In-depth analysis of Pinduoduo’s product operations in 2019!

Jobs said that consumers don’t know what they need until we come up with our products, and then they realize that this is what they want. In this era of commodity explosion, do users know what they want?

Obviously, users are familiar with the necessities of life, and they are usually unaware of many other products. Only when they see them, they may discover that they need this product.

1. User online shopping scenarios - Pinduoduo’s motivations

1. Pinduoduo from the perspective of consumption

E-commerce is a typical economic activity in which people conduct daily shopping transactions. Therefore, we first need to understand Pinduoduo's position from the perspective of human consumption levels in economics, as shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1 Consumption levels

Pinduoduo is roughly above survival consumption and within development consumption. Therefore, Pinduoduo's product positioning and development plan must be consistent with the consumption level it satisfies, so we will not be surprised by the product strategy adopted by Pinduoduo. If a user spends 10 yuan to buy tissue paper, will they spend another 5 yuan on postage for faster express delivery and have the product delivered within one day? Obviously, this is not what they need. In short, judging from the picture, Pinduoduo has developed from selling prices to selling goods.

2. The consumer motivations behind Pinduoduo

So for users at this level, what is the biggest motivation behind their shopping?

In the previous article, the author introduced the five major motivations behind online shopping, and e-commerce also designs and plans the platform shopping channels based on these five motivations. The core motivation of the platform's mainstream users for shopping is exactly the core demand that the platform needs to meet, and it is also the positioning of a platform itself and the shaping of user minds. When it comes to Pinduoduo, what everyone thinks of is bargains, Taobao is about shopping on the Taobao platform, and JD.com is about enjoying quality. The core motivation behind Pinduoduo is "price", Taobao is "social entertainment", and JD.com is "quality".

Different groups of people have different consumption motivations. E-commerce platforms often expand other motivations after satisfying users' core shopping motivations in order to satisfy more user motivations and cover more people. Therefore, when designing each shopping channel, it is necessary to fully weigh consumers' motivations in order to maximize their needs. Figure 1-2 uses Taobao as a reference to list the main page architecture and channel module design of Pinduoduo and Taobao under the scene-motivation flow.

Figure 1-2 Scene-Motivation Flow

As can be seen from the figure, in terms of satisfying shopping motivations, Pinduoduo focuses on the "price" motivation , and secondly focuses on expanding the "quality" motivation. Price is the biggest pain point for Pinduoduo users, but it is also the reason why Pinduoduo has emerged as a dark horse. Therefore, Pinduoduo has seized the biggest shopping motivation of low-end users, "price", and designed diversified channels in the shopping channel, such as limited-time flash sales, 9.9 yuan special sales, and 10 billion yuan subsidies.

As for the “quality” motivation, it is mainly because the inferior goods caused by low prices have affected the platform’s reputation and the users’ perception of the platform as a “grocery store”. In order to change the situation, Pinduoduo must focus on the "quality" shopping motivation .

• First, it can improve the reputation of the platform;
• Second, it will help Pinduoduo expand its user base to first- and second-tier cities;
• Third, provide positive guidance to users, shifting their consumption from high-repeat purchases of low-priced goods to low-repeat purchases of high-priced goods.

When it comes to quality, what can give consumers the most intuitive impression is the brand . Because when you tell others how good the quality of an unknown brand is, consumers cannot judge in their minds, while the brand naturally has the endorsement of quality.

It can be seen that whether it is clearance sales, brand sales or even hundreds of billions of subsidies, Pinduoduo is highlighting brand products and winning users' trust in the quality of the platform's products.

However, for Taobao, "price" and "quality" are no longer the primary motivations. It mainly attracts users through low-priced hook products, and focuses on entertainment, content, and scenario-based consumption to better satisfy "social" and "entertainment" motivations. This is in line with Taobao's development stage. Taobao has gone through the stage of pursuing "price" and "quality", and users' understanding of Taobao has become mature.

So are “social” and “entertainment” motivations important to Pinduoduo?

Currently, Pinduoduo’s main entertainment motivation is games, such as Duoduo Orchard and Duoduo Love Elimination. We have also started preliminary exploration in content, such as the planning of the [Buyer Recommendations] community for review posts.

Overall, Pinduoduo still has a lot of shortcomings in "entertainment" and "socializing" (especially stranger socializing). Perhaps the path that Taobao has taken is also the path that Pinduoduo needs to take. "Social" and "entertainment" motivations remain important for Pinduoduo's future development. When the traffic dividend is gone, it becomes increasingly important to seize users' time. Social entertainment content has a strong stickiness to users and can attract users to stay longer, especially in scenarios where users are shopping aimlessly, which can drive long-tail consumption more significantly. Users have a lot of consumption scenarios without purpose. Compared with simply looking at products, entertainment content will appear more interesting and can drive long-tail products.

