Home
News
Station B shop goes online and breaks out of Xintiandi of e-commerce?

Station B shop goes online and breaks out of Xintiandi of e-commerce?

News2025-02-07

Bilibili is intensifying its e-commerce layout, upgrading its previous merchant backend management platform "Bilibili Workshop" to "Bilibili Small Shop", and will launch virtual item sales and trading services in batches this week. In addition, the original display window of the "UP Owner" homepage has been upgraded to a "small shop", where users can purchase goods directly through the small shop or redirect to external platforms such as Taobao. This series of measures means that Bilibili is seeking breakthroughs in e-commerce business.

Although Bilibili has a unique community ecology and a large group of young users, its commercialization has been unsatisfactory. Until November last year, there was some improvement. According to the third quarter 2024 financial report released by Bilibili, the adjusted net profit was 240 million yuan, achieving the first quarterly profit since its listing.

According to the financial report for the third quarter of 2024, Bilibili's revenue mainly comes from four major sources: value-added services, advertising, mobile games, IP derivatives, and others, which contribute 38%, 29%, 25%, and 8% of the total revenue for the third quarter of 2024, respectively. Among them, the e-commerce data only presents GMV data in the advertising revenue section of the financial report, indicating that the e-commerce business has not yet grown into a dominant core force in the overall revenue structure of Bilibili. However, this also highlights its enormous potential and expandable space.

With the launch of the Bilibili store, Bilibili will also embark on a new exploration of e-commerce business. This is not only a powerful supplement to the existing business sector, but also lays an important foundation for future diversified development. However, can Bilibili do a good job in the popular e-commerce business?

Bilibili launches new e-commerce features
"Small store" has become the name of e-commerce business of major platforms, such as Tiktok small store, WeChat small store, Kwai small store, etc. Now, Station B has launched its own small store.

At present, the types of merchants who stay in Bilibili's small store are individuals, individual businesses, and corporate enterprises. Merchants can apply to join, and this week, virtual commodity trading services will be launched in batches for merchants to further enrich the product library sold in Bilibili's small store.

After upgrading to a Bilibili store, the biggest change is that the display window of the "UP Owner" homepage has been changed to a small store, and the total sales volume will be displayed.

After entering the small store, you can see the products sold by the UP owner, which will be displayed in the form of a double row waterfall, including product images, names, prices, and sales volume. In addition, you can also see information about new products, reviews, and more. Compared to the original storefront, the small store also supports searching for products within the store, making it convenient for users to accurately locate the products they want to buy.

Not only has the showcase of the "UP owner" homepage become a small shop, but the original "product" column below the UP owner will also become a "small shop", synchronously arranging the products sold by the UP owner. Users can complete the entire process from product selection to order and payment on Bilibili through the Bilibili store.

It is worth noting that UP owners' small shops not only sell goods, but also support links to goods from third-party platforms, including Taobao, JD.com, and other platforms. These are more suitable for UP owners who only want to earn commission for goods and have no source of goods.
From a product logic perspective, after launching the small store, UP owners can showcase the store on the homepage, deeply integrating content creation with product recommendations. For example, when sharing cooking tutorials, UP hosts in the food area can recommend relevant kitchenware and ingredients through their small shop; After reviewing electronic products, the UP host in the technology zone can guide fans to purchase the same product in the small store.

This small store model not only allows users to obtain high-quality content while meeting their shopping needs, but also enhances the interaction and connection between UP owners and fans, making users more dependent on Bilibili, further consolidating the community ecology, and becoming an important window for UP owners to promote products and users to consume.

Bilibili e-commerce accelerates sprint
At the 2023 performance conference, Bilibili Chairman Chen Rui stated that in 2023, the company will no longer simply pursue MAU (monthly active users), but will focus on higher quality DAU and commercial value conversion efficiency.

In other words, although Bilibili has accumulated a massive number of users in the past, there is still room for improvement in efficiently converting these user traffic into actual commercial value. Now, Bilibili focuses on improving the efficiency of commercial value conversion, aiming to optimize various commercial links within the platform, including advertising accuracy, e-commerce business conversion rate, and attractiveness of value-added services.

Especially in the e-commerce business, the previous attempts of Bilibili in e-commerce have had limited results. Against this backdrop, Bilibili small shops may become the key "winner" in the breakthrough of Bilibili e-commerce.

By optimizing the merchant entry and management process, Bilibili's small store connects UP owners with product sales, which is an important measure to improve the efficiency of commercial value conversion. By leveraging the influence of UP hosts, high-quality content can be accurately directed towards relevant product recommendations, thereby improving user purchase conversion rates.

