JD.com is teaming up with live streaming for business

Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Huang Yu

Since last year's Double 11, JD.com has set high expectations for live streaming and has been trying to carve out a piece of the competitive live streaming track.

Wall Street News has learned that JD.com recently announced that it will add an additional monthly investment of 1 billion RMB in cash and traffic resources to provide unlimited "real money" subsidies and "substantial" support to high-quality institutions and influencers.

This is at least the third time this year that JD.com has tilted resources towards live streaming, showing JD.com's dedication to content e-commerce.

In March of this year, JD Retail first proposed the concept of "content ecosystem", which, along with "open ecosystem" and "instant retail", is listed as one of the company's three major directions for 2024, known as the "three must-win battles". According to insiders, the "content ecosystem" includes live streaming, short videos, and other sections within JD.com.

A month later, JD.com officially announced a billion RMB investment in cash and traffic to attract more original creators and high-quality content institutions to join. The person in charge of JD.com's content ecosystem stated that video creators are an important force driving the prosperity of the content ecosystem, with the aim of inspiring creators to produce professional and interesting content.

In this incentive program, JD.com provides cash subsidies to influencers covering over 20 creative fields such as digital 3C, home appliances, and maternity. JD.com also offers more exposure opportunities for high-quality, original videos. In addition, JD.com extends an olive branch to MCN institutions, specially setting up an institution incentive list with rewards of up to 5 million RMB.

The 618 promotion has become a rehearsal for JD.com's live streaming. As of the evening of June 18th, JD.com's 2024 618 transaction volume and order volume reached new highs, with JD.com's live streaming order volume increasing by over 200% year-on-year; JD Cloud's digital hosts started live streaming in over 5,000 brand rooms, with a total live streaming duration of over 400,000 hours and over 100 million total viewers.

Currently, e-commerce is still in intense market competition, with JD.com facing challenges from new e-commerce forces such as Pinduoduo, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, as well as traditional e-commerce rival Alibaba. Throughout the entire e-commerce industry, live streaming e-commerce remains the fastest-growing sector.

According to a report by iResearch Consulting, the scale of China's live streaming e-commerce market reached 4.9 trillion RMB in 2023, with a year-on-year growth rate of 35.2%, and it is expected that the market size will have a compound annual growth rate of 18% from 2024 to 2026. For JD.com, this is an opportunity that cannot be missed.

JD.com has been early to rise and late to gather in the development of live streaming e-commerce.

In fact, as early as 2016, JD.com started doing live streaming, with Richard Liu even personally appearing to cook. However, JD.com has always viewed live streaming as a marketing method and did not elevate it to a strategic level, thus missing out on the boom of live streaming e-commerce. Now, JD.com hopes to make a comeback through digital host live streaming.

This time, JD.com is ramping up its live streaming efforts, focusing not only on incentives for service providers and influencers, but also placing emphasis on digital host live streaming service providers, indicating that JD.com's support focus is still on digital host live streaming.

Specifically, for service providers and influencers, JD.com will provide tens of millions in cash and hundreds of millions in traffic for targeted support. Sales reaching a certain scale can receive a one-time cash reward of up to 1 million RMB in a single month, and the platform will also provide high commission and quality goods JD.com hopes to create a more professional live streaming ecosystem by introducing industry experts, well-known artists, and other expert-level certified influencers in 15 popular fields. In addition, JD.com is recruiting professional live streaming service providers for industrial belts, providing them with comprehensive support such as targeted communication, traffic, and policy preferences.

For the first time, JD.com proposed to introduce digital influencer service providers, offering traffic in the billions and fully opening up the platform's traffic entrance to JD Live channels, search, recommendations, and other public domain channels, providing direct traffic support to digital influencers.

According to the internal sources mentioned above, by massively introducing digital influencer service providers, JD.com aims to help businesses reduce the cost of starting live broadcasts through digital influencers, with nearly 10,000 businesses benefiting so far. At the same time, JD.com will also categorize digital influencer service providers and improve their product capabilities in terms of cooperation models and cooperation chains.

After 8 years of rapid development in live streaming e-commerce, whether JD.com can seize the tailwind of live streaming and achieve overtaking in the curve remains to be seen. This will be a highlight in the live streaming e-commerce industry, and time will soon provide an answer