During this year's Double 11 promotion, Bilibili also tried to enter the "cake" of this year's e-commerce festival, and officially launched a shopping channel in the live broadcast section on the eve of Double 11.

During this year's Double 11 promotion, Bilibili also tried to enter the "cake" of this year's e-commerce festival, and officially launched a shopping channel in the live broadcast section on the eve of Double 11. So what is the atmosphere of Bilibili’s big promotion in this year’s Double 11 event? How is the e-commerce business of B station developing again? In this article, the author analyzes the development of e-commerce business of B station and takes a look together.

"The end of the video content is selling goods", B site entered the Double 11 promotion for the first time this year.

htmlOn October 14, B Station officially launched a shopping channel in the live broadcast section. This channel is full of live broadcast rooms with shopping "little yellow cars". The product links on different types of live broadcast rooms are also different. For example, Mr. Mian is a product related to home decoration, while the shopping cart of the Bilibili League of Legends event is the personalized outfits of each team.

Image source: B station screenshot

. At this Double 11 live e-commerce good products festival, B station also provides users with Double 11 shopping guide, that is, launching a major live broadcast early knowing column, and listing the more representative live broadcast rooms every day for users to choose and make appointments.

In addition, B station also launched the Double 11 channel with the theme of "Colorful Life, Enjoy UP" on the homepage, but the page is presented in conjunction with Tmall Double 11. Clicking on the relevant module will jump to the Tmall related interface.

Whether it is the first "Double 11 Live E-commerce Goods Festival" or the "Colorful Life, Enjoy UP" event jointly with Tmall, these are all major breakthroughs in B station's e-commerce business. Why did B station choose to participate in this year's Double 11 E-commerce Festival? Where has its e-commerce business developed?

1. How does B station B have the sense of existence?

B website has prepared for this year's Double 11. As early as the second quarter, according to Tech Planet, B website opened the live streaming function to the first batch of 1,500 UP owners for testing. At present, Bilibili’s live streaming business is not under the e-commerce business structure, but belongs to the live streaming business. The number one position of the live streaming business is Wang Yuyang, the person in charge of live streaming, who directly reported to B station Chairman and CEO O Chen Rui , which shows how much importance Bi station attaches to this Double 11.

During the "Double 11", B station also launched the "Live E-commerce UP Master Recruitment Incentive Plan". As long as the number of fans is ≥1,000 and has not conducted live streaming and selling goods, all UP masters can participate. When the UP master fills out the registration information and starts the broadcast and opens the small yellow car, the live streaming can receive a 50 yuan bonus through the small yellow car to sell goods. It is not difficult to see from the lower participation threshold that the purpose of Bilibili to increase the participation of UP masters is very obvious.

Photo source: Screenshot of B station

In addition, B station also launched the "Healthy Gift Package" and "Opening Duration Task Competition" to increase the enthusiasm of UP hosts to live streaming and sell goods. UP hosts can also participate in this event through the topic reward for submission #Double Eleven Good Things in Live E-commerce#, and participants may receive a takeoff reward of 50,000 yuan or 10,000 yuan.

Although B station has made a lot of efforts for this Double Eleven, it is not that popular in terms of actual results. Whether it is a UP host or a user, it is not difficult to see from the live broadcast situation that the enthusiasm of both parties to promote live broadcasts is limited.

First of all, the live broadcast room in the "shopping" section is not very large. Some live broadcast rooms have even only a few hundred or thousands of people watched it. Among them, the highest number of viewers is the Bilibili League of Legends live broadcast room, with more than two million viewers.

, and in the "Key Live Broadcasting Knows" section, there are very few users who make reservations. For example, on October 31, Xiaomi's "B Station Double 11 Super Welfare Live Broadcast" had only 13,000 appointments. Although the final viewer exceeded 15 million, this was a result with the support of many UP hosts such as Luo Xiang and He and . The "Mr Fan Xing Double 11 Home Decoration Festival" promoted by Bilibili was only 34,000 appointments, and there were only a few thousand appointments in the live broadcast room.

