Before the festival, many tycoons entered the bureau to “give gifts” to e-commerce. Why are there so many rumors and heavy rains?

 Wen HaoShi Tianhao observed Shi Tianhao 

According to the old etiquette, the traditional Spring Festival is over only after the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first month.

Seeing that the New Year is coming to an end, the most eye-catching gift-giving e-commerce company before the holiday did not have any eye-catching news. As we perceived, this blockbuster product launched by WeChat after it was once regarded as a red envelope failed to replicate the success of the former.

In the environment of stock competition, the gift-giving function launched on WeChat on December 18, 2024 opened up a new imagination. This gift giving, which combines gift giving + shopping, is very similar to the WeChat red envelope function that combined red envelopes + transfer money back then. It has attracted the attention of the whole society since its birth.

Since then, giants such as Douyin, Taobao, Jingdong, and Quick Hand have also launched similar functions one after another. With the example of the WeChat red envelope attack on Pearl Harbor in 2014, the outside world has viewed this new form of gift-giving e-commerce with optimism. Judging from the performance of various e-commerce companies in handling gift-giving functions after the holiday, this kind of expected explosion has not yet come.

Has the red envelope effect not reappeared?

There is a saying that war reports will lie, but the front line will not.

In the era of social media, companies have changed their past habit of low-key and often disclose the digital results of the company as a whole or a specific business or activity to the public, using real performance growth to show their muscles. However, companies often encounter situations where performance is not up to standard or activities are not ideal. At this time, they will select some real and beautiful secondary data to fill in.

On February 5, WeChat released the “2025 Spring Festival Data Report”, which contains relevant data related to gift giving. The report revealed that the top three provinces receiving the largest number of gifts are Guangdong Province, Shandong Province, and Zhejiang Province, while people in the distant Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Tibet Autonomous Region also received blue bag blessings.

In addition, categories with gift-giving attributes have significant advantages. Judging from the tracking data, the month-on-month growth of small household appliances, trendy toys, cultural toys and jewelry, books, and cosmetics is relatively obvious, while the performance of other categories is weak. Books have become the first choice for gift-giving for many people. The number of gift-giving orders in multiple book categories, including classic works and parenting encyclopedias, has increased by 10000%+ month-on-month. nbsp;

How many people give gifts? How much GMV was generated? These two data are what the outside world cares about, and they are also the key to proving the success of the WeChat gift giving function. The answer is obvious. The number of participants and the GMV are not disclosed to the public only because the performance is not ideal.

Compared with the performance of red envelopes in the Year of the Snake, the loneliness of the gift-giving function is even more highlighted. The report also revealed that during the Spring Festival, a total of 100 million + user-created red envelopes were born on WeChat, and about 390 million people received red envelopes containing these red envelopes.

As chasers, giants such as Douyin and Taobao also have publicly published data on gift-giving, but like WeChat, they are also secondary data, which shows that each platform has a very average performance in gift-giving e-commerce. Just as Brother Xiao Ma said, he hopes the outside world will not over-praise this function. WeChat will take 5 years or more to build an e-commerce ecological connector, give full play to the power of social interaction, pay attention to slow work, and make high-quality products.& rdquo;

Maybe we really want to use a five-year time scale to look at gift-giving e-commerce. As the country on earth that is most concerned about human relations, WeChat gift-giving has attracted many giants to follow suit as soon as it was launched. Naturally, we value the business potential. However, traditional gift-giving focuses more on offline, and how to tap the gift-giving economy through online shopping models really takes some time to explore slowly.

During the Spring Festival, Douyin also vigorously promoted the gift-giving function. The “2025 Spring Festival Consumption Data Report” released by Douyin Life Service on February 4 showed that Douyin Life Service continued to upgrade the group purchase coupon gift-giving function during the festival, and cyber gift-giving became a New Year custom. From January 24 to February 1, the number of group buying and giving users on the platform increased by 125% year-on-year, and merchant group buying and giving sales increased by 196% year-on-year. Many chain brands focus on participating in special activities to summon the patron saint of the New Year, providing users with personalized patron saint gift covers on the gift page and customize exclusive New Year card faces.

During the event, Mixue Ice City ranked top 1 in gift-giving orders, and flavors such as Jasmine Milk Green were popular. GMV gift-transfer from brands such as Zui Deyi, Guoquan Shihui, and Qixintian increased by more than 60% month-on-month.

At the same time, Taobao revealed in an interview with Shangguan reporters that silver-haired people have become a large recipient of gifts, and physical examination packages, hearing aids, and hair dye have become a three-piece gift set for silver-haired people. After Taobao gift-giving was launched, the transaction volume of hearing aid products increased by more than 50% month-on-month, and the sales of hair dye also increased by nearly 50% month-on-month. Brands such as Schwarzkopf and L’Oréal have become popular and have become popular gift-giving products.

