Nearly ten years ago, when China discounted shopping applications made a lot of appearances, the Chinese e -commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com led Chinese e -commerce giants.

At that time, Pinduoduo felt more like a gimmick, not future competitors.This application combines the game hall, shopping platform and social network, and the main selling point is to provide lower prices for shoppers of "grouping".Users play video games on it to pass the time, or make some money by logging in to the application every day.

Now people no longer despise this company.

Pinduoduo is Temu's sister company.Temu, an application for purchasing cheap goods, has tens of millions of users outside China (including in the United States), and is investing billions of dollars in the United States to increase its popularity.Americans who have not used TEMU may have seen its advertisements on the super bowl, or Instagram posts.

Like Tiktok, TEMU is also a very successful version of Chinese companies in foreign countries.As Temu is becoming more and more popular in the United States, its business behavior has also been carefully reviewed.Members of Congress questioned whether the application was providing a US sales channel for Chinese products used.It is criticized for its labor approach and failure to implement the intellectual property law.

In China, Pinduoduo has also received more and more attention.As a popular cheap food grocery and daily necessities shopping platform, from the perspective of market share, Pinduoduo is now close to China's second largest online retailer Jingdong.Last year, Pinduoduo's market value once surpassed Alibaba, and briefly became China's highest market value e -commerce company.After that, Alibaba founder Ma Yun posted a post on the company, saying that he "believes that Ali will change, Ali will change" to welcome the challenge.

Last month, Pinduoduo and TEMU's parent company Pinduoduo Holdings stated in the company's financial report that its annual revenue almost doubled in 2023, while Alibaba and JD.com increased by less than 10%.The company claims that this result is a "key chapter" in its history.

Pinduoduo successfully used one of China's largest economic challenges: consumers are unwilling to spend money, and the price of food and other goods has declined.With the slowdown of China's economic growth, consumers are gladly accepting "consumer downgrade". This lifestyle is centered on shopping on Pinduoduo.

This is very different from the situation when Pinduoduo appeared in 2015.At that time, the rapid growth of the Chinese economy over the past few decades made people confidently believe that the continuously growing middle class will continue to show new wealth through generous consumption.

At that time, Alibaba opened a chain supermarket, selling emperor crab legs, a single malt Scotch whiskey and other luxury goods.JD.com launched a high -end brand e -commerce portal named Toplife.

"The biggest mistake at that time was that China was everywhere in middle -class consumers, and it would only be better and better in the future," said Wu Ge, the editor -in -chief of Bai Guan Technology News about China Investment and Business.

In an interview in 2018, Huang Yan, the founder of Pinduoduo and the second ranking in China, said that Pinduoduo must not only try to meet the needs of Chinese upstarts, but also try to meet the "Five Ring Road" in Beijing.Demand, he refers to those who live in a difficult life away from the center of the big city.

Pinduoduo has increased by the sharp discounts of verbal spread.Because Pinduoduo is closely linked to Tencent's WeChat with the ubiquitous SMS platform, it is easy for users to share special products online.Less than a year after Pinduoduo was established, users reached 100 million.Five years after its establishment, Pinduoduo users have reached 788 million, surpassing Alibaba.Pinduoduo did not reply to the reporter's comment request.

Goldman Sachs estimated in a report in 2023 that in terms of product sales, Pinduoduo accounted for 19%of the Chinese e -commerce market, JD.com accounted for 20%, and Alibaba accounted for 41%.

The shoppers in Pinduoduo directly deal with suppliers, farmers and manufacturers, so they can get lower prices.Pinduoduo keeps the costs charged by users and sellers at a low level, and uses logistics to other companies to avoid a lot of investment.Huang Yan once said that he wanted Pinduoduo to be the e -commerce version of Facebook and the place where people gathered online, not necessarily for shopping.

After Pinduoduo's success, social e -commerce has become the norm of China.Each e -commerce application has live broadcasts and goods. Internet celebrities test new products and answer user questions above.Some of China's largest social networks have become shopping destinations.These include Xiahongshu, which is equivalent to the Chinese version of Instagram and the application of byte beating, and the vibrato called TIKTOK outside China.

The main attraction of

Pinduoduo is that the price on the platform is amazing.A box of five pounds of cherry tomatoes are priced at less than 35 yuan, but if another person joins "group purchase", the price of each box will be halved.The 12 -roll toilet paper on the fifth floor of the roll paper sells for less than six yuan.And it is free delivery.

The early Pinduoduo platform was filled with fakes.The company has taken positive measures to solve this problem.Buyers who received fake goods were qualified to get a maximum refund from the seller.If the customer is not satisfied with what you buy, he can return the goods, and the seller will refund without asking any questions.

Wang Hong (Yin) is an English teacher in Beijing.She claims to be a loyal consumers who buy fruit, vegetables, rice and yogurt on it.She gets a larger price discount by paying 10 yuan per month.

Ms. Wang said that she likes Pinduoduo's low prices, free delivery, and generous return policies.She said that although there were more discounts before, she would continue to shop for a lot of shopping, because "the things above are still cheap."

For sellers, what attracts them is the huge traffic brought by Pinduoduo.Marcus Ding (sound), general manager of a sporting goods company, said that he made more money on Pinduoduo, because the platform charged the seller is lower.But he spent about 20%of Pinduoduo's income on the platform to play product advertising.Most of Pinduoduo's income comes from advertising on the website.Last year, about two -thirds of the company's revenue came from the cost paid to the seller to make their products appear on the significant position of the platform.

This model of advertising is likely to be influenced by Google. Huang Yan served as an engineer in Google between 2004 and 2007.Pinduoduo's advertisement is sold at keywords with a auction system similar to Google.

There are other signs of Google on the platform.

In 2018, Huang Yan submitted his first public offering application on the Nasdaq Exchange.Although he has left Pinduoduo in 2021, he is still his largest shareholder.He wrote at the beginning of the letter that "Pinduoduo is not a traditional company."Fourteen years ago, Google founder Larry Page and Sergei Brin had a well -known way to open the first public offering of Google.

One of Google claims its principle is "not evil."Huang Yan also expressed the same view."We may not be understood, but we are always out of goodwill and do not do evil," he wrote.

Critics say these Li's doctrines are contradictory with the company's practices.Last year, the Google Play store suspended the download of Pinduoduo applications outside China because network security experts found that there were a large number of malware in the application.Pinduoduo may also face more censorship due to the success of TEMU.TEMU is one of the most downloaded applications in the United States and expands to dozens of other countries.

TEMU sales do not include food grocery, mainly clothing and beautyProducts and small appliances.Like Pinduoduo users in China, people who buy things on TEMU directly buy products from manufacturers and suppliers.The platform may lose money on most orders because the price is low.

Since most of the products of the TEMU platform are originally produced in China, it is estimated that the delivery cost of delivery to the United States for each order is $ 11, and the delivery cost of delivery to Europe and Australia is 9 to 10 US dollars.Chinese Internet analyst Zhu Xi said.

Last month, Chen Lei, the co -CEO and chairman of Pinduoduo Holdings, told analysts that the global expansion of TEMU was still in the early stages, and there were many uncertainty.But its business model is based on the company's Chinese experience, that is, consumers always want to save more money.