3. Consumption conversion routes in three major scenarios

Scene is an indispensable topic in product design. In online shopping, users come to the platform to consume mainly in three scenarios: clear purpose, vague purpose, and no purpose. Therefore, it is crucial for e-commerce platforms to explore the user shopping routes behind the scenarios, design pages based on the routes, and deeply explore the user's consumption at each node in the routes.

By comparing with Taobao, let’s take a look at Pinduoduo’s considerations in shopping scenarios.

Taobao meets users' three major shopping scenarios through two first-level pages (home page/Weitao). On the home page, Taobao has already met all three major shopping scenarios of users.

Pinduoduo uses three first-level pages (home page/recommendation/search) to handle three major shopping scenarios, as shown in Figure 1-3. The home page mainly meets the two shopping scenarios of ambiguous purpose and no purpose, the recommendation page meets the no-purpose shopping scenario, and the search page meets the two scenarios of clear purpose and ambiguous purpose.

It can be seen that Pinduoduo is more about creating a purposeless shopping scenario, giving more exposure to recommended products, but in terms of overall architectural design, Pinduoduo also appears to be more redundant than Taobao.

Figure 1-3 Shopping pages in three major scenarios

On the homepage, in addition to the navigation bar, Pinduoduo focuses on the King Kong area, full column, and product recommendations. Pinduoduo placed the main entrances in the King Kong area and did not design a tile area. The tile area can more prominently display shopping activity channels and segmented scenarios (limited-time flash sales, shopping, etc.) to attract users to enter the corresponding entrance. However, Pinduoduo did not add a tile area, but instead used part of the first screen area to display popular recommendations. In fact, we can see that popular recommendations and recommendation pages are a kind of repeated display. Therefore, the input-output ratio should be considered between increasing the tile area or displaying recommended products on the first screen.

In socialized consumption, many of people's needs are triggered by stimuli. Pure search-based shopping can hardly carry new consumption trends, especially for consumers 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 goods . As can be seen from Figures 1-2 , both Taobao and Pinduoduo are strengthening shopping scenarios with ambiguous purposes and no purpose.

The three scenarios often do not appear in isolation, so we need to effectively utilize the user's shopping paths in the three scenarios to maximize shopping conversions. The consumption conversion path is shown in Figure 1-4.

Figure 1-4 Shopping consumption conversion path

(1) When users have clear goals , the platform wants to achieve two goals:

• One is that it can help users quickly find products and complete transactions.
• Secondly, after completing the transaction, users can stay on the platform longer and achieve more conversions.

To find products quickly, the key lies in the design of the [Search] function. Although Pinduoduo does not have a search box on its homepage, it names the category page tab as search, which provides strong guidance and can be considered a compensation, preventing users from not knowing where to find the entrance. Since users come to shop with a clear purpose, the design of the search entrance is the key to quickly finding products and completing transactions.

In terms of search entrance , Pinduoduo only has an entrance on the search page, and there is no entrance on the homepage or recommendation page. So what are the advantages or disadvantages of reducing search entry points?

Advantages: Since the homepage and recommendation page are mainly aimed at shopping scenarios with no purpose or vague purpose, the shopping desire generated by users is mostly temporary impulse consumption. When analyzing users, it can be seen that users have the habit of comparing prices from different stores. By not providing a search entry on browsing pages, users can reduce the time it takes to search and compare prices (Pinduoduo's products are mostly low-priced and discounted products, and users have low decision-making costs and are prone to impulse shopping), shorten the user decision-making path, and avoid users converting impulse consumption into rational consumption.

In addition, searching will cause users to have too many choices, and too many choices will cause users to not make choices and thus give up consumption. Among user cognitive characteristics, difficulty in choosing is a major pain point for users, and not allowing users to choose is the best option.

shortcoming:

• First, users will still compare prices for some products that are more expensive or have quality requirements. It is troublesome for users to jump from browsing to searching, which increases the operation path and reduces the user experience.
• Secondly, when users are actually shopping, the three major scenarios appear in an overlapping manner. For example, when users are browsing aimlessly, they see women's clothing and suddenly want to see if there are any nice skirts, so they need to search. In the situation where the three major scenarios intersect, users need to constantly switch between the home page/recommendation page and the search page, which greatly increases the operational burden and affects the user experience.

Of course, the choice between user experience and commercial interests is a strategic balance, and different considerations apply in different periods. Therefore, we cannot generalize the pros and cons of increasing or reducing the "search entrance". The key lies in the weighing of interests. It is very likely that when Pinduoduo develops to a certain stage, there will be a more important first-level entrance, and the three currently redundant first-level pages will be simplified.

(2) When shopping in scenarios with unclear purposes, we need to provide users with a clear search entry point. The key lies in the exposure of various categories and large segmented scenarios and the optimization of fuzzy search. Pinduoduo mainly provides users with search paths through various category classifications and the main [Electrical Appliance City] channel. Pinduoduo even placed category searches on both the first-level homepage and the search page. Of course, this is related to the redundancy of Pinduoduo’s own architecture, but it is not difficult to see the importance of this clear search entry.

