Why does Walmart want to bid for TikTok?
Wal-Mart joined the acquisition of TikTok’s US business. In fact, Douyin, a short video app operated by Bytedance in the Chinese market, has provided a model, showing that the short video platform can become a shopping platform for Internet celebrities to promote products. And this is exactly what Wal-Mart wants to imitate.
Later this week, Wal-Mart entered the ranks of snapping up TikTok’s US business, which raised some questions.
In fact, these are two questions: Wal-Mart? really?
However, considering the development direction of Douyin in the Chinese market, the plan of Wal-Mart and Microsoft to jointly run this video application in the US market makes more sense.
ByteDance’s short video application Douyin in the Chinese market is not only a platform for playing funny videos, but also an e-commerce platform with many young buyers. This is the user group that Walmart hopes to have.
ByteDance has been testing e-commerce functions on Douyin since 2018 . It was only in the last few months that ByteDance began to launch a “Buy Now” button on TikTok that redirects users to shopping sites.
To a large extent, Chinese smartphone users have become accustomed to buying products while watching Internet celebrities promote them, just like TV shopping ads redesigned for the mobile era. For many years, China’s e-commerce platforms have been adding live broadcast functions to their applications, while video applications are also adding shopping functions. According to market research company Bernstein estimates, the Chinese market will sell a total of 140 billion U.S. dollars worth of goods through live broadcast this year, more than twice the amount last year.
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The huge scale of the Chinese consumer market has also created a broad field for other types of retail experiments. Pinduoduo, one of China’s newest e-commerce giants, has turned online shopping into a more surreal video game. For Pinduoduo fans, the process of accidentally discovering novel and low-priced products is an important part of this shopping experience. In fact, the actual receipt of these products is of secondary importance to many users. Currently, Pinduoduo has close to 570 million monthly active users.
Douyin initially allowed video producers to post links to their stores on Taobao. Ultimately, it allows users to open storefronts inside the Douyin app, and now it is more actively promoting content creators to sell through local stores rather than leading to external websites.
For most Chinese consumers, Douyin will not completely replace Taobao and other mature shopping sites . Marketing company Many works with content creators on Douyin and TikTok, and the company’s head Fabian Bern said that the design of the app means that the best-selling products on the platform are cheap impulse purchases by consumers. product.
“The content you browse is updated very quickly,” Berne said, which means that very few people will buy things like expensive watches on this app. “If you think twice, basically the video is over.”
“That’s why I think Walmart’s involvement in the TikTok acquisition is very interesting,” Berne added. “They can sell cheaper products directly to TikTok users.”
Low prices do not guarantee complete customer satisfaction. Bern admitted that ByteDance still has a lot to learn in terms of retail customer service. He said that if TikTok’s e-commerce functions are not as advanced as Douyin, part of the reason is that Chinese internet celebrities are more entrepreneurial, trying to convert their appeal as video stars into physical product sales.
Compared with Douyin, TikTok’s global audience also forces Bytedance to be more cautious when making adjustments to the platform
“We have already seen that TikTok will be exactly like Douyin. It’s just a bit slower,” Berne said. “Compared with Douyin, TikTok is nothing unique.”