Produced | Tiger Sniffing Business Group
Author | Li Ling
Recently, Douyin Group Purchase has been launched in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. Currently, the main content covers four aspects: food, leisure and entertainment, accommodation, and play. Although TikTok group purchase does not occupy a large proportion of the screen in the App page, it can be seen that its weight is not low at the very top embedded in the “same city” column.
The diversion effect of such a prime location did not disappoint. The No. 1 Italian restaurant in Beijing’s food hotspot list has sold 299 yuan discount coupons for a two-person set meal group purchase by 61,000 people. Although the discounts shown are a bit exaggerated, the sales volume of Meituan’s 799 yuan double set meal in the first half of the year was 424 compared to the same restaurant, which shows the effect of Tik Tok.
For ByteDance, which has been repeatedly reported to be listed, new business is closely related to the valuation of capital. On March 2, someone broke the news on Pulse that the in-purchase price of ByteDance employee options has risen to $180 per share, which has doubled compared with the same period last year. Regardless of whether the number is true or not, the continued expansion of local life business will inevitably become a powerful driver of Bytedance’s valuation growth.
However, in the response of the relevant person in charge of Douyin to the interface news, the above-mentioned local life service is called an extension service of the Douyin POI function, and the more important function POI is just to allow users to share geographic information in the video. Position, “This is a universally available capability in the industry, and there is no need to over-interpret it.”
It is not surprising that ByteDance’s local life business is carried by Douyin. After all, apps with a daily life of more than 600 million at this stage are really rare. It is also thanks to Douyin’s traffic pool that Byte is able to lay out new businesses leisurely when giants are vying to penetrate the industry chain.
At this stage, Douyin needs more monetization models to maximize user value. Therefore, Zhang Yiming chose to learn from the growth path of Meituan and use his most proud product, Douyin, to raid old friends.You Wangxing’s local life service position.
Raid Meituan
Is Douyin Group Buying really over-interpreted? Actually not.
Feel the speed of Douyin first: In December 2020, ByteDance established a special localization development team and transferred 10,000 employees to the team; in February 2021, Douyin’s “Preferential Group Purchase” started Closed beta; in March 2021, Douyin Group Buy will be officially launched in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou.
A TikTok group buying merchant told Hu Xiu that it had settled in about a month ago, and the platform actively contacted and clearly informed that it was TikTok group buying and not other group buying. According to the other party, TikTok group purchase is free to enter, and users who purchase group purchase coupons can spend normally at the store without using other third-party tools.
Tiger Sniff understands that TikTok will also promote the QR code in the contract stores in the future, a scoring code sticker that looks like a payment code, and it has been affixed in some popular TikTok stores.
According to the user service agreement of Douyin Group Purchase, the service body of Douyin Group Purchase is Beijing Space Transformation Technology Co., Ltd., which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toutiao, the Sun Company of Bytedance, and the legal representative Li Fei is BYTE. Department of senior management and legal representative of a variety of products.
Whether it’s the speed of TikTok group purchases or past attempts, it is enough to come up with an answer. Bytedance’s idea of local life is not born overnight, but gradually deduced from a single function into a new business landscape. process.
Huxiang learned that the POI positioning function mentioned by the above-mentioned person in charge of Douyin had wanted to try it early internally, but did not think about how to connect with the original business in the early stage. Until 2019, the marketing tool “Shake Store” will be launched, and the positioning function will be combined with the actual business. However, because Douyin users did not develop the habit of spending on the platform at that time, the closed-loop commercialization of Douyin e-commerce was not completed, and the role of POI did not appear.
As of March 2020, Douyin’s “group buying” function will be availableOnline, POI has a commercial scene.
At that time, the Douyin group purchase was only open to certified merchants with platform enterprise accounts. Officially defined this function as a marketing tool. It was a help measure for offline merchants in catering, hotel, tourism and other fields during the epidemic period. Certified merchants created The group buying activity is added to the video, and Douyin recommends it to users who are 6 kilometers nearby. The user clicks on the video link to place an order, which can be delivered by express delivery or consumed in the store.
Except for the blue V certification platform that has the group buying function, it charges a review fee of 600 yuan. There are no other fees, which is equivalent to a channel for merchants to get a free shop exposure on Douyin. If users often browse the content under the “surroundings” column, they are likely to be planted, and then follow the address to navigate to the store, realizing the process from planting grass to offline consumption.
As the positioning function is increasingly applied to specific scenarios, Douyin’s local life services are gradually taking shape.
start from the list
Currently, there is not much content for Douyin group purchases. According to “food and dining” and “hotels and hotels”, there are only two major pieces. The page is relatively simple, and the basic sorting selection system is relatively complete. There are options regardless of whether it is divided by cuisine, region, discount, or price.
Under the product attributes of the Douyin App, the detailed display content of merchants is very different from that of Meituan. At this stage, the merchants who get good display positions on the homepage are basically settled merchants, and their pages are composed of group buying items + expert visits + related short videos. However, due to the lack of relevant video content, the hotel ranked No. 1 in the New China World Trade Center. When the relevant video was pulled down a little, there were some short videos of fitness guides in the category of “specializing in thick legs”.
