Ran Caijing (ID:chaintruth) original author | Zhao Lei
Editor | Rao Xiafei
In China's Internet arena, I am afraid that there is no second company that is more controversial than Pinduoduo. Earlier, a self-media big V wrote an essay with more than 100,000 readings, "Draft People's Daily to pay attention to online shopping platform Pinxx". The author's mother-in-law is a traditional woman who is hardworking and thrifty. There are more than 500 orders, and they are still buying at 11 o'clock in the evening. In the morning, I open my eyes and continue to fight. The APP's medal wall is full, but there are a lot of fake fakes at home. The magical thing is that the old people "have caught the evil of Pinduoduo", thinking that cheap is good, instead they treat the genuine goods in the tens of billions of subsidies as fakes, and think that offline supermarkets are tricking people, and they still give five-star praise when they receive fakes. Another relative was even more outrageous. He also bought a bunch of crooked goods. He didn’t listen to persuasion, but was disconnected from the internet by his family, handed in his mobile phone, and even the phone card was taken out and hidden. Counterfeit goods are a label that Pinduoduo has always been unable to tear off. Under the large-scale media reports, it has become a kind of "prejudice" against Pinduoduo in the hearts of many urban users. However, in the tens of billions of subsidies, the "true fragrance law" This prejudice is gradually diminishing, and more and more young people in first-tier cities have tried to buy an iPhone or Estee Lauder, and then started buying toilet paper and socks on Pinduoduo. “Some people seem to be big-named and walk in and out of high-end office buildings, but they use Pinduoduo’s subsidized iPhone behind their backs and eat free fruits from Pinduoduo." User Orange teased herself, saying that she would never use Pinduoduo before. , "This kind of cheapness is beyond my cognizance, and cheap is not good." But is cheap really bad? After Orange bought the iPhone, she became curious about Pinduoduo. She successively bought some low-priced daily necessities, such as toothbrushes, towels, long trousers, etc., and found that there was nothing wrong with the quality. Some well-known brands did indeed have cottages. Circumstances, that is, there are suspected false propaganda in the pictures and descriptions, but it does not particularly affect the use of the product. In Pinduoduo, you get what you pay for, it’s true that what you pay for is true, it’s true that cheap products are good, and cheap products are fakes. There are fakes, but in the eyes of different groups of people, this problem can be big or small. Some people, like the mother-in-law, think that selling expensive is fake, but cheap is different. In the eyes of almost everyone, it is a real deal. Yes, it is intuitive and comparable, and few people will choose expensive ones. Pinduoduo’s latest financial report for the third quarter of 2020 shows that Pinduoduo’s annual active buyers have reached 731 million, which is very close to Ali’s 7. 5.7 billion, maybe it will surpass Ali in one or two quarters. Although from the GMV perspective, Pinduoduo is still a long way from Ali and JD. From the perspective of daily life, Pinduoduo is already China’s largest e-commerce platform. . It is accelerating its entry into the lives of more people, including white-collar elites in first-tier cities. They either become Pinduoduo users themselves or are surrounded by Pinduoduo users. The former Pinduoduo was within the Fifth Ring Road and did business outside the Fifth Ring Road. Now, users of different regions, different levels, and different ages are involved in the same Internet and enter the same Pinduoduo. The richness and diversity of the real world and the "magic fantasy" in the eyes of different people are concentrated in Pinduoduo. Some people don’t understand investment or the Internet, but are loyal users of Pinduoduo and persevere in bargaining. Some people are firmly optimistic about Pinduoduo. Even if they did not place an order, they bought Pinduoduo’s stocks and made a fortune; Some people don’t have a good impression of Pinduoduo. They persuade relatives and friends not to shop at Pinduoduo every day, thinking that Pinduoduo will collapse sooner or later; more people are watching, doubting, entangled, and entering the pit of Pinduoduo under an unexpected opportunity. Some not so lucky people have become victims of Pinduoduo fakes.
The existence of Pinduoduo tells us that both the inside and outside of the Fifth Ring are two different worlds, but they also have certain commonalities. Pinduoduo straddles them, firmly grasps this commonality and continues to grow.
