The title "The distribution method of Douyin's interest e-commerce " is not difficult to understand. It is in line with Byte's algorithm system. To be precise, it should be called product distribution. In the Douyin e-commerce era, in addition to the distribution of information, products are also being disseminated as information.

To put it bluntly, "product distribution" is an upgrade of the "goods find people" model. When more merchants and more abundant high-quality products are settled in Douyin, Douyin e-commerce can recommend products that users are "interested" in and have potential purchasing needs.

In fact, Douyin is not the only one that distributes goods. The same logic applies to Taobao's Guanguang. However, excellent product distribution capabilities depend on an ever-expanding product library, strong technical capabilities, and a more three-dimensional user demand dimension.

Some recent internal testing actions of Douyin just further reflect the logic of "product distribution".

What specific changes might occur? How should we respond? As well as some of the opportunities that exist, let us talk about our thoughts and understanding, and you are welcome to discuss in the comments section.

01 The recommendation page was redesigned and the e-commerce shelf attributes were activated

The recommendation page on the Douyin homepage has been recently revamped and is currently in grayscale internal testing. Currently, the upper left corner of the interface that everyone opens is still the traffic entrance to the live broadcast square.

However, the internal beta version of the page shrinks the entrance to the live broadcast square into a secondary entrance, and adds other entrances such as buying good things.

Clicking to buy good things is equivalent to entering a shopping mall page, with special product searches and product classifications, just like traditional shelf e-commerce.

What does this action mean?

It is equivalent to building a shopping mall page similar to the traditional Taobao and Jingduo, where users can directly find the products they want through search and classification.

With the emergence of search and pages, the e-commerce shelf attributes have been activated. Douyin is not just a model where goods find people, people can also find goods.

Although the page looks simple and similar to traditional e-commerce, there are many differences. For example, when we open the page, click on the category, and enter a keyword to search:

Did you find anything different?

We can find that the top products on this page are usually those that are being live-streamed or have high-quality short videos.

Therefore, Douyin did not separate this page from the content, but integrated it with Douyin's basic content base. It not only strengthens the e-commerce attributes but also the content attributes , further interpreting the definition of "interest e-commerce".

02Possible changesChanges that have already occurred

1. Possible changes:

For influencers, traffic is further eroded and traffic entrances are more diversified, but it is more beneficial to businesses.

If you only do low-price flash sales and the prices are uncontrollable, it will have a huge negative impact on influencers, and the requirements for the products and the quality of the supply chain will be higher.

For merchants, those who will reap the first wave of dividends must be those with good content (live streaming rooms, short videos) and store operations; I observed the sorting rules of the entire page, which are roughly like this: products with a positive review rate of more than 90%, high store DSR, and products that are being live streamed or have high-quality short videos.

It is not the case that the higher the sales volume and the lower the price, the higher the ranking. It is a ranking based on comprehensive statistics.

2. Changes that have occurred:

Douyin attaches more and more importance to the user's "interest" experience on the platform, and does not allow particularly vulgar content to damage the user experience for the sake of e-commerce monetization.

Interest comes first, e-commerce comes second. Ensuring the user’s content experience is the prerequisite, and e-commerce monetization comes after that.

If you are already on the Douyin live streaming track, you should have already felt that the authorities are now cracking down on false propaganda and profit-induced attention. The live broadcast room is often banned.

Because since April, Douyin’s official acceptance rate of complaints about live broadcast rooms has greatly increased. Of course, there are also reports of vicious competition from peers, but the reports are successfully accepted because there are indeed violations in your live broadcast room.

There has been competition from peers in the past, but it may not have been so bad, which shows that the platform is also deliberately suppressing it and doing it intentionally.

For the platform, centralized traffic, low-price flash sales, and low-quality content will greatly damage the platform's user experience. Therefore, before going online, it is necessary to resist low-quality marketing, support live broadcast rooms with truly high-quality content, and eliminate low-quality live broadcast rooms. What the platform wants is healthy development and a healthy e-commerce ecosystem.

In addition, the order entrance: it is guessing that you like traffic overflow, the store group model has emerged, and many merchants have entered Douyin without making short videos or live broadcasts. They can enter the pool by selecting products in batches and brushing orders.

