Português
EnglishIn recent days, Yintai Department Store launched a large-scale group-buying coupon livestream event on the Douyin platform, covering more than 60 shopping malls, over a dozen international beauty brands, and more than 80 coupons.
In traditional workflows, such events require repeated communication among multiple parties, involving product information, price review, coupon combinations, process validation, and other steps. This often takes a team several weeks to complete, with extremely high coordination costs.
However, Li Kai, the content operations manager at Yintai Department Store, completed the entire process of information alignment and collaboration in just a few days—using only one person and one table: DingTalk AI Spreadsheet.
"DingTalk AI Spreadsheet is like a small ERP system. You could say it allows me to function as an MCN company all by myself," Li Kai said.
Starting from Scratch: Building the First Successful Case
In August 2024, Li Kai joined Yintai Department Store, taking charge of a brand-new online group-buying business. Although the team was generally optimistic about its potential, there was no clear path for implementation.
He determined that the core value of group buying lies in driving new traffic to offline shopping malls, increasing in-store foot traffic and conversion rates. Mall managers, as those responsible for performance, are most concerned about this.
So he chose Hefei Zhengwu Yintai Department Store as a pilot site, combining dining vouchers, retail vouchers, and parking vouchers into "X+Y" packages for sale during Douyin livestreams. Within a week, nearly 10,000 packages were sold.
By reviewing redemption data and input costs, he found that the customer acquisition cost of Douyin group buying was only 50% of that of advertising channels like WeChat Moments and Xiaohongshu, making it highly cost-effective.
This case quickly spread internally, and the group-buying requests Li Kai received began to surge.
The Challenge Rises: One Person Handles Full-Scale Operations
As the business expanded, Li Kai faced increasingly complex management challenges: He needed to collect product information from each mall, schedule livestreams, manage influencer performance, and more—all tasks that would normally require a small team.
These tasks relied heavily on repeated communication, which was inefficient and prone to errors. He urgently needed an efficient collaboration tool.
Since 2020, Yintai Department Store has fully adopted DingTalk. After accidentally clicking on a pop-up window, Li Kai came across DingTalk AI Spreadsheet and realized its potential.
The First Trial of AI Spreadsheet: Automating Information Collection
In December 2024, he built the first version of the AI Spreadsheet to centrally collect product, price, and discount information from each mall participating in group buying.
In the past, they relied on Word or Excel templates, leading to messy data formats, time-consuming aggregation, and difficulty in synchronizing updates. Now, all parties simply fill in the corresponding fields in the spreadsheet, and the data is automatically aggregated.
More importantly, the AI Spreadsheet supports bidirectional linked fields: When one data table is updated, all linked tables are automatically refreshed, ensuring real-time consistency of information.
"It's like everyone is collaborating in real time, and efficiency improves dramatically." After tasting success, Li Kai further built a more complex system in January 2025.
Today, Li Kai single-handedly manages a livestream matrix across 62 shopping malls, with an average monthly transaction volume exceeding 20 million yuan. At the core of this operation is transforming DingTalk AI Spreadsheet into an MCN-level mid-end system that covers "people, products, locations, and finances."
To each mall, Li Kai functions like a third-party MCN agency: A contract is signed for each collaboration, and a virtual fee is charged.
In traditional models, contract and reconciliation processes are cumbersome, requiring repeated reminders and confirmations. In the AI Spreadsheet, deliverables and payments can be tracked in real time, and the system automatically sends follow-up reminders.
For influencer management, he has built a personnel database that records resumes, contracts, livestream durations, and other information. Through multi-table linking, salaries are calculated automatically, eliminating the need for manual Excel checks.
Before a livestream, the system automatically schedules the event and pushes time, location, and product information to influencers and malls. New influencers also receive training materials. After the livestream, influencers upload screenshots of the live screen and other data to the spreadsheet for post-event analysis.
In product management, the AI Spreadsheet not only enables collaborative data entry among multiple parties but also uses AI fields to automatically optimize prohibited text and generate mall prefixes based on city, preventing misclassification errors.