A divided world
What does the real world look like? From a very young age, Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, has been thinking a lot about this issue. He recalled his childhood life, "It can't be talked about poverty, but certainly it can't be talked about wealth. It's still relatively tight." He often wears In such an ordinary family, the clothes of his mother, colleague, or relative’s child, he has many observations, and it affects his subsequent business decisions. He found that the consumption habits of many people have a lot to do with the family environment in the early stage, and have nothing to do with the wealth they have now. For example, his mother is still reluctant to take a taxi because she feels that her time is not worth the money. In terms of consumption, no one will take the initiative to consume and downgrade. Everyone does not have a toilet and they have to buy a toilet, but everyone has different needs for different consumer products, and different people will have different upgrade needs. From the consumption point of view, he saw the diversity of the real world. Huang Zheng’s mother went to buy vegetables and paper towels. The difference of one or two dollars would be very concerned, but at the same time he would also buy a high-end iPhone and a good TV. This seemingly divisive behavior happens every day in thousands of families. The same is true for young people who have not experienced the hard times. The place in the province must be saved, the place where the flower must be spent, and the place to spend must be spent, eat frugally, buy high-end mobile phones, carry bags from Chanel and Gucci, and find friends and colleagues to borrow from iQiyi Members are always happy to carpool and order orders. They don’t pay much attention to basic daily necessities. The quality is OK, so worry-free. Consumer needs are diverse and even fragmented, but the demand for cheap is common. People want to buy high-quality and cheap things. People who are not sensitive to prices will not be in the face of absolute preferences. Hesitate to choose a cheaper one, as long as it is genuine and the quality is no problem. This reality, placed in the Chinese e-commerce market before the rise of Pinduoduo, is in serious conflict with the popular perception of "consumption upgrade". Around 2015, Ali and JD.com ranked first or two. Traditional retailers such as Suning and Gome, and vertical e-commerce companies such as Vipshop, Dangdang, and Koala were far behind. The arrogant JD.com felt that it would be able to surpass Ali's confidence lies in the user experience brought about by the quality, quality control and self-built logistics of the self-operated model.
At that time, Taobao was trapped in the quagmire of public opinion about fakes. In order to win this defensive battle, Taobao launched a severe anti-counterfeiting operation, saying that "240,000 counterfeit merchants were offline in one second." At the same time, Tmall (the original Taobao mall) ) Higher status and more resources will "brand" and "high-end" Taobao's C store and small and medium-sized B stores, covering high-end consumers and high-end brands. Looking back now, Ali’s strategy is very correct. It not only defended JD’s offense, but also found new growth points for itself. Brand e-commerce’s high customer unit price, high marketing budget, and supply chain, user experience, etc. The reliability of Alibaba has greatly increased the user scale and monetization rate of Alibaba, and Amoy e-commerce has become Alibaba's money printing machine. However, in the Ali ecosystem, resources are highly concentrated to the head, and the small and medium-sized C stores and B stores with larger bases have been abandoned, traffic is getting less and less, and business is becoming more and more difficult to do. And behind these small and medium businesses is China Those inconspicuous townships, factories and even family-style workshops in the manufacturing map do not understand channels, brands, and Internet marketing. They can only sell things through a layered intermediary system. go with. Just as Ali Jingdong believes that the core advantage of e-commerce compared to offline retail is no longer price, but a comprehensive user experience. In the vast fourth- and fifth-tier cities and rural markets, with the popularity and traffic of smart phones With the decline in tariffs, e-commerce has begun to slowly enter people’s lives. They are in the stage of starting from nothing, not from being good to good. Factory girls, massage brothers, salesmen and pawns, grandpa and aunts are more willing to pay lower prices. The prices are similar to those of offline stores. They have never heard of the big brands on Tmall and JD. Huang Zheng once said a very famous saying, “The consumption upgrade is not to let the Shanghainese live the lives of Parisians, but to let the Anqing people of Anqing have kitchen paper and good fruits to eat.” But in the subtleties of Chinese society, For example, in towns and villages, due to uneven information, scattered supply chains, and weak competition, in most cases, bad things are bought at high prices, and the quality is good, but there is no channel and brand, and they cannot be bought on Tmall Jingdong. Traffic merchants cannot sell their products at discounts. This is a serious mismatch between supply and demand. Just as "difficulties in recruiting" and "difficulties in employment" coexist in the job market, the general background of this mismatch is brought about by the dual structure of urban and rural areas in China. After all, things in the countryside are useless. Good things are sent to high-consumption places, and those in the city are sold to the townships. The so-called sinking market has become the "most ignored".