Those who do well can have sales of several million to tens of millions in a month. This is one of the students we incubated. They have been playing with store groups. When the shelf e-commerce attributes of Douyin are further strengthened, perhaps this model will usher in new opportunities, but they still have to understand the logic of product sorting.

03How should we respond?

The main efforts are to deal with the two aspects of live streaming and e-commerce. In fact, most people who do e-commerce when they enter Douyin do not know how to create content and do live streaming. Similarly, people who do live streaming do not necessarily understand e-commerce or products.

At the Douyin E-commerce Ecosystem Conference on April 8, Douyin E-commerce President Kang Zeyu said that GMV is not the first indicator of Douyin e-commerce at this stage, and quality GMV is the core indicator.

What is “quality” GMV?

The first is content, which requires a more benign form of live broadcast. Like the various low-price card plazas and live broadcasts with a very strong marketing rhythm, they are bound to not develop in the long run. Not to mention the deceptive flow (for example, selling clothes for 9.9, but actually not in stock, or having stock but never shipping, etc.), complaints will surely lead to death, and relevant rules and documents have been issued before.

Of course, it’s not that you can’t play with low-price benefits. You can’t deceive users. If you actually lose money and spend tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the early stage to gain popularity, that’s fine. The platform will not suppress you because you are helping the platform serve users.

But there is a problem with doing this. If the product you want to sell has a mid- to high-end customer order, and you sell too many products at a low price, how can you transition from a low price to a full-price product without violating any rules? How can you label the account as an accurate shopping fan, rather than a fan who is looking to take advantage of the situation? This will test the host's and the product's capabilities.

The second is goods, returning to the essence of e-commerce. The most important change in Douyin e-commerce in the past year is not the specific growth of GMV, but the low-cost and efficient popularization of the habit of "Douyin consumption" through third-party e-commerce.

As "interest e-commerce" continues to develop, in addition to continuously increasing GMV data, Douyin e-commerce must further delve into the source of e-commerce in order to more efficiently match high-quality products with effective user needs.

We need high-quality items and brand sources. I searched on the shopping page and found that the same product was sold in the live broadcast room for 9.9, but after searching, it was 7.9, so the price comparison attribute appeared . From the user's perspective, people generally don't blame the merchant, but the anchor.

Summary: It is difficult for merchants or influencers who engage in price wars to survive. For example, the daily necessities category is a competition of low quality and low prices. It is difficult for both influencers and merchants to develop sustainably in the long run, so who can survive? It must be a merchant or brand with good price control.

Therefore, branded goods and merchants with supply chain advantages have great opportunities, especially brands, because price control is very obvious, and if they do not engage in price wars, the survival squeeze will not be that great.

In addition, we need to change our mindset about the way we understand goods. We should try our best to retain customers through the content and the goods themselves, weaken the inducement of interests and exaggerated publicity.

In addition to the above, the traffic structure also needs to be adjusted.

Let’s take the department store category as an example. In fact, most of the live broadcast rooms have a not-so-healthy traffic structure. They basically rely on the platform’s free traffic. They may have been able to survive well last year, but they will definitely not be able to survive this year, because the platform cannot always let you take advantage of it, which is not in the long-term interests of the platform.

The healthy live streaming traffic structure generally consists of: 50% natural recommendations, 30% short videos, and 20% paid . Short videos are a very important point, but they must not be low-quality short videos. The oral short videos like before will gradually be replaced by high-quality short videos. Short videos require more effort to produce.

04What opportunities are there?

1. Paid Bonus

From Qianchuan’s current perspective, it must be a bonus period, and as the bonus progresses, more tools will appear. For example, after the emergence of SEO, will there be tools like “through train”? I think there will definitely be some, and it may be classified under the Qianchuan large investment platform.

If you have experienced paid tools from traditional channels, or take the previous feed as an example, you will definitely understand that the initial customer acquisition cost of a platform's paid tools must be the lowest, whether it is for effect conversion or brand promotion.

Now, if you have enough budget and the live broadcast room has the right people and goods, you can create a "Douyin brand" by spending money. However, when a large number of merchant brands start bidding later, the traffic cost will increase and you will not be able to create it even if you want to.

