Taotian kicks off the year by brewing a growth campaign: six major directions, aiming for growth.

After the Chinese New Year this year, 36Kr has learned that Taobao Tmall has intensively initiated a series of small-scale merchant meetings and 1v1 merchant communications. Merchants who participated in the communication meetings revealed that the Taotian business side at the meetings was very concerned about what merchants really needed, explained the logic behind many strategy and rule adjustments, and asked for merchants' opinions. "The word 'growth' was also mentioned many times."

36Kr has learned that the result of the above communication is that Taobao Tmall will proceed in six aspects: new product incentives, off-site traffic expansion, member private domain, commission incentives, new merchant support, and business environment optimization. Taotian internally defines this as the "growth battle" of the new year, which runs throughout the year with a clear purpose, that is, to achieve the common growth of merchants and the platform by supporting high-quality brands and merchants.

It is worth noting that Taotian particularly emphasizes the joint investment of the platform and merchants this time, even to the extent of "the platform will invest as much as the merchants do".

Looking closely at the six types of measures, they all focus on the key links in growth - new products are the starting point for brand growth, and are the basic actions to create a sense of freshness, promote users to visit and return, and make purchases; off-site placement introduces traffic from the entire network to solve the problem of "user introduction"; operating the member private domain well can increase the frequency of repurchases and solve the problem of users "staying"; in addition, a major change in this round of policies - returning commissions in cash form and significantly increasing the commission return ratio - directly enriches the merchant's operating cash flow and increases the operating profit; the brand support strategy of bringing forth the new and discarding the old is Taotian's attempt to discover more innovative new brands under the new consumption trend and help new brands grow larger.

Whether it is a new brand or a leading brand, the major prerequisite for ensuring its long-term positive growth is to create a healthy and orderly business environment. Therefore, optimizing the business environment is still one of the basic measures in this round.

It is reported that the above series of measures have currently been taken the lead in implementing in the three core industries of apparel, beauty, and sports outdoor on the Taotian platform. After the industry has gone through the incremental stage and once fell into "low-price internal friction", Taobao Tmall is systematically carrying out "physical conditioning" to help merchants seek healthy and deterministic growth from the mechanism.

01. Supporting high-quality brands and merchants, Taotian aims at growth

From the two aspects of user introduction and user repurchase, Taotian's current series of measures are intended to solve the "traffic" problem of merchants.

The "new product strategy" has been placed in a more important position. For brand merchants, new product competition has become a necessary means to win the incremental market in the stock era and is the main way to acquire new customers. Therefore, Taotian chooses to encourage high-quality brands and merchants to focus more on new products.

This year, merchants on Taobao Tmall releasing new products are expected to directly leverage more in-platform traffic.

Taking apparel as an example, under the new measures, some merchants said that for each new product released, they can get up to 30,000 precise traffic exposures with a PV value for free, which is approximately equivalent to saving 500 yuan in advertising fees, and the number of new products released by merchants per day is not limited.

In terms of the release threshold, currently, Taobao Tmall has "0 transaction requirements, 0 commercial investment, and 0 operating costs" for apparel merchants. This means that the cost of merchants launching new products becomes lower, and new products can also gain more exposure. For the platform, encouraging merchants to develop new products and supporting apparel merchants who are dedicated to making original and high-quality products can further enhance the basic competitiveness of "abundant quantity and excellent quality".

At the same time, Taotian has increased the in-platform incentives for new beauty products, with a maximum expansion coefficient of up to 3 times. For fast-moving consumer goods, a wider range of seeding content exposure helps new products reach consumers to a greater extent and improve the conversion efficiency. For the sports outdoor category, Taotian will open a cyclical industry subsidy every month - this category is more seasonal and functional, and shopping subsidies can stimulate immediate demand and promote new customer consumption in the current season.

Currently, the new product sales in the above three categories can receive up to 100% commission cashback from the Taotian platform.

In fact, in core industries such as apparel and beauty, Taobao Tmall has long been the primary position for brand new product launches. In the past 2024, the average daily number of new products on the Tmall platform exceeded 53 million, and the GMV of new products accounted for 18%. In order to help merchants use new products to capture traffic and to exert and consolidate Taobao Tmall's new product advantages in core industries, new product incentives have become the top priority for the growth of high-quality brands and merchants this year.

Off-site, Taotian will continue to increase investment this year, and the intensity is unprecedented - for some merchants that meet the threshold, the off-site investment incentive can even achieve "the platform will invest as much as the merchants do".