The reason is that many users in low-tier cities, especially middle-aged users, have relatively limited mobility. They are not good at direct searching, but need guidance and signposts. Therefore, classifications are like signposts that can guide them to search efficiently. Taobao also highlighted the classification function in the revision to facilitate use by users in lower-tier cities.

When users conduct fuzzy searches, Pinduoduo separates store searches from product searches. However, from the increase in [Daily Good Stores] and [Search Stores], it can be seen that Pinduoduo is gradually paying more attention to stores. With the development of businesses, many shops have been built slowly, from small businesses to medium-sized or even large businesses. Merchants will then be more eager to promote their own stores. At the same time, good stores can increase user stickiness and repeat customers, which is also of great benefit to the platform. Therefore, the author believes that in addition to [searching for stores], users can also add store search related recommendations when they associate keywords for fuzzy searches, as shown in Figure 1-5.

Figure 1-5 Store search

The benefits of this improvement are:

• It is conducive to the exposure and promotion of the store;
• Users can have a faster selection path when they are doing fuzzy searches, and it can also strengthen their conceptual understanding of the store.

(3) The last scenario is when users wander around aimlessly, which is a deep exploration and triggering of users’ shopping needs.

First, the platform will attract users through hook products, mainly through promotions, big discounts and other means. This is the same as when we go shopping in a supermarket. Many people go there for promotions and discounts.

Second, by making collaborative recommendations based on the user's daily shopping habits and the shopping habits of other similar users, we can discover the products that the user may need and the corresponding segmented scenarios.

Third, simply shopping may make users feel monotonous and boring, so entertainment will be used to increase user stay time and stimulate possible consumption through entertainment. Pinduoduo mainly uses games to increase users' stay time, and links games with shopping to drive shopping.

2. Pinduoduo Online Shopping Action Link

The user analysis section briefly introduces the key action links of users when shopping online, as shown in Figure 2-1. This article will analyze Pinduoduo’s main links.

Figure 2-1 Online shopping action link

1. Information stimulation stage

Information stimulation can be said to be the origin of biological actions. We can also see from Fogg's behavioral model (behavior = motivation * ability * trigger) that "trigger" is the switch that starts the action. When designing a product, whether it is an advertising system, message reminder and recall system, or attracting new users and sharing, all of them are information stimuli to encourage user actions. Therefore, when we analyze the user's online shopping action chain, the information stimulation stage naturally becomes the first priority.

From the action chain diagram, we can see that we are mainly stimulated by two major stimuli when shopping online: the intrinsic stimulation of the platform and the external stimulation of the environment.

(1) Intrinsic stimulation is like a hook that hooks users to the product. It plants a seed in the user’s mind, and the user will automatically run towards the product. Products often use task systems/growth systems, games, content, etc. to trigger users' perception of the product, so as to achieve the purpose of users opening the product again.

Advantages: Pinduoduo has established a multi-dimensional product internal stimulation system based on the two major characteristics of its user groups: “leisure” and “savings”. Pinduoduo has designed a variety of game tasks within its product, ranging from monetary and material incentives such as cash sign-in, free orders after helping others, and free items after bargaining, to game entertainment incentives such as Duoduo Orchard and Love Elimination, as well as marketing activities such as hundreds of billions of subsidies and limited-time flash sales. It has established a multi-dimensional internal incentive system that fully takes into account the two major characteristics of the user group: "leisure" and "saving".

However, whether it is a money task or a game task, it only brings short-term stimulation to users, and the user migration cost is very low, that is, Pinduoduo has not built a user growth system around the entire shopping closed loop. Once a user completes a shopping transaction on Pinduoduo, the user no longer has a connection with Pinduoduo. Let’s go back to the question we asked earlier. If the prices and quality of products on Pinduoduo and Taobao are similar, users may choose to consume on Taobao for the sake of Taobao’s subsequent growth system (rights/points, etc.) or even to show off their purchases. Therefore, for Pinduoduo's continued development, it is important to establish a necessary growth system and increase the opportunity cost of user escape.

(2) Compared with internal stimulation, external stimulation can attract new users and awaken old users, and plays an important role in the dissemination and growth of products.

Advantages: When it comes to external stimuli, Pinduoduo does a good job in controllable factors, which is also its weapon for rapid growth, namely the fission growth system, as shown in Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2 Fission growth

When users are attracted by various prey rewards, they share Pinduoduo in their social circles, thus achieving Pinduoduo's fission growth.

shortcoming:

First, Pinduoduo's sharing is mostly based on prey rewards, and the prey rewards are all of a certain degree of difficulty. Users will consume their own connections for these benefits, causing certain harassment to other users. At the same time, the failure of the task will also increase the frustration of the sharer. This kind of sharing is somewhat harmful and can only work better among users who particularly want to take advantage.

