A guide to entering and starting broadcasting on Douyin Box!

My friends, will you use Douyin box instead of Taobao Jingpin?

1. What is TikTok Box?

Douyin Box is an independent e-commerce app developed separately for Douyin's e-commerce business. Currently, Android and iOS users can download it directly through the corresponding application store. Douyin Box is positioned as a trendy and fashionable e-commerce platform for young people.

In fact, long before this, there was news that Douyin would launch an independent e-commerce app in October; but for some reason, it did not go online as scheduled.

Instead, on November 16, ByteDance launched a comprehensive e-commerce app for global users - Fanno.

2. Why does Douyin have to make a Douyin box?

To put it simply, e-commerce business for Douyin is something it wants to do, has to do, and must do.

1. Want to do it

Whether you admit it or not, you have to admit that the purpose of users using Douyin and Kuaishou is to consume content and have fun.

As a result, every three messages now encourage users to buy, and guide users to place orders in the live broadcast room. This is very abrupt and the experience is very bad for users who have not yet formed consumption habits.

Teacher Pan Luan mentioned before:

“There is something called AD-load in the short video feed, which means an ad is inserted for every number of videos you watch. The AD-load is about 8%, which means that there are 8 ads inserted in 100 videos.

You can’t increase this number any more, this is the advertising inventory, there is only so much, otherwise it will affect the user experience."

If e-commerce penetrates too much, reducing the space for pure short video content, will it also affect user experience like advertising?

I think the answer is self-evident.

In one of the current beta versions of TikTok (estimated to be visible to 5%-10% of users), the [Mall] is listed alongside the follow page and recommendation page.

For TikTok, of course, it is based on comprehensive considerations of effective traffic distribution and maximizing traffic conversion efficiency.
But, are you really sure that this does not affect the user experience?

Therefore, Douyin decided to differentiate the content ecosystems, with commonalities but differences, one for entertainment and the other for promoting content.

2. Have to do

In fact, Douyin launched the Douyin box separately for its e-commerce business, and behind this is the contradiction between Douyin's advertising revenue and e-commerce revenue.
Putting the two on the same APP will cause conflicting business logic, and too much e-commerce content will inevitably squeeze the length of short videos.

On the one hand, the commercial monetization method of short video content is advertising, which requires users to click and consume time;

On the other hand, live streaming also requires users to watch for a certain amount of time before transactions can be facilitated;

For example, data shows that in the just-concluded Douyin Double 11 Good Products Festival, there were 577 brands with sales exceeding 10 million (including 100 million) in Douyin's e-commerce live broadcasts, and there were 282 live broadcast rooms with a single-game sales exceeding 10 million (including 100 million).

During this process, the live broadcast room will consume a large amount of users' consumption time, which will inevitably squeeze the users' original content consumption scenarios and duration, causing the corresponding advertising revenue to be threatened from within.

When a certain critical point is reached, will there be a possibility of mutual restraint or even a rise and fall of one at the expense of the other?

I think the answer is: yes.

Although the live streaming e-commerce business is developing rapidly, compared with the advertising revenue of 200 billion, the e-commerce GMV of 100 billion can only bring in tens of billions of revenue.

Therefore, when Douyin wants to continue to expand its e-commerce business, it has to better balance the game relationship between e-commerce business and advertising business.

So how do we expand our e-commerce business?

The entire TikTok Box App alone.

It can not only break through the bottleneck of existing e-commerce business, but also take on more accurate traffic from users' e-commerce behaviors, striving to achieve a win-win situation for existing users and incremental markets.

3. Must do

A few days ago, when I saw the news that Bilibili launched the "Little Yellow Car" function in the live broadcast room, allowing users to place orders while watching live broadcasts, I posted a circle of friends and sighed:

In the future, there may be no social platforms, no short video platforms, and perhaps no community platforms. There will only be e-commerce platforms.
Why?

Not to mention the top platforms like Tik Tok and Kuaishou, the three mid-level platforms: Bilibili, Zhihu, and Xiaohongshu are all moving at full speed on the road of e-commerce.

For example, Xiaohongshu, as one of the most influential portals for promoting content, had a GMV of approximately US$1 billion in 2020, of which e-commerce business revenue accounted for approximately 15%-20% of total revenue.

What about Zhihu?

Zhihu VP Gao Qiang stated at the business conference: Zhihu achieved a GMV of 5 billion through content sales in 2020; in the first half of 2021, it reached 3.52 billion, a year-on-year increase of 148%.

