Consumers can buy iPhones, Huawei mobile phones, Nike sports shoes, and Lancome skincare products on Pinduoduo. However, all these brands did not accept its proposal to open brand flagship stores.

Most brands still sell in the name of dealers, or refuse to participate in the “10 billion yuan subsidy”, or only provide low-end products. They keep a distance from Pinduoduo and regard it as an online factory outlet store.

An outlet store, factory outlet or factory shop is a brick and mortar or online store in which manufacturers sell their stock directly to the public.

Winning more brands has become one of the most important tasks of Pinduoduo this year. Pinduoduo has listed the proportion of brand GMV as the focus of this year’s work, according to LatePost.

Before the government agency issued the fine to Alibaba, Pinduoduo’s related brand investment promotion activities have been accelerated.

Pinduoduo provides traffic support to cooperative brands, including promotion activities such as “super brand day” and “ten thousand people group”. In addition, it also newly designed the “official” or “flagship store” gold logo to distinguish it from the “brand” black logo of the dealer store.

Relying on WeChat traffic bonus, low price goods, and good user experience, Pinduoduo enables users in low tier cities and those who did not use e-commerce before to buy things online. In this process, the 9.9 yuan box of fruit and the counterfeit products news placed the label “cheap” on Pinduoduo brand.

Taobao and JD have become the backbone of consumption in China today. In the past year, the number of Pinduoduo buyers has exceeded Taobao/Tmall and JD, but the people who grew up with Taobao and JD have not trusted it as much.

The “10 billion yuan subsidy” that went online in the second quarter of 2019 tried to alleviate the problem.

It also really drove the growth of platform sales and users very quickly. In 2020, the per capita consumption of its buyers has increased from 1551 yuan to 2115 yuan at the end of 2020, but this figure is less than 1/3 of JD and 1/4 of Alibaba.

The participation of 10 billion subsidies mainly included the second and third level distributors of the brand, which could not improve the trust of users on Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo marketing activities also focused on highlighting products rather than stores.

The available brand products categories are relatively limited, which restricts the frequency of consumers’ shopping and the average purchase order value.

This is why Pinduoduo has now accelerated the persuasion of the brand side to open official stores: not only to eliminate the doubts about the quality of goods, but also to have enough profit space to promote, and to sell advertisements to the brand merchants with abundant financial resources.

Internal Competition

By the middle of 2020, Pinduoduo’s total investment in merchant recruitment team had exceeded 400 people.

Based on product categories, they are divided into a brand merchant recruitment team and an industrial belt merchant recruitment team. At the beginning of 2020, Pinduoduo set up an industry-wide brand recruitment team with 30 people to attract large brands.

The 30 people team was divided into two groups to compete against each other. They do not share any data or resources with each, and team members are required to compete for brands everywhere.

The competition is extremely fierce. The performance of the two groups was assessed monthly, including the number of brand stores, GMV, and GMV growth rate.

“Two groups of people will not look up to say hello when they meet.”, according to LatePost. Sometimes the two groups approached the same brand to talk about store launch, and they didn’t know each other.

In addition to the internal competition, Pinduoduo also conducts a variety of A/B testing on the product end to observe which merchant presentation form is more attractive to consumers.

In Pinduoduo’s brand store suffix, there are “brand” black label, “official” and “flagship store” gold label, and “flagship store” label. Among them, the gold label is the official flagship store, while “brand” black label and “flagship store” label are usually dealer stores.

Showing or hiding different labels are part of Pinduoduo team’s A/B testing.

Brands’ concern on pricing control

Not all brands accept the sales strategy of trading more for lower price, especially those international brands which have built multi-level distribution system and stable profit sharing.

Pinduoduo’s discount may destroy their original pricing system and affect dealers who need to pay store rent and staff salary. Pinduoduo hoped that the brand side would also participate in the 10 billion subsidy, but some refused.

In this regard, Pinduoduo has made limited compromises and agreed not to label their listings with “10 billion subsidy” and to issue consumption vouchers instead to achieve a discount.
For those brands willing to participate, Pinduoduo also relaxed some restrictions.

Previously, it had asked businesses to make special packaging materials for “10 billion subsidy”, printing Pinduoduo’s logo and QR code on the package with brochures inside explaining “10 billion subsidy” to highlight Pinduoduo’s own brand.

Nowadays, the restriction of this kind of special packaging is no longer compulsory.

Adidas is the biggest brand in the recent round of official brands launch on Pinduoduo, and it is also the company that Pinduoduo gives the most resources; the banner of “Adidas official launch” is placed on not only the top of the “my order – to be received” page.

Adidas received a lot of support from Pinduoduo but it launched its presence as an outlet store on Pinduoduo. Its daily GMV is by far below expectation.

If Pinduoduo wants to attract brands to open stores and sell to consumers directly through its platform, so as to change consumers’ impression of this platform, for a period of time, it can only accept the positioning of the online version of outlet store – a special, low-cost, but limited variety of authentic shopping mall.

The number of brands and merchants on Tmall Global grew 60%

In the ninth year of the world’s largest 24-hour shopping event, this year’s Tmall Double 11 2017 will showcase:

Alibaba Economy at scale. 11.11 will demonstrate the technological innovation and global scale of the entire Alibaba Economy. More than 140,000 brands and hundreds of millions of consumers will participate in 11.11 this year. This shopping festival will be supported by Alibaba’s global cloud, payment and logistics infrastructure.

