Overview of this article: Relevant reports show that the scale of live e-commerce transactions will reach 1.92 trillion yuan in 2021. A large number of grassroots poured into this industry, becoming a super big V, sitting on millions, tens of millions of fans, fans represent traffic, traffic represents money, and the live e-commerce market has undoubtedly become one of the biggest outlets at present. However, with a number of head anchors being "banned", live e-commerce has also come to a crossroads. Many industry insiders mentioned that the era of extensive growth of live streaming with goods has ended, and now the competition is strategic thinking and specialization, systematization and refined operation.
1. The vigorous development of live e-commerce (head anchor, market growth)
2. Pain points of live e-commerce (industry supervision, tax evasion, product protection; profit dispute between anchors and merchants)
3. Live e-commerce next Huafu (operation of service providers and traders, operation of refined content)
If 2019 is the first year of e-commerce live broadcasting, then 2020 is the year when e-commerce live broadcasting blooms. Affected by the epidemic, the crowd has reduced the flow of people, and e-commerce live broadcasting has become a "life-saving straw" for many physical industries.
Celebrities enter the live broadcast room to promote the endorsed products; bosses enter the live broadcast room to stand for their own products; the clerks of offline stores and the cabinet sisters at the shopping mall counter all turn into anchors and shout products in front of the camera. Subsequent live broadcasts of selling houses and live broadcasting education have also become the outlet, and major platforms have opened live broadcast functions, and for a while, everyone is an anchor.
However, in January 2021, "Half Moon Talk" once published an article in which it clearly put forward such a "prediction": I believe that 2021 will become a turning point for live e-commerce to end the barbaric growth.
Whether it means something or not, it is now 2022, and there is no doubt that this prophecy is about to come true.
The "Spring" of Live E-commerce
In May 2016, after three months of trial operation, Taobao Live was officially launched, kicking off the prelude to live e-commerce. In the past few years, from the excitement of a brother and a sister double 11 with a total of nearly 20 billion yuan of goods, to the head anchor has been fined for tax evasion, live e-commerce has both the romance of big fish and the fierceness of mud and sand, but all this does not hinder the fact that this is an era of e-commerce live broadcasting.
According to Ali's announcement, in the 12 months as of 2021Q1, Taobao Live GMV exceeded 500 billion yuan, accounting for 6.7% of Alibaba's platform. According to the announcement of Kuaishou, from 2020Q4 to 2021Q3, the total amount of its live e-commerce transactions reached 616.9 billion yuan; of which 2021Q3 reached 175.8 billion yuan, an increase of 86% year-on-year. 2021 M8/M9 Gecko to see the monitoring of the Douyin live broadcast sample turnover of about 430 / 48 billion yuan, after considering the sample coverage, platform growth rate and seasonal factors, Soochow Securities speculated that the 2020Q4~2021Q3 Douyin live GMV reached 450 billion yuan.
"Live e-commerce was originally one of the means for Tao to improve the conversion rate of brand owners on the platform, similar to group purchases and short videos, and since then, as live broadcasting has brought good conversion effects, the priority of its entrance has gradually increased." Relevant industry insiders pointed out that the entry of the content platform has brought new traffic to the live e-commerce, the user portrait of Douyin Kuaishou is highly consistent with the main consumer force of the e-commerce platform, and the e-commerce platform can also make up for the lack of supply chain resources when the content platform is monetized, and the cooperation between the two is more in-depth, bringing opportunities for the vigorous development of live e-commerce.
As far as the current live e-commerce market is concerned, it has presented the "top three" pattern of Taobao, Douyin and Kuaishou, with more than 80% of the GMV share. UBS predicts that by 2025, the two platforms of Kuaishou and Douyin will account for 55% of the content-based e-commerce GMV share, and Taobao will account for 28%.
On June 18, 2020, ByteDance set up an e-commerce first-level business department to officially release the "Douyin E-commerce" brand; on October 9, The Douyin live broadcast room officially banned external links and opened the e-commerce closed loop. Douyin e-commerce began to accelerate the construction of an e-commerce ecosystem. In terms of Kuaishou, in addition to e-commerce infrastructure initiatives such as the Good Things Alliance and Magnetic Juxing, it has begun to solve the problem of traffic distribution in the public and private domains. The Kuaishou family, represented by Simba, has been rectified by the platform many times.
In 2021, after the talent anchor completed the task of live e-commerce market education and the whole people breaking the circle, brand live broadcast began to be on the desk. At the same time, Douyin and Kuaishou have also successively put forward the concept of interest in e-commerce and trust in e-commerce, and began to build a moat.
