How does Pinduoduo make people addicted?

Pinduoduo is well aware of the pain points and pleasure points of human nature, has a firm grasp of users' psychology, and applies it to every aspect of the product with action and creativity. Rather than saying it is an e-commerce software, it is more like a textbook on human nature, accurately capturing users' fleeting shopping impulses.

1. What is the product?

Pinduoduo is a "social + e-commerce" product based on the WeChat user fission model, focusing on continuously providing users with "more, faster, better, and cheaper" products.

What needs does Pinduoduo meet?

Pinduoduo has integrated entertaining social elements into e-commerce operations through features such as Duoduo Orchard, Duoduo Love Elimination, and Golden Pig Makes Big Money, allowing users to experience more benefits and fun through entertainment and gamification.

Pinduoduo plays a very good social role by sharing benefits with friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, etc. through functions such as group buying, bargaining to get free items, helping others to get free orders, and receiving cash every day.

Pinduoduo uses machine algorithms to accurately recommend affordable and high-quality products to users, helping users find practical, applicable and affordable goods, so that they can enjoy quality products without leaving home.

2. Target Users and Typical Scenarios

2.1 Target Users

Pinduoduo's users are price-sensitive, spend more time online, and trust their circle of acquaintances. Compared with traditional e-commerce platforms, their users have a lower educational level and a higher age distribution.

• Geographical distribution : Pinduoduo took a different approach and focused on lower-tier users, namely users in third-tier cities and below. As of March 2019, the user scale of the sinking market has exceeded 600 million, and the user groups in the first and second tier cities are currently rising.
• Gender distribution : Most users are female.
• Age distribution : The user age coverage is wide, and the main consumers are young people aged 25-35.

2.2 Typical User Profile

Case 1:

Target users: Zhang Tian, ​​female, student, currently studying in Beijing, often reads Weibo and Xiaohongshu, likes sharing videos about beauty and fashion, and likes to share useful items with classmates. Since I am a student, I have no stable source of income and my living expenses are fixed. I pursue cost-effectiveness in online shopping and will not spend money easily. I like products with good quality and low prices and I have plenty of time.

Typical usage scenario: On the eve of Double Eleven, a user received a red envelope of considerable amount by sharing it with friends, and then downloaded Pinduoduo. He was pleasantly surprised to find many essential items in daily life, and the group purchase price was preferential. Later I found that the quality and style of the items I purchased were also good, so I am more willing to recommend Pinduoduo to my friends and family.

Case 2:

Target users: Wang Juan, a housewife, lives in a fourth-tier city and works in a public institution. In order to save money to buy a house for her son who works in Shenzhen, she usually lives frugally, has plenty of time, and pays attention to health preservation in her daily life.

Typical usage scenario: Recently, a friend asked her to help bargain, so she downloaded Pinduoduo. After entering the homepage, she was attracted by the festive interface and the affordable and eye-catching price tags, and became more interested in bargaining and cash withdrawal. I shared the link with friends and family every day to help them bargain, and successfully got a computer desk.

Case 3:

Target users: Li Hua, a white-collar worker based in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, earns his income from a fixed monthly salary. He seldom goes out to buy things and prefers online shopping, pursuing cost-effectiveness and quality.

Typical usage scenario: Li Hua has always had a stereotype about Pinduoduo, thinking that there are mostly fakes on it, so he has never considered buying goods on Pinduoduo. Recently, a colleague bought Apple wireless headphones on Pinduoduo. After receiving the goods, he verified with the official website and found that they were authentic. Li Hua recently also needed to buy wireless headphones, so he placed an order. He was very surprised after receiving the goods, and his impression of Pinduoduo changed greatly.

3. Key Function Experience and Description

Pinduoduo uses three first-level pages: homepage, recommendation, and search to meet users' three major shopping scenarios.

The home page mainly meets the shopping scenarios with vague or no purpose, the recommendation page meets the shopping scenarios with no purpose, and the search page meets both the scenarios with clear purpose and vague purpose.

From this, we can see that Pinduoduo is intentionally creating a purposeless shopping scene to give recommended products more exposure. This is why Pinduoduo is called the "Today's Headlines" of the e-commerce industry.

Let’s analyze the key and highlight features of Pinduoduo:

3.1 Basic functions

1) Purchase order process

When you enter the product page, you will find two ways to purchase, namely individual purchase and group purchase.

If you click to purchase individually and jump to the payment page, you will find that there are multiple payment methods to choose from, with WeChat Pay being the first.

If you click to initiate a group purchase , a link to share with friends will pop up after successful payment. Since new users do not understand the group purchase process, most of them will choose to share the link with friends. But in fact, you can successfully group buy with strangers, and the threshold for group buying is very low. Compared with individual purchases, initiating a group purchase can get more price discounts, which encourages users to choose the group purchase model to purchase goods and increase product sales.

