In 20 15, Pinduoduo was just an e-commerce company selling low-priced goods by relying on WeChat official account. In 2020, it has become the second largest e-commerce platform in China. It took Pinduoduo five years to create an e-commerce miracle, from "cutting bills" that everyone dislikes to "really fragrant" again and again, from "this can also be listed" to hundreds of billions of market value.

Consumption degradation, social e-commerce, tens of billions of subsidies, and inconspicuous actions have all become market-oriented. The sustainable development of agriculture has become the core strategy of Pinduoduo. Tens of billions of subsidies continue, from attracting high-end users at the beginning to becoming important commodity labels.

In five years, the growth of Pinduoduo seems to have reached a weak stage. Ali JD.COM is constantly chasing and intercepting the sinking market, consolidating the barriers in the high-end market, and the new business is also fiercely competitive. The live e-commerce has not improved much, and the future of community group buying is unknown. Whether Pinduoduo, which is not yet profitable, can achieve a breakthrough is also full of doubts.

My roommate bought an electric kneepad from 6.6 yuan, and my colleague bought a humidifier from 9.9 yuan. The students in the WeChat group are all shouting to help him cut a knife in the microwave oven in 0 yuan. Looking at 13 yuan's 5 kg kiwifruit, they finally couldn't hold back the order.

Whether you have bought anything on Pinduoduo or not, Pinduoduo has captured nearly 700 million annual active users. According to the financial report for the second quarter of 2020 released by Pinduoduo in August, the annual active users of the platform have reached 683.2 million, a net increase of 200 million compared with last year, with a year-on-year increase of 4 1%, of which 5,565,438+million was added in a single quarter, setting a record for the net increase in a single quarter since listing.

The continuous growth of users has driven the stock price to climb. In June this year, the market value of Pinduoduo has exceeded 1000 billion US dollars, which has more than tripled compared with 30 billion US dollars when it was listed in July 2008. The growth of the speed of light since its establishment is the main reason why it is favored by capital.

2065438+In September, 2005, Pinduoduo was formally established, selling low-priced goods in the official WeChat account in the form of group work, and the number of fans reached one million in two weeks. In September of 20 16, the number of platform users exceeded100000, in September of 20 17, and in September of 201830 million. 2065438+In July 2008, it was listed on NASDAQ. From 2065438 to September 2008, the number of active buyers reached 388 million, surpassing JD.COM. 20 19, 1 1, the number of users exceeds 500 million, and the GMV (total turnover) exceeds one trillion. In June 2020, the number of active users reached 683.2 million, which was 654.38+0 billion less than that of Ali (742 million).

Behind the rapid development are the key words brought by Pinduoduo to China e-commerce: consumption degradation and social e-commerce, which are the joint effects of these two keywords on users, businesses and the platform itself, and promote the rapid growth of Pinduoduo.

Consumption downgrade has the greatest driving force for users. 20 15 mobile internet has reaped the demographic dividend of the first wave of high-consumption groups, but the consumption demand of netizens outside the Fifth Ring Road, low-tier cities and rural areas has been ignored. Such users are price-sensitive, and high-end goods and branded goods cannot better meet their consumption needs.

Social e-commerce has become the perfect way to solve demand. Sharing orders, bargaining with friends, cutting into agricultural products and white-brand (non-brand) products, far below the price of branded goods, has gained a large wave of potential consumer groups. Compared with other categories, agricultural products can achieve lower prices faster through channel problems, while compared with brand products such as 3C electronics and clothing, small "white-brand" products such as drawing paper and toys can also be sold at low prices.

This is also the reason for business promotion. Most agricultural products and "white label" products are small and medium-sized enterprises. In 20 15, JD.COM still emphasized the authentic experience, and Ali continued to join the brand attributes of Tmall. Small and medium-sized businesses can hardly get traffic support on the two platforms, and the high marketing cost makes it difficult for them to compete with many high-end brands. Pinduoduo's initial product positioning attracted many small and medium-sized businesses to migrate from Taobao and JD.COM.

The social e-commerce model and Pinduoduo's product design continue to allow businesses to sell goods at lower prices. Relying on WeChat group and circle of friends, merchants have lower-cost marketing channels, which are no longer limited to the promotion and marketing in the e-commerce platform. In early Pinduoduo, the information flow "recommendation" mode without search box also reduced the promotion cost of merchants, and the display of home pages was dynamically matched according to users' preferences, which increased the exposure of merchants in the form of traffic inclusiveness.

At the same time, compared with the higher threshold and deduction point (transaction commission) of Tmall and JD.COM, Pinduoduo has greatly simplified the process of opening a store, charging no transaction commission (only 0.6% of the third-party payment fee), and taking online marketing service as its core revenue, further reducing the cost of merchants.

In Pinduoduo, small and medium-sized enterprises have also achieved economies of scale. Although low-priced goods have low profits, they can achieve small profits but quick turnover under the huge capacity supply.

