In the interview, Yi Xing used Man Xiao Bao as an example to explain how the brand transitioned from interest-based e-commerce to shelf e-commerce.

  • Brand Exposure
  • Influencer Seeding
  • Livestream Conversion
  • Transition to Shelf E-commerce

Man Xiao Bao is a brand that builds online convenience ready-to-eat food based on its offline nearly 70 handmade rice noodle restaurants under the brand Xiao Man Handmade Noodles. It entered Douyin with the hope of quickly breaking through the red ocean of ready-to-eat food and securing a place in the category.

1. Brand Exposure Before starting brand exposure, it's essential to identify the target audience and adapt to consumption scenarios. For example, late-night food cravings, overtime supper, and office workers who don't want to cook at home. By creating content around different scenarios, the brand triggers demand resonance, aggregates consumer groups, and achieves viral spread. An innovative scenario can drive consumption trends and horizontally expand the product's audience scale. Man Xiao Bao quickly formed a "collective spectacle, instant breakthrough," which rapidly boosted brand awareness.

2. Influencer Seeding With a certain level of brand awareness and consumer base, the next step is to collaborate with food bloggers and fashion influencers for seeding. Using the popular Hong Kong-style fat juice rice noodles as a selling point, they create a visually appealing picture from dimensions like rich taste, savory flavor, and portability, continuously driving traffic. When discussing this step, Yi Xing mentioned: "From brand exposure to influencer seeding, it actually serves to seed users and quickly drive traffic. When linked to the next step of livestream conversion, it's a progressive promotional approach. The speed of traffic and brand conversion is, in our view, the fastest and most direct way."

3. Livestream Conversion This stage can be seen as a sprint phase, where a combination of tactics gradually increases GMV. Starting from small-scale livestreams in the first few months to large-scale ones, GMV broke through one million within just half a year, significantly boosting product sales. At the same time, the hit product fat juice rice noodles climbed to the top three in Douyin's ready-to-eat food category. This stage, through a hit product mindset, maximized both brand awareness and sales. What is the hit product mindset? It's about concentrating advantageous resources on a "hit product," creating a product that makes users scream with excitement, quickly gaining market attention, triggering consumer seeding and social sharing, forming a "internet celebrity" effect, and rapidly generating sales. Consumers voluntarily act as the brand's "ambassadors" and organic promoters, spreading the word. Ultimately, this leads to repeat purchases and traffic harvesting.

4. Transition to Shelf E-commerce The first three steps are solid, and the final shelf e-commerce makes repeat purchases more convenient for consumers. They can find historical orders and reorder from there, creating a closed loop. Throughout the entire conversion process, by operating audience assets, the brand achieves hierarchical leaps such as user interest seeding, new customer conversion, and repeat purchase enhancement, increasing customer lifetime value and bringing quantifiable, accumulable, and optimizable growth. This is also the three stages of interest e-commerce described by Wei Wenwen: building the ecosystem, linking the ecosystem, and full ecosystem construction. More importantly, it drives merchants to conduct comprehensive operations in Douyin Mall and search scenarios, bringing incremental value, expanding business scenarios to cover more people, further amplifying business growth, and making the connection between people, goods, and scenes more efficient.

02 The "People, Goods, Scenes" of the New Online Retail Form When it comes to people, goods, and scenes, it can be said that Douyin's omni-interest e-commerce has completely opened up the two-way consumption link of "goods finding people" and "people finding goods." We can view Douyin e-commerce as a form of online retail, where interest e-commerce is "goods finding people," while omni-interest e-commerce is "people finding goods." How is this two-way consumption link achieved? It's based on Douyin's powerful data algorithms. First, let's look at the differences between Douyin's "people, goods, scenes" and offline retail's "people, goods, scenes." As the name suggests, offline retail's "people, goods, scenes" refers to consumers, products, and scenarios.

Douyin redefines "people, goods, scenes": people = the streamer themselves, goods = products in the livestream, scenes = the livestream venue and scene setup.

△Image source: Internet

During the interview, we also asked Yi Xing this question, and she gave us a deeper answer.

