Chinese social media giant, Douyin, has launched a new service for brands to open flagship stores on its apps. A one-stop-shop application, the service includes a campaign banner, brand recommendations, vouchers, and off-line store details.
A campaign banner enables brands to generate and direct traffic to general landing pages and those for upcoming online campaigns. The brand recommendations feature allows the display of categorised products for enhanced user shopping experiences and vouchers can incentivise customers to place orders for increased conversion rates. Offline store Information showcases brands’ brick-and-mortar stores to generate interest in offline visits.
To date, more than 220 brands are using the Douyin function, including Homegrown Giants Perfect Diary, Peacebird, and Huawei.
“I believe the landscape of e-commerce is evolving. Search engine driven companies like Taobao and Jingdong are losing market share to content, and social-driven players, like Pinduoduo, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin,” said one brand owner.
Douyin’s enormous influence among younger customers has encouraged luxury brands like Celine, Gucci, Dior, LV to launch accounts in spite of concerns that the social media platform would downgrade their upmarket image.
Since its launch in 2016, Douyin has positioned itself as a leading short video-sharing social platform with 600 million users by 2020. Today it features micro-vlogs, lifestyle content, business advice, and even videos from local police.