The promotion of the platform in the form of social e-commerce is the final result. In addition to reducing the promotion cost like merchants, the most important thing is to share the form of spelling and bargaining so that the platform can acquire users faster. Those who participate in spelling will become the next initiator of spelling, spread wildly, and use the powerful traffic of WeChat to continuously penetrate.

The rapid growth brought by the new mode of sharing orders has made capital see the opportunity of the rise of new e-commerce, and its further growth has made capital see the possibility of the birth of the next Taobao.

Agricultural products are the original category of Pinduoduo, and have been strongly supported by it ever since. If Taobao Tmall's advantages are clothing and JD.COM. The advantage of COM is 3C electronics, so the basic food in Pinduoduo is agriculture.

As mentioned earlier, the relatively low price is one of the reasons why Pinduoduo chose to cut into agriculture, which also laid the foundation for its low price. Brand merchants have been deeply bound with Tmall, and so has JD.COM. The self-management of COM is even more difficult. The fruit-based agricultural products not only avoid the competition with giants, but also gain a broad market for Pinduoduo due to the extremely low participation of agricultural products e-commerce.

20 16, Pinduoduo started a new exploration in the agricultural field after merging with Haohuo and giving up its own e-commerce business. In 20 17, Pinduoduo invested 3.4 billion yuan to promote agricultural products in poverty-stricken areas, which solved the problem of "selling goods" of millions of farmers, covered 730 state-level poverty-stricken counties and supported 48,000 rural merchants, making the annual revenue of these stores increase by 3 10% year-on-year.

While reforming the supply chain of agricultural products, Pinduoduo also tried to go deep into the upstream of agricultural production and optimize its agricultural products procurement service from the source. This is also the initial exploration field of C2M (Factory Direct User) mode in Pinduoduo. In 20 18, Pinduoduo invested 10 billion yuan in marketing resources, helped 500 agricultural products from different producing areas to be sold nationwide, and supported 10000 new farmers to establish their own commercial brands, thus solving the supply problem.

In 20 19, when GMV of Pinduoduo exceeded one trillion yuan, its agricultural (by-product) turnover reached136.4 billion yuan, accounting for the largest category proportion of the platform. At the financial report meeting in the first half of 2020, CEO Chen Lei still stressed that Pinduoduo will continue to invest in the agricultural supply chain.

Agriculture is a basic dish, but other categories must also be strengthened. Pinduoduo's early products, except agricultural products, were mostly "white brand" products, and many of them were fake and shoddy products, which seriously affected the early platform image.

C2M started from agriculture and expanded to more categories to solve the problem of commodity brand. In 20 18, Pinduoduo launched the "new brand plan" and began to support the "Pinfactory" in the platform. The manufacturing ability of domestic small and medium-sized manufacturers is not bad, but the awareness of brand building is weak, and most of them are OEM for foreign brands. Self-owned brands are not well-known and have poor sales. At the same time, most small and medium-sized manufacturers only pay attention to manufacturing and leave sales to more dealers. The layers of overweight in the intermediate links make the products that are not concerned more uncompetitive, which eventually makes it difficult for the factory to operate.

Pinduoduo's "New Brand Plan" aims to use the platform model to directly connect factories, build factory brands at lower cost, and empower both ends with the dual reform of demand side and supply side. Under the expanded category, the "product factory" brings its own factory products with the same ultra-low price to many products. In China, Pinduoduo is also the first e-commerce enterprise to use C2M model on a large scale.

The purpose of C2M is to expand the category at a lower price, and the "10 billion subsidy" is to expand the category to the high-end field.

During the period of 2065 438+09-6 18, Pinduoduo launched the "10 billion subsidy" plan, which has been imitated by all major platforms so far. With the genuine guarantee of "fake one loses ten", we will vigorously subsidize mobile phones, home appliances, branded clothing and other commodities.

Tens of billions of subsidies are an important way for Pinduoduo to "go low-end" and exert its strength to users in first-and second-tier cities. "Low quality, fake" is the label that Pinduoduo has been accompanying since its establishment. The low customer unit price is not conducive to the long-term development of the platform.

Among the tens of billions of subsidies in Pinduoduo, Apple mobile phone is a representative commodity. During the period of 20 19 pairs 1 1, Pinduoduo's tens of billions of subsidies covered 23,000 popular products, of which each iPhone 1 1 series directly subsidized 500 yuan, and * * * sold 400,000 sets, with a subsidy of only 200 million yuan. Others, such as Apple headphones, branded household appliances and branded clothing, are also subsidized, and all of them are directly reduced in price.

Tens of billions of subsidies did threaten their rivals, and Ali Juhua and JD.COM also shouted the slogan of "tens of billions of subsidies". However, compared with the direct decline of Pinduoduo, because of its stronger brand trust, Ali JD. The subsidy cost of COM will be very high, and it is difficult to cover more goods with the subsidy of10 billion, and most of them are snapped up in a limited time.