Let’s look at Douyin’s e-commerce actions, from the earliest launch of Douyin Store to ByteDance’s establishment of a first-level e-commerce business department in June last year. Douyin then used Douyin Store to close the loop in the live broadcast room, and later launched Douyin Payment. The Douyin App homepage began internal testing of Douyin Mall, etc. Douyin has gradually improved its e-commerce ecosystem.

The strategic importance of e-commerce business to ByteDance is self-evident.

Douyin e-commerce's GMV in 2020 exceeded 500 billion yuan, more than three times that of 2019. The GMV target for 2021 is 1 trillion yuan.

Everyone knows that compared with advertising and live broadcast rewards, the profit of e-commerce is not high, but the imagination space of e-commerce is too huge, and making 1 trillion is just the beginning.

In addition, in early November, ByteDance’s domestic advertising revenue stopped growing, especially the advertising revenue growth of Douyin, which is known as the "traffic engine", also stagnated.

Douyin must open up a second growth curve, and the e-commerce business naturally assumes this role.

The second reason why we must do this is to give hope to merchants and brands.

Currently, too many merchants are doing live streaming to sell goods on Douyin, and all of them "die" at the first step.
It's the start-up stage.

Douyin’s live streaming sales are very different from Taobao’s, because the live streaming room relies on recommendations to gain traffic, and the recommendation mechanism has various indicators, which makes it impossible for Taobao-based or new merchants to play. This is why those training courses on Douyin’s live streaming sales are so popular.

Merchants are desperate and try all kinds of methods.

When most regular businesses continue to fail to make profits or even suffer losses on Douyin, they may become desperate. The merchants’ desperation or even giving up will make their budgets disappear.

This is certainly not what Douyin wants to see.

Then we can create an independent e-commerce business line to attract merchants and let them make some money. We must develop e-commerce on a large scale, and that’s it.

III. Challenges

Of course, even a traffic factory as strong as ByteDance cannot succeed in making every app. For example, even with 300 Zhihu big Vs completing the cold start, Wukong Q&A still failed to be recognized by the public.

So what challenges will Douyin Box face?

1. User mindset building

First of all, how do users perceive the TikTok box?

We all know that Douyin has proposed interest-based e-commerce. The rapid growth of its interest-based e-commerce is due to its use of [short video content] to stimulate users' interest and release users' [potential consumption] needs in advance.

This is what we often say, goods find people.

Users consume content on Douyin and engage in e-commerce activities incidentally, generating transactions through "shopping".

The mind itself is still entertainment, not a transaction.

At present, the Douyin box is more like the way people search for goods in traditional shelf e-commerce.

So if Douyin Box wants to compete head-on with Taobao, it must have a unique selling point.

Assuming Taobao offers all categories, JD.com focuses on fast logistics, while Pinduoduo focuses on cheap prices.

So what is the unique selling point of the TikTok box?

trend? young people?

I personally think that this selling point or positioning is too vague for user perception.

2. Migration of user consumption habits

The essence of traffic lies in two points: flow of people and retention of people.

• There is naturally no shortage of traffic. Whether it is quickly attracting new users and diverting traffic through ByteDance's App matrix or offline promotion in the future, Douyin Box will compete head-on with traditional shelf e-commerce such as Taobao and Jingpin, but can users retain after trying it out?
• Will users give priority to Douyin Box next time they look for goods?
• Even if it does, can the number of merchants, products or price advantages of Douyin Box win the favor of users?
• Can users’ consumption habits be migrated smoothly?
• Will users naturally form shopping and trading habits like they do when watching content on Douyin?
• Just as users will consume short video content on Taobao?

3. Public domain involution, private domain ascendancy

For the e-commerce industry or ecosystem, the cost of acquiring traffic is getting higher and higher, and the difficulty is increasing.
Simply put, it is more inward-looking.

In the era of inventory, users and traffic are clearly not enough.

At the same time, any platform has its own attributes, and merchants need to learn individually how to better obtain accurate traffic on the platform. The same is true for Douyin Box for merchants.

But all of this traffic is called public domain traffic, and merchants need to spend money over and over again to continuously acquire traffic. Every time a new platform comes out, they have to start all over again, and every time a new platform comes out, they have to place advertisements again.

This time, the way to play the Douyin box may be different from before, and most businesses don’t even understand how to play Douyin yet.
Does this give merchants a huge sense of traffic insecurity?

Does this also indirectly tell all merchants that the public domain traffic of any e-commerce platform will migrate with the user's consumption habits and need to be acquired again at a high cost, so why not settle it in the private domain?

Compared with the public domain, the private domain can achieve repeated, low-cost, or even nearly free access to precise users.

After all, if the traffic can only be used once and cannot be reused, it is the most expensive.

