Pinduoduo, the "uncut" live broadcast room

The development of live broadcasting rooms in 2022 can be said to be in full swing, and it is not uncommon for anchors who bring goods to become popular overnight. Now that the traffic of the entire e-commerce industry has gradually reached its ceiling, even Pinduoduo is facing the dilemma of slowing user growth. If it cannot carve out a path in the live broadcast e-commerce track, what else can Pinduoduo rely on?

Faced with the booming live streaming scene, Pinduoduo seems to have fallen behind.

At present, although live streaming sales has entered the second half, its popularity remains unabated, and there are many live streaming hosts who become popular overnight.

However, in the field of live streaming e-commerce, among the three major e-commerce platforms, Taobao, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, Pinduoduo is the only one missing.

1. E-commerce live streaming is slow

Judging from the timeline alone, Pinduoduo's live streaming is much slower than Taobao.

As we all know, Taobao Live started trial operation in March 2016, and the live platform was officially launched in May of the same year. However, Pinduoduo's first online live broadcast took place in November 2019, more than three years later than Taobao.

One step slow, all steps slow. Taobao Live started to rise, and the gap between it and Pinduoduo became wider and wider.

It is worth mentioning that 2019 was also the year when live streaming e-commerce ushered in an explosion, with top anchors such as Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya beginning to stand out. It was in this year that Taobao Live's GMV exceeded 200 billion, while Kuaishou and Douyin achieved 60 billion and 40 billion respectively.

▲Image source: Li Jiaqi's Taobao live broadcast room

Of course, it would be fine if it was just a few steps slower than other platforms. When the live broadcast event was just started in 2019, the live broadcast entrance of the Pinduoduo APP with hundreds of billions of subsidies was not even a service plug-in. It did not have a separate live broadcast entrance, which made many users not very interested in it.

A very obvious contrast is that on April 12, 2020, the well-known basketball star Marbury landed on Pinduoduo and held his first personal live broadcast to sell goods.

▲Image source: Pinduoduo official Weibo

However, within the one-hour live broadcast, there were only 21,000 viewers and 158 items were sold, which can be said to be quite bleak statistics. Compared with Luo Yonghao's performance on Douyin with over 48 million views and over 100 million yuan in sales during the same period, there is a world of difference.

Although Pinduoduo later tried hard to introduce various remedial plans, such as adding a first-level entrance for live streaming, opening MCN agencies, inviting celebrities to join, and even fully leveraging its own social e-commerce attributes and "decentralizing" live streaming rights, these have never caused much waves.

Today, Douyin and Kuaishou have formed a "three-legged race" with Taobao in the field of live streaming sales. Under the pressure from these giants, Pinduoduo's road to e-commerce live streaming will only become more difficult.

2. Why can’t it be done?

If it weren’t for Huang Zheng’s definition of the attributes of live streaming tools within the company, perhaps Pinduoduo’s live streaming e-commerce business would be a completely different story. After all, in comparison, Pinduoduo’s own advantages can be said to be quite obvious.

First of all, Pinduoduo has a large user base. After years of rapid development, Pinduoduo's original slogan has long changed from "300 million people are fighting" to "700 million people are fighting." Judging from the number of active buyers alone, Pinduoduo is second only to Taobao in the entire e-commerce field.

As we all know, active users have always been a core asset for Internet companies. If Pinduoduo can attract active users when entering the live e-commerce field, it may have a good chance of catching up.

The second is the "cut one knife" model that Pinduoduo is proud of. Compared with traditional shelf e-commerce, it has an additional layer of social attributes. This feature also enables Pinduoduo to achieve crazy dissemination through WeChat, making it more handy in acquiring traffic.

It’s just a pity that Huang Zheng has always defined the role of live streaming for Pinduoduo as a marketing tool, which is more inclined to help platform merchants gain traffic, and Pinduoduo has always done so in the early stages.

For example, the live broadcast entrances that were previously relatively scattered, and the cooperation with Kuaishou was only to vigorously promote the merchant's product links, and the live broadcast activities of sending red envelopes and drawing free orders were to attract audience retention.

However, since 2020, Pinduoduo seems to no longer be satisfied with its positioning as a marketing tool. Pinduoduo has also placed the live broadcast business in a strategic position, but it is too late.

All major live streaming e-commerce platforms have fully grown up, with Taobao in the front and Douyin and Kuaishou behind. The top anchors have been divided up by these platforms, and Pinduoduo’s situation can be said to be very embarrassing.

Of course, one point that cannot be ignored is that in the first half of live streaming e-commerce, the competition was more about price advantage, but Pinduoduo once relied on "10 billion subsidies" to dominate the market, and it can no longer take a more cost-effective route.

▲Image source: Pinduoduo APP

Regarding Pinduoduo live broadcast, many consumers said: "If you want to buy something, just search and order it on the platform. The price is the lowest, so there is no need to watch the live broadcast."

3. Are there any other “back-up plans”?

In fact, Pinduoduo is now facing a situation of "internal and external troubles".

Domestic users have basically been completely swept away by Pinduoduo's magical spread, and it is difficult to have substantial user growth in the short term; and as traffic gradually reaches its ceiling, more and more merchants choose to leave and return to Taobao.

The typical reason is that for merchants, the continued low prices on Pinduoduo will largely affect the sales of their own products at full prices. In the second half of live e-commerce, the competition is no longer about price but supply chain, and Taobao will have more advantages.

In addition, Pinduoduo has to face competition from short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, so it is obvious that it also needs to make changes.

At the beginning of this year, Duoduo Video was moved to the first-level entrance of the mobile APP homepage by Pinduoduo. Judging from the content, most of them are reposted videos, and Pinduoduo was even criticized for "copying Duoduo".

▲Image source: Pinduoduo APP

As live streaming e-commerce is hindered and short video content is not feasible, Pinduoduo has set its sights on seeking a second option for increasing e-commerce platforms besides live streaming, which is cross-border business.

Judging from the information released so far, Pinduoduo's cross-border e-commerce platform Temu has achieved good results in its first overseas expansion.

It is reported that Temu became the most popular Android shopping app two weeks after its launch in the United States; on September 17, it even surpassed Amazon and SHEIN in the Google Play Store to become the No. 1 in daily downloads.

Many American consumers have shared unboxing videos of products they purchased on Temu on social media, such as $0.99 faucets and $2.99 ​​headphones, which have attracted exclamations from many people.

▲Image source: Temu

At the same time, in terms of talent reserves, Pinduoduo is also continuing to recruit for Temu, and it can be said that Pinduoduo has high hopes for cross-border business.

Currently, there are more than 15,000 merchants on the Temu platform. Although there is still a big gap in product categories and quantities compared with the domestic Pinduoduo platform, the number of goods has been increasing rapidly.

Of course, Pinduoduo has not completely given up on live streaming e-commerce and is trying to seize more market share in the sinking markets "outside the Fifth Ring Road".

Pinduoduo, which lacks the short video gene, cannot currently survive on its own relying on Duoduo Video.

Author: Li Dawei

Source: WeChat public account "Internet Brand Official (ID: szwanba)"