Pinduoduo local life began to attract investment
The local life track has ushered in another heavyweight player.
Recently, Pinduoduo's grocery shopping business platform "Duoduo Buy" began to test the local life business in Guizhou, Hainan and other provinces, recruiting local life leaders, including in-store catering coupons, hotel coupons, as well as scenic spot tickets, movie tickets, etc.
Source: Weibo.
In order to attract merchants to settle in, Duoduo Grocery adopts a cooperation model of 0 commission, and merchants only need to pay a deposit. However, in terms of requirements, in addition to having the business qualifications of the corresponding categories, Duoduo also requires merchants to have simple shooting, copywriting and platform docking capabilities.
Local life is a path that Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, never envisioned. In an interview with Caijing in 2018, he asked Huang Zheng: "It is said that Pinduoduo has always refused to communicate with Meituan, are you considering doing service e-commerce or are you worried that the other party will enter the field of physical grouping?"”
Huang Zheng replied:"Pinduoduo doesn't want to do service e-commerce at the moment, because physical e-commerce is big enough. Service e-commerce is traffic thinking, that is, traffic is poured in, and different services are used to consume this traffic. If we are still using the perspective of traffic to do things in the post-traffic era, we will definitely hang up. ”
Now it seems that Pinduoduo has the conditions to live locally, or when it has to try local life.
In fact, since 2019, Pinduoduo has been eager to try in the field of local life. On the eve of the Spring Festival that year, Pinduoduo was launched on the App and mini programsTrain ticketsbusiness, providing a 5 yuan no threshold subsidy;At the beginning of 2020, Pinduoduo launched a medical aesthetic project on the "10,000 people" activity page, but it was soon taken offline.
Source: Pinduoduo.
This year, Pinduoduo began to accelerate in the local life track. In March, Pinduoduo's community ** mini programHurry upBegan to test the functions of local life products, and started local life investment, and began to launch local life products in May, and spread them through the head store.
In July of this year,Pinduoduo opens a "local life" entrance in the app, to provide users with the goods and services of food category brand merchants. Although there are well-known brand products such as KFC, McDonald's, Starbucks, and Luckin Coffee, most of them provide e-coupons or order models for third-party merchants, and cooperate directly with Meituan.
Obviously, Pinduoduo is not satisfied with "selling", but wants to establish its own ** network, so it began to test at a fixed point and recruit ** businessmen to be ready for battle.
What is the confidence of Pinduoduo
To live locally, you can't avoid Meituan, an industry giant. So as a latecomer, Pinduoduo's competitiveness comes from?
The first is the huge user base. According to QuestMobile statistics, the average daily DAU of Pinduoduo in July 2023 is about 30.7 billion,Monthly active users are about 65.6 billion。Service-oriented e-commerce relies on traffic is relatively high, and the traffic provided by more than 600 million users is the killer feature of Pinduoduo.
The second is that it has been established for a long timeLow priceMind. From the beginning of the "cut knife", to the later "tens of billions of subsidies", Pinduoduo successfully left users with the impression of "low price". People who understand life tend to be better at budgeting, and low prices are very competitive in the local life field**.
What's more, if you really start a first-class battle, Pinduoduo is very confident. According to the financial report for the third quarter of this year, the net cash generated by Pinduoduo's operating activities was 325$37.9 billion, cash holdings, cash equivalents and short-term investments were202.8 billion。For new business, Pinduoduo has always been willing to "burn money".
In addition, Pinduoduo also has a wealth ofGround pushExperience. At the beginning of 2022, Duoduo Grocery entered the express delivery collection business across the border, which can produce efficient synergy with the platform's extensive warehouse distribution system and offline self-pickup points. Under the promotion of the Duoduo grocery sales team, even many rookie stations have been turned into Duoduo express collection points. With this kind of local promotion ability, it is not difficult to negotiate cooperation with merchants.
From the perspective of the industry, it is not so difficult for Pinduoduo to enter the game. Local life is a platform-based business, which does not have a high technical threshold and does not require heavy asset investment, which is essentially the caseMatchmaking transactionsOn the one hand, it builds a traffic system for effective customer acquisition, and on the other hand, it contracts with a wide range of merchants, from which the platform takes commissions and earns advertising fees.
So for Pinduoduo, local living is a business that can reap high returns in the short term, and the proof isTik TokThis has already been done. In the first half of 2022, Douyin's local life GMV was about 22 billion yuan, exceeding the whole year of 2021;The "Douyin Life Service 2023 Store Visit Report" shows thatFrom January to September 2023, the number of influencers who settled in the Douyin Life Service** Center increased by 289% year-on-year.
Although Pinduoduo does not have as much traffic as Douyin, the current penetration rate of Meituan in third- and fourth-tier cities is not so highSinking marketPinduoduo, which has rich "combat experience", may not be able to tear a hole in Meituan's turf.
Meituan's three moats
Of course, as a veteran player who has been deeply involved in local life for nearly ten years, Meituan's barriers are not easy to break. In front of Pinduoduo, there are at least three "moats" of Meituan.
The first is the "high frequency driving low frequency" style of play.
Most of the merchants who have settled in Meituan to carry out in-store business have also opened takeaway services. As a high-frequency consumption behavior, takeaway can bring a large amount of accurate traffic to the platform. The high frequency and low unit price of takeaway make Meituan sticky for a long time, so that its position as the entrance to local life remains solid.
The second is the high-quality BD team and the long-term accumulated merchant barriers.
Meituan has a tradition of attaching importance to merchants since the "Thousand Group War", gathering a large number of merchants with the tactics of "frenzied visits and frenzied orders", and has maintained the strategy of "focusing on supply, first and then better". Years of accumulation have made Meituan's local life cover a wide range, covering all aspects such as eating, drinking, and entertainment, convenient life, transportation and travel, etc., which is difficult to benchmark in a short period of time.
The third is the "review" system.
As a service industry, the in-store business needs a self-reinforcing infrastructure, the review system, and this is precisely Meituan's unique advantage. According to the relevant data of iiMedia Consulting, there are 546% of F&B users obtain information through the ** life service platform, and as of 2021, the number of Meituan reviews has exceeded 10 billion. A large-scale review system means that the platform has a higher credibility, so it further strengthens the user's mind and increases the consumer's dependence on the platform.
Even if Meituan is strong, the local life entrants will continue to grow, because there is still a lot of room for imagination. According to iResearch, the online penetration rate of local life is only 12 in 20217%, and the growth rate in the next 3-4 years is estimated to be only 20%.
It is foreseeable that in the future, Meituan will face a protracted battle to compete for internal strength.
Author |The wind is clear.