I spent 30 days in Pinduoduo's live broadcast room and discovered these secrets...

After spending 30 days on Pinduoduo, I discovered that they actually have these secrets. This article will help you explore their secrets. This article is also recommended to newbies who want to do live streaming sales on Pinduoduo, so that you can read together and discover the secrets of live streaming sales on the Pinduoduo platform.

Huang Zheng’s “Disney” metaphor has become more concrete on the Pinduoduo platform.

The combination of "Costco + Disney" is what Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, imagines for the future of Pinduoduo: a new space where the virtual space on the Internet and the real world merge. On one side is the material world, and on the other side is the spiritual world.

But in the past two years, when Pinduoduo's financial performance has repeatedly exceeded market expectations and its revenue and profits have continued to soar, the public has always talked about how it has achieved the ultimate cost-effectiveness by refining supply and eliminating excess, but few people mention its "Disney" side.

In fact, as Huang Zheng said in an interview with Caijing, "In addition to meeting people's basic material needs, we have also done a lot of product design and operation to meet people's different spiritual consumption needs, such as impulse consumption, rational consumption, and venting consumption. This is why Pinduoduo can still attract consumers to come back in the face of homogeneous competition."

Now, the "Duoduo Video" listed alongside the homepage in the Pinduoduo APP can, to some extent, be seen as a concrete version of "Disney" created by Pinduoduo for users. It not only covers live broadcasts, short videos and other content, but also recently added an independent "short drama" channel.

Everything points to the length of time users stay on the platform, which ultimately leads to growth. (Click here to view more content on the short drama channel, "The short drama about the overbearing CEO has been on Pinduoduo, with over 90 million views!")

Among them, the business that is most directly linked to growth in Duoduo Video is live streaming, which connects content on one end and sales on the other.

In July last year, Duoduo Live replaced Duoduo Video and was promoted to the first-level entrance position in the grayscale test. In addition to the fresh food and clothing industries, Duoduo Live has also started to expand into all categories.

Nearly a year after launching full-category investment promotion, how has Pinduoduo's live streaming business developed? Compared with Taobao, Douyin and other platforms, what is its uniqueness?

1. Live streaming of mid-priced products is also selling well

"What fabric is this made of? Is it silk?" a user asked in a women's clothing live broadcast room on Pinduoduo.

"Imitation acetate fabric, can you buy real silk for a few dozen yuan? Impossible. Ours is imitation acetate fabric, everyone is not stupid, I can't lie to you, right? A shirt that costs 79 yuan can't be real silk."

The host Mimi was busy trying on and explaining the various clothes in the live broadcast room. At the same time, she did not forget to keep an eye on the continuous stream of comments in the live broadcast room, and responded to users' comments enthusiastically and honestly in between her explanations.

"Someone asked if it would fade? It faded. Would it pill? It pilled. People were more willing to accept it if we said it out loud." She added: "The anchor may lie, but the sales volume will not. We sold more than 1,300 pieces of this model."

During the live broadcast for several hours, Mimi not only understood the user pain points such as "whether it makes you look thin", "whether the fabric is comfortable", and "whether it shows your belly", but also showed and explained the products in detail to users in the role of a professional anchor. She also "chatted" with users like a friend. For example, she even remembered the weight of an old user in the live broadcast room, and chatted with him while trying on clothes: "Weren't you more than 130 pounds before? How did you lose weight now?"

Although the clothes in the live broadcast room have been discounted by 50% after the call of "321 link", a shirt at 79 yuan and a pair of pants at 79 yuan are still not considered the "cheapest" on the entire Pinduoduo platform.

After all, when you search for the keyword of imitation acetate shirt on the Pinduoduo platform, the top search results are similar to the above-mentioned shirts in material and style, with polyester fiber (the main component of imitation acetate fabric), long sleeves, POLO collar, single-breasted and multi-buttoned, solid color, simple commuter style products, with unit prices of more than 20, 30, or 40 yuan. However, there are products priced at 79 yuan or more, but they are ranked relatively low in the search results and their sales volume is far less than the above-mentioned low-priced products.

