Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
You may not believe it when you say it. Recently, a new force made in China has directly entered the hinterland of large consumption in the United States and directly fought with Amazon, and it is still 55%.
What the bad reviewer said is none other than Temu, the overseas version of Pinduoduo, the most controversial e-commerce platform in China.
Pinduoduo’s “sister version” Temu, which only landed in the United States on September 1, occupied the top one-day download of shopping apps in the U.S. Android App Store and Google Play Store in mid-September, surpassing Amazon and SHEIN.
On October 18th, Temu, which had been in the United States for less than 50 days, directly topped the App Store’s shopping app download number one in a single day, conquering noble Apple users.
In just over a month, it has become the second most popular shopping app after Amazon, with a fierce momentum.
The second largest e-commerce company in the United States, SHEIN, which has 120 million users, even directly opened a red alert: requiring some core suppliers to make a “choose one” exclusive cooperation requirement, which was really stepped on.
It has to be said that Temu’s “sparks and lightning” pinduoduo-style speed is hard not to think of Pinduoduo’s series of “social fission” methods in China, especially the widely circulated and criticized “cutting” One Knife” campaign.
Is Pinduoduo “opening up again”?
Unfortunately, due to legal considerations and other factors, Pinduoduo is still hesitant to fully replicate the crazy routines such as slashing a knife.
But with all due respect, this time Pinduoduo is no longer the dark horse in the industry that needs to overtake in corners. This time there is no showy operation in the sea, and it all depends on hard power.
What is the hard power of pdd? On the surface it is banknote capacity.
The absence of “Chop a Knife” did not prevent Temu from accelerating the promotion of the app.
For U.S. users, Temu also followed the local tradition and started a social fission of “users pull new commissions”.
On overseas social platforms, some users said: “As long as a new user accepts my Temu invitation, I can get a commission of $20.”
It has to be said that although Americans are not good at mathematics, they are not ambiguous when it comes to picking up wool.
Under the Temu pulling new tutorial video of a tiktok celebrity, an old brother calmly left a message and said, “I spend 200 knives on Temu a day.”
According to the bonus of 20 dollars per 5 people, it is equivalent to 50 new users. My evaluation is: there is still room for improvement.
In addition to the tutorials that teach people how to cut wool seriously, there are also many confusing “ghost animals” pulling new dances that are all the rage.
It is recommended to add a title: Why does the black brother dance late at night, please search for the mysterious code 18xx55.
There are even those who want to turn “pinduoduo wool” into a regular job.
On the US reddit forum, someone posted a message seeking new Temu users and promised to reward everyone with $2. (It’s divided into 19, it’s really dark)
To this end, I looked at the 100 billion cash and its equivalents on Pinduoduo’s balance sheet, which is enough for Temu to subsidize 10 billion for 10 years. All I can say is, old Americans, please step up your efforts.
But just throwing coins can’t stand it.
Pulling new ones is an old routine, and since ancient times, the most troublesome problem for apps that can throw coins has to be “user retention”.
The last such crazy promotion was the short video software Zynn launched by Kuaishou in the United States to “become TikTok”, and it only lived for more than 400 days.
Therefore, I am afraid of everything, and I am most afraid of meat buns hitting dogs.
Only by throwing money scientifically can it really become hard.
On this point, no one has more say than the “ten billion subsidy” for three years, but the net profit margin is the highest in the e-commerce circle.
According to the observation of the poor reviewer, the details of Pinduoduo’s “scientific coining” are actually very rich.
First of all, we have to use “insanely low prices” to break consumers’ rationality and cultivate consumption habits.
Everyone who makes apps knows how to cultivate user habits, but no one is more ruthless than Duoduo.
Temu launched a “Grand Opening” event in September, with a 1-cent shopping privilege at the beginning, and each account can spend 1 cent on an item in a specific section.
It is even more conscientious than the activity of the king of pesticides in the goose factory, “1 Head of State Charges Zhao Yun”.
Later, it was even directly free, and it can only be said that the pattern of Temu is too big.
From the point of view of the subsequent shopping experience, Temu has beaten Amazon, the king of American e-commerce.
The “cabbage price” of the whole product is generally 1/10 of the price of similar products in Amazon.
The most exaggerated thing is that at this price, there are still many users who say that the quality is good.
Not only Amazon, but also the most cost-effective e-commerce brand SHEIN, regardless of style, is still not Temu’s opponent in terms of price.
For the price of SHEIN dresses generally above 2 digits, Temu’s answer is: as long as 3 yuan, 9 hair and 9.
This way, needless to say, users in the United States are completely crazy.
Although low prices are the norm on the Internet, it is often not low prices that retain users, because there is no minimum, only lower.
And the low price of Temu is different. His low price is not the price, but the dimension, the kind that cannot be measured by thinking.
For example, some consumers have already played the thrill of a “blind box game”.
I bought ten and only one was good, and I even made a profit.
This Amazon user can’t just call “refund” after seeing this?
Therefore, “ultra-low price” is the core of scientific currency. Compared with low price, it is not only more sticky, but also buys the desire to share and buys user fission.