For hotels and homestays, Douyin currently focuses on accessing third-party OTA platforms. In addition to domestic top-level platforms such as Ctrip Travel and Tongcheng Travel, there are also scattered small platforms such as Lv Mama, Mitu, and travel agencies.
Except for the group purchase coupons of local catering merchants, the important part of Douyin group purchases, one for the last 30 daysThe ranking of user interest index, which is similar to Dianping’s must-eat list, has also been formed.
This leaderboard is undoubtedly a key step. Drawing on the core moat of Dianping, Douyin chose to establish a recognized consumer guide through user selection in the early stage to accumulate the authority of the platform. However, the difference between Douyin and Dianping is that Douyin is composed of video content as a consumer guide, and reviews are composed of textual content.
At this stage, the number of merchants for Douyin Group Buying is relatively small. Except for the catering section, most of the merchants on the list of entertainment, hotel and other categories have not entered the list. Douyin except for the collection options on the merchant’s homepage , In addition to recommending other similar merchants to make up for it, there is also a pure diversion method.
The merchant page has an address link. The user clicks to jump to the map, and can choose to use a third-party map platform to navigate to the store for consumption, or choose a nearby popular location to continue spending time in the App.
However, judging from the fact that the merchant page does not clearly identify the location, Douyin does not want users to jump out of the App. However, with the increase in group buying content and rich user consumption data, Douyin group buying is likely to directly display how far it is from users in the feed stream like Meituan, so as to extend to navigation and even taxi services.
Tigersniff experienced the TikTok group purchase. Both the order and the refund will be notified by SMS immediately, but the refund is a bit slow, and it took about a day. Slightly different from other platforms, the Douyin background shows that refunds need to be reviewed and processed by the merchant.
There is a high probability that the user experience will not affect the merchant’s choice of Douyin. If in the subsequent expansion of local merchants, BYTE still uses the free strategy of no commission, the marketing cost of merchants on Douyin will be much lower than the existing platform, then there is no reason to reject such high-traffic and low-cost promotion channels.
Zhang Yiming has no cards to play
For a long time, Bytedance has made rapid strikes in various fields, and it has also been accompanied by rapid retreat. According to the research data of Futu Securities, byteJump’s 2020 revenue will be around 37 billion U.S. dollars, or about 240 billion yuan. Among them, advertising revenue is 175 billion yuan, which is nearly 30 times the revenue of the e-commerce that contributes second in revenue. Live broadcast, games, and education are not worth mentioning in front of advertising.
In other words, besides advertising, ByteDance does not have a business that can play.
For such a large amount of bytes, it is not a good thing for revenue to rely heavily on the simplest traffic monetization. The 650 million daily livelihoods obtained by relying on short videos are close to the ceiling, and there is no national-level consumer business that just needs high-frequency in the original field.
The just-needed and high-frequency local life services are exactly what Zhang Yiming needs. And he was eyeing Meituan, and there were early signs.
In January 2019, Douyin launched the coupon issuance function, and merchants can initiate 50% off catering coupons on the page. A month later, Douyin launched the regional marketing tool “Diuyin”, local offline stores can be positioned when Douyin releases videos. The content expression form of coupon + video is quite attractive to consumers, and free promotion channels can also attract merchants.
Wang Xing’s defense against Zhang Yiming was mixed in the brief test of live broadcast and short video. In May 2020, Meituan launched “Travel Live” and “Kangaroo Live”. The entrances are in the two sections of the Meituan App navigation bar. In order to enrich the live broadcast sample, Meituan recruited travel experts, rewarded the live broadcast, and also tilted the traffic to the scenic spots that actively joined. But it didn’t take long for Meituan’s live broadcast content to quietly disappear.
In the second half of 2020, short videos of food and entertainment projects appeared on Meituan, including the content of big V shop, and introductions shot by merchants. By the beginning of the year, there was almost no business content in the form of live broadcasts and videos on the Meituan App.
Wang Xing’s defense didn’t seem to work, but Zhang Yiming’s deepening continued.
If it is divided according to the business of Meituan Daojia and Daojiao, Douyin has begun to take the embryonic form of Meituan Daojiao at this stage. Meituan Daojia’s main business takeaway is the key to the formation of Meituan’s traffic pool, and Douyin has already acquired a large number of users through short videos, so it is very likely that it will notDo the home part.
In addition, the home delivery business of food delivery and grocery shopping has a heavier model and extremely low profit. This kind of hard work is not in line with Zhang Yiming’s byte-based products, which are mostly lighter and more profitable.
Zhang Yiming has already started the layout of the rest of the wine travel business. In December 2020, at the same time that Byte established its localization development team, WeiByte (Beijing) Travel Agency Co., Ltd., which is wholly-owned by Beijing Weibo Vision, the main company of Douyin, was established.
According to Zhang Yiming’s style, the next step is to embed a Meituan on Douyin or build a Ctrip first, depending on what he buys.