So don’t be afraid of paying, try and test as soon as possible, embrace payment, learn to pay, understand your own crowd portrait and identity labels, and make them more precise and vertical. It is difficult to survive with large general traffic.

2. Non-standard products + SEO bonus

Generally speaking, from the development path of various traditional e-commerce platforms, those who reap the benefits from the development of the platforms are non-standard products, which is also the change brought about by SEO.

It has great advantages for some original design products. Combined with Douyin's SEO, in addition to the search of the special e-commerce page we mentioned above, the search of Douyin's homepage is more powerful, and can quickly retrieve and undertake explosive long-tail content.

Currently, Douyin has 600 million daily active users, and the monthly active users of Douyin search have exceeded 550 million. The search in Douyin will be long-tail + scene + keyword, and a group of emerging Douyin brands will be born.

At the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem conference, Douyin e-commerce vice president Mu Qing introduced the "Douyin e-commerce UP plan" for the next year:

The Merchant UP Plan aims to help 1,000 merchants achieve annual sales of over 100 million yuan in 2021, including 100 emerging brands with annual sales of over 100 million yuan;

The Talent UP Program aims to help 10,000 e-commerce talents achieve annual sales of over 10 million yuan, and 100,000 e-commerce talents achieve annual sales of 100,000 yuan;

The Product UP Plan aims to help 100 trendy new products achieve annual sales of over 100 million yuan.

This means that as long as your products have advantages, and Douyin is continuing to invest more operational resources in the supply side such as influencers and merchants, there is a great chance to reap the benefits.

3. Branding opportunities

At present, there are many brands that have done well in Douyin e-commerce, such as:

Ningyigou super buyers achieved a GMV of 308 million on Douyin live streaming, setting a record for a single live streaming transaction on Douyin;

After domestic women's clothing brand Evely entered Douyin e-commerce for 40 days, the total GMV of its official live broadcast exceeded 80 million;

Peacebird, a well-known domestic clothing brand, has achieved a GMV of over 60 million in the past 30 days.

In the past, brands may have used Douyin as the main battlefield for promoting their works, but with the development of Douyin e-commerce, it has gradually become the main retail battlefield for more brands to launch new products, connect with users, and plan sales activities.

The retail industry is built on the basis of mutual trust and mutual benefit in all links. Douyin will inevitably continue to deepen its last shortcoming - support for brand merchants. Only in this way can Douyin reach the source of e-commerce.

At present, there are still many category defects in the entire Douyin e-commerce. For example, there are products like air fryers in the department store category, but there are no or very few categories like vacuum cleaners. However, for a user who has already developed consumption habits, there is definitely a demand for these things.

Coupled with the SEO attributes, there must be opportunities in these categories. For merchant brands, it is nothing more than moving from the left hand to the right hand to fill the gap. As long as they are put on the shelves, there will be passive traffic.

If we want to attract passive traffic for small stores, we must look at the degree of filling of the categories, and speed is of the essence. Branded goods + category defects will have huge dividends.

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4. Other opportunities

In addition, from the perspective of major categories, I found that there is no virtual recharge. With the promotion and application of Douyin's payment function, virtual categories related to phone recharge will definitely generate huge dividends. This can be seen by comparing with our previous traditional e-commerce categories.

There is another category. After carefully studying the ranking of the entire shopping page, we will find that the jewelry culture category is very high. This detail is very consistent with the content attributes of the Douyin platform. There may be many opportunities in this category.

There will also be a lot of room for high-customer-unit products on Douyin. Douyin's recommendation algorithm is more powerful than Taobao's one-size-fits-all approach. It makes precise recommendations based on the user's N tags, behaviors, and interests.

Now most of the players who make Douyin don’t dare to touch high customer orders, so there must be opportunities, but this will require higher content output and need to be more refined, not just live broadcasts, but also short videos.

above. All that has been said actually comes back to one unchanging topic: healthy growth .

Whether it is for the platform or for our merchants, what we pursue must be healthy growth.

In fact, Douyin does this for SEO and mall pages for the healthy growth of the entire platform and user experience, and to reduce user churn. Users are the lifeblood of the platform.

Author: A Tao and Chu Xin

Source: A Tao and Chu Xin