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tik tok's march in the e-commerce landscape is accelerating towards the shelves.

huxiu learned that douyin e-commerce has recently reached a strategic cooperation with yonghui supermarket, and plans to enter more than 100 yonghui stores, aiming to quickly cover offline high-net-worth retail users and complete the penetration of douyin e-commerce's offline shelf mentality.

people familiar with the matter said that the background of the above cooperation is: it is mainly to achieve further coverage of high-end users by douyin e-commerce. the core business directions are to increase the mac (monthly active users) repurchase rate and to strengthen the construction of industrial belts (currently coordinating more than 300 douyin live broadcast bases).

huxiu immediately verified the above content with douyin, and the other party said that the information was untrue but did not give any further response.

in fact, as early as the beginning of 2023, when douyin supermarket was launched, the outside world regarded it as a self-operated business benchmarking tmall supermarket and jd supermarket. the business logic is nothing more than using online supermarkets as a carrier, targeted access investment, and next-day delivery, but douyin has high hopes for the project. douyin supermarket business is another move by the group in the e-commerce ecosystem after live streaming and mall model. because when the traffic pattern is reshuffled, the onlineization of supermarkets is also a major trend. douyin supermarket must assume the role of "strategic positioning", and douyin supermarket has been accumulating potential energy under the big framework of e-commerce since its birth.

"latepost" once wrote an article pointing out that under the dual influence of traffic anxiety and price competition, douyin e-commerce proposed in 2023 to be more "aggressive" in developing shelf venues (mall, store, search and other shopping scenarios). support strategies include reducing or exempting commodity card commissions and increasing marketing investment.

looking back, the effects of the above measures taken by douyin e-commerce can be said to be immediate - according to douyin's official data, by the end of 2023, the proportion of douyin shelf sales in douyin's e-commerce market exceeded business expectations and reached 35%.

not only limited to the increase in the overall share of shelves, wei wenwen, president of douyin e-commerce, revealed at the all-staff meeting in july 2024 that douyin e-commerce's nps (net promoter score) has steadily increased in the first half of the year, and "the proportion of users willing to recommend douyin e-commerce to people around them has increased by 10%"; mac (monthly active users) in the shelf scenario in the first half of the year also increased by more than 60% - you must know that nps and mac are the two major user-side indicators that douyin e-commerce has long paid attention to. the former reflects user loyalty and satisfaction, and the latter reflects the scale of business users.

behind this, douyin emphasized the "one-item discount" in many major promotions this year, trying to improve user stickiness with a minimalist approach. taking this year's 618 as an example, the transaction volume of douyin's e-commerce "super value purchase" channel increased by 150% year-on-year, and the order volume of the "10,000-person group" activity increased by 101% month-on-month from april; other data show that the conversion rate of douyin's e-commerce marketing coverage products in the first half of 2024 increased by 18% compared with the beginning of the year.

in view of the steep data curve of the shelf market, wei wenwen stated that increasing shelf sales in the second half of the year will still be one of the team's key goals. "adopting more refined strategies and improving service experience are the basic skills of e-commerce platforms, and are also the long-term direction of douyin e-commerce efforts."

an internet analyst believes that as douyin's e-commerce gmv (gross merchandise volume) continues to rise,in 2024, tiktok needs to further improve live broadcast conversions and strengthen shelf mindset to help the entire e-commerce ecosystem continue its upward growth momentum.

the “new anchor point” of douyin e-commerce?

"the supermarket business can meet the needs of some specific users in terms of platform services and logistics timeliness, and is an effective supplement to our existing platforms and merchants." mu qing, vice president of douyin e-commerce, said in an interview in 2023 that the original intention of douyin supermarket was to meet users' needs for e-commerce purchasing experience.

as a new business that is still building momentum, douyin supermarket has been implementing targeted entry investment promotion (referring to the supermarket's acceptance of preliminary consultations with suppliers for some specific brands or categories of goods, and then formally introducing them as official suppliers of the supermarket after evaluation that they meet the requirements) since it established its business prototype in 2023, unified packaging of goods, direct shipment from warehousing, and next-day delivery (orders placed before 23:59 on the same day will arrive the next day) delivery services.

however, douyin supermarket has taken the lead in opening warehouses in south china, east china and other places to sell its own products. for example, the guangzhou warehouse, which is operating normally, covers zhuhai, jiangmen and zhongshan. the delivery locations are 2 to 6 kilometers away from the warehouse radiation range and can be reached within hours. it is not ruled out that douyin supermarket will further subdivide its own warehouses and merchant purchasing warehouses in the future, especially renting supply warehouses in areas with large order volumes.

