Douyin is Going All In For This Year’s 618 Shopping Festival
China’s second largest shopping holiday, the 618 Shopping Festival, is only a month away and e-commerce platforms are already ramping up promotion. These past few months, video platform Douyin has been making a huge public push into the e-commerce space with its new flagship stores. Not long ago global cosmetics conglomerate L’Oreal launched official Douyin stores for several of its sub brands including L’Oreal, Maybelline, and Kiehl’s. And now it appears Douyin is trying to become a key player in this year’s 618 Shopping Festival, recently announcing its promotional plan for this year’s event.
Timeline of Douyin’s 618 Shopping Festival Promotions
The shopping festival will start on May 25 and end on June 18. The total process will be divided into two phases.
The first phase will be from May 25 to May 31, and it is the preheat for the whole event. The second phase starts from June 1 to June 18, and this will be the highlight of the whole event.
Deposit presale
During the first phase, users can put down deposits first to lock in the items they’d like to purchase during the actual shopping festival, which is the second phase. Before the start of the second phase, users will receive messages reminding them to pay the rest.
Paying deposit will help merchants get an estimate of potential customers. They can also predict GMV generated from the event, and it can also help them to prepare stock and improve logistics ahead of time.
Gamify the 618 shopping festival
To increase users’ engagement and bring entertainment for the event, Douyin will launch a game called “The Interaction City”. The game is mainly asking users to finish tasks and they will be rewarded with tools in the game. When the number of those tools reach a certain level, users’ can only pay 0.1 RMB to buy specific products.
Featured Livestreams
Douyin will support three kinds of livestream during the 618 shopping festival: KOLs, brands, and featured livestreams. The last type of livestream are about different topics and festivals, such as Children’s Day and the Dragon Boat Festival. These two holidays both fall within the 618 shopping festival period.
Provide discounts for Douyin’s service fee
During the second phase of Douyin’s 618 event, if brands offer prices which are lower or equal to the lowest price they’ve offered during the past 30 days, the platform will reward those brands with cheaper service fee of just 1% of the total sales amount.
Work with other platforms from ByteDance
Douyin is also leveraging other Bytedance-owned apps such as Toutiao, Watermelon Video, Douyin Huoshan and Douyin Jisu, to drive as much traffic as it can for this big event and prove its place in the ecommerce industry.
To improve users’ shopping experience on the platform, Douyin is introducing the fast refund function, shortening users’ waiting time for their refund request to be checked. One of the reasons that Douyin does this is to reduce users’ complaints regarding refunds.
Taobao Live has released its 618 plan as well
Different from Douyin, Taobao Live’s 618 campaign period will start earlier, and it is divided into more detailed phases.
The whole event will last for a month, starting from May 20 and lasting until June 20. In general, Taobao Live will two main promotional cycles. The first round is from May 20 to June 3, and the second one will be from June 4 to June 20. Each round will have a presales and sales period.
To help brands generate more GMV, Taobao Live customizes plans for different accounts, including top and Tmall flagship store accounts, mid-tier accounts and small accounts. Other than this, Taobao also has plans for different types of livestreams, such as new products livestreams, celebrity livestreams and CEO livestreams.
Our take
It is fair to say this year’s 618 shopping festival is a big test for Douyin. If it does well and can prove strong results, it will be able to persuade more international brands to open up flagship stores on the platform.
And it’s not only Douyin, many ecommerce platforms are seriously preparing for the 618 event. It seems it is really becoming the second 11.11.
Read more: 抖音618活动怎么玩？看完就知道了