Products that appear after searching for the keyword "imitation acetate shirt"

Unlike the outside world that often equates "low price" with Pinduoduo, observing the hourly sales charts in the live broadcast rooms, we can see that in the sports trends, women's boutiques, trendy shoes and boots, home life, men's clothing selection, beauty and skin care, fashion and beauty charts, the products sold in the live broadcast rooms at the top of the charts include sun protection clothing at more than 200 yuan per piece and T-shirts at around 10 yuan; there are whitening essences at 13 yuan/30ml and repair essences at more than 270 yuan/30ml...

Relatively speaking, products in the mid-range price range also have good sales performance in Pinduoduo's live broadcast room. Yibang learned that merchants like the above who sell "relatively high-priced" products (compared to the average price of most similar products on the main site) in the live broadcast room are not isolated cases.

A women's clothing store with an average customer spending of 200-300 yuan can have a maximum daily sales of more than 400,000 yuan if it broadcasts for 6 hours a day, and its monthly sales can reach about 4 million yuan.

Another clothing merchant whose products are priced between 299 yuan and 999 yuan only joined Pinduoduo Live in November last year and started to build its account through paid traffic. On the fifth day after the launch, the live broadcast GMV exceeded 500,000.

According to Yibang's observation, although the items in these live broadcast rooms are not "extremely cheap", like most Pinduoduo live broadcast rooms, the anchors often create an atmosphere of "cheap and extremely cost-effective" in the live broadcast rooms.

Pinduoduo live broadcast room is selling clothing

The anchors will repeatedly claim that the prices of the products they sell are cheap and favorable enough, and that the quantity of the products is limited, so that the products will be sold out as soon as they are put on the shelves, leaving line after line of comments urging for restocking.

Some anchors even explain: "My cheap prices don't mean the products are bad, I just want to give you a low price. I have to sell them even if I lose a little."

This is similar to Huang Zheng's previous definition of Pinduoduo as "high cost performance". As he said, "Low prices are just a way for us to acquire users in stages. Pinduoduo has a deeper understanding of cost performance than most platforms - that is, it is always beyond consumers' expectations. Our core is not 'cheap', but to satisfy users' feeling of getting a bargain."

This still applies in Pinduoduo's live broadcast room.

In Pinduoduo's brand live broadcast list, the top 50 are mostly occupied by digital home appliance brands such as Midea, Xiaomi, Little Swan, and Ecovacs, and some beauty and skin care, clothing, food, and household chemicals brands are also among them.

Some brands on the live streaming list at different times during the 618 promotion

This may be closely related to the fact that Pinduoduo Live has increased its support for home appliance brands this year. Yibang learned that from 2024, Pinduoduo's home appliance live broadcast commission will be reduced by 1% across the board, as low as 0.4%. At the same time, if users enter the live broadcast room from the merchant's private domain traffic entrance, such as the product details page or the store details page, no commission will be deducted.

At the same time, Pinduoduo also has special support plans for categories such as kitchen appliances and household appliances. In addition to advertising red envelopes ranging from 200 to 800 yuan, Pinduoduo will also provide rebates of 4% to 8% of the merchant's live broadcast sales.

In addition, Pinduoduo has also opened up short video permissions for Duoduo live broadcast companions for household appliances, kitchen appliances, and personal care and health care categories. This means that the above-mentioned types of merchants can insert short videos in the live broadcast room to more intuitively display product functions and improve conversion rates.

Digital home appliances may be divided into high-end and low-end in terms of price, but the overall customer unit price is still much higher than other categories of products. Yibang observed that in the recent live broadcast of Xiaomi flagship store, the mainstream products are Xiaomi Civi 4, Xiaomi Civi 4 Pro, Redmi Note 13 Pro, Redmi 13C and other series, with prices ranging from 649 yuan to 2999 yuan, focusing on "cost performance". However, Xiaomi's high-end model Xiaomi 14 Ultra, which was launched in February this year and priced at more than 6499 yuan, is not included in the live broadcast.

2. The ultimate cost-effectiveness vividly demonstrated

Although there are many big brands and "relatively high-priced" products, according to the tracking results of Yibang, the current live broadcasts on Pinduoduo are still dominated by white-label merchants or products such as industrial belts, and the product prices are relatively low. This is consistent with the basic inventory of Pinduoduo's main site, and this is also the result of Pinduoduo's live broadcast supporting "low-priced good products".

