13. A Quiet Double 11? | No—the Blade Is Pointed at Streamers: A Traffic Revolution Is Underway
Summary
This unusually quiet Double 11 looks more like a structural brake on the price war than a sign that e-commerce has lost its relevance. Exports were hit, consumer and merchant confidence weakened in tandem, and platforms leaned into “price power,” with all 3 sides jointly building an accelerating slide; only after regulators called for an end to vicious involution did platforms begin repairing refund-without-return policies, shipping insurance, and merchant settlement.
Pure-play e-commerce’s dividend has been squeezed to the danger zone, and brands are using bargain-priced acquisitions and offline channels to buy certainty. E-commerce CEOs in Hangzhou have cut this year’s brand net-profit expectations to below 5%; Three Squirrels plans to shift its sales mix from 70% online to 70% offline within 3 years, while offline companies with 10-20 years of operating history are selling for just 1-2x PE versus the 30x-plus multiples commanded by the previous generation of internet brands—a clear bottom-fishing setup.
The real power shift this year is that platforms have turned the blade from merchants toward streamers. After Douyin removed streamers’ priority access to traffic, a top-10 streamer served by 倪叔, with annual GMV of roughly RMB1.5B, saw operating traffic-buying costs rise from last year’s peak of RMB500K a day to a roughly RMB3M daily norm this year—“a whole house was donated in one morning”; streamers have gone from traffic wholesalers to operators who must buy traffic themselves and retail it.
Taobao is using merchandise subsidies to break top livestream rooms’ stranglehold over brands and traffic. 千寻 issued RMB160M in coupons on day one and drove RMB1.6B in sales; after a week of promotion, 李佳琦’s team also added merchandise subsidies at the last minute, because if identical goods were priced higher in its room, the sales report could be followed by “nothing but returns.” Brands have largely reclaimed the right to break livestream prices this year, while Taobao now sets slotting fees dynamically based on each round’s results, merchandise subsidies, and mechanics.
Streamers are not broadly losing money; the excess profits of the past are simply being redistributed. 倪叔 estimates that top-streamer profits could fall 20%-30%, essentially asking: “I was going to put RMB10,000 into your account—can I move RMB2,000 of that into subsidies?” Platforms, brands, and streamers must share customer-acquisition costs for the industry chain to keep functioning.
The repeated streamer blowups are not fundamentally about education, but about a one-shot game created by deteriorating profits, non-owned traffic, and ramshackle management. 倪叔 says roughly 90% of Douyin’s major streamers never attended college; low education itself is not the issue. The real risks are passing traffic that cannot be recalled, multiple merchant-acquisition channels controlled by relatives of certain top streamers, and quality-control costs the industry cannot afford—卫诗婕 notes that Nike alone spends roughly RMB20M a year on product inspections for Taobao.
88VIP has become Alibaba’s key lever for managing core users, but roughly 60% of its growth may also reflect a lower entry threshold. 乔帮主 puts 88VIP growth at around 60%, while 卫诗婕 suspects the Taobao “Taoqizhi” threshold may have been lowered. 乔帮主 estimates the program could require RMB20B-RMB30B, with the platform spending roughly RMB10B less on advertising and streamers, brands, and the platform sharing the cost; he sees Double 11 as a potential turning point for Alibaba’s recovery, while 卫诗婕 withholds judgment and focuses instead on the platform sacrificing attractive headline numbers to reinvest in its merchant and consumer ecosystem.
Deep dive
1. A post-pandemic supply-demand mismatch pushed all 3 parties onto the price slide
卫诗婕 dates the start of the price war to the post-pandemic period: many export goods were forced into the domestic market, while high-quality, high-cost products from the industrial-upgrade cycle also moved onto domestic shelves. Oversupply, combined with platforms’ emphasis on “price power,” sent competition rapidly downmarket.
After revisiting the episode, she no longer sees the platform’s role as a simple policy error. Consumers were afraid to spend, merchants were afraid to stock up, invest, or carry inventory, and platforms merely captured the moment when all 3 parties were chasing value for money—it was “really a collective force.”
The problem was that all 3 sides built a slide without knowing how far it would go or how quickly the descent would accelerate. 卫诗婕 sees this year’s Double 11 as the point when everyone stopped after “running blind and fighting chaotically” to clean up the aftermath, and believes it may mark the beginning of a new cycle.
2. Sub-5% margins are forcing brands to abandon pure-play e-commerce
After 618, Hangzhou’s e-commerce CEOs reconciled their books and found that milk is not a necessity during an economic downturn and had been hit by enormous market volatility: 6 cases of 12 bottles each were selling for just RMB99. After a complicated sourcing and processing chain, the final price had come close to that of bottled water.
