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Title image｜Visual China

Dear friends who are engaged in e-commerce, how are you doing this year?

Many merchants lament that business is not doing well, but many new merchants continue to enter the market.

Should we continue to do it? Which track is still worth pursuing? Should we engage in content e-commerce or shelf e-commerce?

Content e-commerce represented by live streaming and short videos has experienced explosive growth for quite a long time, and many businesses have reaped the benefits.

Shelf e-commerce, represented by comprehensive e-commerce, is traditional but still effective. It can be said to be the basic foundation for merchants' online operations.

For businesses, no one dares to give up, and everyone has to invest real money. However, no one has a definite answer on how to achieve growth.

E-commerce forms, different paths to the same destination

It must be admitted that content e-commerce has become a kind of business infrastructure.

In the stock era, the value of content e-commerce itself has not disappeared. In traditional e-commerce platforms, content sections such as pictures, texts, short videos, and live broadcasts are emerging in an endless stream; and merchants building their own live broadcast teams and cooperating with anchors are an inevitable part of daily e-commerce operations.

The logic behind this is not difficult to understand. The essence of the e-commerce industry is matchmaking and contract fulfillment. The supplementation of content and shelves by different e-commerce platforms is more like an extension of these two functions.

The value of content ecology in terms of information access, interest stimulation, etc. is unquestionable. The matching "grass planting" action directly narrows the distance between users and products, and effectively supplements the "matching" function.

Search, shopping malls and other "shelf" venues are the direct carriers for merchants to complete conversions through marketing actions, which is inevitably driven by the need for "fulfillment".

"Content" can be said to be the most efficient and effective traffic generator in the current business environment. And the "shelf" field is the most effective way to convert traffic into business growth, which has been verified by the market, time and users.

For this reason, it is imperative for content e-commerce companies to build their own shelf space.Taking Douyin e-commerce as an example, it announced its upgrade to a full-domain interest e-commerce as early as 2022, and began to promote shelf e-commerce on a large scale, trying to interconnect the content field and the shelf field.

The "planting + pulling out" link brought by content + shelves is obviously the optimal solution that is more in line with consumer habits. Users no longer need to jump back and forth between different platforms to be "planted", and no longer need to copy links and keywords to find products to "pull out". Merchants can focus on one thing and maximize operating efficiency, achieving 1+1>2, which was previously impossible to achieve with single-point operations.

At least in Douyin e-commerce, the correctness of walking on two legs of content and shelves has been verified.The Douyin e-commerce ecosystem conference held in May last year released two sets of data. First, in the past year, Douyin e-commerce GMV increased by 80% year-on-year, of which the shelf scene GMV accounted for 30%; second, in the past year, Douyin Mall GMV increased by 277% year-on-year, e-commerce search GMV increased by 159% year-on-year, and more than 56% of the merchants on the platform had more than 50% of their GMV from the shelf scene.

During this year's 618 shopping festival, the shelf space has become a new business blue ocean for Douyin merchants. According to official data, compared with previous promotions, the mall advertising brought merchants a 311% increase in average daily GMV and a 330% increase in average daily orders.

In this way, the "content + shelves" model that can achieve a self-consistent model may be the ultimate form of current e-commerce operations.

After all, judging from the results, in the current era of increasingly scarce attention, content-driven is still the trump card. In addition to the trump card, adding the shelf ecosystem to form a trump card seems to be a must for merchants to choose a business platform.

Global operation, but also global promotion

Whether it is content or shelves, the premise for merchants to achieve business growth is to obtain traffic. The traffic on a platform can often be divided into two types: natural traffic (i.e. free traffic) and commercial traffic (i.e. paid traffic, or partially incentivized traffic). Taking the Douyin platform as an example, merchants on the former need to leverage through content management, shelf management or participation in platform marketing activities, while the latter needs to be obtained through real money or completing incentive tasks.

If a business wants to do deterministic business, it is inseparable from the support of commercial traffic. This leads to several problems:How can paid investment bring about the maximum effect? ​​How can we obtain a larger traffic scale?

These problems are still "sometimes limited" even for experienced pitchers. After all, promotion is time-consuming and laborious, there are too many indicators, and the final result is more like a "black box". Pitchers may not be able to explain why the product becomes a hit, and the existing marketing products cannot really work on the increasingly diverse and segmented target groups, and cannot meet the merchants' sophisticated goals from basic exposure and clicks to deep conversion and continuous conversion.

Merchants are looking for solutions, and platforms are also looking for ideas. Merchants doing business in Douyin e-commerce are no strangers to Juliang Qianchuan. As an accelerator for Douyin e-commerce business, Juliang Qianchuan plays the role of a hub between the commercial traffic resources of Douyin ecosystem and the business growth of merchants, and tries to provide solutions from the perspective of business acceleration.

One background is that last year, Bytedance Qianchuan was the first in the industry to launch the "global promotion" product, expanding the ability to explore high-quality traffic to all live broadcast areas such as live broadcast squares, short videos, shopping malls, and searches, ensuring stable ROI while attempting to achieve greater transaction volumes.

In addition, the core difference is thatFocusing on the merchant's overall payment ROI goal, global promotion broke the boundary between paid traffic and natural traffic for the first timeFrom a technical perspective, we ensure that the people that can be reached by natural traffic are no longer reached redundantly through paid traffic. This avoids waste of investment while ensuring that the merchants' paid investment is converted around incremental growth, thereby finding the optimal solution for global traffic and running volume.