Affected by the winter vacation, the sales of various primary and secondary school textbooks and teaching aids on Taobao increased by more than 175% month-on-month, and more than 20 million copies were sold in two weeks. Nearly 1.4 million consumers search Taobao for gift-related terms every day.

In other words, each gift-giving function has achieved certain results, but compared with the commercial impact of red envelopes back then, the data level is still relatively general. Judging from the current vertical composition of the data disclosed by WeChat, Taobao, and Douyin, each gift-giving e-commerce company also has its own strengths.

To sum up, among the hottest products among WeChat gift-giving products, small household appliances, books and other categories have a stronger social color, which is in line with WeChat’s social advantages. As a player who is expanding the local life landscape, Douyin’s gift function is more deeply tied to local life and serves offline stores as a marketing tool. Taobao is closer to the original intention of giving gifts, such as hearing aids for silver-haired people and big-name cosmetics for women.

The nature of low frequencies determines the upper limit”

As soon as the gift-giving function was launched, Brother Xiao Ma’s five-year theory seemed very rational in the face of optimistic interpretations from the outside world.

Then why didn’t gift giving, a new function that combines human feelings, social interaction and traditional habits become as popular overnight as red envelopes? The editor-in-chief believes that this is related to the low-frequency behavior of gift-giving. Compared with the high frequency of transfers between people, the ceiling of gift-giving is more obvious. It is normal for the Year of the Snake to be lukewarm and lukewarm during the Spring Festival.

1. Low-frequency ceilings;

According to data from Ai Media Consulting, the market size of China’s gift economy industry increased from 800 billion yuan to 1,091.3 billion yuan from 2018 to 2020, showing an increasing trend year by year. The market size in 2021 is expected to be 1,156.8 billion yuan, and the market size for the whole year of 2022 is expected to reach 1,226.2 billion yuan. Compared with the domestic zero social consumption of 40 to 50 trillion yuan per year, the gift economy accounts for 50/1 overall.

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And compared with the high frequency of shopping, the per capita frequency of gift-giving consumption is even lower. AiMedia Consulting data shows that the frequency of gifts given by China’s gift economy users in the past year has concentrated 2-6 times (63.7%).

Red envelopes are based on mobile payments. Regardless of the number of people covered by mobile payments or the frequency of mobile payments per capita, they lay the foundation for the popularity of red envelopes. In contrast, relatively low-frequency gift-giving behaviors make it difficult to push gift-giving to the throne of phenomenal behaviors.

2. A double-edged sword of form;

In terms of the composition of gift-giving, it is roughly divided into two categories: gifts from acquaintances and gifts from special relationships. Simply put, for example, between father and son, between brothers and sisters, between colleagues and friends, etc., it is all acquaintances who give gifts. This kind of gift giving often does not pay attention to the sense of form, and the gift-giving behavior is hidden in daily consumption.

For example, if you buy gifts for your wife, children, or elderly people, because you know the other party’s address, you will directly place an order on the e-commerce platform. If you use the gift-giving functions of various platforms, it will make these relationships seem stiff.

The biggest feature of the gift-giving function launched by WeChat, and later gift-giving functions such as Douyin, Taobao, Jingdong, and Quick Hand is the sense of form.

WeChat users only need to open the WeChat chat box and click the + sign in the lower right corner to see the new gift options. On e-commerce apps such as Taobao and Jingdong, products that support gift-giving will also have similar entrances on the ordering or purchase page. The difference between normal shopping behavior is that users do not need to know the recipient’s address in advance. They only need to send the link or password to the other party. The other party can directly fill in the delivery address and check gift logistics information and other services at any time.

This kind of gift-giving behavior suitable for special relationships, such as giving to couples in love, giving to children’s teachers, giving gifts to leaders ‘families, etc., is more suitable for using the gift-giving functions of various platforms. These relationships require these forms as emotional lubricants.

As a low-frequency consumption method, gift-giving is only suitable for the latter few gift-giving behaviors that are semi-familiar with relationships, so it is also decided that it is difficult for the gift-giving function to suddenly explode.

From current observations, the integration of gift-giving and instant retail will have more potential. In contrast, WeChat’s gift giving method is similar to e-commerce shopping, and will only be a niche existence. Because timeliness is very important in gift-giving behavior, according to the traditional e-commerce delivery time of one to three days, the emotional color of gift-giving behavior is very destroyed. If it is delivered on the same day at instant retail, the emotional experience of this gift-giving is extremely improved.

Judging from the data related to gift-giving published by various families during the Spring Festival, the Spring Festival of the Year of the Snake is a critical time point for the development of gift-giving e-commerce, but it fails to show explosive development potential like red envelopes. As an behavior that has long been integrated into daily life, gift-giving has strong vitality. Will it change greatly in the next five years? Everything remains to be observed.