Koshiro – stock.adobe.com

On 25 April, the e-commerce section of Kuaishou, TikTok’s biggest competitor in China, released a project to support up to 500 fast brands with over 23 billion internet traffic this year. This project will help fast brands gain weight on the Kuaishou E-commerce platform on five fronts, including traffic bonus, start-from-zero benefits, product privileges, marketing events, and exclusive services.

Why it matters

In January 2022, Kuaishou opened its e-commerce store to local online-to-offline businesses, involving almost everything from grocery delivery to hospitality. Supporting fast brands by splashing over 23 billion internet traffic is the company’s next step in expanding into the e-commerce market, competing against fierce rivals such as China’s TikTok Douyin, Alibaba’s Alipay, and Meituan.

Kuaishou E-commerce offered its first-round incentives in cash to business owners in January 2022 to encourage new store registrations. This promotion plan gave individual stores up to 1,000 yuan ($158) in cash and internet traffic from 50,000 potential consumers.

Context

Kuaishou is the second-largest short video app in China. Apart from making money from live streaming and online marketing business, the company has ventured into e-commerce and mobile games. Kuaishou users are exposed to ads of small businesses and can purchase items from online influencers via the app. It accounts for 8% of the e-commerce live streaming market share in China, following Alibaba’s Taobao Live and Douyin.