According to official data from Juleliang Qianchuan, after merchants use live streaming for full-area promotion, the overall GMV of the live streaming room increases by 15%-20%.

Behind the remarkable effect is the technical support that hits the pain points of merchants' marketing. On the one hand, the global promotion of Juliang Qianchuan has built a global integrated efficiency model. In layman's terms, it is to connect the samples and characteristics of paid traffic and natural traffic at the data level, so that the two major traffic sources that were originally independent can work together and even leverage each other. At the same time, it can accurately estimate the conversion possibility of each user in the live broadcast room.Paid competition is introduced only when natural recommendations cannot reach users, so that every penny spent by merchants can bring incremental value.For merchants, it can even be called another dimension of traffic dividend.

This has become a new growth point for many brands. For example, during the 618 promotion, L'Oréal Paris planned a complete marketing campaign, and through live broadcasting, it amplified the effect of seeding and promoted the conversion of pulling out the grass, achieving a 3-fold increase in the daily GMV of the brand's self-broadcasting and a 69% increase in the conversion rate of the entire population, finding a dynamic balance between natural traffic and commercial traffic.

On the other hand, it is using "technology" to replace "experience". With the support of AI technology, merchants only need to set an overall payment ROI target, and the global promotion product can automatically create and edit materials for merchants, optimize and deliver materials, and make overall dimensional traffic estimates and adjust delivery plans to achieve the ultimate goal.

This has been the key driving force for some businesses to break through the bottleneck of their business. For example, Jiaoxia, after adding multiple matrix accounts recently, is facing the dilemma of insufficient operating manpower. However, global promotion has become a breakthrough for Jiaoxia. With 520 as the node of the big promotion, after the early stage of the promotion, after the promotion of influencers, with the help of the global promotion of live broadcast, the GMV has finally increased by 6 times during the big promotion.

And Juliang Qianchuan is still filling in the promotion puzzle of omni-regional operation. In April this year, in addition to the traditional live broadcast field, Juliang Qianchuan launched a test of omni-regional product promotion, further opening up the dual fields of content and shelves at the marketing level.

Business growth, completing the puzzle

Content and shelves used to be a single-choice question. But now, at least under the global concept of Douyin e-commerce, they have combined to form a king bomb, bringing new growth pools for both itself and merchants.

Judging from the overall actions of the platform, whether it is business layout or ecological completion, there is no doubt that Douyin e-commerce continues to exert its efforts in the shelf field, and its efforts and growth process are naturally an important new source of business growth for merchants.

As a platform, the strategic significance of building a shelf market is greater than other things. Allowing more people to build houses, do business, and make money on this foundation is its main task for a long time in the future. It can be regarded as a new bonus brought by the development of the platform, which is extremely precious at a time when the traffic bonus is exhausted.

For this reason, it seems natural that the global promotion will cover the shelf scene from the live broadcast scene. In addition to the live broadcast format, short videos, product cards, pictures and texts are also covered, and "products" as the core element can achieve one-stop promotion in the entire domain, so that incremental gains can be obtained in both the shelf and content fields. According to the data from Juliang Qianchuan, after using the global promotion of products, the overall GMV of the products increased by 20%-30%.

Under the premise of interconnection between the two fields, each business operation of the merchant can avoid the loss and loss caused by jumping between different apps. The global promotion connects the platform traffic and field scenes from the two dimensions of live broadcast and goods, and is like a lubricant inside Douyin e-commerce, allowing every investment to be converted into real transaction data as much as possible.

Especially for merchants who have begun to deploy Douyin e-commerce shelf space, the business story of business growth has a new chapter. Brands that took the lead in testing the waters and found the right method have also reaped actual growth returns.

Semir Jianbei Shoes Store, which mainly sells shoes and clothing, is a representative example. Faced with bottlenecks, Semir tried to find new growth possibilities for its popular men's hole shoes in the live broadcast room. After trying to place product cards through the global promotion of goods, it opened up a "new space" in the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem: the sales of this product increased nearly 20 times in the Douyin mall, of which the mall advertising GMV accounted for 78%.

For merchants who already have an advantage on the shelf, the combination of Douyin Mall and product omni-marketing can help them better integrate into the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem. Three Squirrels, which already received exclusive traffic incentives as a good-priced product, increased its average daily GMV by 45% month-on-month after adding product omni-marketing and further opening up traffic within Douyin.

In addition to completing the infrastructure and products, Douyin E-commerce is also investing heavily in policy incentives and support to help merchants transition from a single form to a complete "content + shelves" form.

Taking the Chinese Valentine's Day as a node, Douyin e-commerce and Juliang Qianchuan jointly provided merchants with tens of billions of traffic and multiple subsidies and benefits. On the one hand, Douyin Mall provides multiple price subsidies to help merchants create super-value hot products. On the other hand, for merchants who want to grab node traffic through Juliang Qianchuan, incentive red envelopes and traffic strategy additions are provided to help growth.

In short, for merchants, no matter how the platforms’ models iterate, the business position where they should vote with their feet is the one that can bring more certain, more efficient, and lower-threshold business growth.

What we can be sure of is that, at least at the current stage of the development of the e-commerce industry, the parallel development of content and shelves is inevitable, and merchants also need more marketing product assistance that conforms to the new form. It might as well be more patient and confident to find growth possibilities in the new environment.

This content is the author's independent opinion and does not represent the position of Huxiu. Reprinting is prohibited without permission. For authorization matters, please contact [email protected]