Second, although Pinduoduo is a social e-commerce platform, there is little social reward and self-reward in its rewards. Even the rare self-reward – the Medal Wall (Figure 2-3), does not produce a very good effect from the user's psychological point of view. The medal itself should have the meaning of [identity identification], [honor], and [rights], so that users will be motivated to obtain it.

Think about it, the little red flower that your teacher gives you at school is valuable and makes you feel proud. If you buy a red flower for yourself, it will not have this social value. The medals in the medal wall have neither a strong identity identification nor medal benefits. At the same time, it is difficult for the medals to play the role of "honor" such as showing off and competing in social situations. Therefore, it does not make much sense for users to collect medals. It is a relatively useless gamification design. The Medal Wall occupies a relatively good resource position, so its input-output ratio needs to be carefully considered in order to make a choice.

Figure 2-3 Medal Wall

2. Action-enabling Phase

The key to designing for action is to understand the product goals behind it. Pinduoduo has made full use of this in its game design. If the game is just for the purpose of increasing the user's stay time, its effect will be greatly reduced. Obviously, Pinduoduo is not just for the game, but the product goal behind it is - shopping conversion.

For example, in Duoduo Orchard (Figure 2-4), Pinduoduo effectively integrates shopping and stores into the game. Users can not only obtain treasure chests through shopping, but they can also steal water drops in the store to increase the store's exposure and encourage users to place orders for shopping. Pinduoduo adds stores to users’ friend lists, fully demonstrating its social attributes and transforming stores into the concept of “friends”.

Figure 2-4 Duoduo Orchard

The games in Pinduoduo are not just games. They fully take into account the re-creation of people's consumption needs under the trend of socialized consumption. During the game, by binding the acquisition of some props in the game with shopping, users are stimulated to engage in shopping behavior. This is to gamify the shopping process and allow users to complete their shopping while having fun.

It can be seen that Pinduoduo does not miss any opportunity that allows users to shop, which also highlights that users' current consumption is no longer the traditional consumption model of "buy a pot if it is broken, buy a bowl if it is broken", but in socialized consumption, users are not actually clear about what to buy, and they create shopping needs under various stimuli. This is also the final stage of the consumption conversion path mentioned above, where entertainment and leisure drive consumption .

3. Solution evaluation stage

The main influencing factors in the evaluation stage of users' shopping orders are the three-dimensional attributes of the product, that is, the key elements of users' evaluation of products are product attributes, marketing attributes and behavioral attributes.

From the analysis of the user model, it can be seen that Pinduoduo users attach more importance to marketing attributes involving money and lively behavioral attributes. In order to make users more willing to click on products in the product list page and enter the detail page, it becomes very useful to evaluate the early exposure of influencing factors.

Figure 2-5 Solution evaluation

From the comparison in Figures 2-5 above, it can be seen that Pinduoduo has increased the exposure of marketing attributes and behavioral attributes in product lists, allowing users to evaluate in advance and thus attracting user clicks.

We know that Pinduoduo's mainstream users come from low-tier cities. What should a page that is more in line with their minds look like?

The intention map of the supermarket in the picture is what they see, hear and feel in their daily life.

Imagine this scene: in a supermarket, people are attracted by promotions and bustling crowds when they don’t know what to buy. When people consume emotionally, they don’t actually know how much benefit they have gained. Instead, they gain a sense of benefit psychologically and feel that they have made a good deal. Pinduoduo exposes the influencing factors that users evaluate when shopping to users as early as possible, which plays a positive guiding role, reduces thinking costs, and invisibly creates a feeling of a supermarket with lively promotions.

In contrast, Taobao and JD.com are more restrained on their pages, and the overall design is simple and clean, just like the large shopping malls in first- and second-tier cities in the intention map. If we summarize them by design style, Pinduoduo has a rustic and urban style , while Taobao and JD.com have a modern and simple style .

Of course, when Pinduoduo penetrates into the student group and first- and second-tier users, the current page style will give people a sense of low quality. Therefore, the overall page style still needs to be upgraded in the direction of quality while retaining the evaluation impact factor. After all, people are visual animals. They will judge whether a product is high-quality and high-end based on its visual image. To change Pinduoduo's brand image in the minds of students and first- and second-tier cities and get rid of the stereotype of a low-quality grocery store, visual upgrades are equally important.

4. Decision-making and execution phase

When shopping on Pinduoduo, the key actions in decision-making are group buying and collecting. The author conducts appropriate analysis on these two points.

(1) Group order

When talking about Pinduoduo, we naturally have to talk about its unique group-buying model, which is quite popular. There are three main ordering modes on Pinduoduo: individual purchase, participating in group buying, and initiating group buying, as shown in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6 Order method

Individual purchase: With so many purchasing methods, it would be dizzying for the elderly. The individual purchase setting does not essentially serve the purpose of encouraging users to buy. Most of Pinduoduo's users come to shop to save money, so why would they spend more money to buy items individually? The benefit of buying it separately is that it sets a price anchor for users.

