Forced to choose between two options? Pinduoduo’s road to brand upgrade!

If it weren’t for the limited-time promotion of WeChat Wallet, Pinduoduo might have disappeared from the sight of people within the Fifth Ring Road for a while.

After the price-cutting fission, Tencent finally opened the wallet "limited-time promotion" traffic entrance to Pinduoduo. However, just like other third-party services, when we click on the Pinduoduo button, WeChat will tell you that the service is provided by Pinduoduo and WeChat is not responsible.

Pinduoduo's rapid growth is a typical example of seizing the dividends of social e-commerce . Although it has been questioned by the public and the media about counterfeit goods, from the perspective of commercial value, the social e-commerce model should have considerable growth potential. After all, Taobao was also plagued by counterfeit goods in its early days.

Regarding counterfeit goods and quality issues, although Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng has repeatedly said that he would take a different path from Tmall , in fact, Pinduoduo, like Tmall, has launched the Pinduoduo " Brand Pavilion".

What’s interesting is that when you open the Pinduoduo APP, the products recommended on the homepage are generally unknown brand products, such as solid wood beds, household electric drills, car leather table mats, etc.; and when you open the Pinduoduo mini program from the WeChat wallet, most of the products recommended on the homepage are brand merchant products, such as vivo mobile phones , Bosideng underwear, Feike razors, Blue Moon laundry detergent, etc.

The left side is the APP homepage, and the right side is the mini program homepage

Although there are a large number of well-known brands in Pinduoduo's "Brand Pavilion", a cursory observation shows that the vast majority of brand merchants are not official brands. For example, if you buy a genuine Apple mobile phone sold in China on Pinduoduo, it is not sold by Apple directly, but by a certain mobile phone store. Overall, it is a Taobao C store model.

Of course, there are also some official flagship stores moving in, such as NetEase Yanxuan , Three Squirrels , etc., which are all directly tested operations by the brands. But compared to branded products, Pinduoduo's main users are obviously more interested in "no-name brands" with better cost-effectiveness. After all, as long as it saves money and works, it's fine.

It is also because of the purchasing habits of the main users that in Pinduoduo’s official store of NetEase Yanxuan, which is sorted from high to low by sales volume, the most sold Japanese home shoes only show “53 pieces have been purchased”. Compared with the miserable performance of NetEase Yanxuan, the Japanese home slippers of an unknown brand on Pinduoduo were sold at a price of less than 10 yuan and reached nearly 60,000 units, although there were still a large number of users commenting that "the picture does not match the actual product."

It's not just NetEase Yanxuan that is doing poorly. In the Xiaomi flagship store, the best-selling Xiaomi 8 Youth Edition only sold more than 500 units. Dangdang.com was even more embarrassed, with only 8 units in total and no SKU sold more than 1 unit... In comparison, low-priced fast-moving consumer goods brands are more popular, such as Liby laundry detergent and Blue Moon laundry liquid, which have sales of tens of thousands. Overall, Pinduoduo’s branding journey is not easy at the moment.

Pinduoduo's quality approach is actually following Taobao's old path, but for the vast majority of users in third- and fourth-tier cities and towns, quality life still seems quite far away in the face of cost-effectiveness.

During the National Day holiday, when everyone was traveling around the world on WeChat Moments , Pinduoduo quietly managed to increase its transaction volume by more than 300% year-on-year, mainly from Pinduoduo's "Pinnonghuo" plan, whose products are mainly agricultural products shipped directly from poor townships. It is reported that the users who bought these agricultural products are mainly community residents in first- and second-tier cities. My personal guess is that most of them are middle-aged and elderly people who stayed at home during the National Day holiday.

Even the People's Daily published a comment, saying that we must face up to cheap e-commerce consumption represented by Pinduoduo, and also work hard to improve the quality of residents' consumption, cultivate emerging consumption, and stimulate potential consumption.

Recently, Pinduoduo celebrated its third anniversary on Double Ten Day, which was also the first anniversary since its listing. Pinduoduo also persuaded WeChat to open a wallet page to promote traffic. The branding of products recommended by Pinduoduo’s mini program undoubtedly reveals that Pinduoduo hopes to raise the quality of the platform to a higher level.

But this year is a special year for e-commerce platforms. Alibaba 's Taobao is under tremendous pressure from the tenth anniversary of " Double Eleven ", and e-commerce festivals are becoming increasingly ineffective. The special day of the tenth anniversary will make it inevitable that Taobao and Tmall will break new sales records.

According to the normal promotion rhythm, the warm-up for "Double Eleven" will begin in mid-to-late October. If Pinduoduo allows brands to sell a large number of goods during its third anniversary celebration, it will naturally not be a good thing for Alibaba's "Double Eleven". According to a report by Yibang Power Network, Tmall has set its sights on Pinduoduo's big promotion, exerting pressure on brand merchants to upgrade from the original "choose one of two" between Alibaba and JD.com to "choose one of three" among Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo.

Although in previous e-commerce wars, merchants can avoid the risk of platform fights to a certain extent by providing different products to different platforms, the right to distribute traffic is in the hands of large platforms after all, and the invisible "choose one of two" problem cannot be solved at all.

Pinduoduo's threat to Alibaba's e-commerce is obvious. Pinduoduo, which has only been established for three years, has already surpassed JD.com in terms of daily active users. Although Pinduoduo is coming in with great momentum, it has been labeled as "cheap and low-quality", and it is not easy for the brand to grow upward. In quality e-commerce, the situation is no longer as severe as it was around 2010 when there was a lack of high-quality services. Now with Tmall and JD.com in control, even platforms such as NetEase Yanxuan, which focus on consumer upgrades, can only survive in the cracks.

In addition to improving user services on the C-end, the core competitiveness of quality e-commerce lies in the platform's brand merchant resources. If Pinduoduo follows the previous strategy of brand merchants entering Taobao and Tmall, it will inevitably be directly cracked by Alibaba, which has high-quality merchants. This is also the difficulty of Pinduoduo's brand upgrade.

Although it is far from the time yet, let's imagine that when consumption in third- and fourth-tier cities upgrades, will they buy better quality products on Pinduoduo, or switch to Tmall and JD.com?

Source: Spread Gymnastics (ID: chuanboticao )