How to choose between Douyin and Taobao e-commerce in 2024?

So what are the similarities and differences between Douyin e-commerce and traditional Taobao e-commerce?

1. Douyin and Taobao themselves are two different types of platforms:

DOUYIN IS ESSENTIALLY A SHORT-VIDEO BASED CONTENT PLATFORM, WHILE TAOBAO IS A SHOPPING PLATFORM. 

2. For Douyin, live streaming is the expansion of short video to other businesses. Douyin focuses on creating interesting content, and live e-commerce means that Douyin uses its own good content as a conduit to create deep links between the best products introduced on the Douyin platform and the users who are interested in them.

3. For Taobao, live streaming is an extension of the shopping experience for users who enter Taobao with a clear shopping purpose, and live streaming will create new purchasing demands for them.

4. Douyin accurately pushes content to users based on their interests and behavioral habits algorithm; Taobao accurately pushes content to consumers based on individualization algorithms, their spending power, buying habits, etc.

5. Due to the different nature of the two platforms, they have different requirements for e-commerce anchors. For example, the Taobao platform places less emphasis on entertainment, so entertaining anchors are not suitable for Taobao as the main purpose of users entering the livestream room is to get coupons and understand product information. In contrast, Douyin itself attracts users by creating interesting content, so it does not seem incongruent for an entertaining anchor to introduce goods on the Douyin platform.

Similarities between DOUYIN E-commerce and TAOBAO E-commerce 

Nowadays, livestream e-commerce does not exist to cater to the needs of users, but to create demand. Many of the users who enter livestream rooms to buy something are doing so because of impulse buying, rather than because of necessity or demand.

Douyin e-commerce: increasingly “Taobao” styled

We’ve seen the e-commerce model of Douyin shift from the field of interest e-commerce to “shelf e-commerce”. Its strategy previously focused on the content area, that is, selling in the short video and livestream scenarios, to develop users’ shopping habits, which is the so-called “interest e-commerce” model. Shelf e-commerce sales is based on the model “people looking for goods”, the consumption path is “from search to purchase”, and consumers are more purposeful in their purchases.

In order to develop into shelf e-commerce, Douyin Mall is becoming more and more like “Taobao”. The interface of the mall is no different from that of Taobao, a traditional shelf e-commerce platform, and has added campaigns such as seckilling and 10 billion subsidies, allowing users to gradually shift their shopping habits to “rigid buying” from “emotional buying” in interest-based e-commerce.

In addition, Douyin is also vigorously promoting e-commerce membership and repeated purchase coupons to help brands gain access to their own private domain traffic and enable users to actively spend, further converging towards “shelf e-commerce”.

Taobao: also gradually approaching the Douyin model

Previously, Taobao e-commerce focused on selling goods, but now it is constantly strengthening the platform’s live streaming function, as well as the recommendation function of Guangguang. In the Guangguang platform, users can not only post their experience and reviews of purchased products, but also post more daily, relaxing and entertaining content; the platform attracts users’ attention through beautiful pictures and interesting videos, thus enhancing users’ purchase demand and realizing the shift from product-user to content-product.