On the one hand, cheapness is always relative. Without comparison, there is no sense of cheapness. The existence of separate purchases can create a sense of cheapness and affordability for users.

Secondly, many young users have more than one shopping app on their mobile phones, and they will also compare prices on different apps. If the price on Taobao is close to the price of "buying separately", users will form the mindset that Pinduoduo is cheaper than Taobao, which will help them choose Pinduoduo for group shopping in their decision-making.

Participating in group buying: Participating in group buying is probably the most time-saving and labor-saving way of purchasing. It provides users with a better purchasing experience, but it has certain obstacles to sales growth. If users do not share group buying, the effect of user and sales growth brought by the group buying model will be greatly reduced.

Initiate a group order: When a user initiates a group order, the group order enters the group order pool of the current product. Users can group order with friends. Even if they do not share the group order, they can wait for strangers on the platform to group order in the group order pool. The value of sharing group buying is huge. It can bring in additional user consumption. The stocks in the group buying pool are fixed. Sharing brings traffic and added value. Therefore, allowing users to share group buying has greater value than group buying facilitated by users within the platform.

Well, if it is easy to successfully group buy on the platform, users will lack the motivation to share. Currently, Pinduoduo’s driving force to promote sharing is coupons. Since there are many ways to obtain coupons on the platform, and coupons cannot be immediately converted into actual benefits (coupons are only needed when shopping), this delayed gratification has relatively limited stimulation to users. Therefore, there needs to be a more direct stimulating driving force to promote user group buying and sharing. A new incentive mechanism needs to be designed in the product (establishing Pinduoduo’s own currency system, and obtaining currency for successful sharing, as shown in Figure 2-7).

Figure 2-7 Group order invitation

Since there are two types of products: high repurchase and low average order value and low repurchase and high average order value, not all products can be easily group bought. As Pinduoduo continues to expand its product categories, many products will inevitably be difficult to complete group purchasing, which is an inherent flaw of group purchasing. In order to optimize the defects, promoting hot-selling products is a solution. For products with high unit price and low repurchase rate, concentrated exposure can effectively increase the inventory of the group-buying pool. In addition, in the design of the group buying gameplay, remedial measures for group buying are used to reduce the failure of group buying, such as queue jumping, group buying first, and group buying-free, etc. It can be said that the emergence of various gameplays is to optimize the bugs of the group buying mode itself.

(2) Product Collection

By breaking down the user action chain, we know that an important action in users' online shopping decisions is collection. In terms of user cognitive-behavioral characteristics, users will have difficulty in making choices and tend to collect products. In addition, users ’ motivations for collecting products on Pinduoduo include combined payment (shopping cart), price comparison, undecided purchase, next purchase, etc. Therefore, it can be inferred that there will be more products in users’ favorites. Reasonable design of favorites can effectively improve users' search and management capabilities and promote order conversion.

Currently, Pinduoduo Favorites manages collected items from two dimensions: "View by time" and "View by store". Time viewing allows users to clearly see how many items they have collected on which day, but the focus of user collection is not to know what items they have collected on which day. What users want to know more is why I collected it, how I manage so many products, and which ones I want to consume soon. In addition, Pinduoduo operates and promotes the store concept. Many stores have "full refund" and "full discount" promotions, so it is more important to view them in terms of stores.

Therefore, the author believes that on the basis of viewing products in the store, it is necessary to provide label management for the products in the favorites. Label management can improve the purchase rate and user experience of collection items. When users collect products, they create favorites tags according to their needs. The products in the favorites are viewed together by store. Users can select the category to view by sliding the tags in the favorites, as shown in Figure 2-8 below.

Figure 2-8 Product Collection

Reasons for improvement:

1. In terms of feasibility, users managing their own favorites will increase their action effort. However, from the cognitive-behavioral characteristic diagram, we can see that the main users have strong action capabilities, so the increased operational burden is relatively small.

2: When you are faced with 7 products, it is easy for you to process this information, but what about 20 products, 50 products or even more? Information becomes more valuable only after it is processed. There are two viewpoints mentioned in "Kashiwa Sato's Super Tidying Up": one is "space" tidying up - setting priorities; the other is "information" tidying up - introducing personal viewpoints. Therefore, if the products collected by users are coded (labeled as favorites), users will be more clear about why they collected them and how to manage them.

Improved value:

1. Improvement of order conversion rate. When users select or create new favorites, they import their personal opinions into the favorites and know what the products in the favorites are for, which deepens their understanding and impression of the collected products. In addition, products also have purchase priorities. Users think some products are must-buys, while others they think they may buy. Labels can strengthen users' purchase priorities for products.

2. Improvement in user experience. Each user has his or her own logic for managing products. By giving users the initiative, they will be able to manage and find products more easily. For example, a heavy beauty user needs to be able to easily manage her collection of beauty products without having to search for her favorite products among a vast list of collections.

