Douyin Box Product Experience Report

The product inspection report of Douyin Box has just been released. Do you want to know the development of Douyin Box? In this article, the author discusses product overview, product analysis , competitive product analysis and other aspects, and recommends it to people who want to learn about Douyin Box.

1. Product Overview

1. Experience the environment

Product experience: Douyin Box

Software version: 1.2.5

Phone system: ios 15.1.1

Experience time: January 2022

Experienced by: Huihui

2. Product Overview

According to the introduction on the Appstore, Douyin Box is a trendy fashion e-commerce platform under Douyin. It focuses on style, fashion, and shopping. From street culture to high-end fashion, from dressing skills to makeup and skin care, it captures global trends and starts a trendy life together with tens of millions of trend players.

The homepage of Douyin Box provides entrances to functions such as shopping, recommendations, subscriptions, and shopping carts. Users can browse various videos about outfits and trendy items, and can also search for the products they want. It supports users to upload short videos and start live broadcasts.

Douyin Box is connected to the e-commerce service of Douyin Shop, and the information of Douyin Shop will also be displayed in the Douyin Box, including shopping cart, products, etc. This means that the products released by merchants in their stores will also be synchronized to the Douyin box, increasing the chances of product exposure.

According to Qimai Data's estimates, the average daily download volume of Douyin Box exceeded 100,000+ in the first week after its release, and recent data has been relatively sluggish.

3. Product positioning

Trendy and fashionable e-commerce platform.

4. User needs analysis

（1）Who is the user?

Merchants : Creators of grass-growing content or e-commerce content, currently mainly Douyin merchants and small store users. Creators do not need to put extra effort into operating the box. The content posted on Douyin can be distributed to the Douyin box at the same time, and the products in the small store also increase exposure.

Creators: By publishing content that will attract customers, sharing their shopping experiences, accumulating fans, and finally monetizing by promoting products and taking on advertisements.

Consumers: Content e-commerce mainly stimulates viewers to consume quickly by promoting content, unlike traditional shopping platforms where consumption is completed in a simple and crude manner of search-select-buy. The products in the box are currently mainly "trendy" items, and the product level is closer to Tmall rather than Pinduoduo, so the consumers of the content and products are mainly those who have money and time, who like trendy items, and viewers who like content that is popular.

(2) User characteristics

It is speculated that it is close to the user characteristics of Douyin. According to the "2021 Douyin E-commerce Ecological Development Report", Douyin e-commerce consumers are mainly women, users born in the 1980s and 1990s have an absolute advantage, and users born after 1995 have the highest growth rate in the past six months. The male-to-female ratio of creators is close to 1:1, and their ages are concentrated between 18 and 45 years old.

(3) Target users’ needs

Merchants: Products and stores have more traffic, acquire customers at low cost, and make money.

Creators: Get views, fans, and make money from advertising.

Consumers: Browse the content they like and buy the products they like and at a good price.

(4) User (consumer) usage scenarios

Goal-oriented: When planning to buy something, after comparing, you find that the box has the lowest price, so you buy it directly.

Passerby type: browse randomly, are successfully attracted, and then buy.

(5) Summary

Judging from the reviews on the appstore, it is currently mainly used by Douyin merchants, who hope to have an additional channel to display their content and gain more traffic and monetization, but are still watching the prospects and traffic pool of the box, and have not invested too much energy in operating it independently, and are simply syncing Douyin content.

Judging from the interaction volume of the recommended feed, there are relatively few likes and comments, basically no more than a hundred, far less than a fraction of Tik Tok. The portrait features of the audience and consumers have not yet taken shape and need further observation.

5. Current market situation and analysis

(1) Market environment

As a commercialization method that has emerged in recent years, Internet traffic advertising, "grass planting" monetization, and live streaming sales all change user behavior by stimulating user emotions. Its characteristics are easy to accurately determine, the ROI (return on investment) can be clearly measured, and the monetization speed is fast and can be quantified.

