This is the most direct question in the He Tuber public's mind after Taotian announced the cancellation of Double 12 and replaced it with "Taobao Year-end Good Price Festival". Although this is a strategic adjustment made by Taotian for the normalization of low prices, in the context of the cooling of the shopping festival, it is inevitable that it will give the outside world the impression of "sending troops away with gold".

Judging from the performance of each company during this year's Double 12 , in contrast to Taotian's hesitation, Doukuai is ushering in the dividends of pan-shelf e-commerce construction, occupying the high ground of year-end promotions, and a new industry pattern is brewing.

More than ten years ago, Taobao used the "Singles' Day" to launch the Double 11 promotion. At the same time, JD.com also used the 618 store anniversary to launch a limited-time promotion. The shopping festival once made traditional e-commerce a feast for the eyes, and it became a leader in the Internet industry. At that time, the short video live broadcast platform had not yet entered the center of the stage. The enthusiastic response from the market allowed the platform to see the vitality of the big promotion. In order to undertake the remaining demand of Double 11 and cater to the year-end consumption climax, Double 12 came into being.

For a long time, Double 12 has been immersed in the proposition of continuing to write the “consumption myth”. However, subsequent shopping festivals have become more homogeneous. Frequent and similar promotions have overdrawn consumer enthusiasm, and traditional e-commerce's control over promotions has weakened. In addition to the main position of Double 11, “auxiliary festivals” such as Double 12 are also targets for e-commerce companies to capture.

There was a loud thunder in the shopping world, which contributed the first wave of popularity to this year's year-end sales, and also brought the shopping festival into the whirlpool of controversy.

Is there still a need for shopping festivals?

The major platforms have given a positive answer by sparing no effort in publicity. Taotian did not compromise with the empty talk, but used the adjustment of shopping festivals to normalize low prices. For traditional e-commerce companies whose transformation pressure has doubled, how to take advantage of the waste heat of major promotions to transform low-price presentations is the most urgent issue at the moment. As for Doukuai, which is aiming at the main position, it is enhancing the collaboration between the shelf market and the content market, and improving the construction of global interest e-commerce, just to get in.

In 2009, the newly established Taobao, under the leadership of then CFO Zhang Yong, launched the Double 11 Shopping Festival in the name of "Singles' Day" promotion, which was subsequently followed by other platforms, bringing e-commerce into the carnival era.

In the increasingly intensive consumption atmosphere, the promotion time is gradually extended and the gameplay is constantly enriched. In just a few years, platforms competing for customers and fanatical consumers have joined forces to create a "consumption myth". "Hand-picking party" has become a hot topic of discussion. The numbers on the battle report have grown exponentially, and the influence has spread beyond the circle and radiated to the entire consumer market. .

The performance of Double 11 allowed Alibaba to see the potential of holiday promotions. At that time, in order to seize the general trend of consumption upgrading, Alibaba changed the name of Taobao Mall to Tmall, shifted its focus to B2C, and focused on Tmall's brand building. The Double 11 promotion was It has contributed a lot. For the purpose of broadening market coverage, Alibaba followed suit and created another festival for small and medium-sized Taobao merchants in order to maintain its C2C position.

In addition, another purpose of Double 12 is to absorb the remaining demand of Double 11 and seize users’ spending budget at the year-end nod aobao’s original intention was to position Double 12 as a supporting role for Double 11 . Rather than driving turnover growth, the most important tasks are to complement Double 11 and build a complete e-commerce ecosystem. Therefore, the concept of Double 12 has placed great emphasis on differentiation from Double 11 since its inception.

However, even if Double 12 emphasizes the differences from Double 11 in terms of discount plans, target groups, etc. at the beginning of its establishment, the two will inevitably converge at the operational level. Since 2016, the growth of Double 12 has begun to slow down. Online and offline integration has been combined with Alibaba’s local life business. The complicated tasks have gradually blurred the positioning of Double 12.

The degree of distinction is no longer there, and the significance of complementing the platform ecology is eliminated. As Double 12 gets closer and closer to Double 11, the too close time node exposes the embarrassing situation of Double 12. The interval between the two promotional holidays is short. With the promotion of the pre-sale model, the promotion time of Double 11 has been continuously extended, leaving extremely limited buffer time for merchants and consumers.

In addition, the market penetration rate has almost reached its peak. Frequent promotions have made the year-end activities more crowded. Consumers feel tired from the high-frequency stimulation. Merchants have also reduced their interest in shopping because promotion fees are getting higher and the conversion rate has hardly improved. festival enthusiasm.

Looking back at the differences between shopping festivals, Double 12 was cancelled, but there are actually traces to follow.