Zhihu, Little Red Book, Station B... UGC content communities have entered the sales track this year, And the way Xiaohongshu intervenes in the e-commerce industry chain is mostly jump ads; zhihu's user answers are embedded in shopping windows and grass videos; there are always jump links to traditional e-commerce under the video of Station B, and its own channel closed-loop "Little Yellow Car" live broadcast room has also been planned to be ready to go online.
The intention of making e-commerce a second growth curve is more obvious, and the trillion blue ocean has become red.
The "chaos" under the costume
In 2020, with the outbreak of the epidemic, live e-commerce quickly took center stage. On March 25, Guangzhou issued 16 policies to support live e-commerce; on June 20, Yuhang District of Hangzhou issued a live e-commerce policy, and live e-commerce enterprises can receive up to 100 million yuan of R&D investment and other subsidies; on July 6, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and other departments added "live salesman" jobs under the "Internet marketer" occupation. As a result, e-commerce anchors have become official types of work; on July 17, the State Administration of Taxation stopped e-commerce tax reimbursement and vigorously cultivated emerging economic growth points...
However, its barbaric growth ecology has led to frequent chaos and fakes.
In the case of tax evasion, anchors can evade taxes by concealing the commission income they obtain from live broadcasting platforms; they can set up a number of sole proprietorships and partnerships to create fictitious businesses, and convert the income from labor remuneration such as commissions and pit fees obtained by their personal participation in live streaming into business income for false declaration and tax evasion.
This has also spawned a huge industry – tax planning. In the tax planning advertisement of Chongming Island in Shanghai, it was even directly pointed out: "The establishment of sole proprietorship, the application for approval and collection, of which the enterprise income tax is all exempt, the personal income tax is as low as 0.5%, the comprehensive tax burden is as low as 1.6%, and the effective tax saving is 96%."
"In addition, the head anchor monopolizes the traffic, but also monopolizes the price and profit, which is very unfriendly to the new brand," the head of the head e-commerce live broadcast once said, "the head anchor with goods is usually accompanied by a large discount, which is an important reason for promotion, but also to pay a high commission." ”
The anchor's commission to the merchant mainly includes two parts: "pit fee" and "commission". According to soochow securities research, the pit fee + commission of some categories of head anchors can reach 30% to 50% of sales. As a result, it is often difficult for the brand side to make a profit, and more become a marketing means, but the traffic belongs to the head anchor.
In 2020, China Consumer Daily reported a case of brushing orders, and an e-commerce company in Changshu, Jiangsu Province, brushed 135,000 orders from September 2019 to July 2020, with a total of more than 4.2 million yuan in principal and commission, of which 6,201 were brushed on a number of live broadcast platforms.
Even many people in the industry said that the counterfeiting of brushing orders and false war reports has become a major problem in the live e-commerce industry.
The spring breeze of live broadcasting is still blowing
"In 2022, about 35-50% of the traffic of the entire live e-commerce will be reshuffled." Relevant industry insiders predict that, in other words, the industry will be turbulent in the second half of 2021, but anchors, merchants, and platforms agree that in 2022, the wind of live e-commerce will still blow.
The middle-waisted anchors compete for the position, the merchants want to regain the right to live broadcasting, Taobao, Douyin, Kuaishou and other platform players all increase the code, no one wants to miss the vast market that will reach 7 trillion yuan in 2025.
At the end of 2021, the three major platforms have new actions. Taobao organizational structure adjustment, good live broadcast and small and medium-sized businesses, Douyin launched an independent e-commerce APP, Kuaishou support industrial belt merchants, all intend to give the middle waist anchor more traffic support, encourage business live broadcast.
While decentralization, the platform is also gradually promoting planning and specialization. Kuaishou e-commerce has obviously paid more and more attention to service providers and traders: integrating service providers into four categories according to the areas of expertise: MCN service providers, industrial service providers, merchant service providers and brand service providers; following the "STAGE Methodology: Kuaishou E-commerce Merchant Operation White Paper 2021", the "Leapfrog Cycle - Trader Work Manual" and The Kuaishou Trader System 1.0 have been released to help more merchants improve their professional live broadcast operation capabilities and cultivate more trader teams.
"The development of live e-commerce to this stage, the current gap of professional operation talents is still relatively large, resulting in higher operating costs of live e-commerce, directly affecting the profitability and further growth of merchants." Gecko looked at the founder Hu Wenwen said that Kuaishou e-commerce to engage in service providers and promote the professionalization of traders will accelerate the maturity of the entire live e-commerce industry, which is of great significance to the entire industry.
The development of the live e-commerce industry has led to the refinement of the division of labor, and the service provider system needs to be further subdivided and specialized. For the platform, in order to help merchants control operating costs, achieve long-term stable profits, and let live e-commerce enter an automatic and sustainable positive cycle, creating a service provider ecology has become an inevitable goal.
In a word, after experiencing barbaric wealth, live e-commerce will also enter the long journey of mean reversion.