The CEOs of these e-commerce companies uniformly cut this year’s brand net-profit expectations to below 5%, with even the industry’s top 3 no exception. 卫诗婕 believes front-end profits will likely fall further, to 2%-3%.
Three Squirrels built its business online for roughly 12 years, yet now plans to shift from a 70% online mix to 70% offline within 3 years and has acquired 2 offline companies in succession. 卫诗婕’s conclusion: the pure-play e-commerce dividend may no longer exist.
Offline assets have fallen to the opposite extreme. Internet brands from the previous generation once traded at more than 30x PE; offline companies with 10-20 years of operating history can now be sold at 1-2x PE, giving channel consolidation a distinct bottom-fishing character.
3. Offline channels trade asset stickiness and conversion for operating certainty
卫诗婕 argues that the key comparison is no longer whether online or offline is inherently more advanced. Online traffic-buying costs keep rising while merchants lack bargaining power; the same investment made offline at least leaves behind fixed channel assets and a more controllable space for brand operations.
倪叔 adds that the mobile-internet demographic dividend once masked online channels’ low conversion rates. As traffic gets more expensive, disciplined operations are highlighting offline efficiency: a 10% online conversion rate can be used to “issue a battle report,” while an offline sales conversion rate of only 10% could get someone fired.
He cites Miniso’s acquisition of Yonghui: Yonghui had lost money in China for 11 years, yet its assets surged within a week of closing. His view is that offline channels may be at a special capital inflection point.
倪叔 believes Trump will definitely impose special tariffs on China after taking office, further obstructing exports, and that large volumes of goods will be pushed into domestic circulation next year. He is convinced that 2025 will definitely bring policies to revive consumption; without them, domestic circulation cannot turn. He sees investment in consumption as a bottom-fishing opportunity.
4. Platforms first stop the bleeding for merchants, then look for subsidies in incumbent profits
卫诗婕 sees 2 clear shifts: starting in July, regulators began emphasizing industry self-discipline and preventing vicious involution; platforms, through interoperability and a loosening of refund-without-return policies, began improving the certainty of returns on merchant investment.
Shipping insurance originally cost about RMB7-RMB8 per order; platform subsidies brought it down to RMB6-RMB7. During major promotions, when cash flow was tight, merchants also received one-click settlement support. Government subsidies were simultaneously supporting consumers with weak purchasing power—卫诗婕 cites the fact that an oven could be bought for a few hundred yuan as one signal.
倪叔 frames the platform’s accounting problem this way: traffic still has to be monetized, users need concessions, and merchants can no longer shoulder the entire cost. “Where is the space in the middle?”
The industry began looking for that space in 2 directions: making streamers who had previously enjoyed near-guaranteed profits contribute to merchandise subsidies, while cutting platform advertising spending. As 卫诗婕 puts it, the industry chain has finally stopped “everyone lying on merchants and sucking blood.”
5. Douyin’s algorithm turns streamers from traffic wholesalers into traffic retailers
Streamers once had priority as builders of the platform: they could buy traffic wholesale from the platform and retail it to brands. Once they reached sufficient scale, they could almost “make money lying down.”
After Douyin changed its algorithm and removed that priority, a top-10 streamer served by 倪叔 could still potentially generate roughly RMB1.5B in annual GMV, but would need to spend RMB3M-RMB5M a day on traffic. Last year, total operating spend peaked at RMB500K a day; this year, roughly RMB3M a day has become normal. “A whole house was donated in one morning.”
GMV may not have fallen, but profits have been sharply reduced by traffic-buying costs. The platform controls traffic allocation and has the power to replace any individual: if “杨哥 falls,” it can promote “听泉鉴宝”; if the latter disappears, it can promote “K总.” No single streamer is irreplaceable anymore.
6. Taobao uses merchandise subsidies to dismantle top livestreams’ bargaining moat
Taobao chose a different path from the algorithmic approach, using merchandise mechanics to force streamers to deliver real concessions. 千寻’s livestream issued RMB160M in coupons on day one and sold RMB1.6B of goods through mechanisms such as RMB30 off RMB300—a demonstration of the leverage of “one yuan of coupons driving ten yuan of sales.”
李佳琦’s team initially believed that the best products were concentrated in its own room and made no provision for merchandise subsidies. After a week of warm-up, it added subsidies at the last minute because several top livestream rooms were carrying the same products; if its own price was higher, the RMB3B-RMB4B sales report could be followed by nothing but returns.
Brands have largely reclaimed the authority to break prices in livestream rooms this year, with lower prices increasingly funded by streamers. Taobao has also moved from fixed slotting fees to round-by-round assessments of results, subsidies, and mechanics, quietly loosening the old relationship in which “Taobao Live was held hostage by a few top streamers.”