Yibang learned that in the first half of this year, Pinduoduo will give real-time traffic weighting to live broadcasts selling flash sales products. After the products in the merchant's store are registered for flash sales through live broadcasts, the anchors who broadcast or sell the products can get rewards. Among them, the most important requirement for registered products is the lowest price of the same product in the entire site. When the flash sales products in the live broadcast room have sold more than 10,000 in the past 3 days, and the product is in the small red box in the live broadcast room, a large amount of traffic weighting can be obtained on that day.

Generally speaking, merchants who focus on selling products with the ultimate cost-effectiveness tend to find it easy to start a live streaming account on Pinduoduo.

For example, there is a merchant who mainly sells clearance shoes in the footwear industry. His products are all clearance shoes with prices ranging from 8.9 yuan to 39.9 yuan. After joining Pinduoduo Live, the number of views for a single show exceeded 500,000 within a week of its launch. As a new account, the number of views for a single show can reach around 100,000.

Yibang learned that in the early stage of the account, the merchant started broadcasting in the early morning every day to avoid the time period with high competition. A merchant revealed that the first peak of Pinduoduo live broadcast is about 6-10 am, the small peak in the afternoon is 11:30-14 pm, and the second peak is the evening peak, concentrated between 18-24 pm. For novice merchants, when the weight, fans and traffic of the new account are unstable, staggered competition is a better choice.

At the same time, the "extreme cost-effective" discontinued products also helped the above-mentioned merchants attract a lot of natural traffic. Initially, the merchant's daily broadcast time was about 4 hours, but it was gradually increased to 8-12 hours, because the live broadcast time will largely affect the weight of the live broadcast room account.

In fact, most of Pinduoduo's live broadcast rooms have long and stable broadcast times, with a daily broadcast time of 8 hours or even more. At the same time, there are emotional anchors, who not only have rich body language, but some are even passionate. While selling goods, they do not forget to actively interact with consumers, trying to keep every "passing by" user and make them pay for the goods they are selling.

At the same time, these anchors are often well aware of the user's pain points and use on-site demonstrations to dispel user doubts. Take a live broadcast of a laundry detergent factory at the source of the industry as an example. The anchor's demonstration process is not to point at the laundry detergent packaging to introduce how good the ingredients are, but to tell users the effect of the product by showing a white T-shirt that changes from flawless white to "black" and then back to flawless white.

In the live studio, the anchor's demonstration process is often like this: first dye a white T-shirt with ink, soy sauce, etc. into colorful colors, and finally turn it black; then try to wash it with other brands of laundry detergent, but the effect is not good; finally use their own products, and wash it with several basins of clean water, and finally the white T-shirt returns to its original appearance. Some anchors will even take a sip of the clean water when changing it later and then spit it out to show that it is just ordinary clean water without adding anything else.

The difference before and after using the product

In summary, it is to create suspense in the live broadcast room first, and then present a straightforward and exposed effect to attract consumers to stay. In addition to vigorously showing whether the washing is clean, the anchor will also explain the points that consumers care about, such as fragrance, whether it can be machine washed or water washed, and whether it is cheaper to stock up. It is revealed that this laundry detergent factory at the source of the industrial belt broadcasts for more than 12 hours a day on average, and the highest transaction in a single game exceeds 500,000.

In Pinduoduo live broadcasts, many merchants in industrial belts often choose warehouses as the live broadcast background to create an atmosphere of first-hand sales at the place of origin and highlight the wholesale advantages of merchants. At the same time, in categories such as clothing, shoes and accessories that require anchors to try on and try on, these emotional anchors often adopt a fast-paced live broadcast method to create a tense rhythm of grabbing orders, thereby speeding up user order conversion. Because, for users in the live broadcast room, if they are a few minutes slower, the skirt or coat that the anchor looks like will be sold out.

Live broadcast room with "warehouse" as the background

After all, under Pinduoduo's consumer-friendly policies such as "refund only" and "free shipping for returns", returns or refunds do not cost too much.

