In the past 618, the GMV of the over-the-top anchors is ushering in a plummet.
According to Qingyan Intelligence data, the GMV of the beauty category of 618 Li Jiaqi's first live broadcast this year was about 2.675 billion yuan, far lower than nearly 5 billion yuan in the same period last year, a decrease of 46%.
Behind the data, "the head anchor has no way to make money in the big promotion" is becoming a definitive conclusion in the live broadcast e-commerce industry.
Now in front of the live broadcast brother, he must find a new traffic pool.
Recently, Li Jiaqi's company, Beauty Wrist, launched its own brand "Beauty Wrist Selection", and several products were launched in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room through the flagship store.
From last year, fans have been asked to reflect on "Are you working hard?" After the incident, Li Jiaqi was particularly low-key this year, and it was not until 618 that the news that Li Jiaqi confirmed that he would participate in "Brother 4".
In this regard, Li Jiaqi responded that "I want to make money, I want to make money and send you red envelopes", but from a realistic point of view, participating in variety shows can increase one's own popularity, and at the same time, it also has the opportunity to save one's reputation. It's a pity that except for the splash when the news just came out, there has been no related Reuters in the past month.
Wrist selection is Li Jiaqi's second path.
This is also the second Tmall flagship store launched by Meifang after the "Naiva Family". Today, the flagship store of the Naiva family has a relatively complete SKU layout, and the number of fans in the flagship store is also 55w+.
After the Huaxizi incident, Li Jiaqi's Douyin account lost nearly 10 million followers, but in the Taobao live broadcast room, which is closer to the actual transaction, Li Jiaqi's fans have increased by nearly 10 million this year. Overall, Li Jiaqi is still the first brother.
However, the anxiety of the growth of the traffic of the entire live broadcast ecology undoubtedly includes "Brother Yi". Behind Li Jiaqi's "anxious to make money", shelf e-commerce, which is regarded as the "past tense", is getting back users.
As the growth gap between live broadcast e-commerce platforms and integrated e-commerce is getting smaller and smaller, can shelf e-commerce return to the throne?
Is it deep binding, or is it getting rid of head dependency?
The launch of Beauty Wrist Preferred, whether from the Logo or the product detail page, seems to be deliberately avoiding the three words "Li Jiaqi", and instead wants to emphasize the IP of "Beauty Wrist", which is more like a new independent brand.
But in fact, the only few sounds of the beautiful wrist are closely related to Li Jiaqi, except that the first announcement of the launch was on Li Jiaqi's WeChat public account, and the first time it was launched in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room. In the live broadcast room, Li Jiaqi also made a clear definition of the positioning of the beauty wrist for the first time.
He said that China now has a strong supply chain capacity, and many familiar international brands are made in China and come from Chinese factories. Beauty Wrist is hoping to integrate the high-quality products of the factories behind these brands into Beauty Wrist Selection.
When it was first launched, the store only launched four products: laundry pods, latex mats, silicone quilts, and dry hair towels. At present, although it has been 10 days since the products were put on the shelves, the sales of these products are not too optimistic. Among them, the highest sales volume is the laundry pod with a unit price of 109.9 yuan (the actual payment after choosing a coupon is 99.9 yuan), the sales volume is 2000+, and the sales volume of latex mats with a unit price of 329 yuan is 500+.
It is reported that these two products with slightly higher sales are both products recommended by Li Jiaqi in the live broadcast room. In addition, the products that were not recommended by Li Jiaqi in the live broadcast room basically had no sales.
In the three years affected by the environment, live broadcast e-commerce ran blindfolded all the way in its "wasteland era", which gave birth to many head anchors. Individual super-head anchors even have extremely high bargaining power over the brand, among which Li Jiaqi, as a veritable "first brother", has been caught in public opinion turmoil many times because of this.
In the past, when the goods in Brother Yang's live broadcast room were removed from the shelves due to low prices, he angrily accused Li Jiaqi of controlling prices and inventory, and then there was a "contract agreement between Mei ONE and the brand", which pushed public opinion to a climax. To put it simply, it is not that Li Jiaqi really pushes the goods to the lowest price, but that the prices of other anchors, whether they subsidize themselves or brand subsidies, cannot be lower than Li Jiaqi.
High attention means high risk, and this matter is not only realized by the anchor, but also by the platform. Since last year, major head anchors have begun to consciously weaken their positions in the live broadcast room.
After the platform gradually realized the limitations and potential risks brought about by over-reliance on a single head anchor, "de-heading" began to become an industry consensus.
On the one hand, the platform began to look for "the next Li Jiaqi". In February this year, Taotian established a live broadcast e-commerce company and announced that it would provide "nanny-style" fully managed operation services for celebrities, KOLs, and MCNs who are interested in entering Taotian to start broadcasting.
On the other hand, driven by the platform, storecasts began to enter the public eye in a big way. Brands began to increase their investment in their own live broadcast channels, putting more traffic on the live broadcast rooms of brand stores. Brands have begun to regain product pricing power, a notable example is this year's 618, and the voice of the head anchor about "breaking the price" has become quieter.
Traffic is getting more and more expensive, and when the limited traffic begins to flow to the store, the traffic in the head live broadcast room will naturally decrease. HSBC data shows that sales in many leading live broadcast rooms have decreased by 70%.
