On the Pinduoduo He Tuber  APP’s main New Year’s Festival page, most of the top products on the real-time best-selling product list are big-name products marked “official and authentic” and sold at low prices. In particular, medicines, fresh produce, and other products that have extremely high quality requirements and are extremely sensitive to authenticity have occupied an important share of Pinduoduo’s multi-year product festival best-selling list. The same situation also occurs with high-priced products such as Moutai, iPhones and even gold jewelry.

It is not difficult to see that the three giants are well prepared and targeted. This year’s New Year Festival is destined to be another fierce battle.

It’s not just the three “cat and dog” giants that are eyeing the New Year Festival. Content e-commerce platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu, second-tier e-commerce platforms represented by Vipshop and Suning.com, and emerging players such as Hema are all preparing for the New Year Festival at their own pace. .

Dou and Kuai are eager to give it a try, fully explore their own advantages and prepare for the early stage.

The former launched a "15% off one item" special event, which lasted from January 13 to January 28. It created four themed scenes of trendy New Year goods, reunion New Year goods, flavored New Year goods and welfare New Year goods, and multiple headers. The live broadcast room has launched a large number of exclusive discount products based on the platform's discounts.

The latter also officially launched the New Year Goods Festival on the 13th. Taking advantage of the Northeast tourism boom, it collaborated with Harbin's cultural tourism and consumer departments to launch the "Old Iron New Year Goods Please Get on the Train" pre-heating campaign and launched a train of Kuaishou Mall New Year Goods Festival in Harbin. Special train.

All in all, the e-commerce platform has shown great enthusiasm and confidence in this New Year's Festival, making this major promotion node the focus of the entire bank. The current popularity and investment in energy saving for New Year’s goods may seem reasonable at first glance, but in fact it is surprising – after all, the decline of shopping festivals is very obvious, and no one can guarantee whether the New Year’s goods festival will be like Double 11 or 618. , following the footsteps of Double 12.

Looking back on the past year, the e-commerce industry has not been very happy. The Value Institute previously reported” analyzed that the lack of shopping festivals is one of the six mainstream trends in the e-commerce industry in 2023. Statistics from Star Map show that last year’s 618 traditional e-commerce platform’s GMV growth rate was only 5.4% year-on-year, and all Double 11 platforms had a tacit understanding not to release battle reports. According to brokerage estimates, the total GMV growth rate was approximately 7%-9%.

There are many reasons for the Shopping Festival’s downturn: the objective factor of consumption downgrade, the rise of live streaming e-commerce and the prevalence of tens of billions of subsidies have eliminated the price advantage of big sales, the rules for full discounts are too complicated, and the growth channels for mid-level merchants have narrowed. Among other commonplace issues, there are also the negative effects brought about by the increasingly fierce price war and traffic war between platforms.

It’s not hard to find the cause, it’s the headache to find the solution. In the past few years, leading e-commerce platforms have tried many ways to rekindle consumers' desire to shop, including combining them with the most popular concepts such as the Metaverse and AI, but the effect has never been obvious. At this time, the New Year Festival, which has remained popular for many years, is even more worthy of appreciation.

What is the strength of the New Year Festival? It can be summed up in two points.

On the one hand, compared with man-made festivals such as Double 11, the New Year Festival has some inherent advantages: it is backed by the Spring Festival, the traditional festival that Chinese people value most and has the deepest cultural genes, and under the overwhelming festive atmosphere both online and offline. The consumer desire of Chinese people is naturally much higher than usual.