Pinduoduo's success has attracted imitators, and Russian e-commerce Ozon has entered the group shopping market

In September 2015 , Pinduoduo made its debut with group shopping , and "carved out a path" among e-commerce companies such as Taobao and JD.com.

As of today, Pinduoduo has 788.4 million active buyers, exceeding Taobao's 779 million. At the same time, Pinduoduo's full-year revenue in 2020 was 59.4919 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 97% over 2019.

Pinduoduo's success has attracted a lot of attention from overseas media and e-commerce companies, and some overseas e-commerce companies have begun to imitate Pinduoduo's group shopping.

Recently, Ozon, a Russian e-commerce platform known as the "Russian Amazon", launched group shopping. Similar to Pinduoduo, buyers select items, place orders to initiate group purchases, and wait for other buyers to successfully place orders, and then they can purchase the items at a discount of at least 20%.

The group buying interface of the Ozon mobile app

Currently, Ozon's group shopping is still in its early stages, and buyers can only group order through its mobile app. Soon, the Ozon website will launch this feature, and goods from Ozon's own warehouses will also support group ordering.

People who have used Pinduoduo should know that the group purchase period of Pinduoduo is within 24 hours, but Ozon's period is longer. Since group purchase is still unknown in Russia, Ozon's group purchase period is up to 30 days . If there are not enough buyers to group purchase within 30 days, the order will be automatically cancelled.

These group-buying products are not selected by Ozon, but are voluntarily participated in and published by the platform's sellers . Sellers must set a separate discount price for the product, and the discount must start at 20%. In addition, sellers can also set purchase limits, group order numbers, and time limits.

Evgeny Shirinkin , head of product and technology at Ozon , said that Ozon launched group shopping mainly for two purposes : the first is to provide buyers with a more favorable shopping experience; the second is to provide sellers with a mechanism to manage sales. Sellers can test the demand for new products and clear inventory by launching group shopping.

Moreover, sellers can save logistics costs by group shopping. One group order can get several or even dozens of orders, and sellers can send the goods to Ozon's sorting center at one time, sharing the logistics costs incurred in the process.

Of course, this new social e-commerce model can also bring more potential customers to sellers and platforms. Once buyers initiate a group purchase, they are very likely to share it with friends and family, and seek other buyers on social platforms to place orders together.

Alex Vasiliev, former head of international development at Russian e-commerce company Yandex.Market, agrees, adding that this form of shopping already exists on Russian social platforms, but has yet to take off on a large scale.

Alex believes that one of the reasons for Pinduoduo's success is its integration with the WeChat ecosystem. Compared with Ozon, AliExpress is well aware of this. The editor learned that recently AliExpress Russia cooperated with the Russian national social platform VKontakte to launch group shopping.

Alex said that whether Ozon and AliExpress Russia can succeed in group shopping depends on the bargaining power of the platform and suppliers, because this will affect whether buyers share the group purchase link.

Russia

E-commerce

Ozon