2) Functional details description

Detail 1: The buttons for individual purchase and group purchase are placed side by side, using price anchor points to create relative values.

At the bottom of the product page, the two buttons for individual purchase and group purchase are placed side by side, using price anchor points and product price comparisons to create relative values. This not only allows consumers to recognize the product valuation, but also stimulates users' purchasing nerves and prompts them to place orders.

Detail 2: Scroll to display the message that users have successfully placed an order to create a buying atmosphere.

At the top of the home screen, product page, and payment page, there are messages about users’ successful group buying, such as “xxx was group buying 3 seconds ago, xxx just successfully group bought”, etc., which connects users with other users. It also cleverly utilizes the user's herd mentality. This information will continuously strengthen the user's cognition, create an atmosphere for the user that everyone is buying, and create a sense of tension.

Detail 3: If the payment is not made, a dialog box "Are you sure you want to give up payment" will pop up.

Compared with other e-commerce apps, if you click the return button without paying, Pinduoduo will pop up a dialog box asking "Are you sure you want to give up payment?" and display that xxx users have given positive reviews of the product, with a brief positive review of the product attached, in order to allay users' doubts about product quality.

Detail 4: You can purchase directly by clicking on the large image of the product without returning.

The ordering process has been simplified. This optimized design reduces one operation step for users, compresses their decision-making thinking time as much as possible, and increases transaction volume.

Detail 5: Featured recommendations for “taking advantage of every opportunity”.

In socialized consumption, many of people’s needs are triggered by stimuli, and simple search-based shopping can hardly carry new consumption trends. Especially for users in the sinking market, most of the time they don’t know what they need to buy, so it becomes particularly important to find people for the goods. Both Taobao and Pinduoduo are strengthening the shopping scenarios with ambiguous purposes and no purpose.

Many users in low-tier cities are not good at searching and need clear guidance. Therefore, featured recommendations provide a good guide to help users find selected good items and trigger their shopping needs.

Detail 6: No shopping cart, optimized ordering process.

A shopping cart means sunk costs, which is equivalent to the process of "shopping around". Without a shopping cart, the user's decision-making time is accelerated. This is similar to the one-click ordering feature launched by Amazon, which allows users to optimize the ordering process without having to think too much. As a result, Pinduoduo users have formed a shopping habit of high consumption frequency and low order value.

Detail 7: The return to top button is obvious and provides clear instructions.

Compared with Taobao, Pinduoduo has three ways to return to the top: the first is to click on the blank space at the top of the page to return to the top; the second is to double-click the home page button to return to the top; the third is to click on the obvious "Top" button in the lower right corner of the page to return to the top. This function takes into account the needs of older users who do not often use their mobile phones, and provides clear prompts, providing a great user experience.

3.2 Abnormal Operation

After placing an order, initiate a return immediately

Detail 1: The return application function is hidden deep and difficult to find.

Detail 2: Products cannot be returned if the group purchase is not successful, which prolongs the return process and time. The order was placed at around 23:00, the group purchase was successful at around 00:50 in the morning, and the merchant notified me of the shipment at 9:00 in the morning. I only remembered to apply for a refund at around 11:00, but because the merchant shipped the goods earlier, my refund application failed.

Detail 3: When you click to apply for Pinduoduo's intervention, it shows that you need to communicate with the merchant first and be rejected by the merchant before you can communicate with Pinduoduo customer service. This increases the difficulty of communication and the experience is not very good.

Detail 4: A new product snapshot is added at the bottom of the logistics dynamic interface so that buyers and sellers have an objective basis as an important reference when checking transaction details.

Detail 5: Returns require a written description, which is a required field. This increases the difficulty of returns and also strengthens the platform’s understanding of the reasons for user returns.

3.3 Highlights

Pinduoduo has firmly grasped the "addiction" in the hearts of users through the form of social + games + e-commerce. Pinduoduo has vividly demonstrated the business goal behind the product, namely shopping conversion, in its game design.

Under the trend of socialized consumption, people are actually not very clear about what they need. Under the continuous stimulation of various advertising slogans and brand special tags, the seeds of shopping needs grow in the hearts of users. Pinduoduo has fully taken this consumer psychology and consumption trend into consideration, and has made shopping entertaining, gamified, and scenario-based, allowing the "addiction" in users' hearts to be nurtured in the soil of Pinduoduo, and users will unknowingly drive consumption while entertaining and strolling around.

1) Bargain and get the detailed description of the function for free

This feature is placed in the recommendation column of the homepage. Users can invite friends to help them bargain by sharing. Each person haggles a random amount, and ultimately the user buys the product at the lowest possible price, or even receives it for free or gets cash back. Pinduoduo takes into account the characteristics of low-end users, so the threshold is extremely low, and only requires forwarding and bargaining. This has become Pinduoduo's main way to achieve explosive growth in users, and it is a textbook design.

