Pinduoduo, which once relied on strategies such as “slashing a knife”, “tens of billions of subsidies” and “refunds only”, now has revenue falling short of market expectations in the fourth quarter and full year of 2024 financial reports, but its establishment of an AI large model team in 2023 intends to keep a low profile, and it has not been promoted with much fanfare at the beginning of 2025, and the refund policy alone will also be sadly withdrawn in April 2025.
Huang Zheng, who is born in the 80s, has been silent for a long time.
At the same time, the Pinduoduo e-commerce empire he single-handedly built, which relies on “slashing a knife”, “tens of billions of subsidies” and “refunds only”, also seems to be facing a situation of “sunset during the day”.
A typical example is that in Pinduoduo’s latest financial report for the fourth quarter and full year of 2024, although Pinduoduo gave a report card with revenue of 110.6 billion yuan, it was still far short of the market estimate of 116.03 billion yuan – which means that Pinduoduo still did not satisfy the market in the fourth quarter after its revenue fell short of expectations in the third quarter.
It is true that in terms of profits, Pinduoduo has maintained its gold-absorbing physique as always.
But whether it is from the data trend or the business situation, Pinduoduo’s performance can’t help but make people feel a trend: is Pinduoduo, which was once in full swing, moving away from the favor of the times?
After all, at the moment when large models are hot, Pinduoduo’s old rivals are more or less in layout, but looking back, Pinduoduo is missing from this AI feast.
Pinduoduo’s rising star, Temu, seems to have been dumbfounded after landing in the United States, advertising + subsidies + pulling people, and facing the Trump administration’s tariffs and the never-ending tax exemptions for small orders.
Even the commercial operation of “refund only”, which once killed the Quartet, has become a yellow flower of tomorrow.
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The river rushes away, at least from the current trend – the tide of the times is moving away from Pinduoduo.
Rich, but deliberately not rushing to the scene
“Duty is what you should do in your position” – Huang Zheng
From the toddlers in 2023, to the heroes in 2024, and then to the three points of the world in 2025, it has taken nearly two years for the domestic large model field to complete the industry path of starting and developing steadily.
Pinduoduo’s old rivals in the e-commerce field, the Alibaba and Byte systems behind Taobao and Douyin e-commerce, came up with Tongyi Qianwen and Doubao models respectively.
Through multiple versions of improvement iterations, both are obvious to all in terms of performance and user acceptance, and have long competed with Baidu, Kimi and other manufacturers for the first place.
Even at the moment when Deepseek is on the rise, Tongyi Qianwen and Doubao can still have a place.
JD.com, which has been overtaken by Pinduoduo in the field of e-commerce, has also come up with the Yanxi model and the “Procurement and Marketing Dongge” digital human based on this.
Although JD.com’s original intention of making a large model is to solve its own customer service, live broadcast and other problems, it is not as hot as Byte and Alibaba, 2C and 2B business is hot, but whether it is customer service, logistics assistants or procurement and sales Dongge’s live broadcast is full of topics and earns enough eyeballs.
Even Meituan, CEO Wang Xing said on the earnings call when asked about the AI-related layout: “Meituan’s strategy in artificial intelligence technology has always been active attack rather than passive defense.”
At the same time, Wang Xing also proposed a trilogy of AI at work, AI in products, and Building LLM, and said that some achievements have been made in the field of AI.
More importantly, Meituan’s layout in the field of AI is not only about developing large models, but also an important shareholder of AI innovation companies such as the new humanoid robot company Yushu.
In this way, Meituan, which has a smaller voice, is also silently making efforts and has not been left behind.
Whether it is AI as the next growth curve or to help their own business, each major manufacturer has crossed the sea.
At this time, from the perspective of the entire Internet industry, there seems to be only Pinduoduo who is rich but has not caught up with the scene.
At the end of 2023, Pinduoduo was revealed to have formed an AI large model team. However, in the face of inquiries from the outside world, Pinduoduo made it clear in response to Tencent’s “Deep Web” that the company has no layout on AI large models for the time being, and it is indeed doing AI intelligent customer service internally, but it is not on the scale of a large model.
Of course, Pinduoduo cannot completely stop doing AI, and there are indeed similar needs in its internal business. But it seems to be deliberately making a backward gesture and is unwilling to be in the limelight.
In 2024, Pinduoduo AI will be dumb across the board, and it will not even participate in that year’s China International Big Data Industry Expo.
While AI summaries are available on product detail pages, they are based on full reviews and are questionable.
In February 2025, it was revealed that Pinduoduo had developed an e-commerce recommendation model by Baidu experts before recruitment, which was applied to price comparison, advertising, search, etc.
