What JD.com is serious about is never just low prices.

At the "JD.com 11.11: Affordable and Quality" press conference on October 14, JD.com's purchasing and sales team entered the rap scene and made a big splash.

"A boy said his mooncakes are from Hong Kong. Taking a closer look, there are many tricks inside. Poor consumers, we keep getting deceived and are even asked if our wages have increased..." A rap song with sharp lyrics, "The Fearless Purchasing and Sales", fiercely criticized several live-streaming routines such as selling fake and inferior products, making it clear that JD.com will never compromise on industry ills.

Consumers have been suffering from the chaos in live-streaming sales for a long time.

Since September, incidents of live-streaming hosts making mistakes have occurred frequently, turning what should have been a win-win situation for brands, consumers, internet celebrities, and platforms into a lose-lose result.

In response, Xu Ran, CEO of JD.com Group, said at the press conference that in the current fierce market competition, there are still phenomena of "vicious involution" and "bad money driving out good money" in the industry. "JD.com's low prices are to make users truly feel 'affordable and quality', not 'cheap to buy but expensive to use'.

JD.com Purchasing and Sales performing the rap song "The Fearless Purchasing and Sales"  

Reduce prices, improve quality, and give benefits to consumers. This year's 11.11, JD.com continues the theme of "Affordable and Quality" from 618 and continuously optimizes around "cost, efficiency, and experience".

Taking the initiative to uncover the industry's "fig leaf", JD.com has broken through this layer of window paper: A low price supported only by shouting and squeezing is untenable. The foundation of extreme cost performance depends on low cost and high efficiency.

This principle seems simple, but it contains countless details.  

Don't Let Live-Streaming Sales Become Live-Streaming "Disasters"

In the era of live-streaming sales for all, consumers have long been complaining about the various fancy routines in the live-streaming rooms.

Not long ago, the talk show actor Mao Dou relied on telling his feelings about live-streaming sales and scored high points and blew up the audience on the show.

"Now it's popular to do live-streaming while beachcombing, focusing on freshness. They beachcomb in Dalian and find Australian lobsters. " "They keep saying, 'Today, I've brought down the price for the brothers', every day. The brothers have become as hard as steel."

At first listen, they are hilarious jokes, but upon closer examination, they are all the real pain points of consumers.

As an emerging sales model, the essence of live-streaming sales is to do "trust economy". To some extent, the relationship between people is more important than the relationship between people and goods. The hosts establish a trust relationship with consumers in front of the screen through their personal reputation appeal, professional ability, and honest attitude. Their main responsibility is to recommend products, not to be the actual sellers.

Up to now, there are many cases of live-streaming "disasters" in live-streaming sales. Why do the methods of hosts exaggerating the efficacy and fabricating the script keep happening?

In the market, some brands have the problem of overly relying on the top hosts' channels. In order to seek development, they focus on marketing rather than product quality. At the same time, some super top hosts take extremely high commissions and blindly promote "the lowest price in the whole network", without helping the brands establish the due brand value, nor deeply checking the product quality and providing after-sales guarantee.

Today, when pure shouting and selling are difficult to easily impress consumers, JD.com has shown the feasibility of another path.

Last year's JD.com 11.11, the JD.com Purchasing and Sales live-streaming room, which was not professional, with a temporarily set up meeting room and only two cameras, quietly became popular.

Compared with many "luxuriously decorated" live-streaming rooms, there are few celebrity big names, no advanced setups, and no gimmicks here. It is all based on being affordable and having guaranteed quality, focusing on "three nos": no commission, no slot fee, and no routines. It can be called an alternative "mudslide" in the live-streaming rooms.

Without collecting slot fees and talent commissions, and the goods are self-operated by the company, JD.com has the confidence to choose products with greater discounts. You should know that for the single commission item, the asking price of some categories of top hosts can even be as high as 80%. Saving these costs for subsidies, merchants are naturally willing to cooperate.

