A 6,000-word article analyzing how to play Douyin e-commerce for you!

The popularity of short video/live streaming e-commerce began to show signs in 2019, but the epidemic seems to have added fuel to the boiling water. More and more ordinary people, KOCs, and small B merchants have joined the wave of content e-commerce, and "bringing goods" has become more and more a national movement.

So are you also a player in the content sales race? If you are one of them, have you truly mastered the skills and methods of selecting products and promoting them on Douyin , and creating short video e-commerce content? In addition to the conventional content-based sales, what other alternatives does Douyin e-commerce have? The following is a long article to give you a detailed answer.

01 | Douyin e-commerce has undergone many changes in one year

As early as 2014, Toutiao launched the e-commerce product "Today's Specials". In 2016, Toutiao launched the “Jingtiao Plan”, but due to the lack of a proper way to integrate e-commerce with graphic and text content, Toutiao has not made much progress in the e-commerce sector.

In 2017, with the sudden popularity of TikTok, Toutiao quickly connected to the e-commerce advertising system "Luban", and in June 2018, it officially added e-commerce functions, which is the "shopping cart" that everyone sees in daily life. After half a year of testing, the shopping cart was officially opened to the public at the end of 2018. The initial threshold for adding products to cart required an account to have more than 10,000 followers and to have published 10 or more videos. Afterwards, the threshold was adjusted several times based on changes in strategies in different periods. It was not until August 2019, with the further revision and upgrade of the system, that Douyin e-commerce officially got on the right track.

What followed was the entry of a large number of Taobao customers and speculative players. The Douyin short video sales ecosystem faced serious homogeneity, low content quality, false propaganda and other problems for a period of time. In order to eliminate bad content producers, the Douyin platform also frequently adjusted its sales policies to fight wits and courage with speculative players. From the changes in the number of products in Douyin's showcases, we can also clearly see the purpose and impact of Douyin's various adjustments.

Since September 2019, a large number of e-commerce players have flocked to Douyin, which was most obvious in the number of window products in October, which increased nearly 3 times. In November, due to the impact of Douyin's Internet cleaning campaign, the number of products declined slightly. Subsequently, with the official lowering of the threshold for joining the product showcase by Douyin (the number of fans was adjusted to 1,000, and more than 10 videos were published), the number of products nearly tripled in December.

In the same month, in order to further regulate the order of goods sold on the platform, Douyin revised the shopping cart, no longer popping up cards, and jumped to the product aggregation page. Increasing diversion increased the difficulty of conversion, so the number of products dropped significantly again. With the various segmented initiatives released by Douyin since January this year, we believe that the short video e-commerce ecosystem of the platform will no longer grow wildly in the future.

The above mentioned are the various policy adjustments and content environment changes of Douyin for e-commerce. Now, Kas Data will analyze the recommendation algorithm tendencies of Douyin, which everyone is very concerned about, through the differences in recommendation flows of Douyin accounts under five different login states, to understand the traffic environment of Douyin e-commerce competition.

First of all, it can be seen from the three accounts that have not logged in that Tik Tok values ​​the initial experience of "new" users. The newer the user, the less likely they are to see videos with low likes. At the same time, new users see very little commercial information, and almost no shopping carts. Information flow ads are between 4% and 6%, so for this type of user, the chances of seeing video content that promotes products are very slim.

But when it comes to live streaming content, Douyin can be said to treat everyone equally. Regardless of whether they are new or old users, the proportion of users receiving live push videos is between 7% and 13%. The difference is that the newer the account, the higher the number of likes for the live push videos received, which to a certain extent also reflects the better quality of the live content.

Therefore, from the perspective of the overall traffic environment, the accounts that bring goods must capture active users who have certain viewing habits on Douyin. According to an official report from Douyin, highly active users with high playback, high login, and medium/high interactions account for more than 38% of the Douyin platform. Successfully capturing the attention of these 38% of users is also an important step in breaking out of the short video live streaming market.

From the above, we can get a very accurate signal, that is: making videos/accounts is difficult, and making videos/accounts that sell products is even more difficult, so should we still do it?

The answer is yes.

On Douyin, a top traffic platform with 400 million DAU, short videos are definitely the content monetization direction that is most worthy of investment and development, and 2020 will also be the last year of Douyin's e-commerce window period.

Next, Kas Data will clear the obstacles for everyone in their journey to sell goods by telling them what goods to sell and how to sell them through "content".