According to industry insiders, the main audience of Duoduo Video is the lower-tier market population aged 35 and above, mainly young women and wealthy women in small towns. Their motivation for browsing short videos is often to kill time, find interesting content and get red envelopes.

Therefore, compared to the fast-paced life of white-collar workers in first- and second-tier cities, the time spent on returning goods, buying new ones, returning goods again, and finally buying the desired goods is not a rare cost for small town ladies. Because what they lack the most is time.

3. “Personality” is content

In the field of live streaming e-commerce, Taobao has Li Jiaqi, Douyin has Crazy Brother Yang, Kuaishou has the Simba family, and even JD.com has its own live streaming room for purchasing and sales. However, since its launch, Pinduoduo Live does not seem to have a top anchor of its own.

Despite this, there is no shortage of talented anchors with unique characteristics on the Pinduoduo site.

For example, the "Emerald Bald Brother" who mainly sells jewelry, mainly plays the role of a boss, calling himself a "modern jade carving craftsman wandering in the jade market", and guides users to place orders through the passionate output of detailed and professional content about jade in the live broadcast room. It is revealed that the average monthly customer unit price can reach about 2,000 yuan.

Another expert who is as passionate and infectious as "Emerald Bald Brother" is "Yu Zhuangzhuang", who directly wrote in his self-introduction "It's as real as a piece of iron. If you spend less, I will earn less..." In his live broadcast room, the goods he sells include bedding, nourishing health products, cosmetics, clothing and other categories. When explaining the content, he always calls them "sisters" affectionately. It is observed that the number of viewers of his live broadcasts has exceeded 100,000 in recent days.

On May 30, a stainless steel frying pan sold by "Yu Zhuangzhuang"

Yibang learned from industry insiders that on Pinduoduo, the host’s personality is crucial to the sales of the live broadcast room.

Specifically, a persona is constructed from multiple attributes such as image, identity, expertise, and ability. "A good anchor must be authentic, professional, and friendly."

"Realism means that the host's image, tone, etc. must give users a 'similar' feeling, achieving the effect of a 'worker' looking like a worker, and an 'expert' looking like an 'expert'." The above-mentioned person gave an example, for example, it is best for pet hosts to have raised pets, so that they can achieve emotional resonance with the audience; the teeth of oral hosts must be neat and white, giving people a very refreshing feeling overall.

"Professionalism" means that the anchor not only needs to remember a set of live broadcast scripts, but also needs to have a professional knowledge system in the industry. For example, when an anchor with children at home sells maternal and child products, he or she can answer the audience's questions and solve the problems in a targeted manner, thereby enhancing the sense of trust.

"Intimacy" is similar to an actor's "appeal to the audience": "The host's speech is not mechanical, but the host is able to put himself in other people's shoes, understand other people's emotions, and express the needs and solutions for the target fans."

At present, the traffic distribution logic of Pinduoduo's live broadcast system is horse racing logic, which means that among the live broadcast rooms broadcast in the same time period, when the merchant's live broadcast room data runs better (the faster the horse runs), the better the traffic will be, and sales will increase.

Among them, the data includes four key indicators: order volume (concentrated orders), GMV, live broadcast room interaction and user stay time, and new fans following.

Some merchants revealed that the official waiter would advise merchants who have just started their accounts or live broadcasts to pay more attention to the order volume and total order volume, "so that the algorithm can learn more behaviors, increase accuracy in the short term and increase volume." For merchants in the growth stage or with a rapid increase in the number of live broadcasts, they need to consider increasing the GMV per viewer so that the GMV can take on traffic and maintain order data so that the algorithm can continue to learn.

"How to reduce manual intervention in the rules" is a question that once troubled Huang Zheng in 2018, but it seems that it is no longer a problem now. As he said at the time, "Pinduoduo will change from manual selection to selection by algorithms and machines in the future." Now, algorithms are integrated into every design of the Pinduoduo platform, including Pinduoduo's live broadcast business.

Under the monitoring of the established system algorithm, it is particularly important for merchants to do a good job in Pinduoduo live broadcasting and not violate the corresponding rules. A waiter once emphasized to merchants: "We must pay enough attention to violations. If multiple stores associated with a store group have low prices and low quality violations, they will also be removed from the public domain traffic."