He has also pre-trained an AI analytics model, feeding it industry-standard data so that the system can automatically evaluate the effectiveness of each livestream and generate data insights.
"In the past, it would take more than ten days to analyze a livestream—and sometimes there wasn't even time to do it. Now, data is updated and pushed in real time. Sometimes, a mall receives a post-event report at midnight and thinks I'm still working overtime—but it's actually the system automatically sending the report on my behalf," Li Kai joked, earning the nickname "the ultimate overachiever" from his colleagues.
In reality, it's the AI Spreadsheet that drives him forward nonstop—and that's where its core value lies.
From Tool to Mindset: Reconstructing Retail Operations Logic
He once considered using low-code development to build a MOS system but abandoned the idea due to complicated approvals and the inability to make independent modifications. The emergence of DingTalk AI Spreadsheet gave him the key to cracking the challenges of retail management.
"If you're in retail, you have to use it," Li Kai emphasized.
Retail operations involve complex data and frequent interactions among many people, and the AI Spreadsheet is designed specifically for multi-person co-creation, information linkage, and synchronized collaboration. It's also simple to use, and anyone can get started.
He gave an example: For a brick-and-mortar clothing store, after new merchandise hits the shelves for 30 days, the store manager would traditionally have to manually track sales performance and report the data up the chain—a lengthy process that often leads to missed opportunities for restocking. Today, the AI Spreadsheet can automatically analyze the data and generate restocking recommendations.
This is exactly the situation with Yintai's group-buying business: Product offerings, eligible malls, prices, sales volumes, inventory levels, and other data are updated in real time, allowing malls to instantly decide whether to restock or adjust coupons.
In the past, similar systems had to be developed through outsourcing, at a high cost; today, a single AI Spreadsheet can handle everything. It can even integrate external variables like weather and temperature to predict changes in demand.
For example, T-shirt sales naturally decline as temperatures drop, and the system can automatically suggest reducing restocking, directly addressing the inventory pain point in the apparel industry—the mismatch between production and demand.
With years of retail experience, Li Kai knows all too well how challenging "people, products, and locations" management can be. Today, the AI Spreadsheet has become a "digital hub," enabling scheduling, attendance, performance, promotions, and other processes to be fully digitized, automated, and visualized.
He showed the AI Spreadsheet on his phone: Coupon registrations are recorded in real time, livestream schedules are clearly visible, and post-event analysis materials can be uploaded at any time. "If this system crashes, the entire business could grind to a halt in an instant," he admitted. "In our Douyin group-buying business, we can't go a minute without it."
Efficiency Leap: From 20 to 100 Malls Is Possible
At the end of last year, Li Kai could barely serve 20-plus malls, relying on phone calls and messages for communication and repeatedly double-checking information. Today, thanks to the AI Spreadsheet linking the entire workflow, a two-person team can support more than 60 malls nationwide.
He believes that managing 100 malls is also within reach. The current focus is on tapping the supply capacity of the 62 malls, with the goal of increasing the number of supported events from three to five per month to eight or nine.
Conclusion: Efficiency Is Competitiveness
This is not just a tool revolution—it's a reconstruction of retail thinking. While the AI Spreadsheet cannot replace human decision-making, its AI capabilities provide humans with a basis for judgment, making work faster, more accurate, and easier.
The future of retail competition comes down to operational efficiency. The AI Spreadsheet organizes complex data in an orderly manner, synchronizes multi-person collaboration, and shifts decision-making from experience-based to data-driven.
When "people, products, and locations" are efficiently linked through the AI Spreadsheet, business growth gains a solid foundation of efficiency. Therefore, how to make the best use of such AI tools is no longer a matter of choice—it's a must-answer question for survival.
DomTech is DingTalk's officially designated service provider in Macau, specializing in providing DingTalk services to a wide range of customers. If you'd like to learn more about DingTalk platform applications, feel free to contact our online customer service, or call +852 95970612, or email cs@dingtalk-macau.com. With an outstanding development and operations team and extensive market service experience, we can provide you with professional DingTalk solutions and services!