3. Communication and growth based on interpersonal relationships

In socialized consumption, users’ social relationships become increasingly important. As stated in Pinduoduo’s introduction, users connect with friends, family, neighbors, etc. through group buying. In socialized consumption, every individual may become an “individual” (three popular rules in the book “The Tipping Point”), becoming a liaison and salesman of communication.

Figure 3-1 Social relationship diagram

There are two main social relationships in the social relationship diagram of the crowd, namely, acquaintance-type social relationships and stranger-type social relationships, as shown in Figure 3-1. In traditional Chinese social relations, acquaintance-based social relations occupy an absolute position. However, with the development of society, social space relations have undergone tremendous changes. Young people today may have few social relations with their neighbors, but they have established connections with more strangers, such as people with the same interests, bloggers, and so on.

Pinduoduo, as its introduction states, mainly uses the form of communication based on acquaintance relationships. Then, the spread among a wider range of strangers will also be a new growth point that needs to be considered in product design.

Of course, there are certain differences in communication between social networking among acquaintances and social networking among strangers, as shown in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-2 Social communication model

The biggest difference between acquaintance relationships and stranger relationships is whether they are based on the acquisition of benefits. Acquaintance relationships can be spread through lobbying (of course, mutual benefit is better), while stranger relationships are difficult to lobby and are more driven by common interests. This is a key point that we must treat differently when promoting products through interest-driven marketing.

Everyone has his or her own network of acquaintances, including family, friends, classmates, colleagues, and neighbors. In order to gain personal benefits, users can spread products through lobbying. Pinduoduo makes full use of this key point to achieve dissemination among acquaintances. However, Pinduoduo's user base has grown to a certain scale, and the available acquaintance relationships are becoming increasingly limited. The platform must inevitably use high returns to lure users to dig deeper into their own circles of acquaintances, which naturally leads to an increase in customer acquisition costs. The strong incentive of high returns is very tempting for users to tap into acquaintances around them, and they will take the initiative to ask their parents, friends, and neighbors for help.

Pinduoduo’s communication design is mainly through lobbying among acquaintances, which can be clearly reflected in its copywriting language , as shown in Figure 3-3. When circulated among acquaintances, although this kind of copywriting can be cute and playful to ease embarrassment, its effect is relatively limited. Generally, acquaintances either communicate face to face offline or online, and most of the time, people lobby acquaintances through their own communication.

In addition, this kind of copywriting will be even less effective if it is separated from acquaintances, because interactions between strangers are more driven by mutual benefit.

For example, the bargaining link needs to be spread among strangers to get something for free. Because this activity requires a relatively large number of people, generally more than 100 people, many users will spread the bargaining link among strangers. Among strangers, this kind of lobbying copy is unlikely to motivate strangers to take action. The author believes that mutually beneficial copywriting will be more valuable in communication, for example, mutually beneficial copywriting such as "click and you can easily get a 50% discount coupon" and so on.

Figure 3-3 Pinduoduo copywriting terms

Overall, Pinduoduo's communication among strangers lacks corresponding design and construction of related content. After the changes in the social space, especially for young people, their social relationships with strangers have become larger. For Pinduoduo, this is a traffic pool that brings new growth. Its main breakthrough lies in the mutually beneficial design of communication and the construction of content.

4. Usability Analysis Based on Eye Movement

When we study usability, we tend to analyze the user's operating behavior and tend to ignore the usability of human eye movement behavior. When considering the usability of eye movement behavior, it mainly includes the user's eye movement trajectory, heat map, area of ​​interest (AOI) and people's visual movement habits in the eye movement experiment. Figure 4-1 is an eye movement test chart.

Figure 4-1 Eye movement test chart

You may have heard of the meme "My Brother is Shunliu: The Legend of the Blind Man ", which shows that even on the same page, some important information is difficult for some people to find. People's ability to receive information at the same time is limited. Whether users can receive effective information provided by the product is something that needs to be considered in product usability design. Regarding human visual characteristics, the following points need to be considered during design.

Human visual characteristics:

1. The human eye scans from left to right and from top to bottom, with the upper left limit being the best, followed by the upper right limit, then the lower left limit, and finally the lower right limit.

2. Compared with static objects, dynamic objects attract more attention.

3. Pictures attract more attention than text.

4. Vision tends to focus on areas of interest and ignore other information.

5. Human visual ability to process information is limited, and it is difficult to extract key information from multiple similar information.

Therefore, when conveying information on the interface, it is necessary to present the page information reasonably and effectively based on certain business purposes and combined with visual characteristics.

Of course, most companies will not conduct eye movement experiment research. This is mainly to ensure that you do not ignore some characteristics of human vision when designing products, and whether users can get the information you want to convey and whether they can understand it.

To this end, we can simplify eye movement analysis and use the squinting test to analyze whether Pinduoduo’s information can be conveyed properly in some of its interface designs.