It is reported that there are multiple large model groups within Pinduoduo, and the groups will race horses with each other according to their income.
So even at the beginning of 2025, Pinduoduo did not run out to promote it with great fanfare.
The integration of Pinduoduo and AI technology is limited to its own business and does not bring imagination space such as Volcano Engine and Alibaba Cloud.
Even in the goal of Pinduoduo’s plan to serve the existing business, AI technology can only be partially reflected in the APP, and the interface design and functional innovation have not been fully upgraded, which is difficult to compare with Taobao’s short video community and JD.com’s intelligent logistics assistant.
The “duty” mentioned by Huang Zheng has become the “ancestral law” of Pinduoduo, which is not bad for money, in the AI era.
Refund only: the disappearance of a sharp sword
“Turn capitalism upside down” – Huang Zheng
No matter what the industry says about refund-only, it has to be said that refund-only has indeed completely changed the e-commerce industry.
(Merchants’ dissatisfaction with Pinduoduo Wool Party on social media, source: Xiaohongshu)
The first business in the world to launch a refund-only is Amazon.
In May 2017, e-commerce giant Amazon officially launched a refund-only service, allowing customers to issue refunds without returning their purchases.
Of course, this move also has an element of adapting to local conditions. According to data from Safewise, an American insurance company, more than 11% of express packages will be lost in 2023.
According to a study by Security.org, an American security consulting firm, more than 44% of respondents in 2023 have experienced lost or stolen packages from online shopping.
This is also the situation after the popularity of smartphones, and American courier companies such as Fedex have made taking photos after delivery as a basic workflow.
In some other situations, such as damage to goods during transportation, difficult to sell again, and labor costs such as express delivery and customer service remain high, except for the eastern and western big cities, most of the rest of the country is sparsely populated, and only refunding the value of the goods within a certain range has become a more economical and efficient method.
But Amazon merchants can choose the scope and price limit of refund-only products – and for Pinduoduo, Huang Zheng has a different idea.
In the early years, Huang Zheng posted on his official account, using Buffett’s sale of insurance as a starting point, defining the capitalist model as the poor selling their wealth and reaching the rich for higher certainty in the future.
In a subsequent article, Huang Zheng mentioned that if a large number of buyers jointly order down jackets from manufacturers in the summer, if the deposit is acceptable, the manufacturer and even the entire supply chain may give such a concession as a 30% concession for the relatively deterministic order in front of them.
The poor can also sell certainty to the rich, Huang Zheng argues in the article. And this model, as he called it, turned capitalism upside down.
After the Industrial Revolution, the Western capitalist model in the period dominated by manufacturing had a greater say, at least historically.
Because the cornerstone of the manufacturing industry is the centralized means of production, and the demand side is often the general public, lacking effective organization, and often scattered in the business game.
Therefore, “coercing consumers to make manufacturers” is the model that Huang Zheng wants to do, and it is also Pinduoduo’s model.
Therefore, Huang Zheng’s purpose is not only to do e-commerce.
No matter what kind of political economy theory it is, most of the academic schools emphasize the control of the means of production, but what Huang Zheng wants to do is to encircle the “means of consumption” as if controlling the means of production, and be an “uncrowned king” in terms of purchasing power.
Therefore, it is not surprising that many more radical promotion methods than Taobao and JD.com, such as slashing a knife, smashing advertisements, viral marketing, referral rebates, etc., will appear in the operations of Pinduoduo and Temu.
Therefore, the emergence of refunds alone is an inevitability.
In the eyes of friends, Pinduoduo may be a catfish that stirs up the e-commerce market. However, from Pinduoduo’s perspective, challenging the existing pattern and being involved in this may not be the original intention of its launch of refund-only.
Consumers are there, how to study their psychology more thoroughly, how to better organize them, is Pinduoduo’s “duty”.
From Pinduoduo’s point of view, everyone wants to pick up wool, and only refunding has not affected the platform’s financial report.
In this way, friends are faced with such a situation: destroying you has nothing to do with you.
However, there is a time when everything must be reversed – in April 2025, under the guidance of the management department, this time marked Pinduoduo’s sharp sword splitting the entire industry and finally exiting sadly, and also marked a change in the industry’s discourse.
It may be defined by Huang Zheng as “capitalism”, and small businesses that are punished by Pinduoduo and often cry without tears are not so easy to be “turned upside down”.
Locked “Imagination Space”
One of the pillars that supports Pinduoduo’s huge imagination and market value is Temu.
Temu is so popular that it doesn’t need to be repeated.
(Temu Super Bowl Ad)
In September 2022, Temu officially landed in the United States. In November, Temu already topped the Google Play download rankings.
