Changes and Development of Pinduoduo’s Business

Abstract

In 2015, traditional e-commerce platforms led by JD.com and Taobao had already occupied the vast majority of China's online shopping market. It was under such an intensely competitive environment that Pinduoduo was able to break through 100 million users in about a year and 300 million users in about two years. Therefore, the goal of this study is to analyze the changes in Pinduoduo's platform strategy from its inception to the present day and compare it with JD.com and Taobao, hoping to summarize Pinduoduo's future direction from it. This article studies the development process of Pinduoduo, combined with the annual reports of Pinduoduo, JD.com, and Taobao, as well as different users' evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of these three e-commerce platforms to analyze their similarities and differences. Pinduoduo attracted a large number of users and merchants by offering subsidies in the early stage at lower prices. After having a huge user base and occupying a certain market share, it then strengthened supervision, improved product quality, established brand image, and gradually approached the perspective that traditional e-commerce platforms focus on.