Photo source: Screenshot of B station

It can also be seen from the live broadcast content that UP hosts seem to be not very interested in live broadcasting and selling goods. Most of them just hang up on the yellow car and still conduct their own live broadcast step by step, such as game live broadcast, live broadcast of live broadcasts, food live broadcasts, etc. This is obviously different from live broadcasting and selling anchors on platforms such as Taobao, Douyin , and Kuaishou.

is visible. Although B station has made some preparations for Double 11, the community atmosphere has not changed much because of these activities, and the atmosphere of e-commerce promotion is not obvious on B station.

2. B station’s five years of e-commerce road

B station’s e-commerce layout is not too early.

In 2017, B station launched its member purchase business, selling figures, books and comics and other pan-second-dimensional products through self-operation and attracting brands to settle in. As China's largest ACG (animation, games, comics) enthusiast interactive community, this member purchase business with strong second-dimensional attributes naturally has a high degree of compatibility with this community, so B station's e-commerce business began to have a fulcrum.

A year later, B station launched the UP host's goods sales function and launched the "UP host is opening a store" activity. The UP host's personal homepage with this function will add a "product" column. UP host can add product links to this column. At this stage, B station does not participate in the purchase, operation, transportation and other links, nor will it collect a share from the corresponding income. The main purpose is to allow UP host to obtain more income.

In the same year, after Bilibili cooperated with Alibaba to launch the "Reward Plan", the situation changed. UP hosts can choose product tasks and link them under their video. After fans purchase products and confirm receipt, UP hosts can obtain profits. According to the report of 36Kr , all the products associated with UP masters come from Taobao product library. B station will participate in the revenue sharing, and draw 50% for individual UP masters and 40% for MCN institutions with cooperative relationships. It can be seen that B station has begun to want to take on part of its revenue for e-commerce business.

However, according to 36Kr's report, the product link of the "Borrow Plan" is likely to trigger the advertising review mechanism of B station, especially for products that have little to do with the UP host. Once the review mechanism is triggered, the video may be restricted in the flow or cannot pass the review directly. In fact, this reflects that although B station wants to make money by e-commerce, in order to maintain the tone of the community, it still strictly controls the product categories, which shows that B station is still relatively restrained in e-commerce business.

In September last year, B station official joined hands with four pan-2D UP owners to conduct a live streaming and sales test at its "Benyu Good Products Festival". At the end of last year, B station spent 118 million yuan to obtain a payment license and then launched the small yellow car function in the live broadcast room. This action is equivalent to taking a big step in the e-commerce business.

Since 618 this year, B station has begun to try live streaming and selling goods. However, there is no special entrance to the live streaming room for sale in 618, nor is there any extensive publicity and promotion. Even the cover of the live streaming room is not specially marked. The UP owners who sell goods in various partitions are all browsed by fate. The final result is that during the entire 618 period, B station's e-commerce business still has not been too much.

Of course, e-commerce has gone through five years of development, and B station has also made some remarkable achievements. For example, in May 2021, the first season of the animation " Spirit Cage " was completed on B station. The B station's member purchase followed the trend and launched the crowdfunding plan of related derivatives. The final sales reached more than 16 million yuan.

In July last year, another crowdfunding project, "Caidog", broke the record for domestic blind box toy crowdfunding, raising nearly 14 million yuan in 28 days and selling nearly 30,000 sets. In September of the same year, more than 40,000 people participated in the derivative crowdfunding project " Time Agent ", which was conducted under the original animation of Bilibili, once again broke the record of the number of people who were crowdfunding for Guochuang derivatives.

Picture source network

However, these achievements benefit from the community's two-dimensional atmosphere. At the 12th anniversary speech of B station, Chen Rui mentioned that ACG is still the strongest content of B station, and B station e-commerce is also hard to distinguish from the two-dimensional world.

