The longest Double 11 in history is here, ushering in a new stage of e-commerce warfare

In recent years, there has been a somewhat amusing unspoken rule about Double 11: as the founder of Double 11 and currently the largest e-commerce platform in China, competitors will watch Taotian's Double 11 timing and deliberately start their promotions before Taotian. The logic here is that the earlier you start, the more you can capture the first wave of sales.

In the past few years, Taotian has suffered losses from this. Hence, this year's Double 11 started as early as October 10th, making it the longest Double 11 in history.

The change in timing is just one aspect of the fierce competition in China's e-commerce industry. According to a report by Goldman Sachs, the market share of Taobao and Tmall has decreased from around 66% in 2019 to about 45% in 2023, a one-third decrease over four years. In a domestic market where the incremental growth of mobile internet has peaked, every share lost by Taotian is due to the close combat with its competitors.

So you can visibly perceive the new changes in this year's Double 11.

For example, Taobao completed interoperability with WeChat before Double 11, allowing WeChat users to directly browse, select, order, and pay for Taobao products through shared links in WeChat chat boxes. Furthermore, platforms that have been emphasizing "no refunds" for half a year have also increased their support for merchants, with the Taobao ecosystem even declaring the slogan "Let's do Double 11 again".

From building walls to tearing them down, from collectively learning from Pinduoduo's "no refunds" to promoting favorable measures for merchants, whether consumers or e-commerce practitioners, only by better understanding the platform's changes can one make choices that benefit themselves.

Double 11 is about to start, platforms are desperately courting merchants

Combining the promotional strategies of various platforms, it can be seen that restarting pre-sales and extending the promotion period are major highlights of this year's Double 11.

According to an official announcement from Taobao, the 2024 Taobao Double 11 will start the first wave of pre-sales on October 14th at 20:00, presenting three waves of outbreaks throughout the entire period.

This year, JD.com's Double 11 does not have a pre-sale phase and will kick off the first wave of flash sales on the evening of October 17th at 20:00.

Kuaishou's Double 11 will enter the warm-up phase on October 16th, with the official event period running from October 18th to November 11th. The event is divided into five stages: preparation, warm-up, opening day, category day, and carnival day.

To support the development of merchants and seize the advantages of Double 11, major platforms have also introduced multiple preferential policies to help merchants reduce operating costs.

On September 24th, Tmall Double 11 officially announced that this year, Tmall will invest hundreds of billions of yuan in Double 11 to help merchants grow their businesses through facilitating transactions, expanding customer flow, and reducing costs.

In terms of expanding traffic, Tmall Double 11 will invest billions in purchasing traffic and collaborate with over 200 internet platforms to comprehensively expand customer flow for merchants. On the eve of this year's Double 11, Taobao and Tmall will officially support various payment methods such as Alipay and WeChat.

In terms of cost reduction, Taobao and Tmall platforms have fully launched the Return Treasure service, reducing return costs for merchants by about 20% to 30%; the platform will fully refund the Tmall commission for products participating in the "Hundred Billion Subsidy"; during Tmall Double 11, Taobao merchants will enjoy commission-free promotions and live broadcasts, and Taobao merchants will also be unbound from shipping insurance costs JD.com is also helping merchants in various ways, such as launching a policy to support merchants with billions of traffic, helping white-label products and factory-direct products to gain more traffic and price subsidies, and introducing an advertising gold reward pool for merchants; providing merchants with 20 AI tools for free, covering aspects such as product management, order management, and customer service reception; JD Logistics offers platform merchants discounts on storage service fees, new signing discounts for commercial warehouses, and special freight insurance subsidies for low-margin orders.

According to Yibang Power, Pinduoduo has upgraded its "double compensation for overpaying" service from the original "compensation for overpaying", which took effect on November 16th. All products participating in the "hundred billion subsidy" activity are applicable, and a merchant exit mechanism has been added.