Consumers will enjoy seamless payment and consumer loan services provided by Ant Financial. Alibaba Cloud will serve as the core technology and computing backbone to ensure the best consumer experience throughout the festival. Cainiao Network expects over 3 million logistics personnel to facilitate the hundreds of millions of packages that will be generated from the festival.

The number of annual active consumers on Alibaba’s China retail marketplaces reached 488 million, an increase of 22 million from the 12-month period ended June 30, 2017. See the performance highlights of Alibaba in Q3 2017 here.

Power of the Chinese consumer. Alibaba expects that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers who visit its platforms on November 11 will have access to over 60,000 international brands and merchants to satisfy their increasing demand for goods and products from around the world. This year, Tmall will, for the first time, leverage its popularity outside China to bring over 100 domestic Chinese brands to international markets, targeting millions of overseas Chinese consumers in Asia and the rest of the world.

New Retail implementation. Alibaba’s New Retail model with integrated online-offline customer offerings will be showcased in store locations across China. More than 1,000 brands will convert nearly 100,000 physical locations into “smart stores” and our channel distribution solutions make it easy for more than 500,000 local neighborhood stores and Rural Taobao service centers to sell to consumers in lower-tier cities and rural villages.

Tmall Double 11 Sales Stats 2017

Total sales on Tmall Double 11 Shopping Festival reached 168.2 billion yuan in 2017 from 225 countries and regions, 90% from mobile.

167 merchants each has total transactions of over 100 million yuan. Nike store became the first one with over 1 billion yuan in apparel category.

Top 50 Tmall Stores on Double 11 2017

1. Suning
2. Xiaomi
3. Honor (Huawei)
4. Haier
5. Nike
6. Uniqlo
7. Sharp
8. Adidas
9. Linshimuye (furniture)
10. Midea
11. Quanyou (furniture)
12. GREE
13. Huawei
14. Gujia (furniture)
15. Heilan Home
16. PurCotton
17. Sanzhi Songshu (snacks)
18. P&G
19. Dyson
20. GXG
21. Balabala (children apparel)
22. New Balance
23. Semir
24. Peacebird
25. Jack Jones
26. Pechoin
27. Veromoda
28. ecovacs
29. Lancome
30. Zara
31. ONLY
32. Estee Lauder
33. Hisense
34. Anta
35. Philips
36. Gap
37. Chando
38. Eifini
39. Fotile
40. HSTYLE
41. Vivo
42. SK-II
43. Olay
44. Skyworth
45. Little Swan
46. Meters/bonwe (Apparel)
47. Xilinmen
48. Li Ning
49. Siemens
50. Bosideng (Apparel)

Outdoor sports

1. Nike
2. Adidas
3. Anta
4. New Balance
5. Li Ning
6. Sketchers
7. Puma
8. Xstep
9. Under Armour
10. Camel

Tmall Sales Progress on Double 11 2017

• 1 billion yuan: 28 seconds (vs. 52s in 2016)
• 10 billion yuan: 3 mins 1 seconds (vs. 6m 58s in 2016)
• 19.1 bn yuan: 5 mins 57s (exceeds total Double 11 sales in 2012)
• 36.2 bn yuan: 16 mins 10s (exceeds total Double 11 sales in 2013)
• 50 bn yuan: 40 mins 12s (vs. 2 hrs 30m 20s in 2016)
• 57.1 bn yuan: 1 hours 49s (exceeds total Double 11 sales in 2014)
• 91.2 bn yuan: 7 hours 22m 54s (exceeds total Double 11 sales in 2015)
• 100 bn yuan: 9 hours 4s(vs. 18 hrs 55m 36s in 2016)
• 120.7 bn yuan: 13 hours 9m 49s (exceeds total Double 11 sales in 2016)
• 168.2 bn yuan at 24:00

Alibaba Cloud processed 325,000 orders per second at peak. Alipay processed 1.5 billion payment transactions in total, up 41% from 2016, and processed 256,000 transactions per second at peak.

Other E-Commerce Platforms Double 11 Stats 2017

Total orders from 1 Nov till 7:46:58 on 11 Nov exceeded 100 billion yuan on Jingdong (JD). Total transactions on JD during the eleven days’ online sales reached 127.1 billion yuan with over 50% growth.

Netease Kaola total Double 11 sales value reached 4 times as much as last year’s. It reached the total transactions of last year’s Double 11 in the first 28 minutes. Kaola has 25.6% market share in China’s cross-border e-commerce market in Q3 2017 ranking first according to iiMedia.

Total orders on AliExpress exceeded 10 million as of 19:50 on Double 11 2017. It covers 184 countries and regions in the first two hours.

Find out more Singles Day 2017 Insights »

Apple and Xiaomi are found most relevant to the lives of China’s Gen-Y and Gen-Z consumers according to RTG Consulting Group.

RTG surveyed 4,000 of China’s Gen-Y and Gen-Z consumers, listing which brands they find most relevant to their lives. Topping the list are well-known brands Apple and Xiaomi, followed by WeChat and Adidas.

Xiaomi tops the list of “most relevant brand” among Gen-Z, while Apple is the favorite among Gen-Y consumers. Fashion brands are more relevant in Gen-Z’s eyes, while the technology category plays a stronger role among China’s Gen-Y.

Other top rankings from the RTG report:

Also read: WeChat monthly active users reached 806 million in Q2 2016