Besides throwing money directly, investing in Gome further shows Pinduoduo's desire to "go low-end".

In April this year, Pinduoduo subscribed for US$ 200 million convertible bonds issued by Gome Retail, and was allocated 65.438+28 billion new shares of Gome, accounting for about 5.62% of the increased share capital after the latter's issuance.

The cooperation between Pinduoduo and Gome has already started. Gome opened its flagship store in Pinduoduo on 20 18. Since then, it has undertaken the logistics service of household appliances business in Pinduoduo. In the cooperation with Gome, while completing the logistics business, Pinduoduo can do more confrontation with Ali JD.COM in 3C and household appliances business. JD。 COM's self-operated household appliances business and the deep cooperation between Ali and Suning have effectively suppressed Pinduoduo's expansion into high-end goods.

Effective category expansion and high-end entry were the focus of Pinduoduo's work in the past year, but the slowdown in growth seems to show more and more doubts in the market: will users still use Pinduoduo without the subsidy of10 billion yuan?

In Pinduoduo's Q2 2020 financial report released in August, the slowdown in growth made the capital somewhat worried. The financial report shows that in Q2 of 2020, the multi-year GMV was1268.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 79%, which was significantly lower than that in Q2 of 2020 and 107% in Q2 of 2020. ARPU (average revenue per user) was 1857 yuan, up 27% year-on-year and only 0.79% quarter-on-quarter.

Although the scale of users has maintained normal growth, the slowdown of GMV and ARPU has caused some doubts in the capital market. After Q2 financial report was released, the stock price plummeted 1 1%.

Compared with the ARPU of less than 2,000 yuan in Pinduoduo, the ARPU of Alibaba's e-commerce business in 2065,438+09 was 8,756 yuan. While Pinduoduo is striving to enter the high-end market, the slowdown of GMV and ARPU shows that tens of billions of subsidies alone cannot drive Pinduoduo to penetrate into the high-end.

While the high-end category is full of doubts, its core position is also being infiltrated by opponents.

If it is not enough for Ali to restart the cost-effective containment of Pinduoduo, then the Taobao special edition is another blow to Pinduoduo by Ali. In March this year, Ali launched a special edition of Taobao, which was also aimed at Pinduoduo directly in the mode of C2M direct factory. Six months after its launch, the monthly activity of Taobao Special Edition has reached 55 million, which once ranked in the forefront of the mobile application download list. On June 5438+ 10, the "1 Yuan Fragrant Festival" and the offline 1 Yuan flagship store were launched on the occasion of double1,and their determination to suppress Pinduoduo was self-evident.

Coupled with the "rhinoceros manufacturing" launched at the Yun Qi conference in September, Ali will directly start from the production end and empower platform merchants in a higher form than C2M, which will definitely cause a lot of obstacles to Pinduoduo in the future.

At the same time, there are many obstacles to the development of new business in Pinduoduo. In the field of live e-commerce, Taobao Live has gained a firm foothold, and its cooperation with Tik Tok has been deepened, while JD.COM married Aauto more quickly. Although Pinduo currently has a live channel, its competitiveness is quite weak.

The recently announced "Buy More" grocery business is also facing many challenges, not only the resistance of many vertical fresh e-commerce companies such as Tiantian Youxian, Ding Dong Shopping, Ali's Box Horse and JD.COM. JD.COM of COM has been deeply rooted at home for a long time, but in July, the US delegation, which established the Optimization Division, also went into the community to buy more vegetables.

Judging from the stock price, Pinduoduo seems to have entered a stable period, soaring from March to more than $ 1000 billion, and began to pull back after hitting a new high in August. However, in the stable period, Pinduoduo still faces many problems, such as the choice of e-commerce, the retention of subsidized users, category expansion and so on.

However, the sharp drop in losses has given Pinduoduo a lot of hope. In Q2 financial report, Pinduoduo's net loss was $77 million, which was significantly reduced compared with $465.438 billion in the same period last year and $365.438 billion in the first quarter of this year. At the same time, in September this year, CCTV announced that Pinduoduo won the exclusive red envelope cooperation in the Spring Festival Evening, becoming the fifth Internet company to exclusively name the Spring Festival Evening after BAT and A Auto Fast. With red envelope interaction, Pinduoduo may take the opportunity to launch its own payment channel and stop using third-party payment.

It is a rare miracle to lead Pinduoduo from an official WeChat account to an e-commerce platform with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars to a roof of world e-commerce that threatens Ali and JD.COM with the strategy of encircling cities from rural areas. Entering a stable period after a rush can also make Pinduoduo better think about how to go in the future. Even if it is still losing money, the huge user scale still allows more investors to see the possibility of the birth of the next Taobao.