02 | Understanding the “goods” on Douyin

By tracking information of 430,000 products, Kas Data found that 74% of the products came from Taobao, with an average of about 10 SKUs per store; 21% of the products came from Douyin stores; and 5% of the products came from e-commerce platforms such as JD.com, Kaola, Suning, and Vipshop.

At present, Taobao goods still account for the largest proportion of the channel for Douyin to bring goods . We understand that there are about 33,000 Taobao stores doing e-commerce on Douyin, and the number of Taobao stores has reached 1.1 million in 2018. Therefore, the model of Taobao goods brought by Douyin is still a blue ocean. Taobao sellers who have their own supply chain channels can accelerate their efforts on the Douyin platform.

Douyin is also constantly standardizing and improving its own e-commerce system, including the launch of the Douyin store rating system and the product sharing author level system.

Judging from the categories of goods sold on Douyin short videos, high-end women's clothing, cosmetics and personal care products, and food and beverages rank in the top three. This shows that products dominated by female demand are easier to sell on Douyin . Correspondingly, from the perspective of content creation, the female perspective is also a good choice.

Next, let’s take a look at the product prices. As can be seen from the figure below, about 85% of the products on the Douyin Good Products List are priced below 200 yuan, and 200 yuan is the brake line for Douyin users to consume products on the platform. Therefore, when we add items to the shopping cart, we try to ensure that the items are worth less than 200 yuan.

Of course, the user's understanding of product attributes, the price sensitivity of the product, and the efficiency of product decision-making will also affect the sales volume of the product.

For example, the price of Apple mobile phones is almost transparent, and they are typical standard products. If you can get a price lower than that of Double 11/618, you can also sell them on Douyin by exposing the price through videos.

Now that we have looked at the price distribution, let’s take a look at the commission distribution.

Through the analysis of 430,000 product information, we found that 41.86% of the products have commissions set, which shows that it has become the norm for Douyin to use celebrities/amateurs to promote products . For brands or manufacturers, setting a certain commission rate will be more conducive to the sale of products on Douyin. It can use the commission to attract amateurs/influencers to spontaneously add products to cart and sell them, increase the possibility of the products being seen by more people, and obtain high conversions through high exposure.

Under different commission rates, the product categories and gameplay are also completely different.

The commission is in the range of 0.01-10%, and most of the products are domestic beauty products with brand power. Such brands have sufficient market budgets and can adopt a high-profile strategy to capture a group of top and shoulder KOLs, ensure a certain rate of hits through high-quality content, create an "Internet celebrity" atmosphere, and then attract a large number of amateurs and mid- and low-level accounts for distribution.

The commission is in the range of 10.01%-30%. The products that are promoted by most KOLs are mostly cost-effective household daily necessities. They are also suitable for friends who lack budget but want to do Douyin e-commerce. This type of product has low purchase cost and huge market demand. As long as there is a certain product selection strategy, it is not difficult to make some hot products in this range.

In the 30%-60% range, products promoted by the most KOLs are mostly start-up brands, mainly beauty products, and their characteristic is high gross profit. These sellers are often divided into two categories. The first category is Taobao e-commerce players who give up profits and create high customer orders through Douyin, increase the weight of store products and then reap the benefits. The other category is players who just want to make a quick buck and leave. They are not responsible for the content they produce and only want to follow the trend to make quick money. However, as the platform increases its control, there will be fewer and fewer such players in the future.

From the perspective of commission rate, it is actually a bit like a game between merchants and channels. Low-commission KOLs and KOCs are unwilling to bring products, while high-commission products attract many people, but the manufacturer's profit is also low. Therefore, Kas Data recommends: It is reasonable to set the product commission in the range of 10%-30% , except for individual categories.

The above gives us a general understanding of Douyin e-commerce from goods, channels to commissions. Next, we will talk about how to select products and create sales scenarios. We found that there are 4 factors that affect whether a product will sell well:

1. The user's understanding of the product can be simply understood as whether the user is clear about the purpose, value, and price of the product. Still taking the Apple mobile phone as an example, users will basically have their own subjective evaluations of such products. Unless there is a huge price advantage, it is difficult for it to become a hot product. Correspondingly, brands and merchants of such products should not expect to sell goods through Douyin. Instead, building word of mouth is a good choice.

As for some new and unique products, users’ subjective cognition of the products is vague, so it is easy to convert them through content planting. For example, the totwoo couple sensor bracelet has achieved impressive sales and exposure on Douyin.

