On June 20th, TikTok's feature of attaching stores to short videos was discontinued. For short videos that users have already published with attached stores, the store entry will also be discontinued (for videos published for over 30 days), but it will not have any other impact on the videos published by users.

This means that in the future, TikTok's short video content can only attach links to specific products. As a content-based e-commerce platform, the impact of this change cannot be underestimated. During this year's 618 promotion period, it was not only TikTok that made significant changes within the app. In mid-May, Taobao also updated its homepage module configuration.

The general evaluation from users for Taobao's latest revamp is that it is more concise and refreshing. The original numerous modules have been integrated into two menu bars at the top, while more page space is allocated to the double waterfall flow of product and user content recommendations, indicating a clear trend towards content-driven products.

In fact, the discontinuation of TikTok's short video attaching store function is also a reinforcement of product contentization.

However, this is fundamentally different from the underlying logic of content-based e-commerce we have discussed before. In the past, content served products, but in the future, the platform may force products to serve the content itself.

01. The underlying logic of user payment transactions is changing

In the earliest shelf-based e-commerce, consumers would find relevant products to make decisions and place orders based on their own needs. The advantage of the product transaction platform at this time was its ability to integrate product information.

As e-commerce platforms increased, and consumers could compare prices and service capabilities across platforms, e-commerce platforms needed strong supply chain capabilities and efficient fulfillment capabilities to establish a solid footing among many platforms. At this stage, content platforms had not yet directly competed with shelf-based e-commerce platforms, and most content platforms in the pre-TikTok era still diverted traffic to shelf-based e-commerce platforms themselves.

With the rise of TikTok, the relationship between content and products in the era of interest-driven e-commerce has undergone a qualitative change. Content directly serves the transaction of products, with a shorter link from content to products. Short video sales and live streaming sales are both products of the content-based e-commerce era. At this time, the content capabilities of the platform dominated the new growth curve of the e-commerce sector. Taobao's live streaming sales and TikTok's short videos and live streams are no exception.

However, in the initial stage of content-based e-commerce, all parties, whether platforms, merchants, or influencers, were more focused on transaction results to demonstrate the feasibility of this business path. This also determined that content and products had a service-oriented relationship.

Since there has not been much change in the content models of major platforms in the past one or two years, the only thing left for platforms to compete with each other is price. This is why Pinduoduo can flourish now, essentially because the platform has maximized its supply chain capabilities and fulfillment efficiency.

However, when price competition reaches its limit, the new trend in product transactions in the future is that consumer demand will become more granular.

From a platform perspective, especially in the current situation of intensified content competition between platforms, this model of product and service content can gain higher user stickiness, longer user attention, and at the same time, obtain transactions. From the perspective of influencers, the ideal flow monetization model where content is not linked to transactions is traceable, such as for bloggers on Xiaohongshu.

That is to say, consumers, influencers, and content platforms have all formed a tacit understanding - they all prefer to use products to serve content.

Businesses that prioritize products over content have already stood on the opposite side of this trend.

In contrast, brands with high content capabilities can be collectively referred to as IP brands. Popular brands that we are familiar with can be considered as IP brands, and they usually have strong content generation and topic raising abilities themselves. For example, at various luxury fashion shows, Lancome launches ShakeShakeShake dance by major internet celebrities, and the third generation of Jieliya towels shoots short dramas to drive the brand to break through

Whoever can constantly bring new joy to the people can establish a firm foothold in platform traffic and long-term development of the brand, even if this joy may be closely related to the functionality of the product itself. In this process, it may seem like the brand has achieved sales through marketing, but from the perspective of the audience, purchasing the product is also a part of participating in every "national entertainment", and the product serves content.

Of course, entertainment IPs can be seen as brands that prioritize content over goods. The strong user attraction and stickiness inherent in entertainment IPs, as well as the ability to encourage users to create new products, are what content platforms need the most. Entertainment IPs derived peripheral products have always been outside the "low price", "internal competition", and "decline" patterns of e-commerce.

From a business sustainability perspective, content platforms naturally prefer IP brands.

