---
title: "Spring Festival Consumption Guide: Celebrating the New Year on Douyin, Spending on Meituan"
description: "The 2023 Spring Festival was exceptionally lively, with the relaxation of restrictions fueling an unprecedented desire to return home. From January 7 to 26, 2023, the country saw 741 million passenger trips, a significant increase from 2022, and the return home boom also boosted Spring Festival consumption, with offline spending on dining, gifts, and entertainment rising notably. According to data from the '2023 Spring Festival Consumption Guide' by Yinghe Kanban, during the holiday, popular spending categories included travel and entertainment, New Year shopping, and gatherings and dining."
author: "胖鲸"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2023-01-30"
language: "en"
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# Spring Festival Consumption Guide: Celebrating the New Year on Douyin, Spending on Meituan

> The 2023 Spring Festival was exceptionally lively, with the relaxation of restrictions fueling an unprecedented desire to return home. From January 7 to 26, 2023, the country saw 741 million passenger trips, a significant increase from 2022, and the return home boom also boosted Spring Festival consumption, with offline spending on dining, gifts, and entertainment rising notably. According to data from the '2023 Spring Festival Consumption Guide' by Yinghe Kanban, during the holiday, popular spending categories included travel and entertainment, New Year shopping, and gatherings and dining.

**The 2023 Spring Festival was exceptionally lively.** The gradual relaxation of restrictions made the desire to return home unprecedentedly strong. From January 7 to 26, 2023, the country saw a total of 741 million passenger trips, a significant increase from 2022, with passenger volume clearly rebounding compared to last year's Spring Festival. The surging homecoming trend also drove up Spring Festival consumption, with offline demand for gatherings, gifts, and entertainment significantly boosted.
According to data from the '2023 Spring Festival Consumption Guide' by Yinghe Kanban, during the just-concluded Spring Festival holiday, popular spending items included travel and entertainment, New Year shopping, and gatherings and dining.
Image from the internet. According to the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau, during the first four days of the 2023 Spring Festival holiday, key monitored enterprises including department stores, supermarkets, specialty stores, restaurants, and e-commerce achieved sales of 2.84 billion yuan, recovering to 89.8% of the same period last year, and up 13.7% from 2019. According to the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce, during the Spring Festival period (January 20-26), offline consumption totaled 32.3 billion yuan over seven days, with 10 retail enterprises including Bailian Qingpu Outlets,兴业太古汇, and Jiading Impression City achieving a total business turnover of 1.907 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 0.1%; 10 catering enterprises including Jiangbian Chengwai, Peace Hotel, and Guangmingcun Huaihai Store achieved a total turnover of 36 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.2%.
Looking at the trendy tourist city Chengdu, according to data from the Chengdu Food Culture Exchange and Innovation Center, from New Year's Eve to the fourth day of the first lunar month, foot traffic at 30 stores of 20 catering brands in the city increased by more than 210% year-on-year. A hotpot restaurant in Taikoo Li even set a record high of 4,000 daily queuing orders.
Clearly, the 2023 Spring Festival holiday not only boosted national consumption enthusiasm but also became a key turning point for local merchants to revive and recover growth. In this wave of surging Spring Festival consumption, what new moves have merchants and platforms made? Facing the continued recovery of the consumption environment, how can local merchants seize opportunities? Perhaps we can start with the platforms.
**Douyin's Dilemma in Local Services**
Local life services have been a business Douyin has focused on developing in recent years, and this year's Spring Festival consumption wave has provided a good opportunity for its growth. In Douyin's ongoing 'Collect 24 Solar Terms, Share 2 Billion' activity, users are guided to enter the same-city page to get card draw chances, driving traffic to the 'Heartbeat Spring Festival' local food and entertainment marketing content. Image from the internet. From what to buy as gifts when returning home, to what hairstyle to get for visiting, to where to go for entertainment and dining with family and friends, the diverse Spring Festival lifestyles of different groups are integrated into Douyin's pan-entertainment content ecosystem, using short videos and live streams as carriers for engaging, informative, and atmospheric product output. The intuitive and infectious holiday-themed content maximally stirs Chinese people's emotional resonance with the New Year, subtly influencing people's New Year consumption habits and thereby stimulating more potential consumption desires. Image from the internet. In addition to content advantages, there is also the boost of platform traffic dividends. Douyin converts users' high-stickiness traffic to platform content into store-visit traffic, quickly supporting a third growth curve after advertising and e-commerce. According to 36Kr, Douyin Life Services completed a GMV of approximately 77 billion yuan in 2022, and its 2023 GMV target is 150 billion yuan, about double the previous year's GMV. However, behind the impressive GMV, what really counts is the verification amount. According to research reports from Guohai Securities, in October 2022, Douyin's 30-day verification rate for store visits was 62%, while Meituan's was 83% in the same month. Compared to Meituan users, who have a more mature mindset and stronger proactive consumption needs, Douyin users are more passive. Relying on platform algorithms, Douyin's local life services mainly use 'people find stores,' stimulating potential users' consumption needs through interest matching and content recommendations to drive conversion. Therefore, impulse orders are easy, but refund rates are also higher. The gap in store-visit verification rates reflects differences in users' consumption decision-making efficiency. Even if users are 'planted' on Douyin, a considerable number will habitually open Meituan to compare prices. In addition, the large amount of UGC content accumulated over time on Meituan and Dianping also provides users with decision-making guidance. According to Meituan's financial reports, by the end of 2019, Meituan apps such as Meituan and Dianping had accumulated 7.7 billion consumption reviews. Rich review content not only reduces operating costs for merchants and platforms but also fosters a good information-sharing loop among users. In contrast, Douyin's local life content is mainly produced by merchants and influencers visiting stores, which not only makes users naturally wary of content authenticity but also poses a challenge for merchants with high operational thresholds and investment costs.
