It is not so much imitating Douyin and Kuaishou Technology as conforming to the new trend.

After two years, hand Amoy once again ushered in a major revision.

36Kr Holdings learned that this revision has mainly brought the following important changes to the business ecology of Taobian e-commerce:

1、The top focus map booth becomes a vertical version.Move to the first position of the information flow, and "guess you like" moves up as a whole, which means that the platform is continuing to refer to the algorithm logic of content platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou Technology and Xiaohongshu for comprehensive information streaming.

2、"guess you like" will add a lot of short video contentBusinesses with video production capacity will have a new round of opportunities to rise, and it is expected that merchants will receive a development dividend period between September and December, followed by talent and plain people.

It is not difficult to see that the protagonists of this transformation are "the first focus booth" and "guess you like it".

Occupy Taobao home screen position for many years of the first focus offline.Although there is still a "super diamond booth" on the left side of the home page, it takes up only a small amount of space. Unlike in the past, the newly launched super diamond booth will adopt the algorithm mechanism of thousands of people for the first time, and recommend it according to users' preferences and habits to "circle the crowd" for hand Amoy.

The original logic of Shoujiao is platform-oriented, guiding traffic for some businesses, regardless of whether users want to browse or consume these exposed products. But there is also a hidden danger for a long time: users are prone to the rebellious mentality of "you don't care whether I like it or not." coupled with the rise of video content, the first focus booth continues to decline in terms of transformation and efficiency.

In the field of e-commerce, hand Amoy is not the first person to eat this crab.In June 2020, Pinduoduo issued a notice to merchants that he would take off the first focus booth and launch other resource sites, such as commodity promotion, store promotion, live broadcast promotion, marketing activity page promotion, and so on. In addition to various sub-columns, only the entrance of "10 billion subsidy" was retained on the home screen, and a number of social tools such as small circle, live broadcast and video were launched earlier.

The change of "guess you like" has attracted more attention and speculation from the outside world.

Emulate Kuaishou Technology of Douyin?

Since 2018, the position of "guess what you like" has been moving up, although it still retains the "four King Kong", such as gathering bargain, live streaming on Taobao, 10 billion subsidies and good goods, but hand Amoy began to test the distribution model of information flow as early as two years ago. However, at that time, hand Amoy was still based on pictures and text, and the content was more similar to the Little Red Book in form.

Although Taobao officials have denied the news of "hand Amoy comprehensive short video", the biggest key change of "guess you like" this time is that the video content will be greatly increased.

A Tmall businessman revealed to 36Kr Holdings:"the traffic from short videos will increase by at least 4 to 5 times."Taking advantage of this east wind, upstream production companies have also received a lot of orders: "A short video production company has received 500000 short video production orders, all from Taobian merchants." "

E-commerce APP collectively launched the internalization reform, behind which there is a greater trend: as Douyin Kuaishou Technology's video logic increasingly grabs the hearts of users and separates users from the time they stay in e-commerce APP, it is urgent to increase the proportion of video content. Under the trend of national short video, whether it is e-commerce APP or social APP, the product form is becoming more and more similar.

An industry consensus is that graphics and text are suitable for recommendation, short videos are suitable for smashing items (especially small things with low unit prices), and live streaming is a strong interactive harvest (with the strongest cash ability). Under the objective promotion of the epidemic in the past two years and even the first half of this year, live streaming has become an important starting point for major platforms to attract traffic and increase transaction volume. Taobao Live, the first player, has also achieved the goal of 500 billion yuan GMV for three years.

However, the tide is fading. As the epidemic is coming to an end, the traffic bonus and duration for live streaming are gradually decreasing, and users are gradually returning to their busy work and life. Short videos, which are more suitable for watching debris time, will have a new opportunity.

In additionCompared with live streaming, short videos can help businesses and platforms continue to harvest users: a user can watch at most one live broadcast a day, but can watch several short videos.

When the opportunity comes, Taos merchants also take new measures to deal with it. For example, add a short video showing or explaining goods in the picture and text display, and after making such changes, both merchants and platforms find that users will stay longer and the sales effect will be significantly improved after putting in such videos.