First, "People" First, offline retail's core audience coverage is limited to regional users. With Douyin online, there are no geographical restrictions, and coverage is very broad. Second, Douyin's ecosystem has been doing short videos and information feeds for years, accumulating rich data on each user's profile, from browsing habits to interests and hobbies. Not only is the coverage broader, but the precision is also very high. So when we do early-stage brand targeting, we have corresponding precise audience strategies. I can precisely drive traffic to my short videos and store for the users I want to see them.

So Douyin's "people" combines precise matching and broad coverage.

Second, "Goods" Offline retail adjusts product assortments based on purchasing habits; Douyin follows the same path. But the difference is that Douyin's purchase paths and habits are fed back in real-time. Based on daily GMV consumption and product sales, the product assortment and pricing strategies are adjusted in real-time, promptly filtering out products more suitable for users. Through data analysis and diagnosis, continuous review and optimization are conducted, making it much more efficient than offline. So Douyin's "goods" are adjusted based on user purchasing habits, reversing the consumption link to maximize efficiency.

Finally, "Scenes" Offline retail scenes allow direct tasting and trying on, providing a strong hands-on experience, but the richness of scenes is limited. In contrast, Douyin's scenes are richer and more comprehensive. Whether short videos or livestreams, scene setups can be switched at any time according to different festivals, consumption needs, and brand tones. For example, in the Paili livestream, based on customer needs, they go deep into brand factories, stores, and workshops to create a multi-dimensional, more three-dimensional scene. In this scene, the marketing methods that can be discussed are sufficient in both precision and richness. So, in the ecosystem of "people, goods, scenes" organized by Douyin, precise user reach, precise demand mining, and precise scene adaptation achieve a seamless connection. On this basis, realizing the "omni" concept is a natural progression.

03 Is "Omni" the "Optimal Solution"? Finally, let's look at the full picture of omni-interest e-commerce: short videos, livestreams, and other content streams are the fields for stimulating and converting users' potential interests, where users deeply seed and efficiently transact. Mall, search, and other proactive exploration scenes are the fields for carrying and converting users' existing interests, where users find fixed paths, form habits, and achieve precise matching and repeat purchases.

Users' various e-commerce behaviors are deposited in the store, and through marketing solutions, omni traffic is expanded to achieve overall acceleration. These fields form excellent synergy, providing users with a "one-stop" best shopping experience, bringing merchants traffic and brand accumulation, and delivering comprehensive long-term growth and a healthy, stable business structure. This is also the stage where Paili is currently transforming and laying out omni e-commerce. Yi Xing suggested to the brands they serve: "After reaching a certain level of awareness and sales on Douyin, it's recommended to 'walk on two legs'—open a Douyin store and also open a Douyin Mall to accelerate the conversion path." However, Yi Xing mentioned that some brands are still in a wait-and-see state. Why? First, they consider cost burdens and operational difficulty; second, they worry about conflicts with existing e-commerce. This consideration is understandable. But it must be admitted that omni-interest e-commerce, on the basis of interest e-commerce, has obvious incremental value, forming a more efficient supply-demand link path. However, there is also a contradiction here: If you skip the interest e-commerce stage and directly enter Douyin Mall to do shelf e-commerce, won't you miss out on Douyin's precise play? That would make it no different from JD, Taobao, or Pinduoduo. Yi Xing explained that interest e-commerce and shelf e-commerce are a complete ecosystem on Douyin, and it's not recommended to separate them. The users in these two parts mutually convert and support each other in traffic. It's precisely because of the accumulation from interest e-commerce that shelf e-commerce can settle. If you only do shelf e-commerce, conversion is difficult, requiring strong brand power or product power to break through the bottleneck. Therefore, products in rigid demand and high-frequency categories are more likely to succeed through the hit product logic. Additionally, compared to traditional search e-commerce, if you only do Douyin shelf e-commerce, its advantage is that JD and Taobao's inventory is already quite saturated, with intense competition. Many merchants entered early and have already broken through the 0-1 stage, entering the 1-100 or even 200 stage. But Douyin shelf e-commerce is just starting; the earlier you enter, the easier it is to accumulate more product assortment and audience assets. Moreover, for distributors, Douyin offers subsidies, such as the billion-dollar subsidy, encouraging more distributors to enter. Clearly, Douyin Mall is currently in a significant dividend period, being more open to brands and distributors.

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