Moreover, compared to mature e-commerce platforms, the previous shopping scenes on Bilibili lacked coherence and convenience. On platforms such as Taobao and JD.com, users have a simple and smooth process from searching for products, browsing product details, viewing user reviews, to placing orders and purchases, with each link closely connected. Bilibili Xiaodian is replicating this shopping chain, optimizing the platform shopping experience, and gradually guiding users to form shopping habits on Bilibili.

In fact, the small store model is also a highly effective development path in the current e-commerce field.
Take Tiktok store as an example, it has played a key role in the rise of Tiktok e-commerce business. By providing a convenient store opening process and diversified commodity display channels, Tiktok small stores have attracted a large number of merchants to settle in, effectively promoting the activity of commodity trading. This not only brings users a wealth of shopping options, but also enables Tiktok e-commerce business to flourish, thus becoming an important revenue growth point of ByteDance.

In addition to launching Bilibili stores, Bilibili has been making frequent moves in the e-commerce field in the past month. On the one hand, we will restart the "Bi star" live streaming sales incentive program for UP owners, which is jointly organized by Bilibili and Taobao Alliance. This program is designed to customize live streaming sales incentive plans for potential UP owners both inside and outside the platform, while providing them with inventory and operational support.

On the other hand, the Bilibili App has added an advertising space called "UP Owner Share Good Things", which is displayed above the "Related Recommended Videos" section on the video details page, improving the efficiency of product promotion.
It is not difficult to see that Bilibili e-commerce is accelerating its sprint.

Can Station B e-commerce break out into a Xintiandi?
In the Internet business landscape, Station B is unique with its unique community culture and a large number of young users. However, in the field of e-commerce, although Bilibili has made many attempts, it has always been difficult to enter the top camp of e-commerce.
It is not too late for Station B to start e-commerce business, which can be said to be the same time as Tiktok and Kwai. In 2021, Station B will step down to become an e-commerce station, with the same strategy as Tiktok, Kwai and other platforms to develop e-commerce business in the early stage, that is, to help third-party e-commerce platforms channel the business of taking goods to earn commissions, and to launch the "little yellow cart" function that can take goods.

In 2022, Bilibili officially launched a shopping section in its live streaming section. The live streaming rooms in this section fully opened up the "Little Yellow Cart" shopping function, and almost all UP owners added "Little Yellow Cart" shopping links to promote their products. They also announced their participation in the "Double 11" battle that year. During this period, in order to support e-commerce business, they also launched the "Live E-commerce UP Owner Recruitment Incentive Plan".

However, the e-commerce business at that time did not bring ideal results. According to the third quarter financial report of 2022, Bilibili's revenue from IP derivatives and other (including e-commerce business) in the third quarter was 758 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of only 3%. This reflects the low level of user participation in Bilibili's e-commerce business.

The weak consumer atmosphere has become one of the main reasons hindering the commercialization of platforms. A deep Bilibili user told Tech Planet that they can watch various anime, games, and educational videos on Bilibili for up to 2 hours a day, and participate in hot topic discussions and interact with UP hosts for about half an hour. However, they are not particularly interested in UP hosts' e-commerce products.
In addition, the commodities sold in Station B are mainly related to the community atmosphere of Station B - games, anime, handmade and toys, which means that the category of e-commerce in Station B is still limited.

Moreover, in order to succeed in e-commerce business, a large amount of money burning subsidies are indispensable. In terms of e-commerce subsidies, Bilibili rarely has large-scale and sustained subsidy measures compared to Taobao and JD.com. At large-scale promotional nodes, Bilibili rarely launches activities such as full discounts, consumer vouchers, and billion dollar subsidies with the same intensity as Taobao and JD.com.

In addition, the way UP hosts promote products is to convert content traffic into e-commerce sales, but in practical operation, this model has many challenges. Due to the lack of professional sales skills and product knowledge training, it is difficult to accurately convey product value to fans, resulting in poor sales results. Some UP hosts find it difficult to cleverly integrate e-commerce recommendation content into their videos, and overly rigid ad placements can also easily trigger user backlash.

The launch of small stores in Station B is just a key step for Station B. In the face of e-commerce, it is still difficult to chew the bone. We still need to continue to work from multiple dimensions, such as reshaping user habits, improving the supply chain, and deep integration of content and e-commerce, to establish a perfect e-commerce ecosystem, which is expected to create a Xintiandi in the e-commerce field.

Core Services

News

Station B shop goes online and breaks out of Xintiandi of e-commerce?