再见 电商价格战

This article focuses on China’s e-commerce industry’s shift away from cutthroat price competition, entering a new industry-wide stage of anti-involution. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Core event: 11 major e-commerce platforms in Guangdong, including Taobao Flash Sale, Meituan and JD.com, have formed an anti-involution platform alliance and signed a joint co-governance commitment. Meanwhile, regulators have stepped up crackdowns on predatory pricing, shifting regulatory logic from ex-post correction to ex-ante constraint to reduce involution at its source.

2. Impact on general consumers: Years of low-price involution have crowded out high-quality goods with low-quality alternatives and left the market rife with deceptive promotion tactics. Going forward, industry competition will shift to product quality and customer service, forming a virtuous cycle where good products command fair prices. Consumers will ultimately benefit, gaining access to more reliable, higher-quality goods while avoiding low-quality junk and deceptive promotions.

3. The transition has officially begun with a clear direction. The next critical step is to deliver on the commitments made and put plans into action.

China’s e-commerce sector has shifted from incremental expansion to competition for existing market share, and the old predatory involution model reliant on price subsidies has hit an inflection point. Joint anti-involution efforts by regulators and industry players bring multiple benefits and clear direction for brand growth:

1. Improved operating environment: New rules explicitly bar platforms from forcing merchants to join price-driven involution, ease requirements for mandatory promotions, give brands more autonomy over their operations, and prohibit unfair competition enabled by platforms’ capital and traffic advantages. This creates more breathing room for small and medium-sized brands, which no longer have to sacrifice profits by being forced into price wars.

2. Future growth direction: This transition refocuses competition back on products, with requirements for online goods to match the same production lines, standards and quality as offline goods. The transition also leverages Guangdong’s industrial belts to support high-quality brands, as consumer demand gradually shifts from price-first to quality-first.

3. Brands can seize this opportunity to reallocate resources from price competition to product R&D, brand building and service upgrades, build long-term competitive advantages and achieve sustained growth.

Regulators and platforms are now jointly cracking down on predatory involution in e-commerce, bringing new changes, opportunities and notable risks for sellers:

1. On the policy front, the *Price Behavior Rules for Internet Platforms* has officially entered into force, with regulation shifting from ex-post correction to ex-ante constraint. This institutional change closes off space for predatory price wars and protects sellers’ legitimate operating rights and interests.

2. Platforms have rolled out concrete pro-seller measures: the new co-governance agreement explicitly reduces mandatory promotion requirements and eliminates platform coercion for sellers to cut prices. It also tilts support toward micro, small and medium-sized sellers in terms of onboarding thresholds, fee structures and traffic allocation, significantly cutting sellers’ passive operating costs and granting more autonomy over business decisions.

3. Opportunities and risk reminders: Competition will shift to products, service quality and long-term operations going forward. Sellers should quickly abandon the old playbook of buying traffic with low prices, and watch for the risk of operational disruption during the early transition period, rebuilding their operational capability framework in advance.

The anti-involution transition in e-commerce brings new business opportunities and growth directions for manufacturing factories, particularly those located in Guangdong’s industrial belts:

1. Clearer production and design needs: The new industry competition rules refocus competition back on products, requiring online goods to meet the same production line, standard and quality requirements as offline goods. Consumers are also increasingly willing to pay a premium for quality and branding. Factories no longer need to cut production costs and lower product quality to hit low price points, and can instead focus on delivering consistent quality and standardized production.

2. New prominent business opportunities: The transition explicitly supports the growth of high-quality brands by leveraging Guangdong’s solid industrial base. Capable, quality-focused factories can leverage this opportunity to access platform resources, build their own branded businesses, and move away from the low-margin original equipment manufacturing (OEM) model to capture higher value-added margins.

3. Major platforms have rolled out concrete measures to support the digital transformation of small and medium-sized operators. Factories can leverage these policy support programs to advance their own digital infrastructure and better align with market demand.

China’s e-commerce industry is shifting from predatory low-price involution to quality-based competition under clear rules, and this industry-wide transformation opens up new growth directions and market opportunities for service providers:

1. Clear industry development trend: Regulators and leading platforms are jointly driving industry-wide anti-involution. Existing services that supported low-price involution and traffic wars are no longer aligned with future development, so service providers should adjust their business positioning in a timely manner to adapt to the new industry trend.

2. Clear customer pain points: All types of market players now face transition pain points: small and medium-sized sellers have long relied on the low-price-for-traffic model, and lack capability in product operations and brand building; factories need digital transformation to adapt to new quality requirements; and platforms need compliance and risk control support.

3. Service providers can build targeted solutions to address these pain points, such as offering operational training and brand building services for small and medium-sized sellers, digital transformation matching services for factories, and compliance and risk control services for platforms. All of these represent new incremental market opportunities.

This industry-wide anti-involution transition sets new requirements for platform operations and clarifies the direction for future development. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Competition rules for platforms have been redrawn: New rules explicitly prohibit platforms from using data, algorithms, technology or capital advantages to implement implicit exclusivity, or to manipulate traffic to create asymmetric competition. Going forward, platform competition will no longer be about subsidies and resource dumping, but about operational efficiency within clear rules.

2. Multiple platforms have already rolled out concrete adjustments: For example, Douyin E-commerce has cracked down on non-compliant merchants, removing 190,000 violators in the past three months; Taobao has overhauled its sales ranking rules to crack down on abnormally low pricing and刷单fraud; Meituan has optimized its algorithm to adjust delivery pacing for riders. All 11 participating platforms have signed the co-governance commitment to put the collaborative framework into practice.

3. Key risks and issues to note: Platforms need to overcome the inertia of old price competition models, work out implementation details, help small and medium-sized merchants adapt to the new rules, and clarify the dynamic boundary of regulatory responsibility, striking a balance between curbing excessive competition and preserving healthy market competition.

This article sorts out the latest developments in China’s e-commerce industry, highlighting new industrial trends and governance innovations. Key areas for further research are as follows:

1. New industrial development trends: After the exhaustion of industry-wide growth dividends, e-commerce’s growth logic has shifted from incremental expansion to competition for existing market share. The old growth model of predatory involution reliant on price subsidies has hit an inflection point, and the entire industry is transitioning to anti-involution, with competition shifting from price and subsidies to product quality, service and operational efficiency. This marks a new stage of industrial development.

2. Innovation in governance models: This transition has given rise to an industry alliance for multi-platform collaborative co-governance, paired with a regulatory shift from ex-post correction to ex-ante constraint. This has formed a new governance framework combining government regulation with industry self-regulation, representing a new exploration of internet industry governance.

3. Many open research questions remain in this transition, including platform implementation, shifting habits among merchants and consumers, and defining the boundary between regulatory authority and platform autonomy. The process of resolving these issues will provide a valuable case study for research on internet industry governance and industrial transformation.