Pinduoduo’s Pinduoduo Station is accelerating its expansion in Kaicheng across the country, supporting door-to-door delivery and combining with community group buying business, trying to build a closed-loop ecology of “e-commerce + community group buying + express delivery”. This article will provide an in-depth analysis of Pinduoduo’s expansion strategy, operating model and challenges, explore whether it can become a “catfish” stirring up the industry pattern in the fierce logistics war, and how to compete with competitors such as Cainiao Station.
Pinduoduo’s Duoduo grocery express collection business has been officially called “Pinduoduo Station” and supports door-to-door delivery. In addition, on the basis of the provinces and cities that have previously opened the business, Pinduoduo Station has further expanded to Qinghai, Jilin, Zhejiang, Hubei, Jiangxi, Heilongjiang, Yunnan, Fuzhou and other provinces and cities, according to the filing of the State Post Bureau, such as Yunnan, Jiangxi and other places, Pinduoduo has obtained a license to open a service station to operate express delivery business through local subsidiaries.
For Pinduoduo, the rapid development of its e-commerce industry has put forward higher requirements for consumers for the convenience and timeliness of express delivery, and the market demand for express delivery stations as an effective way to solve the “last mile” distribution problem continues to rise. At the same time, Duoduo has accumulated a certain user base and offline network resources in the field of community group buying, and has the advantage of expanding the express collection business.
This time, the official launch of Pinduoduo Station and the further expansion of the city not only means Pinduoduo’s strategic upgrade in the express terminal service track, but also upgrades the express delivery service that was originally attached to the community group buying business to a new format with independent and large-scale and standardized operation potential.
B-end product manager’s ability model and learning improvement
The first challenge faced by B-end product managers is how to correctly analyze and diagnose business problems. This is also the most difficult part, product design knowledge is basically not helpful for this part of the work, if you want to do a good job in business analysis and diagnosis, you must have a solid …
View details >
However, from the perspective of the industry competition pattern, the express collection market has long been a red ocean. For example, Alibaba’s Cainiao Station has established more than 100,000 stations across the country, and its strength should not be underestimated.
01 Pinduoduo Station accelerates the expansion of the city
At a time when e-commerce competition is becoming increasingly fierce, the importance of express stations to e-commerce platforms as a key link in the “last mile” of distribution is self-evident.
In February 2022, when Pinduoduo’s Duoduo grocery shopping promoted the community group buying business, it aimed at the express collection business, and reached cooperation with many express delivery companies such as Santong Yida, J&T, and Postal to open up the express delivery signing link. This move effectively improves logistics efficiency, reduces the residence time of express delivery at the end of delivery, reduces operating costs, and optimizes the terminal service experience.
According to the research report of Guojin Securities, in 2022, Pinduoduo’s Duoduo grocery collection service point has collected its pieces of 30 million orders per day, in contrast, it took Alibaba Cainiao Station a full seven years to reach this data, and it only took Pinduoduo four months.
In 2024, Pinduoduo will officially begin to test the waters of post station services on a small scale in some provinces and municipalities, which is now Pinduoduo station. In the second half of the same year, the speed of this expansion of the city accelerated, and Tech Planet found through enterprise investigation that in September alone, Pinduoduo obtained the license to operate express delivery business at service stations in 5 provinces and cities including Guizhou, Ningxia, Sichuan, Henan, and Hefei, and reached 6 places in October.
In the above areas, Pinduoduoyi is not slow to open.
A city manager revealed that his area, since the end of last year, has received the task distributed above, using the platform to settle in preferential and incentive policies, pulling the stationmaster to settle in, and can give 500 orders of express delivery to the newly opened post station every day, with a guarantee of 2,000 orders per month, the more pieces, the more subsidies, and the most important thing is that there is no franchise fee to open the post station, only to pay the equipment deposit.
Last month, in an area under his jurisdiction, 7 became Pinduoduo stations, in addition to being transformed from Duoduo grocery collection service points, some of which were transformed from the original local rookie stations.
