In the past year, the GMV of Douyin E-commerce increased by 34%. The annual new strategy is to reduce the burden on merchants and increase their revenue | Exclusive

Author | Li Xiaoxia
Editor | Qiao Qian

36Kr exclusively learned that in the past year (from August 2024 to July 2025), the GMV of Douyin E-commerce increased by 34% year-on-year.

Among them, the performance of shelf e-commerce was outstanding. According to official news from Douyin, the GMV of Douyin's shelf e-commerce increased by 49% year-on-year in the past year, higher than the overall growth rate of e-commerce.

Previously, 36Kr reported that the GMV of Douyin E-commerce in 2024 was about 3.5 trillion yuan, with a year-on-year increase of 30%. This means that this year, while the growth rate of the e-commerce industry is slowing down overall, Douyin E-commerce still maintains stable growth.

The rapid growth of shelf e-commerce is inseparable from the subsidies of Douyin E-commerce for shelf e-commerce. According to exclusive information obtained by 36Kr, during this year's 618 promotion, Douyin's shelf e-commerce achieved good results, exceeding the expected target. The GMV was about 200 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 50%.

Douyin declined to comment on the above figures.

In the middle of 2022, Douyin E-commerce proposed to upgrade "interest-based e-commerce" to "full-scenario interest-based e-commerce", and successively launched the Douyin Mall tab and an independent APP. At that time, Wei Wenwen, the president of Douyin E-commerce, announced that it would focus on the mall and search. The future proportion of the new field, namely shelf e-commerce, should be more than 50%.

A person close to Douyin said that Douyin E-commerce planned to gradually increase the proportion of shelf e-commerce to 30%, 40%, and 50% within three years.

Everything is going according to plan. The proportion of GMV in Douyin's shelf scenario rose to 30% in 2023 and continued to climb to 40% in 2024. Judging from this year's 618, the target of a 50% proportion of shelf e-commerce has also been achieved.

Douyin E-commerce has also adjusted its annual strategy - based on the business growth of merchants, helping merchants increase profits and reduce burdens. Only when merchants grow can the platform grow. This is the new strategy of Douyin E-commerce. As early as the end of 2024, Douyin E-commerce had set reducing the operating costs of merchants as the core business goal for 2025.

This can also be seen from a series of adjustments made by Douyin E-commerce since this year.

In March this year, 36Kr exclusively reported that Juliang Qianchuan was integrated into Douyin E-commerce as a secondary department. The two algorithm teams that previously served Juliang Qianchuan and Douyin E-commerce respectively were also integrated.

The integration of Juliang Qianchuan into Douyin E-commerce means that it is no longer only responsible for the advertising revenue of e-commerce business, but also has to be jointly responsible for overall goals such as GMV, merchant and user experience, especially the ROI of merchant advertising investment, with departments such as e-commerce products and operations. After the merger, how to balance the ROI of merchant advertising investment, user experience and platform efficiency will become the only direction.

After the merger of the product operation and algorithm teams, the two major traffic pools will realize the linkage of the underlying algorithms and distribution rules. For example, the user subsidy vouchers issued in the advertising traffic scenario by the platform may also be distributed to the natural traffic in the future, thereby expanding the user reach and benefiting more merchants with the subsidies.

In early January this year, among the nine merchant support policies issued by Douyin E-commerce, there was one called "optimizing the algorithm mechanism". It claimed that Douyin E-commerce would continue to increase investment in technology research and development, improve the accuracy of traffic distribution, and allow more high-quality content and products to get exposure opportunities. Another direct benefit of improving the accuracy of traffic distribution is to reduce the product return rate and directly improve the operating costs of merchants.

Recently, ByteDance has transferred sales and industry operation teams proficient in e-commerce performance advertising, such as large customer direct sales teams, to the Douyin E-commerce department, realizing the integration of business and operation and facilitating merchants to connect.

36Kr also learned that this year, the subsidies of Douyin E-commerce have begun to shift from subsidizing consumers last year to subsidizing merchants. According to Douyin data, as of the end of August, Douyin E-commerce has subsidized merchants by more than 19 billion yuan this year, continuously helping merchants reduce costs, increase revenues and grow steadily. Since the beginning of this year, subsidizing merchants, reducing commissions and refunding advertising fees have become the focus of efforts of various platforms.

On September 21st, at the Douyin Creators Conference, Douyin E-commerce also released the "Douyin E-commerce Community Operation Specifications" for the first time, clarifying the platform's business boundaries, supporting the good and punishing the bad. In the past year, more than 13 million violation content videos have been dealt with, and 470,000 violation live streaming with goods permissions have been revoked. Zhang Lan, Wang Xiaofei and others have been permanently banned for "maliciously hyping for traffic", and Gu Qianqian, a top internet celebrity with more than 5 million fans who posted remarks about getting rich easily by lying flat, has also been permanently banned.

There has always been a misunderstanding in the outside world about Douyin E-commerce, thinking that top influencers contribute most of the product transaction volume. In fact, top influencers are not the core of live-streaming e-commerce. The GMV brought by top influencers accounts for a relatively small proportion of the overall scale of Douyin E-commerce. Live broadcasts by influencers with more than one million fans contribute about 9% to the overall scale, and those by small and medium-sized influencers with less than one million fans account for about 21%.

The war in the instant retail market mainly dominated by food delivery is in full swing, but a person close to Douyin E-commerce told 36Kr that Douyin E-commerce will not be overly involved in the instant retail war among several major platforms at this stage. This means that Douyin E-commerce will concentrate more resources on e-commerce business to improve the service and experience of e-commerce.

One week ago (September 16th), Douyin E-commerce launched the Mid-Autumn Festival & Double 11 promotion, which will last for 57 days. This longer-span Double 11 is also the clarion call for a new round of growth of Douyin E-commerce.