In 2022, the performance of the last Double 12 has given hints. Investment promotion and publicity efforts have weakened, discounts and event duration have begun to shrink, and the platform official has not announced a battle report after the end.

This year, although Taotian replaced it with the Good Price Festival, it did not take this promotional festival away from the historical stage. New forces began to flock to the former home of traditional e-commerce.

The market penetration rate has reached its peak, and the stock era has arrived. Faced with changes on the demand side and the pursuit of latecomers, sinking has become an inevitable choice for traditional e-commerce companies. However, amid the clamor for “lowest price”, consumers are becoming increasingly numb to marketing incentives. With Pinduoduo, the low-price “goalkeeper,” holding on to its position, users are gradually “desensitized” to the shopping festival amid the diverse choices.

Consumers are eager for more intuitive low prices and services. Taotian tried every means to respond to the demand and introduced a large number of brand merchants for the first time. The number of participating products increased by nearly 20% year-on-year. Compared with previous Double 12 activities, the discount intensity and merchant scale of the Good Price Festival , the scale of products has been greatly improved across the board.

At the same time, Taobao and Tmall are merged to provide cross-store full discounts, which greatly lowers the threshold for order collection, and simplifies the preferential process through official instant discounts. Taotian tries to be as sincere as possible in order to build users' low-price mentality.

Starting anew is a solution. Abandoning the Double 12 Shopping Festival, which has accumulated influence for more than ten years , is Taotian's first step in building a low-priced and long-term IP . However, under the background of rising stars, Taotian’s year-end sales after the revamp were slightly deserted.

First, the Double 11 promotion has harvested most of the user demand, and the remaining amount is limited. Second, the warm-up and launch of Taobao's Good Price Festival was too late. It was only officially launched on December 9, later than Douyin Kuaishou, and the remaining demand was captured by the latter first.

Third, in the face of the revised activities, the enthusiasm of the protagonists of small and medium-sized businesses has not increased significantly, and the evaluation of "losing money and making money" is widely circulated.

Amid the involution of the track, the platform's traffic subsidy seems to be a drop in the bucket, the cost of activities has significantly reduced profits, and stores have to spend more time and energy. Many merchants have to keep pace with the platform in order to obtain stable traffic exposure.

On the other hand, live streaming e-commerce platforms represented by Douyin and Kuaishou have increased their investment in Double 12 , and their popularity is unprecedented.

Douyin Mall’s Double 12 Goods Festival was officially launched at the beginning of this month. Compared with other platforms, Douyin’s event is longer, lasting from December 1st to December 12th. Among them, cross-store discounts and discounts with stacked consumer coupons Welfare, increase discount intensity in one fell swoop. On the other hand, merchant membership activities are launched to increase discounts and help merchants accumulate in the private domain.

On December 12, the Double 12 Good Shopping Festival data released by Douyin e-commerce showed that multiple categories increased by more than 100% year-on-year.

In terms of Kuaishou, the promotion period of the Double 12 Good Things Festival lasts from December 7 to 12. The activity mainly emphasizes "low-priced good things" and "dual-domain growth", using low-priced products to open up the content ecology and business ecology. In addition, it has just been implemented The organizational changes of Kuaishou have broken through the barriers between Kuaishou departments, and the content and business cycle of the platform are expected to be further accelerated.

DouKuai's success in Double 12 is largely due to the improvement of the two shelf e-commerce platforms. Douyin puts Douyin Mall at the forefront, and Kuaishou's investment promotion highlights the importance of shelf stores, which can be evidenced. One or two. Backed by traffic advantages, live broadcast e-commerce companies have made up for their shortcomings, giving them more chips to compete for Double 12 popularity.

Hobby e-commerce companies are staking their claim, laying out shelves in depth, and opening up content and e-commerce scenarios. This not only prepares for the peak growth of live streaming, but also extends its tentacles to the hinterland of traditional e-commerce. At the same time, Taotian and JD.com were still trying and making mistakes to turn the car around.

A surprise attack is quietly staged, the highland of the year-end sale is first come, first served.

The "2023 Double Eleven Network-wide Sales Data Interpretation Report" released by Star Map Data shows that the comprehensive e-commerce transaction volume of Double Eleven this year was 923.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 1.1%. Since the beginning of 2020, the growth rate of Double 11 has declined for four consecutive years.

As the "downstream reservoir" of Double 11, when the popularity of Double 11 subsides, Double 12 will inevitably be affected.

As long as the cake does not get bigger, the battle for sharing will inevitably become more intense. Hobby e-commerce made a surprise attack on Double 12 , and the popularity turned the year-end sales into a scene of "ice and fire". The e-commerce landscape is undergoing profound changes.