Since last year, Taobao Tmall's attitude has become more open, and its cooperation with external platforms such as WeChat, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin has been continuously strengthened, guiding users to return to the platform and convert into stores through various channels. The off-site traffic incentive launched by Taotian essentially abandons the parochial view, takes the merchant's interests as the primary consideration, helps merchants enlarge the "traffic cake", thereby enabling the platform and merchants to jointly invest funds to help merchants achieve more efficient off-site drainage.

Specifically, for apparel merchants, for off-site investments that flow back to the platform and meet the corresponding thresholds, the platform has a maximum 1:1 matching investment. That is to say, if a merchant invests 500,000 yuan on an external platform, the platform may invest an additional 500,000 yuan.

For the fast-moving consumer goods category, Taotian also increases its efforts to help merchants "advertise" on external platforms, achieve cross-platform user conversion, and comprehensively expands the scale of subsidized goods, directly subsidizing UV and attracting users.

In addition, Ali Mama has currently increased the delivery rebate ratio to a maximum of 4.5%, and a single merchant can receive a marketing expense refund of up to 500,000 yuan.

In-platform incentives to stimulate new product launches and leverage traffic, and off-site investment to help merchants attract traffic. Against the backdrop of the peaking of the Internet traffic dividend, Taotian invests heavily to break the development ceiling together with merchants. On the user side, Taotian is also working on improving the frequency and accuracy of directing traffic to high-value groups.

The performance of many retail companies previously has shown that "doing a good job in the member business" is an important way for the retail format to achieve positive growth. For example, Vipshop's financial report for the second quarter of last year showed that approximately 47% of the company's GMV came from SVIP users; Mixc, which operates offline shopping centers, its 46 million members contributed approximately 40% to the total retail sales; and the data from the China Chain Store & Franchise Association shows that among the 100 shopping centers it surveyed, 76 saw the contribution rate of member consumption in the total annual sales increase last year.

Members usually contribute higher customer unit prices and repurchase rates. For brand merchants, this part of users is undoubtedly a high-value crowd. Therefore, after introducing users, another new measure of Taotian this year is intended to retain traffic, help merchants attract more users to become fans and join as members, and improve repurchases.

36Kr has learned that although Taobao Tmall's member strategy has not been fully determined this year, several significant directions have been internally determined. On the one hand, in terms of form, the Taotian platform will set up more member touchpoints, including but not limited to search results, product detail pages, banners at the top of the homepage, information flow, etc., to expose brand and rights information throughout the station, guide users to join as members, and upgrade the member visit-back entrance on the My Taobao page.

It is understood that the first revision plan involving the exposure of the entire APP by Taotian is likely to be launched at the end of February or the beginning of March, and members will also officially move from "private domain" to "public domain" on a large scale, becoming an important means for merchants to attract new customers and stimulate activity.

At the same time, in order to solve the problems of insufficient member rights and the lack of active investment in merchant rights, Taotian will also jointly invest with merchants this year to enhance member rights. In addition, Taobao Tmall will also launch a new member advertising placement mechanism for merchants. Merchants can target and push member advertisements to the old customer group, and the platform will also provide incentive rebates to merchants; from "attracting new customers" to "attracting old customers", the investment return and transaction efficiency are also expected to show a significant improvement.

It is widely believed in the industry that this set of member combination punches is expected to greatly increase repurchases. The previous wave after wave of "low-price wars" infinitely diluted the industry profits, making it difficult for most merchants to squeeze out a budget for member rights. This year, the platform and merchants jointly invest, equivalent to providing merchants with a targeted startup fund to directly distribute benefits to members and help merchants activate the member relationships accumulated within the platform.

It seems that this move has increased some expenses for merchants, but in the long term, it can strengthen the identity recognition of members, activate the continuous consumption power, and release the long-term value of users; coupled with the new member promotion and rebate mechanism, it is ultimately expected to enable merchants to achieve a higher repurchase rate and placement return rate.

02. Solving the merchant development problem solves the platform development problem

Through a series of incentives launched around traffic mining and member operations, it is not difficult to find that the core idea of Taobao Tmall's New Year "big gift package" is that the platform will invest more as much as the merchants do, attract traffic off-site and drive repurchases on-site, and support high-quality merchants to make the cake bigger as much as possible.

In other words, Taotian is not only solving the short-term dilemma of merchants lacking confidence and being reluctant to invest at present, but also solving the business problems of merchants lacking traffic, repurchases, and profits through systematic mechanism transformation.

Take the "commission incentive" policy that has attracted industry attention this time as an example. It is not only real money, but also a complete set of mechanism designs throughout. This year, Taotian has begun to use the performance incentive method for the first time in the industry. For merchants who meet the sales targets, the commission will be directly returned in cash to increase the merchants' long-term operating capital.