"If you create good content, short-term rapid growth will rely on a combination of paid and free services, but long-term business explosion will require reliance on goods and supply chains," an industry insider concluded.

Unlike the main site, for merchants operating on Pinduoduo Live or the entire Duoduo Video, the core driving force is first of all "the impact and credibility of the content, and secondly the cost-effective price that can directly lead to conversions."

Compared with Douyin and Kuaishou, which started out as content-based platforms, or Taobao and JD.com, which increased their investments early on, Pinduoduo’s disadvantage in live streaming is as obvious as its advantage in shelf e-commerce. Therefore, Pinduoduo is also increasing its efforts to introduce anchors from outside the site.

Yibang learned that in the latest "New Super Star Support Plan", Pinduoduo will give new anchors a preferential policy of "exemption from live broadcast technical service fees". When the anchor's daily live broadcast GMV exceeds 20,000, advertising red envelope rewards will be given according to 10% of the GMV amount.

Specific reward rules for the "New Super Star Support Plan"

In this support plan, Pinduoduo divides the anchors who can receive incentives into S-level and A-level. Taking the basic A-level anchor support requirements as an example, in addition to the account's store level exceeding 5 on the site, it only needs to have a cumulative live broadcast transaction amount of more than 300,000 yuan for 30 consecutive days on off-site platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Taobao in the past six months. Among them, flowers and pets only need monthly sales of more than 30,000 yuan. 14 subcategories such as kitchen and household appliances, beauty tools, home textiles, sportswear, bags and shoes, food and health care only need to meet monthly sales of more than 100,000 yuan.

It is reported that a merchant selling hot products on Douyin started live streaming on Pinduoduo at the end of March this year, taking advantage of the platform's new Super Star policy support. After six days of live streaming with the new account, the number of viewers exceeded 400,000 and the number of orders exceeded 1,000.

Not only that, since the beginning of this year, Pinduoduo has also launched the "New Anchor Start-up Plan" for new anchors on the platform. There is no registration threshold. In addition to incentives for starting broadcasts and traffic support, if the daily live broadcast transaction volume exceeds 100 yuan, there will be a chance to receive an advertising red envelope reward of up to 10,000 yuan.

During the "618" promotion, which is a battleground for e-commerce, Pinduoduo Live also launched the "618 Brand Support Campaign" to attract investment from KA brand merchants.

Yibang learned that brand anchors who successfully sign up and participate in the "618 Brand Support Event" can receive free traffic support, and if they complete the corresponding sales volume in the week, they can receive advertising red envelope rewards in the next week. Among them, a single anchor can receive up to 7,000 yuan in advertising red envelopes and tens of millions of free traffic support if his weekly broadcast reaches 500,000 yuan. At the same time, Pinduoduo also has a series of support plans for the 618 promotion, such as the "Fuyao Plan" and "Live Flash Drop", and has launched a special 618 promotion live broadcast list.

618 promotion, PROYA official flagship store is live streaming

In a report by "LatePost", a Pinduoduo insider said that Douyin is the platform with the greatest chance of imitating Pinduoduo's low prices because it has more than twice the traffic of Pinduoduo. If it copies Pinduoduo's inventory and then uses traffic to "control merchants", it will be able to offer extremely low prices.

For this reason, Douyin has been sparing no effort to tilt traffic towards low prices this year in order to grab market share and gain growth. Now, it seems that Pinduoduo is also trying to grab the share of live e-commerce from Douyin.

Just like how Huang Zheng described the competition between Pinduoduo and Taobao at that time: "Alibaba, JD.com, Didi and Meituan, they are competing in an imperial manner, with clear territorial boundaries. But I don’t think our generation should think like this. Pinduoduo and Taobao are more like two different dimensions that are slowly merging. Pinduoduo uses Alipay and Cainiao." Judging from Duoduo Live and Douyin Mall, the same is true for Pinduoduo and Douyin now.

Author: Tian Yu; Editor: Shi Hangqian

Source: WeChat public account "Ebrun Power (ID: iebrun)"