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Chinese retailer Miniso’s founder slams ByteDance-owned Douyin for exorbitant fees
This marks the second high-profile bashing of Douyin over the past several days, involving some of the wealthiest individuals in China
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Coco Fengin Beijing
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok with domestic e-commerce operations, has been slammed for charging exorbitant promotion fees amid insufficient sales by the head of Chinese budget retailer Miniso Group, which runs multiple stores on the ByteDance-owned platform.
Miniso founder and chief executive Ye Guofu, 47, levelled his criticism of Douyin via his WeChat post on Wednesday that showed a video from online influencer Johnknow-nothing, who asserted in his recorded post that the ability of merchants to sell goods on the ByteDance platform was “deteriorating”. Miniso’s stores on Douyin sell a variety of lifestyle products such as beauty tools, toys and apparel.
Citing figures from the video, Ye said Douyin in 2023 recorded a gross merchandise volume (GMV) of 2 trillion yuan (US$276 billion), of which 40 per cent was refunded, while total advertising revenue reached 400 billion yuan in the same period.
Neither Miniso nor the online influencer immediately responded to a request for comment. The WeChat posts of Ye and the influencer that targeted Douyin were no longer online as of noon on Thursday.
In response to the social-media posts, Douyin vice-president Li Liang on Friday wrote in a post on ByteDance-owned news platform Jinri Toutiao: “The reality is that only a portion of Douyin’s advertising revenue comes from its e-commerce business, with most of the income generated by non-e-commerce content such as feed ads.”
Miniso’s fault-finding post marks the second high-profile bashing of Douyin over the past several days, involving some of the wealthiest individuals on the mainland.
Coco Feng joined the Post in 2019, covering the technology and internet sector from the Greater Bay Area. Previously, she worked at the Post's Beijing bureau.
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