According to the "Content-based Social E-commerce Industry Analysis Report in the First Half of 2021" by China Business Network's "Guoji Data", content-based social e-commerce is currently in a period of rapid development.

(2) Policy: State policies on the e-commerce industry

Since 1978, with the rapid development of the Internet, my country's e-commerce industry has ushered in new opportunities and development momentum. E-commerce, as an important part of the "14th Five-Year Plan", is an important part of economic development. In recent years, more and more newly established e-commerce platforms have been established, and the service quality and service system have been continuously developing and improving.

The "2021 China E-Commerce Report" mentioned that in 2020, e-commerce helped achieve a comprehensive victory in the fight against poverty, and as an important tool for targeted poverty alleviation, it led farmers to increase their income and become prosperous. The Party Central Committee and the State Council highly affirmed the role and value of e-commerce. During his inspection in Shanxi on April 20, 2020, the General Secretary emphasized that e-commerce can not only help people get rid of poverty, but also promote rural revitalization, and there is much room for development.

In his 2020 Government Work Report, Premier Li Keqiang pointed out that new business forms such as e-commerce online shopping and online services have played an important role in the fight against the epidemic. We must continue to introduce supporting policies, comprehensively promote "Internet +", and create new advantages in the digital economy.

ByteDance’s policy on e-commerce:

Douyin began to test the waters in its e-commerce business in 2018. Within two years, in 2020, Douyin's e-commerce GMV had reached 500 billion yuan. However, of the total transaction volume of more than 500 billion yuan, only about one-fifth was sold through Douyin's own e-commerce platform Douyin Store, and the remaining more than 300 billion yuan was completed from live broadcast rooms and short videos to third-party e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Taobao. Obviously, this is not the situation ByteDance wants to see, and Douyin is not willing to be just a traffic platform.

In 2020, ByteDance made several major moves in the e-commerce field, such as launching the traffic investment system Juliang Qianchuan, acquiring Wuhan Hezhong Yibao Technology Co., Ltd. (Hezhong Yibao) to complete the acquisition of a third-party payment license, and starting a grayscale test of the first-level entrance of the mall on the Douyin App. It prohibits live broadcast rooms from linking to third-party product sources, and launches the overseas version of Pinduoduo Fanno, etc.

It can be seen that ByteDance’s ambition in the e-commerce field has long been brewing.

But ByteDance’s e-commerce dream is too big and Douyin may not be able to accommodate it. The more e-commerce content that floods Douyin, the more it shows that this is the fastest way to make money. Other authors have also transformed into authors who sell goods, and the diversity of content has been squeezed.

If users are not interested in content that promotes goods, and just come to Douyin to see some fun, beautiful and high-quality content, but frequently see this type of content, the experience will be very bad.

Professor Pan Luan mentioned before: "There is something called AD-load in the short video feed, which means an advertisement is inserted for every number of videos you watch. The AD-load is about 8%, which means that there are 8 advertisements for every 100 videos. You cannot increase this number anymore. This is the advertising inventory, and there can only be so much, otherwise it will affect the user experience."

Zhang Nan also mentioned in his early speeches that "serving users with different needs is a very stressful task."

Some netizens revealed in the Appstore reviews that because the e-commerce content distribution density of the Douyin app is relatively high, which seriously affects the user experience, the box was launched to facilitate the connection between e-commerce content and users. After the box is launched, Douyin will gradually control the proportion of e-commerce content and guide and encourage consumers to download the box for use.

If most of the subsequent e-commerce related users and content are transferred to the box, then the content of the Douyin app itself can be used more purely to "record a better life." The Douyin box may become a new traffic source, helping ByteDance build its own e-commerce ecosystem.

(3) Economic aspects

According to the "Residents' Income and Consumption Expenditure in the First Three Quarters of 2021" released by the National Bureau of Statistics in October 2021, my country's per capita disposable income of residents increased significantly in the first three quarters of 2021. As residents' income continues to recover and the epidemic situation continues to improve, residents' consumption demand is gradually released and consumer expenditure continues to rebound.

