How much profit can you make from live streaming sales on Douyin?

The sales of goods on Douyin have hit new highs, which makes people wonder, how much money can be made by selling goods on the Douyin platform?

June is approaching, and the annual e-commerce mid-year promotion has begun again. Unlike previous years, live streaming has become a standard feature of this year’s mid-year e-commerce promotions.

This year, Douyin, which is advancing into live streaming e-commerce, has also joined the battlefield of "the battle of the gods": During the three days of the "515 Ace Live Streaming Room" event, more than 1,700 anchors with millions of fans sold goods online, and Chen He even achieved sales of 80 million in a single session.

The sales of goods on Douyin have hit new highs, which makes people wonder, how much money can be made by selling goods on the Douyin platform?

01 How does one make money by selling goods on Douyin?

At 8 o'clock in the evening on April 1st, the first Douyin live broadcast of "Lao Luo", the last first-generation Chinese Internet celebrity, started. Official data from Douyin showed that the live broadcast had a total of over 48 million viewers, 508,000 orders, 110 million yuan in sales per show, and 3.35 million yuan in audio revenue.

Lao Luo's live broadcast debut not only achieved amazing results, but also allowed Douyin, which had begun to try live streaming to sell goods as early as 2018, to finally break out of its original circle and successfully enter the public eye.

This live broadcast clearly demonstrated Douyin’s revenue model: sales + sound waves . As long as you get either sales volume or traffic, you can realize cash immediately. In addition, Douyin influencers can also receive orders through Douyin’s advertising platform Star Map. In addition to enjoying a certain share of the live broadcast sales, they usually also receive certain labor fees.

The prices of some popular anchors in the Star Map background

The brand value brought by internet celebrity promotion was also fully demonstrated in Luo Yonghao’s first live broadcast on Douyin. Since he announced on Weibo that he would start live streaming to sell goods, more than 1,000 manufacturers have expressed their willingness to cooperate. It is rumored online that when a certain big shot learned that Lao Luo was going to sell goods through live streaming, he immediately gave him several million in advertising fees, hoping that Lao Luo would promote his products online.

Although Lao Luo’s case is just an isolated example, Douyin live streaming does have incomparable advantages compared to offline stores. According to Feigua Data (a short video data platform under Douyin), on May 25, the top 5 Douyin anchors all had single-time sales of goods through live broadcasts of more than 1 million yuan, and the highest live broadcast sales even reached 8.37 million yuan. Compared with the average daily sales of "over 10,000" of offline physical stores, which is already quite good, the sales of "millions" by the top players of Douyin live broadcasts have made merchants willing to invest real money to pay for this new model.

In addition, unlike traditional e-commerce live streaming, Douyin live streaming is a form of social e-commerce, and sound waves (equivalent to user rewards) are also an important source of income for live streaming. Some Douyin anchors can even ignore the transaction amount and make money just by relying on "sound waves".

Unlike the big anchors who have millions or tens of millions of fans, the number of fans of these anchors is not that high, usually ranging from 30,000 to 200,000. Although the sales volume is mediocre, the "sound wave" of each live broadcast basically starts at 10,000. According to the recharge ratio of 1 RMB = 7 sound waves, the income every night is more than 1,000+. Even considering the platform's withdrawal fees, this income is not low.

In addition, data from iResearch Qianfan's backend shows that regardless of the model or the distribution of super first-tier cities/first-tier cities, it can be judged that the consumption level of Douyin users is relatively high, and it is easier to get paid conversions by live streaming and selling goods on Douyin.

Douyin has the highest proportion of Apple + Huawei users among popular short video applications

Douyin users are mostly distributed in super first-tier and first-tier cities

02 Is it too late to start selling products on Douyin now?

It is actually not too late to enter the Douyin e-commerce market now . Compared with Kuaishou's early layout, Douyin only launched the "Little Yellow Car" (product recommendation) function in 2018. Entering the market at this time to sell goods can still catch up with the growth period of the platform's e-commerce live broadcast, and it is relatively easy to reap the dividends brought by the platform's growth.

In addition, whether from the perspective of user data or the official operational behavior of Douyin, Douyin live streaming has good advantages.

Judging from the data, Douyin currently shows strong potential in daily active users and live broadcast operation capabilities. According to the backend data of iResearch Qianfan, in April 2020, the total number of active users on the short video comprehensive platform reached 890 million, with 162.8 billion launches and 32.3 billion hours of usage. Among them, Douyin ranks first in the industry APP list with 580 million active users, 71.4 billion launches, and 14.33 billion hours of viewing time.

Douyin and Kuaishou have firmly grasped the main users in the short video field

Corresponding to the huge traffic dividend is Douyin’s powerful operational capabilities. The most obvious point is Douyin’s powerful ability to create festivals.

Public media reports show that in the first half of this year, Douyin has intensively launched a number of live-streaming sales activities: During the epidemic, Douyin launched the "Stay Home and Shop Online" plan, providing 1 billion live-streaming traffic support for offline shopping malls, stores, factories, and individual businesses, helping businesses sell goods online on Douyin and boosting consumption recovery.

