If you want to make life better, many times you only need a small dream to come true - the teenager in the mountains put on a pair of comfortable and easy-to-walk basketball shoes, the post-00s Beipiao "big factory workers" use small objects to decorate the rental house into a home, and the entrepreneurs who are confined to work have reached the distant world by shopping online for special food from all over the world......
Pinduoduo has recorded nearly 900 million different but equally beautiful lifestyles. This platform, which has witnessed many Chinese people's first online shopping, is still using affordable and high-quality products to meet the yearning and hope of ordinary people for a better life.
"It's not just because it's cheap, it's about the price and quality. Therefore, I can best meet the needs of the whole family with the least amount of money. As one of the earliest users of Pinduoduo, Xu Yongli, the "all-round mother" who placed more than 1,500 orders, took care of a family of five with a monthly budget of 2,000 yuan, "I can feel that Pinduoduo has been getting better, and people like people who are attentive to themselves, so why refuse a platform that is good for them?"
Since its inception in 2015, Pinduoduo has gained a large number of loyal users from all tiers of cities. They firmly believe and truly feel that a better life is not difficult to achieve, and they can "spell" the appearance from a piece of high-quality and inexpensive objects.
After the release of the third quarterly report, which is still outstanding this year, Chen Lei, chairman and co-CEO of Pinduoduo Group, said, "We also see from user behavior that consumption upgrading is not only about quality, but also about price, the optimization of the 'quality-price ratio', and the ultimate pursuit of consumers for high-quality and good products." ”
It is based on this that in November this year, Zhao Jiazhen, co-CEO of Pinduoduo, also spoke at the World Internet Conference, saying that in the new stage, Pinduoduo will take high-quality development as the company's most important goal and task, promote it in a down-to-earth manner, and implement high-quality development in all aspects such as platform governance, merchant ecology, high-quality supply chain, and high-quality consumption, and strive to create incremental value for consumers and society.
A new world in the courier box
As a left-behind teenager who once lived in the remote mountainous areas of Guizhou, Hu Tao's passage to the new world was hidden in the first courier box he received in his life.
At that time, Hu Tao, who had just entered junior high school, fell in love with playing basketball, which was one of the few times he had for himself besides cutting pigweed, harvesting corn and learning Xi. However, a pair of basketball shoes with a comfortable fit and high bounce power, he walked all over the town market and couldn't find them.
Once opened an old mobile phone left by his mother before he went out to work, Hu Tao downloaded Pinduoduo, and on this software recommended by many classmates around him, he saw the basketball shoes he was missing. He took out the 120 yuan pocket money he had saved for nearly two months, asked the owner of the commissary in the town to exchange it for WeChat change, and placed an order for the pair of black and red basketball shoes.
"It was like flying, I felt like I was a real player. Hu Tao can't forget the feeling of wearing those shoes for the first time, "I originally thought that the world was so big, and what I saw in the town was everything." ”
Hu Tao (first from right) plays basketball with friends (photo provided by the interviewee)
Hu Tao remembers that when he was younger, he ate meat muffins at other people's houses, and when he went home, he casually mentioned it to his grandmother. At five o'clock the next morning, my grandmother walked for more than four hours on the mountain road to the town to buy "rare products" in the mountains. "A pound costs more than 30", Hu Tao only broke a little bit of the bag of meat muffins and tasted it every time.
The surprise brought by the first online shopping was no less than Hu Tao's first taste of meat muffins, and the door was opened to him in a world much larger than the town market, "People in the mountains can also receive surprises from outside the mountains, creating an invisible connection with the outside world." ”
After that, Hu Tao bought a black shirt for his grandmother on Pinduoduo. At first, my grandmother didn't believe that she could buy "good things" without walking the mountains, and she was worried that she would waste money if she bought them with poor quality. But the texture of the dress far exceeded my grandmother's expectations, and she wore the shirt for several summers.
In the corners that had not been covered by the e-commerce network earlier, there were not a few consumers like Hu Tao, who realized through the first order that the road to the outside world also had the opportunity to pave their feet, and it was not so expensive to live a better life.
It is understood that in order to allow consumers to get timely feedback, Pinduoduo now requires stores to have a response rate of not less than 70% within 5 minutes and a response rate of not less than 80% within 3 minutes, and at the same time shorten the delivery time of most categories from 72 hours to 48 hours, and upgrade Xinjiang, Tibet and other regions to "free shipping areas", so that consumers in these areas can also enjoy the benefits of logistics development.
In addition, Pinduoduo has paid attention to the special disadvantaged position of the elderly in online shopping, and the after-sales policy has further tilted towards them. In addition to the original shopping area for the elderly, an exclusive customer service function has now been added to make it more convenient for the elderly to protect their rights and interests and improve the shopping experience.
Affordability and quality are not paradoxes
Xia Xia, a Jiangsu girl with a deposit of more than one million, is also a "Pinduoduo girl".
