Pinduoduo is determined to expand overseas and will be launched as early as September!

Cross-border e-commerce has developed rapidly in recent years, and there are more and more players in this field. Following domestic e-commerce giants such as ByteDance, JD.com, and Alibaba, Pinduoduo will also join the overseas camp.

On August 17, according to LatePost, Pinduoduo was confirmed to be preparing for a cross-border e-commerce platform, and the application is expected to be launched in mid-September. The first stop overseas will be the United States, and it is currently recruiting investors for all product categories.

It is reported that the operating model of Pinduoduo's cross-border e-commerce platform will imitate the independent site SHEIN. Sellers only need to be responsible for putting the goods on the shelves and shipping the goods to the domestic warehouse designated by Pinduoduo. The Pinduoduo platform will be responsible for product selection, pricing and fulfillment.

In terms of investment promotion, Pinduoduo continues to use the previous method to attract small and medium-sized businesses, offering a "0 yuan check-in, 0 commission deduction" discount. Compared with overseas platforms such as Amazon, there is no high entry cost and high commission. Based on this, it is not difficult to guess that Pinduoduo's cross-border platform will be able to attract the attention of many sellers as soon as it appears.

It is not surprising that Pinduoduo chose the United States as its first stop. After all, the United States has been the country with the highest total consumption in the world for many years. According to Statista data, the Internet penetration rate in the United States reached 91% in 2021, of which e-commerce users reached 263 million, accounting for 79% of Internet users. eMarket estimates that the US e-commerce market size will reach 1.61 trillion US dollars in 2025, with a compound growth rate of more than 15% from 2020 to 2025, faster than the global market.

Weibo celebrity “Factory Director in the Wind” believes that Pinduoduo went overseas because it could no longer expand in China, and because SHEIN’s rapid growth and successful establishment in overseas markets inspired Pinduoduo’s expansion. He believes that overseas, similar to the domestic price war, the odds of winning are still very high. In addition, many Weibo celebrities joked that the international version of Pinduoduo should follow the local customs and replace “cutting a knife” with “shooting a bullet”.

Although the United States already has e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, and eBay, the successful example of SHEIN in the United States shows that the e-commerce capacity of the US market has not yet reached saturation.

It is reported that the first categories that Pinduoduo is recruiting for this overseas expansion are low-priced daily necessities, home furnishings, etc., which is also the marketing method that Pinduoduo is best at. SHEIN has also verified the attractiveness of the product features of "quick new products, low prices, and a wide range of choices" to American consumers.

However, an Amazon seller who has been in the industry for many years expressed concerns about this. The seller believes that the delivery rate of foreign express delivery is far lower than that of China, and he often encounters customers asking for refunds on the grounds that the goods have not been received. Logistics issues are the biggest problem in cross-border transportation. During peak seasons or severe epidemics, US ports are congested and logistics costs soar, so the FBM model is difficult to implement.

In any case, Pinduoduo's freeing up of resources to go overseas is of great significance to both domestic e-commerce and cross-border sellers. For domestic e-commerce, the degree of internal competition is reduced and internal consumption is slowed down; for some small and medium-sized cross-border sellers, it is undoubtedly to have a more favorable platform, or even a "0 yuan check-in, 0 commission" platform to go overseas, reducing operating costs.

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