Let’s take a closer look at how Pinduoduo uses price cuts to attract new customers and boost activity.

Detail 1: When bargaining, a higher starting amount is given at the beginning. When the bargaining is initiated, it will be displayed "You have bargained down xx yuan", which makes the user feel that "it's a pity to give up" as if "I am only a little bit away from success".

Detail 2: It is unknown how many users are needed to participate in the bargaining, but users will be reminded that they can bargain for a larger amount by inviting 6 people. This model can motivate users to share, which will lead to advertising exposure and viral spread, and ultimately promote new users and conversions. When users still want to continue bargaining, they can choose to do tasks, such as reading reviews, browsing products, etc.

Detail 3: After continuously guiding users to complete tasks and bargain, Pinduoduo designed a bargaining threshold. New users can bargain for larger amounts, while old users can only bargain for smaller amounts. The bargaining time is limited to 24 hours to guide users to share, which also shortens the time cost of attracting new users and promoting activation.

Detail 4: The message "User got xxx product for 0 yuan" is scrolled at the top of the page, and the friend's avatar + nickname + information about the free products are displayed in the lower left corner of the page. The purpose is to increase the user's confidence in bargaining and remind users that bargaining for free is real and effective. This design acts like a cheering group to motivate users to sprint forward, but on the other hand, it also faces controversy over user privacy leaks.

2) Detailed description of Duoduo Orchard functions

Detail 1: Pinduoduo cleverly integrates shopping and stores into the game. Users can get treasure chests through shopping, and they can also steal water drops in stores. It not only increases the store’s brand exposure and encourages users to place orders and shop, but also enhances its social attributes.

Detail 2: As long as the watering behavior is given a certain frequency, and users are allowed to complete it repeatedly and receive feedback, there is a chance that users will turn this behavior into a habit.

4. Competitive Product Analysis

4.1 Product Positioning

1) Taobao’s positioning: Targeting consumers in all cities, satisfying users’ daily consumption and online shopping needs.

2) Pinduoduo's positioning: Targeting price-sensitive consumers in low-tier cities, providing users with low-priced goods through group buying.

4.2 Functional Analysis

1) Taobao's main information structure and description (the red box is the part unique to Taobao)

2) Pinduoduo’s main information structure and description (the blue box is the part unique to Pinduoduo)

4.3 Functional Analysis

1) Taobao Function Analysis

Taobao’s information architecture is far more complex than Pinduoduo’s, but it is orderly within its complexity.

In terms of product quality , Taobao has strict control over the quality of its products and sets high standards for merchants participating in promotional activities. From the details page to the recommendation article, a certain taste and quality are reflected.

In terms of product recommendations , Taobao understands users’ preferences better than they do themselves. It uses precise algorithms to recommend products that match users’ preferences, allowing users to browse aimlessly and triggering their consumption.

Functions such as Taobao Live, Wow Video, and Yangtao also provide users with a shopping scene, with calls, recommendations, promotions, and high-quality products that meet user preferences. Taobao has moved all offline shopping-related scenes that can be moved online, allowing users to understand products from multiple perspectives as much as possible.

Taobao adopts the method of KOL live streaming to promote products, focusing on supporting internet celebrities who broadcast Taobao live to form a fan economy. Data shows that the year-on-year growth in sales in 2019 was close to 400%.

2) Pinduoduo Function Analysis

Pinduoduo's information architecture is relatively simple, using only homepage, recommendations, and search to meet users' shopping scenarios. The source of users' information therefore becomes much clearer.

In terms of product quality , most of the merchants currently on Pinduoduo are merchants selling long-tail products and small and medium-sized enterprises, so there is no way to fully guarantee the quality of the products. Counterfeit products, clearance products, and cheap products have become part of Pinduoduo's low-priced products at this stage. Pinduoduo is aware of this and is trying hard to get rid of these negative labels, but changing its reputation and tone is a long process.

In terms of product recommendations , daily necessities are recommended most frequently, and efforts are made to create the atmosphere of a hypermarket, with red-marked product prices, grocery store-like product detail pictures, various subsidies and discounts, and a variety of games that make people unable to stop and become crazy about it.

It has to be admitted that Pinduoduo is well aware of the pain points and pleasure points of human nature, has a firm grasp of the psychology of users, and applies it to every aspect of the product with action and creativity. Rather than saying it is an e-commerce software, it is more like a textbook on human nature, accurately capturing users' fleeting shopping impulses.

But users always have moments of clarity. After continuous stimulation, they become numb, and when passion fades, what remains is fatigue. We will wait and see how Pinduoduo will plan in the future.

Author: Zxt~

Source: Zxt~