The national per capita disposable income of residents was 26,265 yuan, a nominal increase of 10.4% over the same period last year; after deducting the impact of price factors, the actual growth was 9.7%, basically in line with GDP growth.

In the first three quarters, the per capita consumer expenditure of the national residents was 17,275 yuan, a nominal increase of 15.8% based on a decrease of 3.5% in the same period last year; after deducting price factors, the actual increase was 15.1%.

(4) Social aspects

Affected by the epidemic, consumers' shopping habits have changed drastically. Most people who stay at home choose to shop online, sales on e-commerce platforms have skyrocketed, and social e-commerce has been fully activated.

Since 2020, indicators such as the number of users of online live streaming and short videos, and the length of time users spend using them have increased dramatically. Merchants are promoting resumption of work and production through live streaming. Many companies are using live streaming as a new tool for brand marketing, continuously improving their online marketing penetration rate. Qichacha data shows that the number of registered live-streaming-related companies in my country reached 75,000 in 2020, an increase of 879% year-on-year, exceeding the total number of registrations in previous years.

Social e-commerce based on content development often relies on high-quality, large-scale communities to achieve stable growth of customer groups, thereby realizing the core value of increasing transaction volume through traffic and reducing customer acquisition costs.

However, due to the low threshold of technical barriers, the homogenization of e-commerce service content, transaction models, marketing models, etc. is becoming increasingly serious. Once a successful case of a certain model appears in the length of e-commerce service, many followers will appear. Early e-commerce service platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Dianping have gained many loyal consumers due to the originality and authenticity of their content.

Subsequently, a large number of authors mass-produced homogeneous content, and the phenomenon of plagiarism was serious. Content homogeneity increases the cost for users to screen valid information, reduces their trust in the platform, and increases their requirements for content.

With the “photo fraud” incident on Xiaohongshu and the “fake bird’s nest” incident on Kuaishou, users’ consumption of content e-commerce will only become more and more rational, unless there is a fundamental breakthrough in the platform’s content quality and pre-sales and after-sales guarantee mechanisms to re-activate users’ desire to buy quickly. From this background, there is great potential for boxes.

(5) Technical aspects

Reduced content production costs:

With the popularization of short video apps such as Tik Tok and Kuaishou, after years of product evolution, users can create and publish content such as pictures, texts, videos, and live broadcasts without any cultural understanding or creative thinking, as long as they have a mobile phone.

The threshold for e-commerce employment is lowered:

Social e-commerce platforms have a professional team of service providers that saves users the trouble of finding suppliers, service providers, consumers, etc. Merchants can easily use the capabilities and services provided by the platform to select products, publish content, and attract customers.

The cost of content dissemination becomes lower:

Powerful content algorithms can help creators accurately find the right audiences and consumer groups. Through just a few videos, ordinary people can gain an audience that exceeds that of TV programs and tens of millions of fans, and quickly realize commercial monetization, which was unimaginable 10 years ago.

(6) Market data

E-commerce transaction volume has been increasing year by year. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, although the growth rate of the total e-commerce transaction volume in the country has declined in recent years, the total transaction volume has continued to rise.

Data source: National Bureau of Statistics

The transaction volume and proportion of mobile devices continue to rise. According to the "2021 E-commerce Industry White Paper" released by Silicon Valley unicorn "Branch Marketing Attribution Monitoring", global mobile e-commerce sales reached 2.9 trillion US dollars in 2020, accounting for 70.4% of the sales of the entire e-commerce industry. It is expected that by 2021, this figure will grow to 3.5 trillion US dollars.

The proportion of e-commerce social and live streaming e-commerce industries in the e-commerce market continues to increase. According to data from iResearch Consulting, the scale of the e-commerce social + live streaming e-commerce industry exceeds 300 million, and is in a rapid growth stage in 2021.