It is understood that Taotian has already started the commission incentive for February-March. An insider revealed that the commission incentive will become a regular incentive means this year. And compared with the previous, the scope of merchants eligible for cash incentives has been further expanded, the incentive has doubled, and a second-tier return has been added.

According to the current standard, merchants whose sales this year are 5% higher than last year can get a 20% commission return; if it is 10% higher, the commission return is 60%. For example, if a merchant's commission for February-March last year was 1 million yuan, as long as the sales in February-March this year increase by 10%, a 600,000 yuan cash commission return can be directly credited to the account.

Compared with the previous traffic coupon commission return, the form of this year's cash commission return undoubtedly gives merchants greater autonomy, equivalent to obtaining an additional operating fund. Merchants can use it for R & D, production, marketing and other investments, or as working capital to directly enrich the cash flow and increase the profit.

The significant increase in the commission return ratio and cash incentives are almost unprecedented in the industry, indicating Taotian's determination to invest in the "growth battle".

Looking beyond the present, another focus of Taotian is the long-term development of merchants.

Currently, the "newbie bonus period" is not applicable to new e-commerce players. Externally, the overall consumption is currently weak, and the consumption demand of households and enterprise sectors is obviously insufficient; internally, although platforms such as Taotian have earlier shifted from the extreme low-price strategy, the remaining influence of industry "involution" is still there. Driving high order volumes with low prices is still the basic operation of some merchants, while the cost of investment and customer acquisition is becoming more and more expensive.

The combination of the above factors has made it very difficult for new brands to "start up".

In response to the collective pressure faced by new merchants, Taotian has previously launched the "Blue Star Project" to support high-quality new merchants to grow rapidly throughout their entire life cycle. For example, in the entry stage, 15 free rights and interests such as providing promotional traffic coupon gifts and 30-day interest-free credit loans are provided; in the advanced stage, merchants are helped to incubate popular products, and services such as packaging and purchasing live-streaming talents and even top live-streaming broadcasters are provided; when the merchants meet the transaction standards, a stepped incentive is given, up to 2.5 million yuan.

For example, the beauty brand "Meiyan Yinshi" only landed on Tmall in early August last year. During the Double 11 of that year, its main compound acid acne gel has become a popular product with more than 100,000 people placing orders.

In October, this brand "almost missed the Tmall Double 11". According to the brand's operations general manager, because the new brand did not have a pre-sale link, its nearly-negotiated Double 11 cooperation with Li Jiaqi's live-streaming room was almost stranded. But in the end, with the coordination of the shop assistant in the vertical industry and the new merchant platform, Meiyan Yinshi successfully opened a pre-sale link and caught up with the schedule of Li Jiaqi's live-streaming room.

The sales promotion effect of the top live-streamer was immediate. The compound acid acne gel created a GMV of over 10 million yuan and more than 140,000 transaction orders during that Double 11. Meiyan Yinshi also quickly reached the expected transaction target and received a traffic incentive of up to 30,000 yuan given by the platform to new merchants.

Entering 2025, Taotian will launch the "Thousand Stars Project" to provide exclusive advanced rights and operating incentives for emerging merchants in 14 subdivided tracks. Specific measures include freely opening the high-level version of data product tools, jointly working with top brand service providers to provide operational diagnoses for emerging brands, and opening exclusive green channels for emerging brands in major promotion nodes and marketing IPs such as Treasure New Brands and Tmall U First.

In addition, several merchants have revealed that Taotian has recently started to solicit relevant opinions from merchants on brand support, and a new round of brand support plans covering the entire platform is expected to be launched in the near future.

"The current industry environment is both a challenge and an opportunity for merchants. Analogous to the large number of emerging and prosperous brands in Japan at the end of the last century, we are also expecting Taobao Tmall to lead merchants to redefine the 'new brand' and find a new brand development path at this historical node", a merchant who participated in the merchant communication told 36Kr.

In the second half of e-commerce retail, from the landmark interconnection last year to the continued support for merchants this year, the platform has long realized that not only do merchants grow relying on the platform, but the platform's own development is also dependent on the development of merchants. Only with high-quality merchants and new brands following one after another can the platform continuously emerge with fresh blood, and users have the motivation to remain continuously active, thereby the platform's basic traffic advantage can also be effectively consolidated in the long term.

03. The "growth battle" has begun, and "physical conditioning" runs through it

Looking at the series of new measures of Taobao Tmall, there is a major prerequisite - the corresponding detailed rules must be carried out in a fair, orderly, and not overly protective business environment in order to effectively drive merchant growth. And planning support and incentive strategies on one hand, and governing the business