The existence of reverse transformation and subversion Pinduoduo has subverted the cognition of many people, especially middle-class people in first- and second-tier cities that have the right to speak on the Internet. Many people naturally think that “genuine products” are correct, fakes are unreasonable, and counterfeiting Selling fakes is the original sin. In trendy cultural circles such as JK and Hanfu, wearing cottages may cause psychological problems. In terms of the use value of consumer goods themselves, brands are only a premium, especially for many highly industrialized consumer goods, such as clothes, shoes and bags, and daily necessities. The price difference between brands is often much higher than the difference in product quality itself. . "They are all OEM production. Anyone who is engaged in clothing foreign trade knows that, except for the different brands, many clothes and shoes have no difference. They are all products of the same factory, the same assembly line, or even the same batch." A Yue, the person in charge of a factory shop in Pinduoduo, told Ran Caijing. The little K in the mixed shoe circle sighed, "The whole circle is complaining about Putian shoes, but you have to say that sometimes Putian shoes are more like genuine than real ones, and sometimes they have to be distinguished by quality control. The quality is poor. Genuine products." The higher the industrialization and standardization of industries, the quality of goods is similar, and the premium can only be based on the brand. This is the common sense of the supply chain, but the common sense of the supply side and the demand side are often opposite. On the demand side, people have the greatest Common sense is that "cheap is not good," and sometimes even willing to pay for more expensive products, because subconsciously believe that the quality, after-sales, and service of branded products are guaranteed.
Huang Zheng cited an example in his official account. For example, products such as air conditioners and Internet direct sales similar to Xiaomi can minimize the price, but it is not as good as Gree to give installers and channels enough profits. "Although it seems that channels The practice of increasing the price of goods, but in practice, channel and service costs may be the most economical and conscientious way to maintain a certain public understanding." But the role of the brand in the sinking market where Pinduoduo started does not apply. Buy The core decision-making factors of daily necessities are the price and the recommendation of relatives and friends. Pinduoduo relies on WeChat and uses the group-join model to replace brand endorsements with social trust endorsements. At the same time, deterministic needs are negotiated with businesses. The use of credit in exchange for price transfer has solved these two problems at the same time. "For example, there are a thousand people who thought of buying a down jacket of a certain style in winter in summer, and they wrote a joint order to a manufacturer, and they were willing to pay 10% at last year's price. % Deposit. In this case, it is very likely that the factory is willing to give them a 30% discount, because the factory has obtained a certainty of demand from their joint order that it did not have. This certainty can be upwards By extension, the factory can sell this certainty to upstream and supporting manufacturers in exchange for further reduction of factory costs." Huang Zheng said. This is Pinduoduo's model. According to Huang Zheng's definition, it is "using the semi-planned economy on the demand and circulation side to promote the semi-market economy on the supply side". In the economic model of Pinduoduo, buyers and sellers must be mutually beneficial. The promotion cost and operating cost of merchants are reduced due to the concentrated demand determined by consumers. The price is lowered, and consumers receive benefits. Therefore, Pinduoduo takes SKU as the core and does not engage in Store promotion and operation, backed by the huge shipments provided by WeChat and the group-joining model, allows factories to set production on a per-sale basis, which solves the risk of overcapacity and inventory, and allows merchants to make small profits but quicker sales, and survive on only one product . Pinduoduo official Weibo/Source
Cheng Bai, who sells women's clothing in Pinduoduo, told Ran Caijing that the two cooling down after Double 11 only sold nearly 2,000 orders for a down jacket in their shop. Others, such as trousers, which were sold better in summer, etc. Sales are bleak, "We can't actually produce such a concentrated demand, and the delivery will be slower. The return rate in the middle is relatively high, but it is always better than Taobao." In Cheng Bai's perception, Pinduoduo users still care about it. It is an absolute low price, but more and more attention is paid to clothing material, delivery, after-sales and other issues, which forces them to increase production efficiency and innovate management models at the factory side. "Control costs and maintain low prices to obtain sufficient exposure. "Alibaba’s basic plate is the KA major customer, followed by the top brand. Pinduoduo is the opposite. The user is the basic plate. Merchants are in a weak position. Most of the user’s dissatisfaction with Pinduoduo is caused by false sales. Huang Zheng is very good at thinking in the opposite direction. The logic of traditional supermarkets and traditional e-commerce is to use high-frequency white-brand daily necessities to drive traffic, and to make money from low-frequency brand-name products with high customer unit prices. "Low frequency" situation, but Pinduoduo uses "low frequency to high frequency" to make a profit of tens of billions of subsidies, and then use white cards to increase GMV. A practitioner close to Ali said with emotion, "Pinduoduo has subverted the logic of the industry. In the past, we always felt that the sinking market will gradually upgrade consumption. The new e-commerce users cultivated by Pinduoduo will eventually come to Tmall Taobao and rely on agricultural products. And low-end supply chains, Pinduoduo will never make money. I didn’t expect that the first and second-tier markets are being eaten by Pinduoduo." Pinduoduo, which spans two worlds, is not good at e-commerce operations and supply chain management. , Platform governance, etc., but "interaction". It is like a translator that translates "information" such as factors of production, resources, and needs into a format that the other party can understand, reducing communication costs, but it does not eliminate the two worlds themselves. The estrangement, this kind of "translation" error, also makes the outside world full of controversy about the evaluation of Pinduoduo.