Image source: Guohai Securities. After all, the core group in local life services is small and medium-sized merchants, and without long-term, comprehensive operational setups, it is difficult to maintain exposure in the Douyin ecosystem. The marketing environment, which is not very friendly to local small merchants, turns Douyin local into a short-term promotional channel rather than the first choice for most local merchants' daily operations. With 700 million daily active users, Douyin still needs time to change users' consumption habits of 'watching the excitement on Douyin and ordering on Meituan.'
**Meituan Local's Moat: Beyond the Live-Streaming Trend, Long-Tail Advantages Falter**
Compared to Douyin local, which is catching up from behind, Meituan local's massive market coverage, stable user traffic, and mature search mechanisms are difficult to shake in the short term. However, at the special node of Spring Festival marketing, this 'tortoise and hare race' may not be about 'endurance.' Douyin local, riding the wave of 'short video + live streaming,' turns its 'explosive daily sales' weakness into an advantage, unleashing even more impressive marketing momentum. According to the '2022 Douyin Life Services Data Report,' among the video packages most 'planted' to Douyin users in 2022, chain brands strongly occupied the top of the rankings. Clearly, with professional and luxurious operational teams and inherent internet marketing genes, new tea drinks, fast food, and other chain brands thrive on Douyin local. ChaBaiDao's first brand self-broadcast on Douyin achieved a GMV of over 15 million yuan; Starbucks also launched live-stream group buying on Douyin during last year's Double 11, with sales exceeding 30 million yuan. During the Spring Festival, milk tea, fast food, and barbecue are popular choices for young people to satisfy cravings, and users will have more time to explore local food and entertainment destinations with a relaxed mindset. For local small and medium-sized merchants, Douyin's public domain operations during the Spring Festival can act as a stimulant for store sales, driving impressive sales conversions.
Image from the internet. Additionally, Douyin's live-stream e-commerce unlocks a new online promotional scenario for local merchants during the Spring Festival: streamers showcase their talents, interact in real-time in the live room, and the lively atmosphere and festive vibe most easily trigger users' consumption desires, filling the gap in online holiday scenarios for the catering industry.
Image from the internet. Facing the bustling Douyin 'Heartbeat Spring Festival,' as the leader in the local life services industry, the author believes that Meituan's differentiated advantages will appear in more detailed aspects. First, in terms of New Year consumption scenarios, Douyin local content is still focused on meeting basic needs mainly for dining, while Meituan, with a more mature merchant operation mechanism, pays more attention to the breadth of New Year consumption categories, especially expanding new consumption formats for Generation Z. On the Dianping app's homepage, the special 'Spring Festival Homecoming Joy' section segments different Spring Festival consumption scenarios such as dining, gatherings, and strolling, pushing content that includes more personalized Spring Festival consumption options like script murder games, Hanfu experiences, and art exhibitions.
Image from the internet. Second, compared to Douyin local's 'wild growth' low-price group buying, Meituan has more thorough and detailed review and control on the merchant side. Meituan has its own quality control team to ensure product quality, and with the 'people find stores' Meituan users, it provides users with good pre-sale and after-sale guarantees, maintaining a high verification rate. Finally, relying on Meituan's mature delivery system, during the Spring Festival, Meituan local can provide users with cheaper and more guaranteed delivery services, while Douyin local, besides in-store consumption, still has an immature delivery service system, with high minimum order amounts and chaotic delivery supervision that need time to regulate and improve.
Image from the internet.
In summary, for platforms, the consumption recovery during the Year of the Rabbit Spring Festival accelerated store recovery, making Douyin, which has advantages in traffic, a new choice for local merchants to attract new customers and drive traffic. At the same time, within Douyin's pan-entertainment content ecosystem, using live-stream e-commerce for holiday promotions also creates a more festive atmosphere. Meituan, on the other hand, leverages its long-tail advantages to develop younger, more personalized Spring Festival consumption scenarios, catering to the lifestyles and consumption preferences of younger consumer groups, and continues to lead the local market with its mature operational mechanisms and good quality assurance.
For local merchants of all sizes, they can temporarily set aside the cost anxiety of long-term platform operations and fight a fast, accurate, and decisive Spring Festival promotional battle on Douyin local to accelerate the recovery of store traffic. Especially in the catering sector, pre-made New Year's Eve dishes and semi-finished takeout have been popular Spring Festival consumption items since last year. Combined with in-store consumption, merchants can list New Year's Eve meal packages online to better meet people's Spring Festival consumption needs.
No matter how platforms and merchants compete, for consumers who can finally celebrate the New Year without restrictions, the most important thing is to have a good New Year consumption experience. During the just-passed Year of the Rabbit Spring Festival holiday, we no longer just watched the excitement on Douyin from afar, but could sit with family and friends chatting about daily life; we no longer had to repeatedly check the inventory in the fridge, but could spend freely, hearing firecrackers from every household and seeing bustling streets and alleys.
**Spring Festival has passed, and the Beginning of Spring is approaching. People's desire to travel and consume is bound to sprout with the spring. Flip the calendar, and the next holiday marketing carnival is just around the corner.**


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