In late March, Douyin launched the "Fighting the Epidemic to Help Farmers, County Mayor's Live Broadcast". Among them, in the Anhui live broadcast alone, the cumulative sales of the six county heads exceeded 20.1 million yuan, and agricultural products such as unsalable mustard in Linquan County, tea oil in Shucheng County, and selenium-rich tea in Shitai County were once sold out;

From April 22 to 26, the "Douyin Good Goods Festival" launched on the Douyin platform, together with hundreds of influencers, broadcast 194 shows, with a cumulative online audience of more than 140 million, total sales of the product pool exceeding 15 million, a cumulative paid order volume of more than 200,000, and total sales of 120 million;

From May 15th to 17th, Douyin held its mid-year large-scale live streaming event - 515 Ace Live Room, with more than 1,700 anchors with millions of fans participating in the event.

The peak daily activity of Douyin platform from March to May basically coincides with the shopping festival period.

The peak daily active data of the Douyin platform shown in the iResearch Qianfan backend (March 26, April 25 and May 16 were all daily active peaks) also happen to coincide with the shopping festivals mentioned above, which also proves the traffic-generating effect of the Douyin platform shopping festivals from another aspect.

03 Is there any chance for an amateur to promote products?

Internet celebrities and stars are an indispensable part of all live streaming platforms.

Take Chen He, a popular star who is a regular in selling products on the Douyin platform, for example. From the evening of May 16 to the early morning of May 17, during the four-hour live broadcast, Chen He achieved e-commerce revenue of 81.22 million, 990,000 audio waves, and a cumulative number of viewers exceeding 50 million. During the event, Chen He also won the championship of the 515 Ace Live Room with a popularity value of 15.6318 million.

Faced with such data, many people will wonder how much traffic can be left for "amateurs" with no background or resources?

In fact, it is different from Taobao, which has the "number one brother" and "number one sister" such as Li Jiaqi and Viya who are the national-level live streaming sellers, and it is also different from Kuaishou, which has super powerful live streaming sellers such as "Simba" and "Sanda Brother". Although Douyin Live has spawned e-commerce live streaming experts such as "Zhengshan Beef Brother", "Pomegranate Brother" and "Beibeitu", it still lacks a representative figure who can stand out from the circle. Although the joining of Chen He and Lao Luo has helped Douyin make up for this shortcoming, their joining is far from enough for Douyin to gain a foothold in the field of live streaming e-commerce.

The recent live broadcast failures of Lao Luo and many internet celebrities are telling us a fact: Douyin live broadcast is a professional job, and traffic advantages alone cannot sustain it for long. For an amateur, if he wants to get a share of the pie in an environment full of internet celebrities/stars, he must possess professional qualities and win with professionalism.

It is worth mentioning that Douyin officials seem to have noticed this problem. In order to support "amateurs" and encourage professionals to enter the market, the platform has also allocated considerable resources. Taking the just-concluded 515 Ace Live Room event as an example, Douyin officially invested hundreds of millions of opening screen exposures and millions of dou+ rewards, and set up two major sections: "Ranking Competition" and "Live Broadcast Traffic Support". Even if the anchor has no background, as long as the content of the goods is professional and high-quality enough, there is a great possibility that he or she will enter the acceleration channel provided by the platform.

During the event, anchors who complete Douyin's designated activity tasks for "traffic support for live broadcasts" can share hundreds of millions of official live broadcast room traffic support - the platform divides the live broadcast rooms into A-level and B-level according to the length of time the anchor hangs the shopping cart on the broadcast and the GMV of the store live broadcast during the event, and gives traffic support of 1,000 exposures or about 3,000 exposures respectively. "Amateurs" have plenty of opportunities to stand out.

A series of actions and data results show Douyin's determination to support mid-level anchors and discover potential newcomers. Although entering the Douyin live streaming market at this time may not necessarily help you stand out from the crowd, compared with other platforms, Douyin is definitely worth a try.

Ultimately, good live streaming sales solves the pain points of the "last mile" of e-commerce. Through live streaming, users can make online shopping behaviors that could not be “seen is believed” in the past more concrete. They can also better evaluate the products they are about to buy through the interactions, comments and introductions of the live streaming rooms and draw an objective conclusion.

For an amateur with no background or resources, if they want to do live streaming well, they must make preparations before the broadcast (familiarize themselves with the product and the live streaming process), operate during the broadcast (operational skills to increase activity), and review after the broadcast (summarize the lessons learned from each live broadcast).

As for Douyin, it should try its best to promote the perfect combination of "people" and product supply chain. In terms of "people", Douyin has been making every effort to catch up. However, Douyin still has many shortcomings to fill in terms of source selection, quality control capabilities, and supply chain improvement.

It is worth looking forward to that Douyin has shown equally huge ambitions and opportunities in the field of social e-commerce, and is sincere enough to allocate a lot of resources. For manufacturers and individuals who are waiting to enter the market, selling products on Douyin is a new opportunity.

Author: Analysys International

Source: Analysys International (yiguanguoji)