The second is to look at the user's decision-making efficiency. The two major factors that affect decision-making efficiency are consumption frequency and price sensitivity. That is, whether it is a commodity that is needed in large quantities and consumed frequently in life, and whether the price of the commodity can allow users to place an order easily without hesitation.

The third is the popularity of the product, which is somewhat different from Taobao and is still based on Douyin’s algorithm mechanism and media attributes. Hot products represent topics, and topics represent traffic. The manufacturers’ thinking direction is to create topics, while the players who promote products are thinking direction to take advantage of topics. For example, the dairy brand Adopt a Cow invited Tu Lei to promote the product in a video that was on the Douyin list of popular products for a week. The popularity of the product immediately attracted 60 KOLs to promote the product, and sales reached 30,000.

The fourth point is the revenue situation. For brands, it is necessary to measure the input-output ratio. For those who sell products, the key is to consider the commission. Of course, don’t just consider the commission as the only consideration and sell products that do not fit the tone and content style of your own account.

After talking about the products, let’s take a look at the scene. For short videos selling products, the scene is the scene in the video that gives the product value. Usually many people limit their thinking to usage scenarios. However, this type of video, apart from being novel and unique, is difficult to attract users to stay and watch it.

So don’t limit your thinking to usage scenarios. Transactions, experiences, evaluations, and even emotions can all become scenarios for selling products.

For example, in experience scenarios, it is difficult to impress the audience by simply posing for photos with the product, while usage scenarios tend to be more explanatory and didactic, which leads to poor empathy. Therefore, maximizing the personal experience is a way to narrow the distance with the audience and enhance the sense of involvement.

For example, the account @可爱QQ呀, which has been gaining followers very quickly recently on Douyin, focuses on strengthening the product experience scenarios in order to stimulate users' empathy and place orders.

03 | Advanced content promotion

In the past year, the creator ecosystem of Tik Tok has also undergone some changes.

It is obvious from the data that the number of users has increased from 200 million to 400 million, and the number of active KOLs has also increased from 32,000 to 76,000. The growth rate of active KOLs is even higher than that of users. At first glance, the trend seems good, but in fact, there are undercurrents.

Judging from the distribution of the threshold of likes for Douyin’s 100,000+ celebrity videos in October 2018 and October 2019, videos with less than 10,000 likes accounted for 56% in 2018, while this proportion increased to 70% in 2019. This shows that as users’ requirements for videos become higher and higher, the threshold for breaking through 10,000 likes has increased, the chance of becoming a hit has decreased, the cost has increased, ecological competition has intensified, and low-like clustering has become the norm.

▲Distribution of the threshold of likes for videos of 100,000+ celebrities on Douyin in October 2018 vs. October 2019

So how can you give your videos a greater chance of getting high likes? The answer is to complete the content advancement for your account.

In the early stages of creating an account, many people are unfamiliar with video production or have not determined the direction of operation, so the content types are mostly purely staged, that is, there is no obvious character setting. The content of this type of account has relatively low requirements for scripts, shooting and editing, and account operations. This type of content has unique advantages, such as being able to showcase product performance to the fullest, highlighting "novel and unique" selling points, and having no restrictions on content production and operation. However, this type of account may produce one or two hit products, but it does not have the potential for sustained operation and it is difficult for it to grow into a major sales account.

Therefore, shaping a personal image becomes the top priority in establishing a high-quality sales account.

First of all, we can see that the current super-big names on Tik Tok almost all have very obvious and clear personalities.

For example, Li Jiaqi is a professional BA with unique credibility in the beauty field. His years of sales experience enable him to keenly capture user needs, and his fans also trust his recommendations; Langweixian is a big eater who has eaten in thousands of stores, so the food or stores he recommends are naturally very attractive.

The personalities of these accounts have laid a solid foundation for his subsequent sales of products, and fans will not have a strong feeling of "incompatibility" with the product placement.

At this point, are you thinking, I know the importance of character setting, but is it difficult to put it into practice? Considering that real people need to appear on screen to establish a persona, and that the persona needs to remain unchanged on a unified account for a long time in order to maintain the persona, and that this type of content requires a high level of professionalism, all of these have led to people not daring to take the first step in creating an IP. In fact, it is not that difficult to establish a personal image.

To put it simply, character setting is to give an identity to the person appearing in the video.

First, determine the direction of the early content based on your own and your team's capabilities. For example, knowledge-based (low initial threshold), plot-based (high team requirements), vlog (high personal charm requirements), etc.

