At 7:00 p.m. on September 20, only two hours of the live streaming show of Austin Li, the famous former “Lipstick King” handed in a sales report of 120 million with more than 630 million views. His return had been unbelievably low key with no announcement in advance. Yet only one minute after the show started, thousands of viewers poured in online. Although the anchor who has been widely adored by his fans, repeatedly reminded fans of "rational shopping", his fans still went for wild spending. Many products were sold out immediately after the purchase link was activated.
While around the same period of time, the "Bee Surprise Club", which is famous for Viya’s (Wei Huang, the former top anchor in this business) succession team but without Viya as the anchor, failed to sustain traffic, and the viewing volume in the live broadcast room was mostly maintained at about 6 million.
On the other hand, the rising show "Oriental selection" has dominated the Tiktok live streaming shopping business for three consecutive months. Its total sales of live streaming in the past week was 120 million yuan.
From this perspective, with Viya’s absense of tax-evasion reasons, no one seems able to surpass Austin Li’s ability in the live-streaming shopping business.
WKI featured the live-streaming queen Viya’s story and explained this new channel of retail in the past. Yet a lot happens to the top hosts in the business in 2022 that transformed the live-streaming industry.
From 2020, when the live streaming -show was flourishing.
Double 11 of 2021,
Austin and Viya, just two of them alone created a sales data of 10 billion yuan, crushing the annual revenue of 4000 listed companies.
The resulting exclusivity and monopoly also directly affect the competitive situation of the entire industry.
November 2021
Viya and Austin Li jointly fought against L'Oreal to defend the "lowest price". The two anchors expressed their anger at L'Oreal Paris for not holding the promise to them of the lowest price. Top brands and top anchor fuse escalated on general level
20th December 2021,
the news that "Viya was fined 1.341 billion for tax evasion" exploded on the Internet like a thunderclap. Next day, Viya’s personal live-stremaing account faced a whole network blocking.
May 7 2022,
Qi'er, Viya’s protegee officially started live streaming sales on Tiktok. For a mature super MCN organization like Qianxun owned by Viya and her husband, the original supply chain, operation team and other resources can still be reused after losing a super anchor due to legal reasons.
June 3 2022,
Austin Li announced that he could not continue broadcasting because of “equipment failure”, and that he would bring products that had not been broadcast to everyone in the future. Yet disappeared completely.
Till last month, Austin’s reappearance proved that this live streaming show is still very much rely on superstars anchors.
As many critics suspected that the “Top Anchors Cut out” strategy of the superstar anchors who caught attention of too much traffic can boost the second tier anchors’ development and lead to a healthier and fair industry. However, this didn’t happen. Even with the former super anchors direct or indirect endorsement, the sales volume and fans size of never the same.
It is not easy to create a god or goddess.
For the brand, Austin's return means the double increase of the cost and the traffic. On the one hand, small and medium-sized brands worry about the replay of the price war and the huge amount of spot fees in the live broadcast room, and big anchors hold the bigger bargining power; On the other hand, the brand side urgently needs someone like Austin to reinvigorate e-commerce traffic. After all, the endorsement of super anchors has created many new brand myths.
From the personal "infatuation" with the anchor to the trust in the brand service behind the live broadcast room, consumers are becoming more rational, and the celebrity effect is also gradually weakening.
Viya and other top anchor’ events on tax evasion also alerted the business. The deep binding with the head anchor means that the anchor's personal problems will affect the brand reputation, which is too risky. Meanwhile, the live-streaming presentation of goods depends more on the personal charm of the anchor. The life cycle of a single anchor is usually limited.
As before the cut out of head anchors, it once was a "selling point" of brand merchants when it squeezed into the head anchor live-streaming room. Huaxizi花西子, and some other brands became famous overnight relying on the endorsement of the head anchor. Without superstar holding most traffic, now middle and waist tier anchors are similar to the dealer channel. This somehow made the brand go back to the original "old way" and seek celebrity endorsements to make its names known.
It is arguable that the live-streaming shopping had created a new business model.
Looking back, these anchors who peddled goods for traffic in front of the mobile phone screen are nothing more than an extension of offline sales by digital means. Different people find their own target channels following the signals and algorithms, and finally form their own consumption circles. If we really want to find out the difference, it is nothing more than that the Internet has widened the distance between consumption scenes distributed in different locations in the past.
In fact, from the feedback obtained from Austin’s quiet return, we can clearly see that the trend of live broadcast e-commerce is still continuing. Although he still got good traffic in the premiere of his return, obviously he is no longer and does not want to be the one negotiate extreme low price for fans to go frenzy purchasing.
The high spot fee, commission and bargaining power of the big anchor lead to very little profit or even loss after the brand uses the big anchor to bring goods. It can be predicted that the head anchors will not appear again in the future, and the live broadcast will also become a normalized means to enter a new round of traffic as part of the e-commerce domain of retail in China.
No more Queens or Kings’ drama generating sales myth dominating the business. Brands shall be more selective to work with anchors to match rather than simply chasing traffic.
Ether you want to join the game, or testing the water to see wheter to enter the China market through live-streaming, it is always a good choice to start with WKI’s Probe Plan.
