Source: JD.com.
The "New Year's Festival" is becoming an important marketing node of major e-commerce platforms.
Recently, JD.com, together with a number of brands, launched an activity called "I send New Year's goods to the countryside", inviting users to send New Year's goods to their hometowns and relatives and friends.
It is reported that in this event, a user named "Dongge" took the lead in placing an order and sent more than 1,300 down jackets and more than 1,300 nut gift boxes to Lailong Town, Suqian, Jiangsu, which topped the "New Year's Goods List" of the event. It was confirmed by people close to Jingdong that the user was Liu Qiangdong himself, and this move was to give back to his hometown and fellow villagers.
As the beginning of the year's consumption, the "New Year's Festival" is of great significance to all roles in the business chain. On the one hand, it can meet the actual needs of consumers to buy New Year's goods and give New Year's gifts to each other during the New Year's holidays; On the other hand, through market verification, platforms and merchants can reuse the consumption data generated by the node for business strategies throughout the year.
On January 26, the 2024 Spring Festival officially opened. According to the official Civil Aviation Administration**, the number of civil aviation passengers during the Spring Festival this year is expected to reach a record 80 million, an increase of 9 compared with before the epidemic8%, up 44 percent from the same period last year9%。The retail and catering industries have also entered the preparation stage early, and the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen has long been sold out.
This means that the consumption demand of the Chinese people will be further released at this node, and the "New Year's Festival" is naturally regarded as a place of contention by e-commerce platforms.
It's just that, in addition to "low prices", what new stories can e-commerce platforms tell?
Judging from the current rules issued by major e-commerce platforms, "low price" is still an important starting point for the "New Year's Festival".
*According to the New Year's Festival strategy guide released by Tmall, low price is its marketing keyword. "1 yuan reservation", "1 yuan explosive New Year's goods do not stop for seconds", "001 yuan to draw the new product of the Year of the Dragon", "limited edition big brand 5% off grab" and other ** words occupied the entire venue.
In addition to continuing the consistent low-price style, Pinduoduo also promises consumers to collect more high-quality products with the most reasonable **. It is not difficult to find from the "official" and "*" logos that gradually appear on the product detail page of the platform that Pinduoduo not only attracts traffic, but also responds to the outside world's doubts about the quality of its products.
Different from pure shelf e-commerce, Kuaishou put forward the concept of "good things at low prices", backed by its social genes, and launched a low-price game for the whole network of 10,000 people during the New Year's Festival, which was officially recruited and screened out for high-quality products with seasonal attributes, high value attributes, and low-price attributes.
The same volume ** also has JD.com. In the past year, JD.com has been implementing the low-price policy to reshape its strength. The main venue of the New Year's Festival played the banner of "good and cheap", mainly promoted digital 3C, home appliances and other advantageous products, and set up an obvious drainage entrance.
But when all platforms are focused on one metric, the competition is bound to be more intense. At this time, platform-based enterprises hope to win by surprise.
Take Jingdong as an example, in addition to low prices, the "I send New Year's goods to the countryside" activity launched this time is also intended to cater to the Spring Festival node, expand new consumption scenarios, and stimulate new consumer demand. At the same time, Jingdong has put a number of high-quality domestic brands and special agricultural products on the table to continue to help rural revitalization.
JD.com has been targeting sinking areas for years. Since the beginning of 2016, JD.com began to launch the e-commerce targeted poverty alleviation plan, as of 2019, JD.com has launched more than 3 million kinds of products in 832 poverty-stricken counties across the country, achieving sales of more than 60 billion yuan, directly driving 800,000 poor households to increase their income, and leading the industries in poor areas to achieve leapfrog development.
In August 2020, JD.com fully launched the "Penfold Plan" for rural revitalization, and as of June 2023, it has completed the goal of "driving rural output value over one trillion yuan in three years" ahead of schedule, helping millions of rural households to increase their income and embark on the "Penfold Road". At present, more than 80% of JD.com's more than 400,000 front-line employees come from rural areas, solving the employment problem of more than 300,000 people in rural areas.
For JD.com, getting involved in the sinking area is undoubtedly a win-win strategy. By boosting the industrial development of sinking areas, we will build diversified product channels for the platform. At the same time, it can open up the consumption link to attract consumers in the sinking market to feed back the ecology of JD.com.
The gradual improvement of the ecosystem means that e-commerce platforms have to consider more complex balancing issues.
In the field of e-commerce, the "impossible triangle" is regarded as an industry curse. In the B2B era, the "impossible triangle" refers to the incompatibility of high gross profit, high turnover and large-scale, while the B2C era has evolved into a contradiction between products, ** and service quality. With the rise of e-commerce, how to coordinate the interests of users, merchants and platforms has become the top problem for practitioners.
Coincidentally, this year's New Year's Festival is the first big promotion after JD.com and Taotian followed Pinduoduo's example to launch the "refund-only" service. Giving consumers a secure after-sales guarantee is one of the secrets of a high retention rate for e-commerce platforms. However, during the Spring Festival, short-term products such as fresh food, prefabricated dishes, fruits and vegetables are high-frequency consumer products, and how to ensure the benefits of merchants is a problem that e-commerce platforms have to pay attention to.
Internet analyst Lang Ting told Times Weekly that the atmosphere of "Double 11" is gradually weakening, and the "New Year's Festival" may become another big promotion node after it, but this is also an opportunity for the platform to seek growth and further test its own traffic mechanism and comprehensive capabilities.