Similar to in China, Temu has also played a three-board axe: pulling people + advertising + low prices.
Temu has launched a “Temu Franchise Program” in the United States, similar to the “slashing a knife” strategy in China to attract relatives and friends in China, encouraging Americans to make money by pulling heads.
According to Temu’s official website, members of the “Temu Affiliate Program” can receive a cash reward of $10 for every person invited to sign up for the app.
Meanwhile, 5% to 20% of the invitee’s spending on Temu will be given to the inviter as a bonus.
If the invitee also joins the “Temu Affiliate Program,” his inviter receives 20% of the bonus received by the invitee as a secondary reward.
Unlike the domestic “slashing knife” that is always close to the door, Temu’s rewards are real money. On social media such as YouTube and Reddit, there is no shortage of people who rely on Temu rewards to earn thousands of dollars a month, and there are even examples of “certified big Vs” getting $5,000 a month.
In terms of advertising, two Super Bowl commercials in 2023 and 2024 have propelled Temu’s influence to new heights. According to data from American consulting firm Morning Consult, in March after the 2024 Super Bowl, more than 86% of Americans were aware of Temu.
Temu had 41.34 million app downloads in the month, a year-on-year increase of 217.02%, and MAUs in the first quarter reached 50.4 million, a year-on-year increase of 134.42%.
Of course, pulling people and throwing money are expenses on the statement, and the purpose of Pinduoduo’s layout of Temu is certainly not to give benefits to the old hairdresser.
How to keep people on the platform for transfer transactions, commissions, and advertising fees are the focus of Temu’s profitability. In this regard, Pinduoduo’s third axe is cut out, which is a low price.
However, most of the low prices that Temu relies on rely on the US small package tax exemption policy.
Before Lao Te took office, e-commerce packages originating in mainland China and Hong Kong and valued at less than $800 enjoyed duty-free treatment when entering the United States.
According to data from Numerator, an American market research company, the average annual consumption of Temu users in 2024 is about $240.
According to SEO marketing agency Backlinko, the average price of Temu orders in Q4 2023 was around $38.9.
Therefore, an important reason why Temu can keep prices low is the small package tax exemption policy.
(Image credit: CNBC)
So on May 3 this year, the US media CNBC reported that TEMU announced that it would stop selling goods imported from China directly to US customers through the platform, and in the future, sales in the US market will be handled by local sellers and shipped from US warehouses.
While localized supply may be better than cross-border shipping in terms of delivery timeliness, the impact on Temu’s most critical price advantage is self-evident.
Temu, which has not dropped the next “Super Bowl” since its landing, has silently stopped sky-high advertising this year.
Even if China and the United States eventually reach a consensus on tariffs, it is unlikely that the tariffs will return to earlier standards. The small single tax exemption policy has been criticized during Biden’s tenure, and it can only be said that it is unlikely to be restored.
If Temu can’t find a way to deal with it, it will only be out of reach to create another Pinduoduo overseas.
Written at the end
At least from the perspective of a series of dynamics since the birth of Pinduoduo, Pinduoduo is a company that has a label in addition to labels such as “insight into human nature” and “strong offensiveness”: “almost ruthless pragmatism”.
Even in the past two years, after reaching a certain volume, Pinduoduo seems to have shown a posture of social responsibility – “10 billion reduction”, “e-commerce westward expansion”, “new quality merchant support plan”, “100 billion support”, “benefiting the people and helping farmers” and other labels, earning a lot of favor.
However, from the perspective of industry development, Pinduoduo has begun to appear a little incompatible with other Internet giants.
The author has always believed that domestic Internet companies can be roughly divided into two categories, one is Internet technology enterprises, and the other is enterprises that organize people with the Internet.
Of course, this does not mean that the latter does not engage in technological innovation at all, and the former does not do 2C or labor-heavy business at all. In fact, the scientific and technological attributes of enterprises, unless they have been positioned at the time of establishment, are often forced out by the business volume because there are many people in the organization. The same is true for Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon, Google and Meta.
However, Pinduoduo’s technological attributes have been intentionally or unintentionally diluted inexplicably.
Don’t forget that Pinduoduo was absent from the private entrepreneur symposium at the beginning of the year and the AI model; Even after Duoduo grocery shopping, Pinduoduo was absent from a new round of instant retail wars – and the e-commerce war about “low prices” that Pinduoduo set off in previous years seems to be gradually letting go.
As the saying goes: this time, that time.
Of course, Pinduoduo can continue to do its own thing on the business empire it has established, and it can still earn net profits that make all e-commerce players jealous, which is still a business ship that is needed and paid attention to – but the tide of the times will not stop for any player, even Pinduoduo, which was once infinitely favored, is no exception.