In the JD.com Purchasing and Sales live-streaming  

The JD.com Purchasing and Sales team, who have moved from behind the scenes to the front stage, have extremely strong product selection capabilities in terms of product professionalism and mastery of user demand pain points, which are beyond the reach of ordinary hosts. The person in charge of JD.com Purchasing and Sales live-streaming said that when JD.com Purchasing and Sales explain the goods, in addition to the benefits, they will also provide information on product traceability, raw materials, industry background, and profit margins, showing the real cost performance in an all-round way.

Removing the unnecessary complications of the live-streaming sales model, this model is enough to directly hit the pain points: What users care most about are still the price and the product itself, which are exactly JD.com's advantages.

Mr. Chengyu, a merchant from the Mancheng Industrial Belt Yusen Paper Products, said that compared with other platforms that blindly compete on price without paying attention to product quality, "JD.com requires cost performance. While lowering the price, the product quality cannot be low."

It is understood that for every SKU, from entry to the sales process, JD.com has established an extremely strict quality control mechanism, and a dedicated team is responsible for following up on product monitoring. Once a problem is suspected in the product, it will be dealt with immediately.

To counter the impetuous environment, being extremely practical and not doing anything false, this is very "JD.com".  

Low Price without Compromising Quality Comes from Awe

At the end of 2022, Liu Qiangdong, the founder and chairman of the board of JD.com Group, gave an internal speech that lasted for three hours, with the core directly pointing to "low prices".   "Low prices are the most important weapon for JD.com's past success, and they will also be the only fundamental weapon in the future." Liu Qiangdong said that JD.com's business philosophy has always been cost, efficiency, and experience.

In order to implement low prices, JD.com has launched a series of low-price measures such as "10 Billion Subsidy" and "9.9 Yuan Free Shipping". JD.com's purchasing and sales team is the gatekeeper to ensure that JD.com's goods are both cheap and of good quality.

It has become a consensus within JD.com and even in the industry that an excellent purchasing and sales person must become an expert in the category. Whether it is high-value products such as computers, mobile phones, and cameras, or low-unit-price products such as paper, towels, and clothes hangers... there are many tricks, and the grasp of the quality cannot be the slightest bit ambiguous.

Zhuang Zhuang, the purchasing and sales person for down jackets in the fashion department, has become an "expert in choosing down jackets" through controlling every detail. From the product's fluffiness, down content, to the down origin, quality inspection... He only needs to take a look and touch it to know how much down content is, how much fluffiness is, and how the down quality is. While ensuring quality, Zhuang Zhuang never forgets to strive for a more affordable price for consumers. Every major promotion, he will work with other purchasing and sales colleagues to check the goods and prices early and communicate repeatedly with the brand. With his efforts, several popular down jackets of Bosideng achieved the lowest price in the whole network on JD.com last 11.11.

Brother Hai, the senior purchasing and sales person for water heaters in the home appliance department, has traveled to more than 20 cities and met with nearly a thousand users face to face, writing the results and insights of the field research into a thick stack of notebooks. A colleague commented, "If you don't understand water heaters, reading Brother Hai's notebooks may be the simplest way to get started. His notebooks are almost the 'development history' and 'white paper' of the domestic water heater industry."

Xu Ran said, JD.com's purchasing and sales team is the gatekeeper to ensure that JD.com's goods are both cheap and of good quality. "Some people may say that they are too serious, but if we can lower the product price a little more and improve the quality a little more for users, we are willing to spend time and energy to compete on this."

The practical attitude of respecting products and details has also infected many merchants.

The founder of Return to the Han and Tang Dynasties flagship store, Lvzhu

Lvzhu, the merchant representative from Chengdu, the "First City of Hanfu", and the founder of the Return to the Han and Tang Dynasties flagship store, said that opening a store on JD.com gives her a great sense of security. She mentioned that JD.com will not ignore product quality for the sake of low prices, and also attaches great importance to the business experience of merchants. Although it has only been more than a year, JD.com has become one of the main platforms for the operation of Return to the Han and Tang Dynasties. "Among various platforms, the return rate of JD.com is also the lowest." Lvzhu said.

To help high-quality merchants like Return to the Han and Tang Dynasties to become stronger and larger, and to discover more good products with good quality and low price, JD.com plans to invest more in purchasing and sales. According to JD.com's plan, in the next three years, it will recruit at least 10,000 purchasing and sales personnel.