Cheng Daofang, general manager of Taobao Live Division, said bluntly: "2023 is the first year of the outbreak of store broadcasting, and store broadcasting has been upgraded from the business tool of Taobao and Tmall merchants to the core business position. ”
Back to the beauty wrist selection, at present, the first step of the beauty wrist selection wants to "go out" first, and it has to rely on Li Jiaqi.
It is worth noting that PConline found that as of press time, the flagship store of Meifang Preferred has quietly launched two low-cost products, garbage bags and disposable face towels, and there have been single-digit sales without any live broadcast.
This is also another important point to discuss live broadcast e-commerce today, whether it is the decline in influencer traffic or the rise of the so-called store broadcast, what is more important behind it is that the supply chain value of e-commerce channels is re-highlighted.
Can't escape shelf e-commerce at the end?
The launch of the beauty wrist selection is regarded by the market as the beginning of the layout of the beauty wrist or Li Jiaqi's own brand. Including thinking that compared with other head anchors, Li Jiaqi is almost the latest to build his own brand.
In the industry, the head anchor is more famous for doing his own brand, which is Xiao Yang's "Xiao Yang Zhenxuan" and Dongfang Selection's self-operated product window.
Xiao Yang Zhenxuan opened a flagship store on Douyin and Taobao at the beginning of last year. The main products currently sold by the two are the same as those in their respective live broadcast rooms, and Xiao Yang Zhenxuan is positioned as a product that pursues the ultimate cost performance, covering daily necessities, leisure snacks, personal care and home cleaning, etc. Oriental selection, on the other hand, focuses more on agricultural products.
Earlier, Internet celebrities such as Zhang Dayi and Sydney also launched their own clothing brands.
This is also the main path for most head anchors to do their own brands, that is, to cooperate with foundries for OEM, without directly participating in the development and production of products. This leads to the fact that if there is a problem with the quality of the product, the first thing to bear the brunt of is actually the reputation and reputation of the anchor.
At this time, the products sold by Beauty Wrist Preferred are all displayed in the form of "Beauty ONE Preferred× brand name". Among them, the cooperative brand of laundry pods is "Xiaochao", and PConline found from 1688 that Xiaochao is actually its own brand of Guangzhou Garsia Cosmetics Company.
Strictly speaking, from this point of view, the preferred method of beauty wrist is more of a "co-brand" than a private brand, and it is not even a "brand".
According to the company's data, from April to the end of May, Meifang began to apply for trademark registration of Meifang, and currently has as many as 75 trademark information, including but not limited to food, kitchen sanitary ware, leather and leather goods, office supplies, jewelry and watches, daily chemical products, etc.
It can be speculated that the beauty wrist prefers to take the possibility of the C2M model of full-category sales, that is, through the Internet platform, to achieve a direct connection between consumers and manufacturers, and remove middlemen.
From the perspective of Li Jiaqi's own positioning as an anchor, the selection of beautiful wrists is actually a very smart approach. Different from Xin Xuan, Xiao Yang Selection, and Fengwei Pie, Meifang Preferred focuses more on the advantage of product selection, rather than OEM products.
The model of direct connection to the factory is undoubtedly intuitively telling consumers that "I give you a wholesale price".
However, PConline found that the price of a single laundry pod on 1688 was 0.25 yuan, and the price of a single piece before the preferred discount was 0.61 yuan, but the former required a minimum of 150,000 pieces×;
The carnival of live broadcast e-commerce has made a number of white-label products stand out, and also made the price of goods "broken again and again". Recently, Uncle Ni, a senior practitioner of e-commerce, bluntly said in an interview that consumers' purchase of goods is tending to the use value of the item itself, and one of the significant trends is the multi-pin of white-collar consumption. Brand premiums are disappearing, and consumers are paying more attention to price than quality.
On a practical level, in the past two years, we will find that searching for "brand foundry" in 1688 is becoming a popular trend. Whether it is some well-known clothing brand stores on Taobao, as long as you add "Tongyuan", "foundry" after the brand name, or what Uniqlo or Muji, you can find several so-called source factories in Xiaohongshu.
Consumers will even find the manufacturer of the product through the tag or label of the product. Or take a screenshot in the live broadcast room, and go to the traditional e-commerce platform to search for replacement products through pictures.
When the use value of the item itself begins to become the main position of consumer demand, the advantages of shelf e-commerce itself in "complete" and "fast" will be highlighted. Coupled with the weakening of the bargaining power of anchors, the value point of "low price" will also return to shelf e-commerce.
A clear example of this is Douyin e-commerce. In recent years, Douyin has been increasing its support for shelf scenarios, including building malls, increasing the proportion of mall and search traffic, etc., and conversely, it has also begun to gradually weaken the dependence of e-commerce on its own content ecology.
Nowadays, when searching for a product on Douyin, the first place is no longer video content, but the products of various Douyin malls, followed by various flagship stores.
After the traffic dividend is no longer there, if you want to really turn "traffic" into "retention" and improve the conversion rate, you will eventually have to return to the main battlefield of shelf e-commerce, which also means that the industry may have to reshuffle again.