(7) Summary

In a nutshell, the country has favorable policies, the industry continues to grow, people have money and are willing to spend it on online shopping, the platform has mature technology that can accurately connect products and users, and ByteDance attaches great importance to it.

2. Product Analysis

1. Product structure diagram

Because there are many sections, the details have been folded for display purposes. If you need the full version, you can leave a message to get it.

2. User flow chart

Take the shopping process as an example:

Different from traditional e-commerce and other social e-commerce platforms, Hexi uses content feed as its homepage, which makes it not like an e-commerce platform. After all, the content communities such as Douyin, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu mainly use content feed as their homepage.

Therefore, the consumption path of the box is somewhat different from that of the social e-commerce platform. If there is no clear shopping demand, people may first browse the content recommended on the homepage and be successfully "planted" before they begin to have shopping needs and try to consume on the platform.

3. Functional experience analysis

(1) Home page

The homepage displays a mixed feed of short videos/live broadcasts that is very similar to TikTok, with the content mainly consisting of recommended items. However, there is no purchase entrance on the video page or the author’s homepage. If you really want to buy it, you can only take a screenshot and then go to Taobao to search for the same product. However, this is probably not what Douyin Box wants to see. However, it is also possible that it is deliberately lengthening the content and transaction link for unknown reasons.

Swipe left on the homepage to enter the "Shopping" column. There are 4 product categories at the top. The TOP1 position displays the live broadcast content and product links, and the other graphic cards showing the products are arranged in a double column.

(2) Subscription

The content structure is basically the same as that of the recommendation page, but it only displays the content published by the author to whom the user subscribes in the box. Still no product links.

(3) Shopping cart

Like other apps, nothing much to say.

(4) My

It basically adopts the form of an e-commerce APP to guide users to jump to corresponding functions. The form adopted by content communities is generally to spread out the content they publish, such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu.

4. Summary

In summary, the product structure of the box is mainly based on video and live broadcast content recommendations, and product display is more like an auxiliary, like packaging the e-commerce related content and functions in Douyin separately, as if hoping that we can achieve a closed loop of planting grass + purchasing in the box.

The account is shared with TikTok, but as a viewer, it is difficult to find authors that you already follow on TikTok. As an author, the fans and content interaction data on Douyin will not be directly linked to the box’s account. Currently, all the big Vs on the Douyin Box app, including Li Jiaqi, Luo Yonghao and other big Vs, only have a few hundred or a few thousand fans.

Although the content of their accounts was synchronized, the fans and interaction data accumulated on Douyin were not synchronized to the Douyin Box app. Obviously, this was to force everyone to return to the same starting line, avoid complete homogeneity with Douyin, and allow more non-head authors to regain opportunities.

In order to achieve a balance between products and content, the box trimmed some of the features that were originally icing on the cake in Douyin. It can be said that it assembled half of Douyin and half of Dewu together. After comparing the box with the very similar pages of Douyin and Douyin, I really had the illusion that C-end products are very simple. Can you find the difference between them?

3. Competitive Product Analysis

1. Comparison of competing products

2. Interactive page comparison

From the comparison chart, we can see that the product recommendation feed, subsidy and discount page, and personal page of the box are highly similar to those of Dewu, but Dewu currently does not have a shopping cart, so there is nothing to copy. The product details page and shopping cart are closer to DianTao. The details pages use a layout of pictures, prices, detailed parameters, and reviews, and the shopping cart does not display "Guess what I like" products.

Perhaps in order to deliberately avoid being similar to Dewu, or perhaps in the hope that users will be more rational when consuming, the overall color scheme uses blue-purple and black. Even though the products in the "hardcore subsidies" are indeed cheaper than those of other stores, it does not seem like there is much shopping desire. Generally speaking, red can create a festive and lively holiday atmosphere. In e-commerce UI design, red is often used as the main color for promotions or holiday activities, while blue gives a strong sense of stability and is rarely used in buttons.