Platform players are also increasing. This year, RED welcomed its first Double 11, the "annual shopping carnival", which will officially start on October 12th and last until November 11th. The carnival will introduce innovative online themed street gameplay, where users can enter the "street" through search and notes, shop while watching live broadcasts, and exchange stamps for goods.

A new Double 11, heralding e-commerce transformation

Some merchants have told Bohu Finance that even if small and medium-sized merchants do not participate in the activities, there is not much change in sales volume.

Behind this is the arrival of a turning point in e-commerce competition.

The essence of e-commerce is more efficient connection, allowing better matching of supply and demand. E-commerce competition is also mainly focused on these two dimensions. Shelf e-commerce based on the logic of "people finding goods", live streaming e-commerce based on the logic of "goods finding people", and Pinduoduo based on low prices and group buying all use their advantages in these two aspects to capture the market.

The wave of consumption downgrading has forced Taobao and JD.com to learn from Pinduoduo, and the hundred billion subsidy is gradually becoming normalized. The core category-based Double 11 promotion centered on low prices is losing its original appeal.

However, it has been proven that blindly offering low prices is difficult to become a platform's competitive advantage: in core categories, prices on various platforms have already converged, and excessively pleasing users will only cause merchants to flee.

Although perhaps for some time in the future, low prices or cost-effectiveness will still be the key to competition, the increasingly diversified demands of consumers make it important to meet these demands from the supply side.

As a Tmall representative stated, the merchant policies for Double 11 are a continuation of the cost reduction measures implemented by Taobao and Tmall this year. The platform has fully "relaxed" policies such as only refunds, launched experience points, and canceled Tmall annual fees. In the current e-commerce environment, what most merchants need is not more intense platform operations, but someone to reach out and save them from the fire and water.

Taobao was the first to realize this.

After the end of the 618 event this year, the Taotian Group held a closed-door meeting for merchants. It was made clear at the meeting that Taobao has weakened its absolute low-price strategy, and the search weight distribution system has been changed back to distribution based on GMV. After changing back to GMV distribution, this year Taobao's assessment focus has shifted to GMV and AAC, no longer pursuing high DAC brought by low prices.

On August 9th, Taotian launched an optimized strategy for "only refunds" for merchants, and then introduced a new service "Return Treasure" in early September, reducing the cost of returns and exchanges for micro-businesses by 10%-30% According to the latest data from Taotian, after the new strategy was launched for two months, Taobao intercepted over 400,000 unreasonable "refund only" cases on a daily basis. The phenomenon of unreasonable "refund only" has been almost completely rectified on the Taobao platform.

In addition to optimizing "refund only," Taotian has also continuously introduced measures such as refundable technical service fees, refundable promotion fees, and cancellation of Tmall annual fees to reduce the operating costs for merchants.

Meanwhile, JD.com adheres to a low-price strategy, aiming to cover a wider range of merchant groups and consumers to increase the platform traffic available to merchants.

This change is almost internal and external. In addition to the iterative measures taken by the platforms themselves, there have been new developments in interconnection between platforms.

Since the beginning of this year, Taobao first enabled WeChat Pay, followed by cooperation between Taobao and JD.com in logistics and payment.

Through cooperation with WeChat Pay, Taotian is expected to gain access to a larger pool of traffic, improve user experience, and benefit merchants. The cooperation between Taotian and JD.com will enhance the shipping experience for merchants and the logistics experience for consumers, while JD.com's logistics will increase the volume of express deliveries, enhancing its market share in warehousing and logistics management services.

In the view of Bohu Finance, major platforms are intentionally stimulating market demand through a series of interconnection actions, injecting new vitality into the industry, and bringing about a new e-commerce revolution.

Interconnection between platforms is expected to enhance the competitiveness and service levels of the entire industry, providing users with a more diverse range of products and services, further improving the quality of platform services and user experience.

This year, e-commerce platforms have introduced various measures to achieve interconnection. How effective are these measures? Will Double 11 rekindle new vitality? These questions will be answered in this year's Double 11 event