Double 12 e-commerce promotion is quiet

This year's Double 12 seems to be particularly quiet, and the presence of Double 12 is relatively low. This article analyzes the reasons for the sluggish Double 12 from the perspective of the platform's low-key invisibility, the anchor's mediocre performance, and the high-level vacation in advance, and the merchants fish in troubled waters. Recommended for people who want to understand the e-commerce industry.

The last excitement of Double 12 last year: Even though Xue Li and Lin Shanshan have withdrawn, Taobao Live still has two top anchors, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, and major brands still want to seize the last big promotion of the year.

This year, the popularity of Double 12 has almost died down. Shopping guides and promotional posters on major social platforms have disappeared. Li Jiaqi's Double 12 preheating was also late. It was not until December 8 that he sent a Weibo post: Double 12 is coming soon, what do you want? Even the logo of the Taobao app still shows the "11.11" logo.

"The presence of Double 12 is becoming less and less noticeable. Many merchants have quietly withdrawn from the finals, and everyone has returned to their daily business rhythm." Meng Xue, head of e-commerce for a certain brand, told Times Finance.

1. The platform is low-key and invisible, and the anchors’ performance is mediocre

Back to 2011. At that time, Double 11 had been around for three years and was growing rapidly. Taobao Marketplace leader Yuyan established Double 12 at the request of market sellers. That year, Double 11 brought in 5.2 billion yuan in sales. One month later, the first Double 12 achieved 4.38 billion yuan in sales, almost on par with Double 11.

This year, Taobao and Tmall did not release any pre-launch microblogs for Double 12. It is understood that the promotion rhythm of Taobao, Tmall and JD.com is basically the same, from December 8 to December 12. In terms of discount strength, Taobao will reduce 30 yuan for every 200 yuan spent, while Tmall will reduce 40 yuan for every 300 yuan spent. JD.com's discount strength is consistent with Tmall.

"Almost everything I could buy was bought during Double 11. After counting the items in my shopping cart, it is hard to make impulse purchases again." Like most consumers, Minmin has not yet recovered from the shopping spree on Double 11.

In 2020, since the Double 11 period was extended, the space left for Double 12 is getting smaller and smaller. Moreover, in the past 10 years, major platforms have been happy to create festivals. In addition to major promotional nodes such as Double 11 and 618, a series of promotional activities such as the New Year Goods Festival, Queen's Day, and 818 have emerged, diverting some sales capacity and making consumers who were originally enthusiastic gradually feel tired.

When the target shifted to the live streaming track, the only focus of Double 12 was a big star that Taobao once again wooed.

On December 8, a live broadcast room named "Li Dan" appeared on Taobao Live, and the first show will be officially broadcast on the evening of December 10. Currently, Li Dan's Taobao Live personal account is online and has 28,000 fans.

However, looking back at the past month, the performance of Luo Yonghao and Liu Genghong, who switched to Taobao Live, seems to have encountered a problem of "not adapting to the local environment". Times Finance found that Luo Yonghao's account had a total of 53 live broadcasts, with an average of less than 3 million viewers in the past week. The last live broadcast of Liu Genghong's wife's account "ViVi Feiyou Kakadiao" was on November 9, with a live broadcast audience of no more than 2 million, and no warm-up videos related to Double 12 were updated.

To some extent, the birth of Double 12 was based on the aura of Double 11. The former was positioned to continue to clear the inventory of Double 11. In 2015, the stage of Double 12 was given to new retail. In the more than 10 years since its establishment, Double 12 has never found its core competitiveness.

2. Senior management took a holiday early, and businesses took advantage of the situation

The original intention of establishing Double 12 was to absorb the residual heat of Double 11, and at the same time to attract some small and medium-sized sellers who did not perform well on Double 11. However, as the presence of Double 12 has decreased, small and medium-sized sellers have gradually stopped sticking to long-term and high-intensity preparations.

As a small and medium-sized seller, Li Ming spends the second half of every year on e-commerce promotions, and his busy schedule usually lasts until he finishes shipping all the goods during Double 12. "The growth efficiency of Double 11 in the past two years has been much lower than before, not to mention Double 12." After participating in Double 12 for nine consecutive years, Li Ming chose to withdraw.

Meng Xue used the phrase "fishing in troubled waters" to describe the entire team's attitude towards Double 12. Most employees went to get off work and came home normally, just like they were living an ordinary day.

"The daily sales on Double 11 are six times the usual amount, and on Double 12 it can only reach 2.3-2.5 times the usual amount, which is less than half of Double 11." Meng Xue told Times Finance that like most brand flagship stores, the company puts the focus on Double 11.

According to Meng Xue, the company only brought out classic hits and inventory products to support the Double 12 event this year, and the scale of the event was far less than that of Double 11. With the internal circulation of preferential benefits, the effect that Double 12 could bring is disappearing. No matter how you calculate it, investing heavily in Double 12 is not a good deal.

On the first day of the Double 12 warm-up, Taobao anchor Huihui still maintained a 4-hour live broadcast a day. A month ago, the company's anchors were still crazy about Double 11, with a live broadcast lasting at least 7 hours. The company also tacitly accepted the same fact: no longer going all out for Double 12.

"The head of the e-commerce department has taken a temporary leave, and no one expects a short-term boom in big sales." Due to the high brand awareness of Huihui Live, according to the company's daily operating rhythm, even if it does not participate in Double 12, the daily transaction volume can still be maintained at a normal level.

The difference between the two festivals can also be seen from the number of links of the top anchors. On the pre-sale day of Double 11, the number of links to Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room reached 292, while the number of links on December 9 was less than 100.

On the other hand, the promotion period is also the period of explosive customer complaints on the platform. Last year, L'Oreal was at the center of the storm, this year it was Shiseido and Ecovacs robot vacuum cleaners. The controversial lowest price on the entire network, substandard product quality, price increases followed by price cuts, etc., have become the chronic problems of e-commerce promotions, and have continuously overdrawn consumers' trust.

According to statistics from the Black Cat Big Data Center, the number of valid complaints on the Black Cat Complaint Platform during the Double 11 period exceeded 460,000, a month-on-month increase of 14.72% and a year-on-year increase of 2.36%. Among them, the most popular question was "whether the price guarantee behavior is real and effective", accounting for 28% of the discussion.

After the Double 11 shopping festival ended this year, neither Alibaba nor JD.com announced the GMV figures for Double 11, but used phrases such as "transaction volume is the same as last year" and "creating industry records" instead. The tacit understanding among major platforms points to one fact: it is difficult to reproduce the high-speed growth of Double 11 shopping festival. And Double 12, which lives in the shadow of Double 11 shopping festival, is naturally in an even more embarrassing situation.

(All interviewees in this article are pseudonyms.)

Author: Xu Xiaoqian; Editor: Shi Chengchao

Source: WeChat official account "Times Finance APP (ID: tf-app)"