But this practice has also been questioned by the outside world as a simple way to videotape the details of the previous picture and text, rather than a real short video.

To change this situation, Taobao must move closer to social platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou Technology in terms of content, creating personalization, storytelling and interaction. The dilemma is that Taobao does not currently have such native content.

It's hard to be yourself and succeed.

The logic of e-commerce internalization and content e-commerce is not exactly the same. Although Taobao has enough traffic and ready-made brand merchants, it will take a long time to strike a balance with the shopping ecology in terms of content operations.

Taobao content Division has repeatedly spread the news of organizational restructuring, tend to live, short video and other business merger or integration, but failed in the end.

All this makes the development of hand-Amoy short video unsatisfactory.

From setting up the shopping section, renaming wow video, setting up independent Taobao short video APP (single guest), and merging with Taobao live streaming, to being gradually stripped of the "four King Kong" and giving way to live streaming, Taobao short video has experienced ups and downs in its fate and experienced a process from strategic importance to continuous weakening.

But,Even though the commercial realization of short videos is still a major difficulty, Taobao has never given up exploration.

This lies in that hand Amoy's desire for traffic is still very strong, not only because the number of users of rival Pinduoduo is constantly approaching, but also because there are so many Taobao businesses that need to be fed and fed. The algorithm recommendation mechanism of thousands of people also scattered the traffic potential energy of Taobao.

The revision on the eve of Singles Day is also to guide the main battlefield of the next Singles Day live broadcast with the help of extra short videos. From a competitive point of view, in order to prevent merchants from relying on external traffic entrances, Taobao must speed up the construction of its own content traffic pool. Live streaming has grown into a big tree, and it is inevitable for short videos to catch up with the shortcomings.

Just three months ago, Xuande, head of Taobao Live, said in an interview with the media: "We have also done a lot of discussion on short videos, and we have started the strategy of short videos again this year." We are not going to build short video platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou Technology, but the short video strategy has been re-established around our business model. "

According to a strategy for short video merchants to obtain traffic obtained by 36Kr Holdings in 2020, Taobao will not only try to link short videos and live streaming, but also establish an all-channel distribution mechanism for short videos to be exposed in both public and private domains.

At present, it is hard to say what the final shape of Taobao short video will be, but learning from the successful experience of Douyin Kuaishou Technology is not only a counterattack, but also a more efficient way.

Several families are happy and some are sad.

Short videos have been given a new strategic position, and some merchants and MCN institutions are encouraged.

A Taos merchant told 36Kr Holdings: "for the merchants who did well in the original store, it is not only the promotion of transformation, but also the new grasp of traffic; and clothing, food, jewelry and other businesses that are more suitable for video display will get a new round of opportunities to rise. "

But there is still a strong content ability as a support behind this. At present, there are still a large number of merchants on Taobao who are not used to making videos, but more in accordance with the presentation logic of previous pictures and texts, which leads to videos that are highly similar to "moving PPT".

Some off-site merchants believe that the move of hand Amoy code short video is more like a new grasp of traffic provided by Taobao for merchants inside the station, and platforms such as Douyin are hindering the flow of Taobao merchants to the platform by breaking the outer chain. on the other hand, for merchants who have mature operations on platforms such as Douyin and do not have Taobao stores, they are not very attractive: the input-output ratio is not cost-effective, so it is better to stay where you are.

For Taobao plus short video, the launch of super diamond booth, small and medium-sized businesses are not excited: "No matter how to adjust, small and medium-sized sellers are still as difficult as in the past." "

On the one hand, small and medium-sized businesses themselves do not have a strong ability to produce short videos, nor do they have a team to help make suggestions; on the other hand, a number of merchants have revealed that the newly launched super diamond booth is too expensive for ordinary businesses to afford. You can't easily expose your content through this channel.

Similar to merchants, MCN institutions with strong content capabilities also have the opportunity to harvest a large wave of orders, but many MCN institutions have also revealed to the media that compared to Taobao, Kuaishou Technology and Douyin are easier to use, the way to get traffic on Taobao is very complicated, and account operation is more difficult.