In this era when everything can be broadcast live and everything can be delivered, it has become common to buy clothes and cosmetics live, even such “behemoths” as rockets can also appear in the live delivery.
This is the age of ALL IN live.
During the 618 period, when major e-commerce platforms were fully engaged in live streaming and subsidies, Meituan Takeout also launched a “live streaming mini program” to cooperate with merchants to hold 618 activities. Before that, 517 Taobao snack festival when Ali local life with its taobao live rich experience, opened the local life live.
In the boom of live streaming, it seems that everything can be live streamed, but when the local life is also dragged into the vortex of live streaming, where should the businesses, users and platforms in the past go?
Platform opportunities and challenges
For the local life service platform, inbound live broadcasting is a challenging upgrade.
In the triangle of platform, merchants and users, the role of the platform is to provide merchants’ information to users, users’ information to merchants, and delivery services. Whether it is takeout or life service, users can see integrated and sorted merchant information on the platform, and merchants can also learn user information for precise advertising.
Take Meituan for example. It uses merchants to drive user growth, and then drives more merchants to join meituan through user growth. When the triangle of users, businesses and platforms is established, a solid whole will be formed, and then the business will be extended to more levels.
For users, the goods are not the board is the root of the consumption experience. Take a takeout for example. What you may see on the delivery platform is the exquisite arrangement and collocation, but when the delivery arrives, the covered rice dispelled all your imagination. Even more, can also dry out the cheating behavior of selling dog meat.
Through live broadcast, consumers can see the real appearance of takeaway food, which ensures consumers’ consumption experience to a certain extent. These transparent and intuitive goods can save consumers the time wasted in worrying about the quality of goods and save part of the time cost.
This kind of goods with guaranteed quality are more attractive to users, so that users choose these goods to consume. The choice of users ensures the reputation of these businesses, and the promotion of reputation also helps businesses attract more users. This ensures the quality of goods on the platform to a certain extent, and also helps the platform weed out some “unscrupulous merchants”.
Of course, meituan and Ele. me are the only two food delivery giants to offer such a product combination. In addition, Meituan only provides this service during irregular live broadcasts at the present stage, while Ele. me only provides users with the information of multiple nearby takeout outlets for users to choose from during live broadcasts.
At present, the most common product combination is to recommend store vouchers and catering vouchers to users through live broadcast. Store vouchers are applied to offline consumption, including catering, beauty, life services and other areas. Dining vouchers can be used both online and offline. They can be used in stores or when ordering online takeout.
It is a good choice for merchants on the platform to use consumption vouchers and vouchers to stimulate consumption and drive demand.
It is not difficult to see that the addition of live broadcasting has a certain promotion effect on local service platforms. However, it is also a double-edged sword. For the platform, live broadcasting also brings many challenges, among which the biggest challenge comes from the riders.
The platform connects merchants and users online, and the rider is the key point connecting merchants and users in reality. As an important part of local life services, the speed and efficiency of riders ensure that users can enjoy satisfactory service. While livestreams attract merchants and increase sales, whether there are enough riders to ensure timely delivery of goods is also a key issue.
This requires the platform to make a hard expenditure on riders, including but not limited to rider training costs, rider equipment and clothing expenses.
On the other hand, as the number of live broadcasts on the platform gradually increases, how to regulate them has become a headache for the platform. The competition within the platform should be ensured, and the competition should be benign, as well as the purity of the broadcast content. These are all issues the platform has to consider.
And in the business side, there are also many problems.
A new burden on merchants
For the merchants, the burden becomes even heavier after they partner with livestreaming in the area of local lifestyle services.
The entry of live broadcast attracts more traffic for businesses and improves their sales to a certain extent. For businesses struggling to survive for several months under the impact of the epidemic, it is like “rain after a long drought” general joy. However, while bringing dividends, live broadcasting also brings new challenges to businesses.
First of all, businesses need to find their own ways to solve the problem of anchors. Depending on their size, businesses will try to make different live streaming plans. Small and medium-sized businesses are mainly hosted by the boss himself, while some large chain brands, some of them are personally attended by staff, and some other brands will invite talent to live bring goods.
Of course, livestreaming in the local lifestyle service sector is different from livestreaming in the e-commerce sector. In e-commerce live broadcast, anchors occupy the absolute right of speech and control the whole process of live broadcast. In addition, in the field of e-commerce live broadcasting, there is a relatively complete cooperative relationship between anchors, platforms and MCN institutions, while in the field of local life live broadcasting, these parts are still lacking.
In addition, for businesses, although they save the cost of hosting hosts, they are not professional hosts, and will inevitably be deficient in field control ability and goods delivery ability, and may even outweigh the loss, which not only takes time to broadcast but also delays the supply of goods.
Secondly, the price war caused by live broadcast is too much for businesses to bear. During the epidemic period, these offline businesses have already experienced a cold winter, and now live broadcast into local life, prompting businesses to sprinkle a large number of coupons and vouchers to attract users to spend, which is even worse for the already hard hit businesses.
Whether it’s the lack of anchors or the unaffordable price war, businesses are burdened by this reform of local life. However, there are some burdens that come from users.
A new drag on users?
Do users really need to consume local lifestyle services on live stream? The answer is not certain.
During the epidemic, due to home quarantine, many users could only order takeout, buy fruit, buy medicine and other activities through online channels. A large number of local fresh food distribution companies also ushered in a wave of dividends during this period, such as Hema Xiansheng and Ding Dong.
As the dark period of the epidemic slowly passes, offline stores are also gradually opened, and consumers can experience closer services in physical stores, and feel the happiness they have not felt for a long time. I ate a steaming bowl of bean flowers that I had been worrying about for a long time, got a cup of milk tea with air conditioning in the summer afternoon, and drank a cup of cold beer with midnight snack.
It is the joy that users need to enjoy immediately at the front of the store that makes the local life service live more cumbersome.
Imagine it’s a summer evening, and you’re in the studio and you see the owner of your favorite grill doing his best to broadcast skewers live. With the action of swallowing saliva, finger light, successful order, one hour after delivery. Then you wait anxiously for an hour, looking forward to your little barbecue. An hour later, when the barbecue arrives, the skewers are not hot, the beer is not cold, and the happiness is gone.
In the end, it was the disappearance of the epidemic that turned part of local life into a life that could be enjoyed immediately, without the delivery of a rider. In these areas, the advantages of live streaming are not obvious. You can grab a voucher in the studio, because everyone wants to take the wool.
On the other hand, although live broadcast can help users to save some time to identify the quality of goods, users spend the time to choose goods in the noisy live broadcast room on the platform, which increases users’ time cost from the side.
conclusion
For platforms, users and businesses, live streaming into local life has brought new challenges and difficulties. However, we have to admit that live streaming will bring users new convenience and changes in local life. Due to the long chain between traditional online advertising and consumers’ payment, live streaming has become one of the new choices of local living platforms.
After all, after the epidemic, any way to return blood, people are reluctant to let go.
So does the local lifestyle service industry really need live streaming? The answer is yes. Whether it is the intensifying competition between alibaba and Meituan in the area of local living, or the digital construction boom brought about by new infrastructure, it is also a boost to local living.
The local life service is the domain that satisfies the user’s last kilometer demand, is the service that satisfies the user’s basic demand. The digital transformation of the industry is deepening in all fields, and there is a huge amount of data and traffic waiting for enterprises to develop in the field of local life service. This is the scene of the future, and the competition has already begun.
Article/New Retail foreign correspondent Hou Zhengyang, public ID: Xlswaican