as of the end of 2023, douyin supermarket logistics’ core service cities cover: guangzhou, shenzhen, huizhou, and dongguan, and it will quickly iterate by collecting business data. core indicators include urban storage area, order volume, main product categories, personnel costs, etc. - after all, inventory control is a systematic project. if sales-related information is not fed back in a timely manner and forecasts are inaccurate, it will lead to unreasonable inventory structure and cycle, causing redundant logistics costs for the business.

huxiu previously wrote an article pointing out that in the first half of 2023, the douyin supermarket team increased the priority of supply chain construction and focused more on front-end supply chain optimization; in the second half of the year, the business actively promoted the trial operation of new warehouses in chengdu and hangzhou, and provided supporting incentives for merchants to settle in, expand skus, reduce prices and other means to increase order volume and coverage.

moreover, in order to provide a better after-sales experience, douyin supermarket has been actively preparing to establish its own distribution team since the second half of 2023 to strengthen its fulfillment capabilities and provide efficient delivery and after-sales services.

correspondingly, the business has also been fine-tuned in terms of organizational structure. the douyin supermarket business team has expanded from dozens of people at the beginning of 2023 to more than a hundred people, with the majority of manpower in direct logistics, front-end and back-end of the supply chain; and the team implements flat management. wang haiyang, the person in charge of douyin supermarket, has many years of practical experience in supermarket e-commerce user operations and merchant system construction. his direct reporting line is mu qing, vice president of douyin e-commerce.

data from jiuqian’s middle platform shows that the douyin supermarket team will set up bd departments, supply chain departments and procurement departments based on the merchant resources they have. these departments will work together with merchants to complete product links and offline store expansion; and douyin supermarket’s performance channels are mainly divided into online channels, product cash flow, logistics and warehousing traffic.

zhuang shuai, an expert in the retail e-commerce industry, pointed out: "if the fulfillment part can be done well, the competitiveness of the entire douyin bu will be greatly enhanced. however, this system cannot be achieved overnight, and online is very different from offline. perhaps douyin will have a shorter period of time to build a fulfillment system than meituan, jd.com, and pinduoduo, but it will still take a long time."

this is mainly due to the fact that douyin lacked the accumulation and internal genes in heavy operation and heavy asset businesses. it has been testing new businesses in pursuit of roi for a long time and has developed a habit of quick in and quick out. logistics fulfillment is like a gestation period of ten months. although the changes are slow from the outside, the internal growth is cumbersome and complicated, and it is not something that can be accelerated by spending money.

to put it bluntly, in the narrative inertia that traffic leads the trend, bytedance is rushing around in a battlefield it is not good at. only time can tell how much of the huge potential energy of douyin e-commerce will be absorbed by douyin supermarket.

the good news is that douyin supermarket has been actively making breakthroughs. one of its actions is to negotiate cooperation with large supermarket chains such as yonghui supermarket and hongqi chain store recently. douyin supermarket has even provided rich resource support to attract more large supermarket chains to cooperate, including: free traffic (increase supermarket exposure and sales), store organization (help supermarkets better display products and improve user experience); in addition, large supermarkets can also obtain product subsidy support (return a certain proportion of advertising resources) by cooperating with douyin, which will undoubtedly help supermarkets better promote products to increase sales.

of course, douyin supermarket is currently also promoting cooperation with small supermarkets in some regions, mainly to achieve regional penetration. small supermarkets will receive certain commission reductions before entering douyin supermarket, and supermarkets that enter within three months will receive gmv rebate coupons. these policies can help small supermarkets reduce the cost of entering douyin supermarket.

it is worth mentioning that the proportion of supermarket commission reductions provided by douyin supermarket to its partners is not the same. the extent of commission reductions for large supermarkets fluctuates according to differences in supermarket gmv. these reductions can help large supermarkets reduce their operating costs in douyin supermarket.

huxiu learned that the cooperation costs between yonghui supermarket and douyin supermarket mainly consist of commissions, advertising expenses, delivery fees, and influencer and agency service fees. perhaps considering the feasibility of the cooperation, douyin supermarket and yonghui first selected a number of single-point cities for cooperation. this strategy may be to better adapt to the regional characteristics and user needs of the douyin platform.

looking back, douyin supermarket conducted four tests in chengdu, shanghai and guangzhou from 2022 to 2023, but the business data was not as expected. douyin e-commerce will further expand its investment in supermarket business to make it a richer e-commerce platform, thereby increasing user stickiness and repurchase rate to douyin.