Although B station e-commerce is the only one in the second-dimensional category, the ceiling of a single category is low, and B station is also intending to develop its e-commerce into the entire category. In August this year, the "Product Selection Plaza" launched by Bilibili is aimed at UP owners with live streaming permissions. In terms of product categories, it is given priority to food and beverage, home daily use, digital home appliances, beauty and skin care, trendy clothing, shoes, boots, luggage, sports and outdoor sports, etc.

For example, the "Mr Fans Double 11 Home Decoration Festival" that was mainly promoted during this year's Double 11 period belongs to the category of home daily necessities, and Xiaomi's "B Station Double 11 Super Welfare Live Broadcast" belongs to the category of digital home appliances. However, judging from the overall live broadcast situation, it is difficult to say how much improvement can be achieved on B Station Double 11, and what exactly is the e-commerce trapped on B Station?

3. Double 11 is difficult to solve the e-commerce dilemma of B station

full screen, play with memes, and one-click triple connections. The unique community culture of B station has established a competitive barrier for the platform, but at the same time it also restricts the development of its e-commerce business to a certain extent.

Compared with other platforms, the user of B station and the UP host has a higher stickiness, and this result is based on the high-purity content of UP host. The impact of this strong relationship on the community atmosphere is that users of B station are more sensitive to a series of commercial behaviors such as live streaming and product advertising. Once the UP host has obvious monetization behavior, the user will have greater emotional fluctuations, and it is very likely to disconnect from fans.

For common traffic diversion methods such as low-price flash sale and red envelopes, some users believe that "this is moving the full set of Douyin live broadcast to B station", which shows that users intend to distinguish B station from the community ecology of other platforms, which actually has caused great obstacles to the development of B station's e-commerce business.

The high proportion of young users also limits the development of e-commerce business. According to Chen Rui's speech on B station's 12th anniversary, the proportion of users under 35 on B station reached 86%, and the average age of new users is 20.2 years old. It is the place with the highest concentration of young users on the Internet, but the purchasing power of the younger user group is limited. In addition, the B station community ecology makes it difficult for B station e-commerce to develop into a large and comprehensive category, which means that B station's e-commerce business is relatively easy to touch the ceiling.

Picture source: Screenshot of B station

It is worth mentioning that B station’s current e-commerce business relies on third-party e-commerce platforms. In addition to member purchases, B station classrooms and other products on site, food and beverages, home daily necessities, digital home appliances and other expanded categories require UP master to bind Taobao Alliance and JD Alliance. It can be seen that B station’s e-commerce business does not have a certain scale, and this has a limited effect on the overall platform.

Despite this, e-commerce carries some of the profit hopes of B Station. Chen Rui once said that B Station will achieve Non-GAAP break-even in 2024, but B Station’s other businesses are not very capable.

In the mobile game business, B station has focused on self-development, but there is great uncertainty in capital investment in self-developed games; for the live value-added business, 21 years of financial data confirms that the more investment it invests, the greater the loss; in terms of advertising, B station has never added the most profitable patch advertisements. Although Story-Mode has expanded the advertising scene, the effect will take a certain amount of time.

Therefore, from the perspective of revenue, in the Double 11 promotion node, there is no reason for B station e-commerce not to participate. In addition, joining Double 11 is a trend in content platforms. Douyin and Kuaishou will get a share of this year's Double 11 with live e-commerce; Xiaohongshu launched the "Double 11 Buy and Buy Festival"; Weibo cooperated with Tmall to launch the Double 11 "hot list". B station, which has long been in e-commerce, cannot miss this opportunity.

Although B station entered Double 11 this year under multiple factors, the problems that restrict its e-commerce development still exist, and B station still needs to find the optimal solution to break the deadlock.

Author: Aries; Editor: Jinan

Source public account: TopKlout Crowrui (ID: TopKlout), a self-media ecological observation account that combines good-looking and informative

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