Then, the characters are given certain social roles, which can be classified into many categories, such as utilitarian roles (entrepreneurs, shopping guides), expressive roles (scholars, experts); prescriptive roles (security guards, police), open roles (best friends, straight men), etc. Simply put, it is to give you a reasonable identity in the real world and give users a reason to believe in you, like you, and be close to you.

After the character and content direction are established, the most important thing to remember is to specifically share content related to the attributes of the role you are "playing" and constantly strengthen the character through content. Once a certain character is recognized, you can continue to create other non-conflicting characters. For example, Wei Ya is a Taobao girl and a sales queen in the workplace, and a wife and mother at home. Under the influence of multiple identities, the account personality is closer to reality, easier to accept, and can attract the attention of a wider range of users.

But one thing is important to remember here: the character must be consistent with the social role, experience and preferences of the person appearing on the screen. It is difficult to create a character out of thin air, and a created character can easily collapse in the process of selling goods. This is also why there are so many institutional influencers, but so few who can actually sell products.

The last step is product selection. Looking at the big names in the front row, there are many examples of cross-border sales. As long as the personality is established and the content is relatively solid, there is no boundary to sales. It can even gradually grow into an IP and even break free from the constraints of the platform.

For example, KOL @捷捷之家有宝藏呀 currently has more than 800,000 fans. The products she sells are mostly daily household items and home furnishing products. She integrates the products into the small details of the display of good things through knowledge sharing and life records. The home clothes she appears in are real and unpretentious, and her sweet and gentle voice does not make people feel distant, making it easy for users to follow her rhythm and gradually be attracted to the products.

04 | Alternative ways to promote products on Douyin

In fact, in addition to selling products through short video content, there are many other alternative ways to sell products on Douyin. Below, Kas Data has sorted out 3 categories for your reference.

1. Live Broadcast

As mentioned earlier, the TikTok platform currently provides a large amount of traffic support for live streaming. Regardless of the login status, almost the same proportion of live streaming content will be pushed. Now can be said to be the best time to join the Douyin live streaming sales.

From the traffic sources of the TOP100 products on Douyin’s daily product viewing volume increase list on March 18, it can be found that 85% of the products on the list have related live broadcasts, among which 53% of the products have more live broadcast sessions than videos. It can be seen that live streaming has greatly increased the chances of products being seen and purchased.

Looking at the performance of each category in the TOP100, clothing, beauty, and food occupy the top three positions. In the clothing category, 100% of the products are associated with live streaming, and the number of live streaming of 70% of the products is greater than the number of videos, indicating that more and more KOLs have shifted their focus to live streaming.

As for the platform, users can enter the live broadcast through multiple entrances, such as the live broadcast square, follow, same city, recommendation, Douyin Volcano APP, etc. Moreover, compared with the situation where the shopping cart hanging in the short video content is likely to be diverted to the product aggregation page, the shopping cart in the live broadcast room will not be like this. It will directly lead to purchase, greatly improving the conversion rate.

Live streaming has surpassed short video exposure to become a larger source of product visitor traffic.

2. Matrix gameplay

Matrix gameplay is common among clothing players. They build a multi-account matrix, produce a large number of "similar" videos, split, merge and reorganize the same materials, create a large amount of homogeneous content, and through strong operations, strive for the explosive rate of Douyin.

The basic gameplay is: through the initial round of large-scale account placement, select individual accounts with better performance data in the first-level traffic pool to place Dou+ for the first time, and then based on subsequent data performance, further select one or two accounts with the potential to become a hit and add Dou+ placement, and determine whether to continue to follow up based on the interactive data feedback to obtain the hit. And follow up with live streaming to sell goods after the hit product is produced.

In order to reduce the output of such speculative content and avoid "over-marketing", Douyin has limited the number of times an account can post videos promoting products and enabled face recognition in display windows. This may deal a heavy blow to pure editing matrix accounts in the future.

3. Taobao Affiliate Gameplay

Taobao merchants can stimulate the platform's amateurs/KOCs/tail KOLs to spontaneously promote their products by setting up high-commission rebate items.

On the one hand, this method can make profits by selling products at low prices and high volumes if the products are sold out; on the other hand, it can use the strong traffic of Douyin as a backing to divert traffic to Taobao, improve Taobao's natural ranking with page views and sales, and increase the probability of being retrieved when consumers search for related words in Taobao, thereby increasing its weight.

Author: Call me Sister Na

Source: Kas Data