E-commerce platform traffic lost?

In 2020, some people will still ask: Who is the next Li Jiaqi? In 2021, even practitioners with a good mentality can only claim, who will be the next anchor with over 100 million viewers in a single game?

The problem of the top players in live streaming e-commerce has almost appeared throughout 2021, because this situation is almost unfavorable to all practitioners except the top players themselves.

Every year on Double Eleven, there is always a new GMV story.

From the initial 24-hour limited-time promotion to the current "nunchaku" model that has lasted for more than a month, the GMV figures are getting bigger and bigger, becoming the best evidence for the competition among various e-commerce platforms.

Slightly different from previous years, there is almost no competition between platforms during Double Eleven this year, and the participants are almost all very calm. Apart from the regular publicity and marketing, we don’t see much other action.

However, the platforms have become "Buddha-like", but the anchors have not. Li Jiaqi, who was regarded by the media as being in a slump and declining since April this year, topped the list with a GMV of 10.65 billion in one night, becoming a new anchor GMV myth.

In 2020, over 100 million yuan in a single game was the dividing line for top anchors. By 2021, this dividing line was raised to the tens of billions level. However, will the top IPs, which are more than one level ahead of their peers, still be the mainstay of the platforms?

Is it "embracing all rivers" or "cutting off the head and tail"? Perhaps, live streaming e-commerce has ushered in a choice that will determine the direction of the industry.

1. E-commerce platform traffic loss

Let’s take a look at a set of data first. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, starting from the second quarter of 2020, online shopping retail sales accounted for more than 25% of the annual total. Prior to this, it took a full ten years for the proportion of online shopping consumption to increase from 2% to 20%.

At a time when traffic dividends are almost gone, 5% of the new share is enough to support an e-commerce platform with a transaction level of hundreds of billions. In fact, this is true. This part of the share did not fall directly into the hands of Taobao and JD.com, but was concentrated in new forces such as Pinduoduo, Douyin, and Kuaishou.

The former opened up the lower-tier markets, while the latter two took advantage of the rise of live streaming e-commerce. Even if traditional e-commerce platforms get that share, it also becomes the food for the anchors.

On the pre-sale day of "Double 11" last year, which was also October 20, the combined sales of Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya's live broadcast rooms were approximately 7.8 billion yuan. This year, the two broke the record again, with combined sales of approximately 18.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 142%.

18.9 billion yuan, this figure has exceeded the annual revenue level of many A-share companies, but in the hands of the anchor, it is just a figure for one night. Of course, the premise of this night is that the top anchors and platforms start investing in pre-heating publicity and promotion resources a month in advance.

On October 20, Lieer Baby, which ranked fourth, had sales of 160 million yuan. Although this figure was worth mentioning last year, it pales in comparison to the 10 billion yuan figure for a single event. The entire Taobao live broadcast is almost equal to Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi. Xue Li, who was painstakingly supported by Taobao, occasionally appears on the stage, and the rest are just some big brands’ store broadcasts to support the scene.

The traffic of traditional e-commerce has been swallowed up by live streaming e-commerce, while the traffic of live streaming e-commerce platforms has flowed into the pockets of top IPs. Outside the Taobao system, Kuaishou is in a love-hate relationship with the Simba family, which is on the decline. Douyin has successively promoted the live broadcast rooms of "celebrities" such as Luo Yonghao and Jia Nailiang, but it can still only rank among the top ten of Taobao live broadcasts. Instead, native Douyin live broadcast rooms such as the Big Wolf Dog Couple and Mr. Dong Jewelry have begun to counterattack. They are not as good as Taobao, but much better than their peers in the entire Douyin e-commerce industry.

Unlike shelf-based e-commerce, due to the particularity of live streaming, the viewing of a single user at the same time basically represents his entire consumption power during this period of time. If he wants to change his consumption target, he needs to switch to another live streaming room. Even on the day when Ru Wei and Li set the record, there was still a group of users jumping back and forth: one was to compare prices, and the other was to get exclusive sources of goods.

Before Mogujie started live streaming e-commerce, no one thought that this would be a market worth over one trillion yuan. It is mostly regarded as a new tool for influencers to monetize and divert traffic to traditional e-commerce. However, the one-to-many and real-time nature of live streaming makes fast delivery possible. Taobao's headquarters in Hangzhou is filled with a bunch of manufacturers who are determined to clear inventory quickly to make a profit even at a loss. This also makes live streaming e-commerce branded with the label of "the lowest price on the entire network" from the very beginning.

