo owner-type merchants, but also meets the consumer habits of actively searching for shopping, and undertakes more certain consumer needs.

On the business tool side, Kuaishou has launched a new data tool - Brand Cockpit, through which merchants can see their own commercialization data, traffic channel data, after-sales fulfillment and other key information to help store operations. In addition, tools for refined links such as the membership system for private domain operations, full-link empowerment of customer service, and product growth tools will also help merchants solve business problems in a targeted manner.

In addition, in Kuaishou’s promotion registration center, both merchants and influencers can match the 618 promotion plan that suits them, and release the commercial potential of key e-commerce festivals in a precise and efficient manner.

This year, Kuaishou’s strategy for 618 is mainly to fill the more certain field of shelf e-commerce, while providing precise support to operators of different identities to meet the core demands of different groups in a targeted manner.

04 Xiaohongshu - Opening up "notes to promote sales" and focusing on content conversion

For a long time, Xiaohongshu's development in the e-commerce field has been relatively restrained. However, in the past year, from the establishment of a new live broadcast department to the emergence of top live broadcasters such as Dong Jie, Xiaohongshu seems to have found a new direction for commercialization. This makes everyone look forward to Xiaohongshu's performance in the 618 event in 2023.

In the early stage of 618, Xiaohongshu launched a new e-commerce function "Notes Bring Goods", which allows merchants to cooperate with KOLs to drive e-commerce transactions through notes. Merchants with the "Notes Bring Goods" permission can select influencers on the platform for linking cooperation. For influencers, the platform has set up an independent note-based product selection center, where influencers can directly link products when posting notes. Currently, a single note supports multiple product links.

According to relevant media reports, merchants and influencers who participate in the note-based sales are settled in the form of commissions, which are settled monthly based on the order dimension. The amount of commission earned by the blogger = effective sales amount * CPS commission rate set by the merchant * (1-platform technology fee). When withdrawing cash, individual bloggers will be charged a 10% comprehensive service fee, while MCN-signed bloggers or independent studio bloggers will not be charged a comprehensive service fee.

In the past, business cooperation notes would display the word "Sponsored" in the lower right corner of the content, but this time the content of the notes with goods is not significantly different from ordinary notes. At the same time, during the 618 period, the platform will reward product notes and notes with goods at different levels of exposure, and display them weightedly on the recommendation page and search page.

At present, the information and gameplay disclosed by Xiaohongshu during the 618 period are mainly centered around the content of notes. For more gameplay and delivery strategies, please continue to pay attention to the [Sprint 618] series of live broadcasts on the Clour Video Account. We will also organize and publish the live broadcast content in the future.

05 Video Account - Focus on private domain conversion and reduce service fees

Recently, Video Account has also launched a video account live broadcast promotion incentive plan. Merchants and influencers can get traffic incentives by starting to broadcast during the event period and meeting the threshold on the spot, which will bring new driving force for the development of e-commerce on the platform. All accounts that meet the conditions for starting to broadcast on Video Account, start broadcasting during the validity period of the event and meet the conditions of selecting the "shopping" category to start broadcasting + opening the window function, can participate in incentive activities such as appointment coupon incentives, GMV target task incentives, technical service fee reduction incentives, and list ranking incentives.

It is worth mentioning that the appointment coupon incentive has introduced a new private domain incentive gameplay. If the anchor introduces specific private domain source audiences during the event and completes the conversion, the platform will issue traffic coupons at a certain ratio based on the actual settlement order amount of the user who has not applied for a refund after the post-sales period. Generally speaking, the more audience transactions the anchor introduces, the more traffic coupons the platform will reward you with.

In addition, Video Account will reduce the technical service fee rate during the 618 promotion, and the entire site can enjoy a discount of 1% on the technical service fee rate. This preferential policy applies to all merchants in the Video Account ecosystem, including Video Account Store merchants, WeChat Mini Program Video Account transaction component merchants, and WeChat Mini Program upgraded version custom transaction component merchants.

In addition, starting today, WeChat official account pictures and texts can also be inserted into the product cards of WeChat video account stores, further realizing the commercial linkage between the two content ecosystems of official accounts and video accounts. Merchants can access this function by binding their official accounts and video accounts and opening the video account showcase.

In general, the series of policies launched by Video Account on June 18th pay more attention to the linkage between merchants' private domain conversion and content. The continuously lowered service fees aim to attract more merchants and users to carry out business layout on Video Account, thereby highlighting the e-commerce function of Video Account.

As the first 618 after the industry rebounded, all major platforms are full of confidence in this promotion. Greater investment, more comprehensive preparations, and more diverse gameplay all seem to indicate that this year's 618 will be lively. All major platforms have made full preparations, and we look forward to what the market will say in a month.

Author: Dake

Source: WeChat public account "TopKlout"