From the perspective of products, the main categories of goods in the box are skin care, beauty, clothing, and luxury goods. There is a certain degree of overlap with Dewu, while Xiaohongshu focuses on beauty and skin care, and the products on Diantao are interconnected with Taobao, and it has everything.

4. If I were a PM

Find the advantages in product content and merchandise as soon as possible, and give answers to the questions of the majority of netizens: "There are so many shopping platforms, why use boxes to sell/purchase goods?"
Gradually transfer Douyin's e-commerce users to the box, and then snatch users outside Douyin.

In the initial stage, we first attract Douyin merchants through traffic, and then attract Douyin consumers through price advantages, such as enjoying lower prices when purchasing through Douyin boxes, and giving coupons to new users when they log in. Once you have accumulated a certain number of users and your retention and conversion data are good, spend a lot of money on promotion before a major shopping festival, using lower promotional prices than other platforms to increase the number of users and GMV.

Increase the categories and total number of products that match the product tone as quickly as possible. The homepage even invites some relatively well-known fashion brands to exclusively join the product section to establish exclusive features. Currently, there are only 32 products in the "Hardcore Subsidy", and although most of them are old and popular products, the types and quantities of products are far less than other shopping platforms.

Integrate product and content recommendations. Currently, the recommendation strategies for products and content are separated. There are no product links in the grass-planting videos, and there is no grass-planting content in the product links. If they are connected, more comprehensive grass-planting can be carried out, thereby increasing the order rate.

For example, if you like certain grass-roots content on the homepage, you can see related products by swiping to "Shopping". Conversely, if you stay on certain products for a long time in "Shopping", related grass-roots content of the product will appear, and even related grass-roots videos will be displayed on the product details page. When searching for certain products, if the products fall within the scope of "hardcore subsidies", they will be displayed at the top.

Gradually, creators will be able to sell goods and receive orders. We will first allow top-quality authors to publish box content with product links. If the data performance is good, it will be gradually delegated to more ordinary users.

Judging from the "Content Creation Guidelines" of the box, ordinary creators of grass-roots content may be given diverse sales capabilities and more brand cooperation opportunities in the future.

Make full use of Douyin’s existing risk control capabilities and user portraits, lay out strategies in the early stages of the product, and avoid risk outbreaks. As the number of users increases and the traffic pool becomes larger, if the risk control capabilities do not keep up, there will be a period of time when technical flows will batch publish high-conversion content or products that have been verified on other platforms, and may even lead other normal authors to imitate them, interfering with consumers' normal experience. ,

Last year, I often saw black sesame pills, quick weight loss pills, and whitening pills on Taobao. This was caused by the platform’s risk control capabilities not keeping up with the development of the content ecology.

Adjust the interactive pages and buttons based on user feedback and ab experiment data to get rid of the label of imitating Dewu/Xiaohongshu. Quietly change some shopping buttons to orange or red to increase click and order rates.

If you are reading this article after February 2021, please help me see if the above ideas have been implemented. In fact, compared to the above, I am more looking forward to the box making some innovative iterations, which will make people sigh "it turns out that e-commerce can be done this way" and "it is worthy of ByteDance", so that others want to copy but dare not, and truly build a moat for the product.

V. Conclusion

ByteDance previously launched Wukong Q&A to compete with Zhihu, launched Duoshan to compete with WeChat, and launched Gogokid to compete with Vipkid, but none of them achieved outstanding results in the market.

My personal experience with the box launched by Dewu and Xiaohongshu is average. If you want to watch short videos and live broadcasts, Douyin has richer content. If you want to shop, Taobao has more things and is more convenient to operate, unless the box can provide products with better cost-effectiveness than other platforms or content of better quality and more suitable for my interests.

It is too early to conclude whether the box can be successfully produced in the future. The product form is still in the process of rapid iteration. After three or four months, we will see the data performance. I hope to see a "box" full of surprises, not just a blue and purple skin.

Author: Huihui

Source: Huihui