7. The blade turning on streamers is profit redistribution, not a streamer-wide loss
卫诗婕 calls the shift, which was never announced formally, “the platform turning the blade toward streamers.” Brands, platforms, and streamers are now contributing jointly, while streamers must participate in concessions to protect their position and commissions.
卫诗婕 clarifies that major streamers remain highly profitable and that broad-based losses do not exist; profits may simply decline 20%-30%. This is not a shift from making money to subsidizing from zero, but taking RMB2,000 out of an existing RMB10,000 in income to subsidize users.
卫诗婕 sees merchandise subsidies as, to some extent, investment in a streamer’s channel and community. 倪叔 stresses that if the industry collapses from merchant cash burn, streamers will have no money to earn even if they preserve their excess profits. “If you want this thing to continue, you have to make some concessions and adjustments.”
8. Streamers are channel brands; scale and low prices reinforce each other
倪叔 believes the era selected human expression: consumers do not want to deal only with cold, impersonal logos. The Beijing Auto Show, a major event held once every 2.5 years, absorbs annual brand budgets, yet what users remember is 雷军 and 周鸿祎, because they want emotional interaction and identification with “real, living people.”
Streamers are not merely content brands; they are channel brands. More users improve procurement efficiency and lower product prices, while lower prices attract more users, creating a positive “stronger get stronger” loop.
Top streamers primarily earn commissions; slotting fees are more a screening mechanism. A product may attract applications from 3,000-5,000 companies, and the upfront fee filters out those without the necessary capabilities. Streamers that rely purely on high slotting fees and charge even when products do not sell are running a one-off business.
卫诗婕 compares the situation with the Cannes awards ceremony: even if travel, hotels, makeup, and styling must be paid out of pocket, a major streamer cannot easily leave the table. 乔帮主 guesses that mid-tier brands, new brands, or white-label brands may pay a relatively high premium to gain access to major streamers, but explicitly says this is only a guess. 倪叔 does not directly confirm it; he only emphasizes that top streamers remain highly profitable.
9. Streamer blowups are manufactured jointly by platform conditions and quality-control costs
卫诗婕 initially guessed that new-generation streamers had been accelerated into maturity: GMV rose, but they had no time to build systems for product inspection, after-sales service, or public-opinion management. 倪叔’s rebuttal is worth preserving: “Don’t be intellectually arrogant.” Low education does not mean an inability to run a good business.
He identifies 3 mechanisms. When platform margins deteriorate, streamers trying to keep making money may “swap sweet potatoes for cassava.” Platform traffic cannot be recalled, like one-off foot traffic outside a railway station. Multiple relatives of a leading domestic streamer can recruit merchants, and ramshackle management allows counterfeit and substandard products to enter the livestream room on a “pay and you get on” basis; 美诚月饼 is the example he cites.
卫诗婕 adds the practical ceiling on quality control: she notes that Nike’s inspection costs on Taobao alone run to roughly RMB20M a year. The industry also contains A-grade fakes, B-grade goods, and “yin-yang” goods, where the sample sent for inspection may differ from what is actually shipped. Whether streamers can afford—or are willing to bear—this inspection cost remains unknown.
10. 88VIP turns Double 11 from a canonization ritual into an ecosystem defense
倪叔 calls 88VIP Alibaba’s private domain: it provides cash compensation when a user has paid too much for a product, while RMB99 in benefits covers free shipping and returns. The program is designed to retain users with the strongest purchasing power and an established habit of buying.
乔帮主 puts 88VIP growth at roughly 60%; 卫诗婕 suspects the Taobao “Taoqizhi” threshold may have been lowered, so the increase cannot be attributed solely to a consumption recovery. 倪叔 argues that the private domain not only retains users but also raises purchase frequency and MAU.
乔帮主 estimates that the overall investment could reach RMB20B-RMB30B, with the platform spending roughly RMB10B less on advertising and streamers, brands, and the platform each contributing a share. The resources are being converted into subsidies for users willing to trust Alibaba and continue shopping there.
乔帮主 therefore sees this year’s Double 11 as a potential turning point in Alibaba’s move from decline to recovery. 卫诗婕 says she cannot determine whether losses have already stopped, and instead places more weight on the platform’s renewed investment in merchants and consumers. 乔帮主 observes that this year there was no Double 11 media briefing and no canonization ritual built around headline numbers.
E-commerce may no longer occupy the center of the media stage, with new-energy vehicles and other sectors emerging as symbols of the new era. But 卫诗婕 believes e-commerce will continue to accompany China’s industrial upgrade for the long term. Chinese manufacturing has always faced excess capacity, and “whether distribution can be done well” is precisely one of e-commerce’s core sources of value.