Video number+applet, in 2023, Tencent will open the closed loop of e-commerce

These days, many people are paying attention to the 2023 WeChat open class PRO. After all, as a national application with a daily life of over 1 billion, WeChat attracts people’s attention.

From this year’s WeChat open class, it is not difficult for us to capture a clear signal: in 2023, Tencent will fully impact the e-commerce business.The left-handed video number and the right-handed applet will become the two trump cards of Tencent’s e-commerce in 2023.

The status of video number has risen and become the hope of "the whole company"

In this year’s WeChat open class, the video number was mentioned in an unprecedented position.

Before the official launch of the WeChat open class, the video number had been "out of the circle" in advance because of the inspiring speech of Tencent founder Ma Huateng: at the internal staff meeting in mid-December last year, Mark, who has always been a Buddhist, was unusually "sharp" and unexpectedly said this:The most eye-catching business of WeChat business group is video number, which is basically the hope of the whole audience (the whole company).

Judging from the data revealed by the WeChat open class in 2023, Ma Huateng’s statement is not empty.

The data shows that in 2022, the watching scale of video number will increase by 300%, the watching time will increase by 156%, the quality broadcasting will increase by 614%, and the broadcasting time will increase by 83%. This means that in the past year, more and more users entered the live broadcast room through WeChat, and the video number stayed longer.

In the aspect of live delivery that millions of people are trying, the live delivery scale of video number has also increased at a high speed, the sales volume has increased by more than 8 times year-on-year, the conversion rate of platform public domain purchase has increased by more than 100%, and the customer unit price has exceeded that of 200 yuan.

There are various indications that after a period of exploration, the road to commercialization of video numbers has begun to dawn.

For merchants, the biggest change in the video number last year was the launch of the "video number shop" in July 2022.

From the functional point of view, as an important move of Tencent’s e-commerce horse racing, "video number shop" is similar to Tik Tok Mall in function, which can be regarded as a signal that video number catches up with Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker and realizes the closed loop of e-commerce through video number.

After the launch of the "Video Shop", many brands are also keenly aware of the upcoming dividend period brought by the video number e-commerce. The number of businesses that live broadcast and sell goods in the first time has increased significantly, among which clothing, food and beauty cosmetics are the best-selling categories in the video number;The sales from video stores have accounted for more than 90%.

From the trend point of view, as Ma Huateng himself said, short videos have had a great impact on the whole Internet in the past three years, and all platforms and enterprises have to pay attention to this piece, which will erode the time of many long videos, games and other products. Nowadays, represented by video number, Tencent has made many attempts to combine short video and e-commerce. Next, video number has reason to bring greater returns in commercialization.

Small programs become an essential channel for small and medium-sized enterprises

In addition to the video number, since the day of birth, the WeChat applet that has entrusted the dream of "Goose Factory People" e-commerce has performed as well as ever.

So far, the average daily users of WeChat applets have exceeded 500 million. It is no exaggeration to say that applets have fully penetrated into our life, work, entertainment and other scenes.

With the blessing of a huge user base, it is not surprising that small programs bear the heavy pressure of Tencent’s e-commerce business.

According to the data released by WeChat and Tencent Research Institute, the transaction volume of B2B applets increased by 45% in the past year, among which the transaction volume of home improvement, department stores, shoes and clothing/sports and tax-free applets increased by more than 47%.

Putting the time further, since 2020, with the transformation of the brand’s business channel from offline to online, Tencent’s importance in private domain traffic has suddenly become prominent, and small programs have become an essential channel for many small and medium-sized businesses to solve the offline sales dilemma. Many businesses have built their own small program malls.

It’s hard to imagine how hard it would be for these businesses in those terrible days without the timely "help" of small programs in commercialization!

Take the catering industry as an example. Since the big environment changes, the catering industry is the first to bear the brunt. At that time, many businesses, including a number of well-known catering brands, were caught in the dilemma of offline traffic fault and business could not be carried out normally;At this time, the applet optimized the online experience of the merchant in time. For example, around the core business factors such as shopping malls, payment, membership and advertising, a "small program+retail" business model is established, so that businesses can move online stores to small programs more quickly and efficiently.Throughout 2022, the number of WeChat active applets in the catering industry increased by 40% year-on-year. Another data shows that nearly 60% of the catering merchants in the national chain top100 have opened small programs for self-take-out. In the coffee and tea head merchants, orders from small programs exceeded 60%. All these have verified the positive driving effect of small programs on businesses.

What does this mean? As time goes by, as a "decentralized" platform, applets carry more and more users’ habits. Besides e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, JD.COM and Jikuai, the influence of applets on users is also increasing.

Tencent is breaking the perception of "not doing e-commerce"

For a long time, people are used to comparing Tencent with another Internet giant, Alibaba. Just as someone said, "Ali can’t socialize well, and Tencent can’t do e-commerce."

Compared with Ali, Tencent entered the e-commerce field too late, but after repeated defeats, it finally chose not to go off to do e-commerce in person, but to invest in other companies that would do e-commerce.

In recent years, Tencent’s layout in the field of e-commerce is not inferior to Ali.

However, it is better to have two birds in the forest than a bird in the hand. In my heart, Tencent certainly wants to make the e-commerce business bigger in person.

After many attempts to do e-commerce in person, it is still difficult, especially after the news that Goose Pinpin, the e-commerce section of Tencent’s key layout, will be shut down at the beginning of this year, the video number and applet have also become the key breakthroughs of Tencent’s e-commerce in 2023.

Of course, despite the "rapid development", video numbers and applets still face some thorny problems.

Take the video number as an example. Although the business presence and the advertising revenue of the video number are very good in the growth situation, we should also see that these "surge" data are basically based on one premise: strictly speaking, 2022 is the "first year of commercialization of the video number", that is, the commercial chassis of the video number is not high, especially compared with other mainstream e-commerce platforms, the absolute transaction volume of the commercialization of the video number is still not at a level.

Therefore, in order to further expand the transaction scale of the video line, at present, WeChat video number has also launched a new action: preparing for the online video number shop optimization alliance,That is to say, it is feasible in theory to further enlarge the scale of the video store by optimizing the supply chain partners. However, for merchants, the impressions are somewhat different. One of the biggest problems is that merchants do not know enough about the commercialization of video numbers, and the main reason for this lack of knowledge is that compared with platforms such as Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker, the lack of video numbers in content is too obvious.

Indeed, compared with Tik Tok and other content platforms, short videos and live broadcasts of video numbers are more like two relatively separated ecosystems. The content is that the diversion effect of the product is insufficient, not only the video signal does not emerge.Stand aloneThe head anchor has relatively few opportunities to drive explosions like shaking fast.

However, the daily activity of WeChat exceeding 1 billion is not only the traffic base of partners such as JD.COM and Pinduoduo, but also the high-quality traffic with low overlap with platform users for content platforms such as Tik Tok, which is the main reason why WeChat has maintained strict and standardized management of external content for a long time.

It seems that in 2023, how to use its own traffic to break the cognition of "not doing e-commerce", form the habit of shopping on WeChat, and form its own closed loop of e-commerce, still has a long way to go for Tencent.

Author | Dianshang Jun Editor | Laodian