Looking deeper, the operating logic of the JD.com Purchasing and Sales live-streaming room is essentially different from the model of super top hosts.

The super top hosts still take the traffic model as the underlying logic. In order to achieve scale advantages and reduce express delivery and marketing costs, they will choose some white-label products that do not have marketing, fulfillment, and after-sales capabilities to achieve low prices.

The JD.com Purchasing and Sales team, which connects users, merchants, and the platform, has the role of a "three-way valve". It works with the brand to save costs from the source, give benefits to consumers, and can also provide ways to reduce sales expenses and advertising spaces to make up for the merchants' losses.

According to the official statement of JD.com, Purchasing and sales achieving low prices is "desperately squeezing out the moisture from the supply chain".

For JD.com, sustainable growth comes from excellent user experience and efficient win-win with partners. To achieve this win-win, it relies on what we have long insisted on, the continuous optimization of cost, efficiency, and experience.

An industry insider commented that the model of super hosts concentrating traffic in a short period of time, which is like "no grass growing under a big tree", will cause harm to the industry ecology and easily lead to the situation where "bad money drives out good money" for merchants. JD.com may have long perceived this point and insists on taking the positive cycle route. Although it cannot rise rapidly, it has maintained the bottom line of the industry and has a higher upper limit.

To put it simply, the characteristics of the JD.com Purchasing and Sales live-streaming basically ensure from the source that merchants will not do things that damage the ecology in order to protect profits.  

The Changes and Constants of JD.com This 11.11

In an important internal meeting of JD.com two years ago, one of the topics was a small kiwi.

Liu Qiangdong, the founder of JD.com, said that there are still many families in China that have not eaten kiwis. If JD.com can help more families buy a catty of kiwis for just a few yuan, what JD.com does is meaningful.

Twelve years ago, the major appliance industry witnessed a price war that can be recorded in history. This lightning-like raid was led by Liu Qiangdong, helping JD.com break through the siege of giants such as Suning and Gome and gain a firm foothold.

Looking back at the past and looking at the present, the winning code of this company has never changed, that is, to create a long-term low-price experience for users by continuously optimizing costs and improving efficiency.

More specifically, the low prices that JD.com advocates are based on sincere concessions from the whole process of the supply chain to reduce costs and increase efficiency, rather than "false low prices" achieved by sacrificing product quality or the interests of partners.

JD.com 11.11 kicks off  

Only this kind of benign ecology can attract more merchants, gather sand into a tower, and accumulate water to form a deep pool, enabling them to achieve rapid and healthy growth on JD.com. Data shows that as of the first quarter of this year, the number of third-party merchants on JD.com has exceeded one million; in the second quarter, the number of new merchants increased by more than 40% compared to the first quarter.

Facing misunderstandings and doubts such as "doing dirty and hard work" and "high operating costs" in the growth process with calmness, and building growth potential around cost, efficiency, and experience, JD.com always maintains the sense of belief in creating value for customers.

To make consumers "buy cheap and use well". Judging from the various details revealed by this year's JD.com 11.11, JD.com's thinking on low prices is continuously evolving.

First, it releases a stronger signal of "true low prices".

On October 14, JD.com simultaneously launched the "Super Flash Sale Day". On October 31 and November 10 at 8 p.m., the "10 Billion Subsidy Day" and the "Peak 28 Hours" will be launched respectively; JD.com's Little Magic Cube brings more than 1 billion new products this time, and the big brand bestsellers with 10 billion subsidies start at only 11 yuan per group. Every night at 8 p.m., you can grab big brands for only 1 yuan during the Moonless and Windy Nights event; In addition, there are also "Trade-In" government subsidies covering multiple categories such as home appliances, home furnishings, 3C digital, and automobiles, and real 50% discounts on all categories of good products such as clothing, car maintenance and use, and cross-border imports.

Continuously increasing low-price measures, for industrial belt good products, JD.com launched the "Factory Goods 10 Billion Subsidy", aiming to provide users with more industrial belt good products