1. Product details page

Figure 4-2 Product details page

In Figure 4-2 on the product details page, Pinduoduo has information about its special service guarantee. As can be seen from the squinting test picture, this piece of information is not prominent. In addition, there are multiple pieces of information together, so users may not be able to perceive the specific information they need. As mentioned in the user analysis, some users lack trust in Pinduoduo and are afraid that placing an order will bring certain risk of losses. In order to reduce the risk of trial and error for users, Pinduoduo has strengthened the protection clauses that affect key decisions. This reinforcement is not just the repetition of information, but also its appearance in a key position (after the title). Even the color scheme does not use the adjacent color of the entire page but the complementary color. From the squinting picture on the right, we can see that the key guarantee information is very eye-catching, which serves as a strong reminder to users.

In order to understand the popularity of group buying, that is, the order volume, Pinduoduo places the order volume in an important position on the page, to the right of the price. They are on the same horizontal line, making it easy for users to scan. Since users tend to follow the crowd when making decisions, group buying can increase user trust. However, compared with pictures, text alone has less visual appeal, so you can consider graphically processing the group order quantity or adding a small icon to emphasize it.

2. Search page

Figure 4-3 Search page

In Figure 4-3 of the search page, when the sub-category area on the right slides upward, the navigation on the left slides to the bottom of the page and remains at the bottom of the page. From the user's perspective, it is not in the center of the field of vision, affecting the user experience. In addition, when the user clicks the category label below the left navigation, the navigation does not automatically scroll up.

First, some inexperienced users may not know to slide up the navigation (because there is no effective visual swipe up prompt);

Second, the hidden categories below cannot be fed back immediately, which affects the user reach of the hidden categories;

Third, when the user clicks on the navigation below, they have to swipe up to see the hidden categories below, which adds unnecessary operations for some users.

Therefore, the visual anchor point can be set on the dotted line in the figure. When the navigation label below the dotted line is clicked, the navigation label will automatically scroll to the set anchor point.

5. Opportunities

1. Pinduoduo Buyer Recommendation Community

In the previous article, I have mentioned many times that under the trend of socialized consumption, it is important for pure transaction e-commerce to expand into e-commerce with social content attributes. Then Pinduoduo will naturally notice this matter, yes, it is [buyer recommendation]. There are many forms of e-commerce content expansion, which can be information, short videos or live broadcasts. However, a user-friendly life-sharing community based on shopping orders is one that can form a closed loop with shopping, in which all buyers can participate more easily, has a lower platform building cost and can increase user stickiness. [Buyer Recommendation] is also the initial exploration of this community. So when it comes to building a community, we should first know what a community is, so that we can know how to build a community and analyze the shortcomings in community design.

Figure 5-1 Community composition

Virtual communities on the Internet can be seen as the evolution of real communities, and some basic construction principles are the same. The skeleton of a community consists of three parts: politics, economy, and culture, as shown in Figure 5-1.

Politics is mainly about letting community members know what to do . Everything has rules, and a good community must be built on certain rules.

The main purpose of economics is to let community members know why they are working . Labor is to create value and generate returns.

Culture is mainly about letting community members know what to do . Every community has its own purpose and unique community atmosphere.

On top of the basic framework of the community is the core of the community, producers and consumers. Only by forming a good ecological system of producers and consumers can the community develop stably.

Currently, Pinduoduo is only making a preliminary attempt at the order sharing community [Buyer Recommendations] (Figure 5-2), and its functions are still somewhat rudimentary. In terms of content (culture), topics are mainly used to guide users to participate in community content production. The path is topic-content, which is relatively short. In terms of content, users mainly post their orders casually, and there is no guidance on the tone of the content, so most users post pictures with a brief description. This format is relatively less attractive to consumers, that is, the content is not nutritious enough. In addition, in terms of the community's reward incentive design (economic), producers mainly obtain feedback incentives by getting likes, which is relatively weak and there is no effective and complete incentive system.

Figure 5-2 Buyer Recommendations

Currently, shopping on Pinduoduo is mainly done through group buying. If products are to be spread among people, it is mainly through group buying between two people. From this model, we can see that even if a user wants to find someone to share an order with, he can only involve one person. If we want users to bring more people and enhance their ability to sell products , we actually need users to share their good user experience with their acquaintances or even strangers. Currently, the platform relies entirely on voluntary sharing by users, and there is no design that drives sharing, and there is a lack of a corresponding incentive system. Therefore, the following mainly introduces the establishment of sharing channels.

The biggest obstacle limiting the consumption expenditure of the lower-income groups and students is their lower income. They have fewer ways to earn income, but they have more free time and are unable to create wealth and social value. Therefore, we build an interesting, useful and profitable content community around shopping review posts and product promotion, so that more people can create and gain new value.

2. Design of the shopping community

In view of this, the author proposes a possible scenario.