After graduating from graduate school in Australia in 2018, she returned to China and opened an online store with friends, plus a full-time job in a small Internet company, "I currently have a deposit of about 1 million yuan, and returning to my hometown is enough for me to 'lie flat' for 10 years." ”
Even if she already has enough material options in her hands, Xia Xia is still careful in every consumption. Referring to how she became a "group expert" in the circle of friends, Xia Xia explained that her perception of price and value may be different from many people, "When buying something, I will pay more attention to whether its actual value matches the price, and I am willing to sacrifice some time to find the most cost-effective product." ”
Her mother loved to joke with her, saying that she was like a miser. At first, when Xia Xia placed an order on Pinduoduo, her mother still told her to save a little money and be cheap, but the quality of the items she received every time reshaped her mother's impression of Pinduoduo again and again. Now in Xia Xia's small circle records, you can often see her mother spelling out home decorations and flowers.
The satisfaction of "affordable" and "better" at the same time has made more and more different consumers pay attention to this e-commerce platform. A survey of Pinduoduo users shows that only 17.1% of users started to use Pinduoduo before 2016, and most of them are concentrated in urban and rural areas, and after the launch of the "10 billion subsidy" in 2019, the growth of users in megacities and big cities far exceeds that of urban and rural areas, with growth rates of 38.2% and 43.4% respectively between 2019~2021.
Su Hailun is 30 years old and has been a journalist in Guangzhou for five years. In the past 5 years of work, he has traveled all over the country, seen and participated in the lives of too many people, and he likes the freshness of this job.
In 2022, Su Hailun left the newspaper to start a business. His new career has tied his daily routine to a strict schedule, and he often wakes up at 7 a.m. to work on work and goes to bed at 11 p.m., leaving no time to explore distant places.
"I always place orders on Pinduoduo for specialties from all over the world, those that I have never tried before, novelty. "The experience of buying Xinjiang milk gave Su Hailun an attempt to see the world in a single order.
"Guizhou pickled fish is too salty and spicy for Cantonese people, and it is very delicious. The raw cut potato chips in Yunnan are crispier than the potato chips I have eaten, and the rice noodles of the three steamed steamed pork in Hubei are glutinous and glutinous, and the meat is satisfying. I also bought shredded snow lotus peppers from Xinjiang, coconut water from Thailand, lake salt from Chaka, and sand crab juice from the Beihai Sea of Guangzhou......"
Although the existing job makes it difficult for Su Helen to go to various places, but a single order can still deliver the customs and freshness from all over the world, "It's a bit against my boring entrepreneurial life, and recently I have taken a fancy to Syrian soap, and I want to know how it is different from the domestic one?"
Su Hailun received the novelty goods ordered on Pinduoduo (photo provided by the interviewee)
A new consumption upgrade
In June 2019, Pinduoduo announced that in the form of "10 billion cash subsidies", co-branded merchants would make significant concessions on 10,000 products with the most popular products on the whole network.
In the following four years, Pinduoduo continued to increase subsidies to stimulate the potential of the consumer market. While other e-commerce platforms are gradually "Pinduoduo" in price, Pinduoduo has looked at a higher level - the quality-price ratio.
Price will no longer be the only reference criterion for consumers to place orders. In the "Year of Consumption Boost", McKinsey has emphasized the trend of quality consumption, "In the past few years, Chinese consumers were easy to be led by marketing, but now it is completely different, and Chinese consumers as a whole are much more mature than before. ”
According to the 2023 China Consumer Insights and Market Outlook White Paper released by Deloitte, 41% of respondents listed "I buy what I really need" as one of the three most consistent consumer concepts, and 36% chose "I am happy to find brands and products with the best value for money".
Rationality and pragmatism have become the mainstream consumption concepts of consumers, which coincides with Pinduoduo, which is committed to returning commodity prices to their own value.
"In 2018, I bought a sports bandage and 'entered the pit' Pinduoduo, and a year later I bought a K song microphone, but I didn't expect the real thing to far exceed my expectations, not only can I connect to my mobile phone through Bluetooth to sing, but the battery life is also very strong. A microphone opened the door for Xia Xia to try Pinduoduo electronic products, and then she also bought electric toothbrushes, Huawei Bluetooth headsets and other products in the 10 billion subsidy area, and she did not "step on the thunder".
In Xia Xia's view, saving money is making money (interviewee content)
Relevant research data show that nearly 40% of the 200,000~300,000 and 300,000 annual income groups have the highest consumption of more than 3,000 yuan in Pinduoduo, and more than 20% of the group's highest consumption in Pinduoduo has reached 5,000 yuan.
Cao Lei, director of the E-commerce Research Center of the Network Economic Society, once said that the current trend of global consumption upgrading on the Pinduoduo platform is obvious, not only APP, but also small programs and web versions to meet the shopping needs of different groups of people. In addition to agricultural products, categories such as wine gift boxes and high-end home appliances have also grown significantly. Driven by support resources such as characteristic live broadcasts, tens of billions of subsidies and 10,000 people's groups, Pinduoduo has walked out of an "ordinary road" that is different from other e-commerce platforms.
Zhao Jiazhen, co-CEO of Pinduoduo, also said, "In the future, we will always maintain empathy with consumers, continue to start from the perspective of inclusiveness and people's livelihood, fully respect every need of every consumer, continue to improve the accessibility of multiple affordable and good services, and achieve high-quality development." ”
Reporter Yang Xinyi