This label not only draws away traffic from e-commerce platforms, but also makes the big promotions on these platforms, which have complicated gameplay and increasingly smaller discounts, pale in comparison. In addition, the term "supply chain" has become a hot topic that is familiar to the public - everyone knows that getting low-priced goods means traffic, and everyone knows that the higher your traffic, the stronger your bargaining power and the lower the price you can get.

This paradox hangs over all live-streaming e-commerce anchors after the rise of top IPs such as Li Jiaqi and Viya, causing platforms that want to break the monopoly of the top IPs to become overwhelmed, and also causing the traffic of traditional e-commerce platforms to be continuously swallowed up by the top IPs.

2. Live streaming e-commerce needs to be cut off

In 2020, some people will still ask: Who is the next Li Jiaqi? In 2021, even practitioners with a good mentality can only claim, who will be the next anchor with over 100 million viewers in a single game?

The problem of the top players in live streaming e-commerce has almost appeared throughout 2021, because this situation is almost unfavorable to all practitioners except the top players themselves.

E-commerce platforms and video platforms do not like too many anchors to dominate the platform, as this will only cause an imbalance in the platform's public traffic pool and give the anchors too much voice for the platform to control. This is intolerable for Internet platforms that are accustomed to taking advantage of the situation. The anchor who carries the traffic is a representative example of Simba, who has had several rounds of PK with the official Kuaishou. If it weren't for the fake goods incident that hit him directly, the competition between Simba and Kuaishou might not have been as clear-cut as it is now.

The merchants don’t like it either. The bargaining power of big anchors has been cut to the edge of price-breaking. No consumers will be willing to buy at full price the things that have been sold at a discount in the live broadcast room. The top anchors almost exist as brand marketing, and sales volume does not represent profits. The number of mid-level anchors is limited, and they can only be regarded as small and medium-sized online distributors, which cannot achieve the purpose of live broadcast explosion.

Even your peers won’t like it. The bargaining power of the big anchors means that mid-level anchors are unable to compete with price advantages, are unable to create new things and inject new blood, and naturally are unable to replicate profits. And how many of the MCNs that the anchors have signed contracts with would be willing to give up their equity interests when faced with big anchors?

The platforms have tried.

Almost all live-streaming e-commerce platforms are encouraging merchants to broadcast themselves. Not to mention Taobao as the main battlefield for brands, Douyin began to focus on brand self-broadcasting in February this year, and Kuaishou announced in July that it would vigorously promote brands. At present, it is not difficult for brand merchants of both to have tens of millions of viewers in a single show, but there is a lack of merchants with viewers exceeding 100 million, so they are still some distance away from the top players. The platforms are also distributing public domain traffic within the platforms. In this regard, Douyin and Kuaishou do better than Taobao. At least the former does not have a real top player at present, while the latter has semi-broken up with its own top anchors and returned part of the traffic to the public domain pool.

▲Kuaishou’s three “big moves”

The anchors are also trying.

Taobao anchors, such as Xue Li, bypass the supply chain barriers built by Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi, and use Tmall International and other sources of goods to create price differences, which is the kingly way of live streaming e-commerce, hitting the key points and colliding with momentum; Douyin anchors are constantly changing from ordinary people and Internet celebrities to celebrities, becoming the preferred platform for celebrity live streaming to replace Xiaohongshu; Kuaishou anchors have begun to become more variety shows, which is more in line with the tone of the content platform and also in line with Kuaishou's trust in e-commerce personality; for example, Mogujie bets on original design models, using differences in goods and dressing plans as differentiated competitive forces; Xiaohongshu seems to be still struggling between bringing goods and content, and still pays attention to its own quality of planting grass.

Going further down, there are basically no people.

Live streaming e-commerce is still e-commerce. The essence of an e-commerce platform is to charge fees from both consumers and merchants. With the insertion of an anchor in the middle, things naturally change. The platform may want to make more money from one side, and the anchor also wants to bypass the platform and claim to be "a wealthy family."

Now that the trend of globalization cannot be reversed, there are really not many opportunities left for e-commerce platforms. Cutting off the head and tail and differentiating themselves may be a new way out.

The pictures in the article are from the Internet.

Author: Shili Village

Source: Shili Village (shilipxl)