Why not direct traffic to the private domain and solve the problem once and for all?

4. The best era, the most involuted era

• Will ByteDance divert all of its related e-commerce traffic to the Douyin box?
• Douyin Box will be a great help to ByteDance in promoting Douyin Pay (Douyin Box already supports Alipay and Douyin Pay, but not WeChat Pay yet);
• For businesses, short video content creation has become a must, and there are currently dividends. The earlier you enter the market, the more advantages you will have, even if it means first laying out and occupying some keywords through content (search traffic accounts for 80% of traditional e-commerce traffic).
• For content creators, especially individual content creators, everyone is at the same starting line, such as grass-growing experts and fashion bloggers (is Xiaohongshu caught in the crossfire?)
• In the future, after all product categories and the Douyin box web version are launched, the Douyin web version + the box web version will be seamlessly connected. For example, users can search for spicy chicken cooking videos on the Douyin web version and then buy seasonings, while intercepting traffic from Baidu and Taobao.
• In the future, will ByteDance connect the user portraits and user behavior habits of all its App matrices, and even after interconnection, add WeChat's social relationship chain to further improve the hit rate of product recommendations for interest-based e-commerce?

It’s terrifying when you think about it.

We will just have to wait and see what model Douyin Box or interest e-commerce can explore in the future.

Is this the best era or the most inward-looking era?

Appendix 1: What does the Douyin box look like

(1) Page

There are four tabs in Douyin Box: Home, Subscription, Shopping Cart, and Mine.

[Homepage] has two secondary entrances: [Shopping] and [Recommendations]. You can switch the Tab bar by swiping left or right.

When you launch the App, the default page is the [Recommendation] page on the homepage. The recommendation page uses a full-screen immersive design for short videos. You can swipe up and down to switch between recommended videos. It is not much different from the interface and interaction of TikTok.

However, there is no yellow car button in the short videos that are currently being promoted, so you cannot directly jump to the product details page and add it to the shopping cart. Of course, what is certain is that the yellow car will be launched in subsequent short videos (you can add it to the cart directly in the live broadcast room).

The [Shopping] entrance in the [Homepage] may be closer to traditional shelf e-commerce.

In terms of product categories, since the target users are still relatively young trendy men and women, Douyin has currently only launched three vertical categories: "fashionable clothing", "beauty hot products", and "second-hand luxury goods";

The [Details] page is no different from other e-commerce platforms.

You can see the price, product introduction and other information of the product. Click Add to Cart or Buy Now to purchase the product.

[Subscribe] is similar to the follow page in TikTok for the accounts you have followed;

Appendix 2: Data Synchronization

Regarding data synchronization, I have sorted out some:

The default login for Douyin Box is to log in with a Douyin account, but you can also log in with your mobile phone number. There is no third-party login option.

If you log in with a TikTok account, the data cannot be fully synchronized, including:

The avatar, nickname, orders, and shopping cart of the Douyin account will be synchronized;

The number of followers on TikTok will not be synchronized;

The works will be synchronized, but the data of likes and comments will not be synchronized;

The live broadcast room is completely synchronized;

Douyin store information is synchronized with Douyin Box;

Appendix 3: About admission and broadcasting

About the admission :

Reprinted from ByteDance official news:

After the Douyin box was launched, many business friends came to ask about the issue of settlement. Now the merchants are passively invited to display in the box, and there is no separate settlement entrance. I have seen some people post about paid activation. Those who have not been invited can wait and see for the time being. You can also make some arrangements in advance, but be careful not to be ripped off.

Douyin Box is a sub-version of Douyin in the e-commerce field, which is connected to the e-commerce services of the small store platform. The products listed by merchants on the small store platform will be displayed in the Douyin box so that the products can get more exposure opportunities. Merchants on the small store platform do not need to settle in separately, nor do they need to sign the settlement agreement again.

Reply: [box] to obtain the invitation application entrance and submit an application to try first.

About the launch of Douyin Box :

The following three conditions must be met:

1. The account has authorized Douyin Box to use the short videos and live broadcast room information under your Douyin account (you can manage the authorization settings through "Douyin Box app" - "My" - "Settings" - "Account and Security" - "Information Management" - "Douyin Content Usage");

2. The account has opened product sharing permissions on Douyin (you can apply through "Douyin app" - "Me" - "Three" in the upper right corner - "Creator Service Center" - "Product Showcase" - "Product Sharing Permission");

3. The account is not a private account (you can turn on or off the private account through "TikTok app" - "Me" - "≡" in the upper right corner - "Settings" - "Privacy Settings" - "Private Account"

Author: Meng Dawei

Source: Meng Dawei