This point, Pinduoduo’s Huang Zheng has long seen through:
Pinduoduopin is not about low prices, it is about the user’s psychology, and it is to satisfy the user’s psychological feeling of taking advantage. Let the user think, oops, I earned it.
What this represents is actually the user’s approval, which is a kind of satisfaction after purchase. This feeling will prompt them to repurchase and “proudly” recommend it to other consumers.
But then again, Pinduoduo’s cost reduction will cause problems sooner or later, especially quality issues.
And objectively speaking, the quality problems of Pinduoduo are too numerous to ignore.
Especially when faced with American users who are not very short of money and have been “pampered” by Amazon.
An obvious sign is that the number of users has gone up, but the ratings have gone down.
For example, currently Temu’s rating in the App Store continues to decline, with a score of 3.9 and a score of 4.8 on Amazon, people with discernment will shake their heads.
But how does Pinduoduo do it?
First of all, head-to-head competition is definitely not possible. Losing the low-price label for the user experience is not worth the loss.
But they are indifferent and will be eliminated by the market sooner or later. The last e-commerce platform wish, known as the “American version of Pinduoduo”, has fallen below 1 yuan.
At this time, Pinduoduo’s choice is very thief: I do not solve the quality problem of the product, I am only responsible for solving the emotional problems of consumers “due to quality problems”.
To tell the truth, the most annoying part of users buying low-quality things is the feeling: fooled.
But Pinduoduo is different. It first uses ultra-low prices for expectation management.
Just like the Rolex Green Water Ghost, which is in the market for 10 or 20 w, it sells for 1,000 yuan on Pinduoduo. Even if most people buy it, they will not expect it to be a genuine product.
So much so that when buying inferior products, some consumers have learned to pua themselves.
As Vivian, a temu user on the US West Coast, said:
I ordered from Temu with a “try it out” attitude, however, their quality exceeded my expectations and most lived up to the description.
Although the quick-drying towel seems to be about 70% smaller than what is shown on the website.
This may be a misleading and deceptive move, but the price of this towel is fair.
For less than two bucks, what more could you ask for?
At this time, if there are still irritable brothers, Pinduoduo can also use the “refund service” to quell their anger.
At this point, we have to talk about a thing that Americans don’t understand very well, only refunds – the kind that do not need to be returned and unconditional refunds. (Even if the merchant will not refund the money, the official will use various means to exert pressure, such as directly deducting the store’s deposit)
Regarding the purchase experience of TEMU, a netizen named Jenny said:
The low price is only one aspect, and more importantly, there is no need to worry about returns. I have encountered a situation where the order was not shipped. I applied for a refund directly in the app, and the system directly refunded without providing information.
I have an order that didn’t show shipping until 8 days after payment, so I received it almost a month later. On the day I got the courier, I also received a full refund email from TEMU, nearly $79, which was all refunded, and I could keep the item for myself.
After receiving the inferior products, a “refund only” is refreshing, the waist is not sore and the legs are not sore, and it even satisfies the user’s small “revenge”.
The bad ones are all merchants, and Pinduoduo is a “just partner”.
There are even 100 kinds of routines that “use Pinduoduo’s overbearing reverse harvest merchants” on the Internet.
In this way, buying Pinduoduo is like a blind box. If you get something good, it is a surprise. If you buy something bad, it is not a shock.
This has led to the fact that although the reviews in the market are not very friendly, the user stickiness of Pinduoduo consumers is simply full.
All in all, when it comes to e-commerce, China seems to be truly ahead of the world.
The experience of China’s e-commerce market tells us:
Occupying people’s minds with low-priced products to establish consumption habits, then whitewashing them, and snatching users away from Taobao (now the enemy is Amazon), is a proven business model.
This is very similar to “bad people only need to put down the butcher’s knife to become a Buddha, but good people have to go through ninety-nine-eighty-one hardships”, ironic but easy to use.
And now the American people seem to be following our old path of being “conquered by Pinduoduo”.
Just like everyone in those days scoffed at the tens of billions of subsidies, now Pinduoduo relies on selling small items for 9.9 free shipping, and pdd has achieved the highest net profit margin in the e-commerce circle – 28.3%.
However, the bad words are also said at the front. Pinduoduo is not the first to go overseas, nor is it the first e-commerce company to go overseas at ultra-low prices.
It also focuses on low-price strategies. Wish, which once had more than 100 million users but now loses 70%, gave Tume a biggest warning:
Low prices won’t be the killer feature of Tume’s continued user acquisition. (Chinese sellers of wish account for as high as 94%)
And more importantly: Pinduoduo’s unfavorable “slashing a knife” and social fission model in the domestic market seems to be difficult to fully transplant overseas.
In this regard, an insider in the cross-border e-commerce industry also said:
The European and American markets are not suitable for Pinduoduo to adopt the popular domestic method of “slashing a knife”, and there will be risks of “induced marketing” and “unfair competition”.
Just look at Google and you will know that tens of billions of dollars may not be enough to compensate for this kind of crime.
It has to be said that how Tume replicates the success of Pinduoduo in the United States will be a big problem.