(1) Establish an internal currency system (also known as a points system). The monetary system can connect Pinduoduo's commodity trading system and community system. For the time being, this currency is named Xiandou (meaning you reap what you sow). Xiandou rewards prey with economic benefits within the community. In addition, through official recommendation and certification of high-quality content, it obtains social and self-rewards such as likes and collections, which together form a multi-faceted and balanced reward system.

(2) The establishment of a general daily life review community. The community is guided by topics, and the main content is based on users sharing their comments and usage experiences of the products they purchased, combining user shopping experience sharing and shopping shows.

rule:

a. Fresh beans are Pinduoduo’s internal currency and can be used for cash deductions in transaction settlements.

b. Set up merchant promotion activities, with fresh beans used as commission rewards. High-quality merchants and products can sign up for the activities.

c. Fresh beans (entrance) are mainly obtained by users through commission rewards by bringing goods. Users can obtain fresh beans by sharing orders when group buying, recommending products in the order-sharing community, and directly sharing with acquaintances. Users will receive corresponding fresh beans according to the sales volume (products participating in the fresh bean event).

Secondly, fresh beans can be applied to games and obtained through game tasks (increasing the variety of rewards in the game and making the game more attractive to more users), thereby connecting products, content and games and making the entire platform system more ecological.

d. Fresh bean consumption (export) is mainly used by users for transaction settlement deductions. Users can pay less money when settling goods, making them feel more cost-effective, thereby promoting revenue growth for the entire product.

The author represents the ideal model of revenue growth from live streaming sales as shown in Figure 5-3 below.

Figure 5-3 Revenue growth model

Model Introduction:

1. The company will use a portion of its revenue as commission W for bringing in goods.

2. Content producer A sells goods by posting order forms. He shares the order forms in the public traffic area (Pinduoduo order posting community) to attract B to purchase (B’s expenditure increases, generating N+X profit for the company), and shares them in the private traffic area to attract C to purchase (C’s expenditure generates Z profit for the company). A will also increase its expenditure because it receives commissions and produces more content (A's expenditure increases, and the profit generated for the company is M+Y).

3. Then as long as Y+X+ZW is a positive value, it can promote the positive operation of the overall system. User A gets commissions by bringing products to customers, which can be used to offset part of shopping expenses, thus achieving growth through sales-driven growth .

Based on the above analysis, we design and plan community products to achieve the purpose of promoting products through social media.

In terms of information architecture design, interests are divided by topics. In each topic, users can find their favorite content through tags. The information architecture is shown in Figure 5-4.

Figure 5-4 Information architecture of the shopping community

Why do we need to divide traffic through interest circles? The main purpose is to allow users' community activities to form their own circles according to their interests (people are divided into groups), that is, dimensional division . Just like the topics discussed in the mothers' circle are difficult to attract students, through interest circles, you can find your favorite circle more clearly, and share common interests within the circle. The topic within the circle is the granular division , which mainly segments the content and guides users to share through topics so that users have something to say. For special events, such as festivals, big sales, etc., they all have short-term effects, so it is appropriate to drive related activities through separate topics to facilitate the development of operations. The main page of the review community is shown in Figure 5-5.

Figure 5-1 Order sharing community page

In terms of incentives, they are mainly achieved through prey rewards and social rewards.

Prey Reward: After a user purchases a product in the Fresh Beans Commission Activity, he or she can share the product's order. If other users purchase the product, the user can get the corresponding fresh beans. Fresh beans can only be used to deduct cash at a certain percentage on the next purchase, and fresh beans cannot be withdrawn. This can reduce users' addiction to money to a certain extent and prevent the community from being so materialistic. Fresh bean discounts allow users to spend less money to buy more things, achieving the goal of "selling to support consumption" and promoting a positive cycle of community content output.

Social rewards: Since not all products have fresh bean activities, in order to balance users' pursuit of fresh bean benefits, social rewards are used to let users feel the fun of posting more orders and the importance of posting high-quality content. When users post their orders, they will receive likes and collections from others. At the same time, good content will be certified with the platform’s exclusive labels, giving the content a greater chance of being exposed on the homepage. (Of course, in the later stage, the community can consider opening up the user relationship chain, so that users can follow others and gain fans)

Content producers can be incentivized by rewards, which serve as a driving force to encourage users to continue producing content. If there are no consumers, the system will not be able to function. That is, what benefits can consumers get from this system?

(1) Trust brought by real shopping. Products that users have personally used are recommended because they are useful. Authentic content can win the trust of others and reduce the cost of user screening.

(2) Community content includes users’ shopping experiences, shopping sharing, and life experiences. Users can find interesting and useful content within the community.

Summarize

Through two articles, one on users and one on products, and combined with the influencing factors of users' online shopping, we conducted some analysis on Pinduoduo. Of course, due to space constraints, it is difficult to analyze all the factors, and this is just a starting point for discussion.

Author: Half past three

Source: 3:30