The incomprehensible Pinduoduo
Even now, many people still have the impression that Pinduoduo is "selling bargains". The reason for the cheapness is nothing more than fakes or subsidies, which are exclusively for consumption degraded groups and sinking market users. Once the subsidy is cancelled, the counterfeit goods will not be treated, and the fight for more will end. Investor Lin Bin, who has been heavily involved in Pinduoduo, has a mentality that is almost gambling. He used to be confused by the various opinions in the market, and then simply closed his earplugs and listened, "As long as my parents are still using Pinduoduo, I will not throw it away. "
An e-commerce industry analyst said frankly that Pinduoduo does not conform to the existing analysis framework. "Most of the products on the market are evolving positively, behind the law of causality, and Pinduoduo is reversed. Two years ago, I firmly believed that This model is unsustainable, but now Pinduoduo has changed the external environment to make it reasonable." Huang Zheng is in awe of Buddhism, and he is also very interested in quantum mechanics. He also believes in the mathematical physicist Godel. The incompleteness theorem means that in a self-consistent system composed of finite axioms, there will always be propositions that cannot be inferred by this logical system as true or false.
Whether it is the impermanence of Buddhism, the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, or the incompleteness theorem of mathematics, it all shows one thing: the whole world and life are unknowable and uncertain, and it is impossible to describe the world with limited rules and logic. Yes, at least not perfect. "I vaguely feel that what I see is largely determined by how I look at it. The part may describe the whole, although the whole is unknowable." Huang Zheng said. From this point of view, Huang Zheng is also a practitioner of "because I believe, so I see", but unlike those who believe that man can conquer the sky and are blindly optimistic, he has a clear understanding of himself and Pinduoduo: "People can change The things are very limited, but people must have the courage to face this common sense, make rational judgments, and transfer the interest in achieving a perfect self to external objective things." Therefore, Huang Zheng’s style of behavior is to respect common sense. Under the premise of being truthful and objective, we will try our best to make some changes through our due diligence. Although most people like CEOs who tell stories in the capital market and public opinion, in limited public occasions, Huang Zheng’s expressions are very simple He analyzed the current environment at a glance, and what Pinduoduo could try to do, but he had never made a ticket, saying what it would be like. Pinduoduo’s corporate culture is exactly the same as Huang Zheng’s personality. Employees only have extremely limited information rights. “You can do what you want, and you don’t have to ask so much.” A former employee said she felt like she was doing Pinduoduo. Individuals cannot gain a sense of accomplishment from the development of the company because they simply sell their labor force without full participation or creation. Huang Zheng has set the goal. He needs the team to work together to avoid the adverse effects of human uncertainty. Therefore, he has established a centralized, low-level, and single-line reporting management mechanism. People are people who listen to commands and understand obedience. "Pingduoduo, who is in the center of the vortex, needs such organizational stability. No one can shake the morale of the army, or you will be disbanded. After all, the controversy you are facing or the things you need to do are mostly not understood. How can you expect people in first-tier cities, with considerable income, and the right to speak, to understand the mentality of the rural elder sister who knows that it is fake and still buys it?" said an investor. For a long time, the disputes of Pinduoduo will continue to exist, and the road to reform the supply chain is also long. The problem of fakes will exist for a long time. As long as Huang Zheng said, control the bad currency in a benign system. Within the scope of purification ability, the nature of the system will not be changed. In the two worlds, Pinduoduo can only gradually bring the two worlds closer together by covering more user groups and maintaining the benefits of cheap goods. . Only then will Pinduoduo be truly accepted and understood.The title map comes from Visual China. At the request of the interviewee, Orange, Ayue, Xiaok, Cheng Bai, and Lin Bin in the article are all pseudonyms. Disclaimer: Under any circumstances, the information or opinions expressed in this article do not constitute investment advice to anyone.