02. The division of Tiktok and the combination of Taobao

Tiktok has been continuously adjusting the specific functions of carrying goods on the platform. As early as May 14, Tiktok's [Auto Add Window] and [Released Video Mount Window] functions have been offline. This means that merchants can no longer add showcase to videos with good traffic in the later stage, and can only add showcase during video publishing.

For low content merchants who focus on "stealing traffic", such a change is like adding insult to injury, because they also know that it is more difficult to obtain traffic by attaching showcase videos at the time of publication.

The feature of short video mounting stores has not been online for long, and businesses that rely more on this feature are likely to belong to the same category as the above. According to the previous mainstream analysis, the function of Tiktok's online launch is to promote the shelf style e-commerce at the same time. However, in fact, this function has no direct connection with the shelf system of Tiktok, and its biggest impact is still the content system of Tiktok itself.

Based on the current changes, Tiktok is further driving the content of these "traffic stealing" businesses out of Tiktok app itself.

Nowadays, many content social platforms such as Xiaohongshu, video number, and Tiktok are entering a new hot stage of grabbing users' attention. WeChat has a natural and irreplaceable private domain advantage, while Xiaohongshu has an advantage in decentralization and guiding users' expression. Therefore, after its own e-commerce model has matured, the changes of these functions are to further clarify the content quality of Tiktok.

In other words, as a whole, Tiktok's content model anxiety is far greater than that of commercialization or GMV.

For these businesses with low content capability, the Tiktok Mall version launched in March may be the content "shelter" for these businesses. At present, the Tiktok Mall version and Tiktok app have a high degree of functional overlap, and both have product recommendation pages and content recommendation pages. However, the Tiktok Mall version has a higher proportion of e-commerce segments. At the same time, according to New Position, the probability of printing videos related to goods in Tiktok Mall version will be higher.

However, regardless of the probability, in terms of the layout of e-commerce, the two apps are not the difference between content e-commerce and shelf e-commerce, but the difference between the psychological state of users' passive shopping and active shopping, which is the core of the dual wheel drive of Tiktok's current e-commerce system.

Different from Tiktok, Taobao's e-commerce system currently only has an active shopping mentality. In fact, Taobao does not lack a traffic portal. Its largest traffic portal is users' original online shopping habits. In this case, only an active shopping mentality is also an advantage. The key to leveraging this advantage is how to keep users in a state of active shopping and keep scrolling non-stop.

Taking the content of this Taobao redesign as an example, the layout has been streamlined, and more homepage pages have been configured for dual waterfall product recommendations. At the same time, the revised Taobao has also significantly improved its personalized recommendation mechanism. Obviously, the e-commerce and content systems within the Taobao app are actively integrating, and in order to ensure that users have the motivation to continue browsing, product pages will also become more and more content oriented.

Tiktok's content e-commerce has embarked on the path of distinguishing users' active and passive shopping mentality, while Taobao's content e-commerce is to integrate content into its own platform and make the goods themselves into content, which is the combination of Tiktok and Taobao.

It can be expected that the Tiktok Mall version and Taobao apps are very close to each other in terms of both users' minds and functions, and they will also "accompany" each other to run the way of commodity content. If there is no significant differentiation between the two in this process, then the only thing that can be compared is the quality of the content.

03. Write at the end

After reading the division of Tiktok and the combination of Taobao, we actually found that both of them are now doing the small red book model. Tiktok is actively reducing the commercialization proportion of its app. Taobao seems to be doing a small red book with a large proportion of commodity content.

Although the commercialization process of Xiaohongshu has been criticized before, it now appears that one of the reasons why Xiaohongshu's content model has advantages is that it has not been so commercialized yet. "Grass planting" itself is a typical model of product service for content, and coupled with its decentralized user mentality, Xiaohongshu can be said to be one of the platforms with the greatest advantages in content model at present.

However, there are still only two types of products that are likely to become popular in the future. One is that merchants can establish a complete content matrix for this product to guide consumers' minds, which is at the level of brand marketing. Secondly, the ability of a certain product to appropriately cater to user generated content trends is partly due to mystical factors, compared to the sudden surge in sales of domestic products before this.

In fact, these two types of products have also experienced explosive sales before, but in the future, with the trend of only content remaining on various platforms, products will become a part of the content.