Douyin E-commerce's 2025 Heavyweight Support Plan: Nine Measures to Help Merchants Reduce Costs and Increase Efficiency

Douyin E-commerce's 2025 Heavyweight Support Plan: Nine Measures to Help Merchants Reduce Costs and Increase EfficiencyAt the beginning of 2025, Douyin E-commerce launched its most substantial merchant support plan to date, announcing nine support measures aimed at reducing merchant operating costs, improving service experience, and fostering a healthier, more vibrant e-commerce ecosystem. These nine measures encompass cost-reduction initiatives such as commission waivers, refunds of returned order promotion fees, reduced shipping insurance costs, and lower deposits

Douyin E-commerce's 2025 Heavyweight Support Plan: Nine Measures to Help Merchants Reduce Costs and Increase Efficiency

At the beginning of 2025, Douyin E-commerce launched its most substantial merchant support plan to date, announcing nine support measures aimed at reducing merchant operating costs, improving service experience, and fostering a healthier, more vibrant e-commerce ecosystem. These nine measures encompass cost-reduction initiatives such as commission waivers, refunds of returned order promotion fees, reduced shipping insurance costs, and lower deposits. They also offer solutions to common merchant concerns such as returns, price wars, and traffic acquisition. Douyin E-commerce has set merchant satisfaction and perceived service experience as core performance indicators for its operating team, highlighting its commitment to merchant development.

I. Empowering Merchants to Reduce Costs and Increase Profit Margins: Upgraded Commission-Free Policies and Lower Shipping Insurance Costs

Cost reduction and efficiency improvement are paramount in this support plan. Douyin E-commerce is accelerating the upgrade of its commission-free and commission-refund policies. In 2025, in addition to continuing its commission-free policy for shelf-based product cards, it will implement commission-free policies in live stream and short video scenarios, currently in the pilot phase. The first phase covers three major categories (including nine first-level categories): fruits and fresh produce, daily necessities, and kitchenware. This will subsequently expand to eighteen major categories and nearly one hundred categories, including agricultural products, seafood, handicrafts, and intangible cultural heritage crafts.

In 2024, Douyin E-commerce's commission-free policy for shelf-based products saved merchants over 10 billion yuan (approximately $1.4 billion USD) in costs. For content-based platforms, in the second half of 2024 alone, daily necessities reduced commission fees by over 600 million yuan (approximately $85 million USD), while commission waivers for fruits and fresh produce saved eligible merchants an average of nearly 5,000 yuan (approximately $700 USD) each, leading to faster business growth for these merchants.

Addressing the widely-concerning issue of shipping insurance, the platform has negotiated with partners to introduce a reduced-fee policy, lowering shipping insurance costs by 10%-40% for eligible merchants or key opinion leaders (KOLs). This is projected to save merchants over 4.5 billion yuan (approximately $635 million USD) in 2025, effectively improving order conversion rates and after-sales efficiency. Simultaneously, the platform has successively lowered the deposits for 32 first-level categories, with the maximum reduction reaching 98.7%, covering approximately 80% of merchants.

In 2024, Douyin E-commerce upgraded its traffic mechanism, favoring high-quality content and products, promoting good content as the primary driver of business growth. Even without traffic investment, merchants can achieve business growth through high-quality content. In the future, Douyin E-commerce will continue to increase investment in technology research and development, optimize algorithm mechanisms, and improve the accuracy of traffic recommendations, giving more high-quality content and products greater exposure opportunities.

II. Responding to Merchant Concerns and Enhancing Operational Experience: Addressing Returns, Refunds, and Malicious Competition

Issues such as full refunds, price wars, and high return rates have long plagued e-commerce merchants. Douyin E-commerce is providing solutions to protect merchant interests through upgraded traffic mechanisms and other methods.

To address the frustrating issue of "instant refunds for order bundling," Douyin E-commerce will introduce a promotion fee refund policy. For promotional orders with full refunds meeting specific conditions, and for various scenarios including platform-identified abnormal orders, the relevant promotion fees will be automatically refunded to the merchant's Douyin GiantCraft account, improving the merchant's operating experience.

For users applying for full refunds, the platform will actively intervene, assess the validity of the request, and strictly handle them to protect the legitimate rights and interests of merchants. For users with high return rates or those flagged as abnormal, the platform will reduce shipping discounts, adjust shipping compensation, and reduce coupons to help merchants reduce losses and save costs.

To enhance transparency, Douyin E-commerce will significantly improve the transparency of its platform governance rules and implement a tiered and flexible governance model. A new appeal channel will be added to the Douyin Shop app, simplifying the evidence submission process. For orders impacted by force majeure, the appeal process will be changed to a proactive reporting mechanism, facilitating merchant handling of unforeseen circumstances.

The platform will introduce management regulations for maliciously low-priced goods, comprehensively cracking down on illegal advertising and false marketing, prohibiting merchants from inducing users to purchase with prices significantly below market value. Simultaneously, the platform will strengthen control over malicious counterfeiters and malicious claim groups, severely handling false evidence, abuse of shipping insurance, and other behaviors, jointly building a healthy business ecosystem with merchants.

In 2025, Douyin E-commerce will also regularly hold merchant forums and exchange meetings to widely collect merchant feedback, using merchant satisfaction and perceived service experience as core performance indicators for its operating teams.

III. Establishing a Hundred-Million Yuan Fund to Provide Key Support for Small Merchants

Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) are the "capillaries" of the Chinese economy, and over 90% of the businesses on the Douyin platform are MSMEs. Douyin E-commerce will invest hundreds of millions of yuan annually in a "Small Merchant Support Fund" to provide MSMEs with support across multiple scenarios, including product listing, first-order incentives, and long-term operations.

Small merchants can receive up to 6,000 yuan (approximately $850 USD) in traffic coupons and targeted traffic subsidies to increase the exposure of their merchants and products. For new merchants without experience scores within 90 days, the platform will launch a fast-track operation green channel to help them participate in platform activities, join the select alliance, and quickly start their businesses.

Douyin E-commerce has introduced a series of measures for small and medium-sized merchants, including zero-cost entry, one-license multi-store operation, reduced deposits, and traffic subsidies. In 2024, 5 billion yuan (approximately $707 million USD) in traffic was allocated to support small and medium-sized merchants, with each merchant receiving an average of 35,000 exposures. To date, 760,000 new small and medium-sized merchants join Douyin to open stores every month.

Douyin E-commerce stated that these nine improvements respond to merchant pain points and represent a commitment to them. It will continue to optimize business processes, improve response efficiency, regularly publish improvement measures, and provide more attentive and efficient support to merchants, accompanying them in their growth within the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem.

(Xinyue)

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