douyin e-commerce is experiencing a second development

"the time window for tiktok's e-commerce is likely to be only three to five years, and its reliance on e-commerce business is far more urgent than the outside world sees." a partner of a us dollar fund told huxiu that bytedance has built a new traffic system in the bat jungle, and it is focusing on cultivating the "secondary development curve" of e-commerce in its prime.

perhaps many people still lack awareness of douyin's e-commerce shelves. one data aspect is: by the end of 2023, the average daily pv (page views) peak of douyin mall has exceeded 1.6 billion times.

douyin, which has emerged as a live streaming e-commerce platform, has been able to build such a high traffic field largely because it has promoted the mall section to the homepage traffic entrance since 2022. after two years of precipitation, some live streaming resources have completed the migration to the douyin mall. for example, last year huaxizi, lancome, and yaya down jackets all achieved remarkable sales results through the live streaming + mall store closed loop.

on the one hand, douyin cannot be limited to the vision of live streaming, and shelf e-commerce is a shortcoming that must be made up.——the douyin e-commerce ecosystem needs a mall, and brand merchants and consumers need to form a "shopping" mentality on douyin. for brand merchants, the mall can provide multiple sales channels, increase sales, increase popularity and the number of fans; for consumers, the mall has a rich sku (product categories) and is easy to shop at low prices.

to this end, douyin mall will judge the popularity of products based on their sales volume and sales revenue, and then try to get users to make purchases in the shortest possible time by recommending popular products, so as to improve user conversion and optimize the purchasing experience - this will not only better attract new users and expand the user base, but also improve user loyalty.

on the other hand, douyin has expanded from content to various life services such as e-commerce, entertainment, catering, and hotel travel.it extends without boundaries again and again, and the more services it connects, the more it looks like building an "online siege" for the entire ecosystem of eating, drinking, and having fun.

in addition, douyin e-commerce divides its users into purchasing users and non-purchasing users, and hopes to attract as many users as possible to make purchases; its criteria for defining popular products are based on their sales volume and sales revenue, rather than on the subjective evaluation of the mall - based on this, douyin mall is becoming more and more like a comprehensive e-commerce platform, and in the short term it will be like pinduoduo (adopting group buying, flash sales and low-price strategies to attract users), and in the future it will be closer to tmall.

of course, support is support, and the rise of a brand is inseparable from commercial investment. after purchasing keyword traffic for a brand, douyin will increase the search weight. for example, after a user searches for a product keyword, douyin will place the brand store that purchased traffic at the top of the page ranking. in addition to keywords, brands can also purchase topics, hot searches and other resources in douyin. these investment flows will directly increase the brand's recommendation density.

in view of this, the support of agents and service providers to douyin e-commerce cannot be underestimated.

huxiu learned that the agent system is managed by the channel management department, while the service provider system is managed by e-commerce. among them, agents account for the highest proportion of advertising consumption (ka - key customers, la - small and medium-sized customers consumption mainly comes from agents), and the growth mainly comes from the dual performance system, which allows agents to obtain more rebates, so agents are more and more interested in douyin sales (direct customer sales can only get douyin commissions); as for service providers, they are mainly responsible for the operation services of merchants and the construction of e-commerce talent systems.

it is worth mentioning that bytedance qianchuan adjusted its agency system as early as 2022. the reorganized business line can outsource customers to direct customers rather than through agency intermediaries. behind this move is that bytedance qianchuan pays more attention to the quality, quantity, diversity and coverage of agents, aiming to provide more personalized services - this means that bytedance qianchuan can allocate customer resources more flexibly and improve business efficiency.

in addition, douyin is further refining the interest distribution of short videos to improve transaction conversion efficiency; and douyin e-commerce is trying to increase the proportion of users' e-commerce stockpiling by adding a search box (in the early stage, douyin will set inherent labels based on user viewing preferences; in the later stage, user minds and content ecology are relatively mature, and recommendations + search can better meet needs).

of course, there is potential room for improvement in the people, goods and places of the pan mall. search tag settings, search matching, supply chain optimization and customer mindset all need to be further optimized. specifically, douyin e-commerce pays more and more attention to the popularity and number of fans of the store, because it can increase the traffic during live broadcasts, that is, the higher the sales of the store, the higher the popularity of the store.

under this logic, order conversion rate is very important for all major platforms. the next challenge that douyin e-commerce needs to solve is: how to convert generalized users into active purchasing users in the mall.