According to him, the most peers may pull 10 webmasters to settle in a month, which is only a small area in the city, and it is estimated that there are more large areas, and more than 20 new ones may be drawn in a month. And in order to launch the brand, the webmaster has recently begun to need to do the door, that is, to affix the logo of “Pinduoduo Station” uniformly.
A stationmaster of Pinduoduo Station told Tech Planet that he was a rookie station before, and later heard that Pinduoduo Station had incentive support, and began to do Pinduoduo Station at the end of last year. Operators can see the status of unpacking and delivery and detention in real time through the background system.
Caption: Pinduoduo Station
The webmaster also mentioned that unlike traditional express stations such as Cainiao, Pinduoduo combines the station with the community group buying business, which means that the webmaster can also do a lot of grocery shopping, and consumers can also receive express packages by the way when they go to the service point to pick up group purchase goods, increasing the passenger flow and revenue of the service point.
Caption: Pinduoduo station manager’s Duoduo grocery shopping group
From the perspective of geographical coverage, Pinduoduo Station has obtained business licenses in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Shandong, Guangxi, Hunan and other places, showing a multi-point flowering situation. Even in some county-level areas, the emergence of Pinduoduo stations has filled the gap in express terminal services.
02 What are the odds of Pinduoduo Station winning
As we all know, the post station is an asset-heavy business, relying on internal blood transfusion for a long time, and for the webmaster, the payback cycle is not short, an industry person told Tech Planet that the average payback cycle of the express post station is 12 to 18 months, which means that investors need to have enough financial support to get through the initial loss stage.
Pinduoduo Station will also face the challenge of large upfront investment and long payback cycle, but it also has certain advantages.
From the perspective of user experience, Pinduoduo Station supports door-to-door delivery, and also launches welfare activities such as pick-up and red envelopes, such as “Pinduoduo picks up red envelopes, and must get 5 yuan threshold red envelopes”, which greatly attracts consumers and can enhance user loyalty and activity.
In terms of operation mode, the combination of express collection and community group buying is a highlight of Pinduoduo Station. Consumers can pick up express delivery when picking up group purchase goods, which not only saves time, but also increases the passenger flow of the station. Through the distribution of red envelopes by many grocery shopping groups, such as “today’s red envelopes, cash payment/grocery change/large coupons”, it can also further promote the development of community group buying business and increase the source of income for webmasters.
A webmaster revealed that in the first month after joining Pinduoduo Station, through platform support, the average daily express delivery collection volume of the station surged from the initial 300 to 1,200 pieces, and now the average daily order is 1,100-1,200 orders, 6 cents per order, there are three contracting areas, plus various subsidies, the net income of a month can exceed 10,000, and the revenue is much more than that of the previous post station.
However, there are also many problems with Pinduoduo Station. In terms of user experience, a user told Tech Planet that since the rookie station downstairs became Pinduoduo Station, the express delivery could not receive the pickup text message after arriving at the station, let alone the previous pickup code SMS, and could only find a pickup code through the purchased e-commerce platform, and the pickup steps became more cumbersome. The station manager also said that because Pinduoduo’s system is used, the pickup code can only be seen by downloading the Pinduoduo App or scanning the code on WeChat.
Moreover, because Pinduoduo Station is in the stage of rapid expansion, the management and service quality of some stations are uneven. In some newly established stations, there are cases of parcels being taken incorrectly, lost, and even backlogged packages due to lack of manpower, and consumers waiting for long pick-up times.
In addition, once the subsidy is weakened, some sites may fall into a state of loss due to high operating costs. At the same time, for the stationmaster, in addition to the early equipment purchase, store decoration and other expenses, rent, water and electricity bills, labor costs, etc. in daily operations are also rising, and the profit margin is further compressed.
From the perspective of industry competition, Pinduoduo Station is facing fierce competition from established express collection platforms such as Cainiao Station and Mama Station. These competitors have formed a mature operating model and a perfect service system, in contrast, the brand recognition and influence of Pinduoduo Station are still relatively weak, which requires a lot of time and resources to invest in brand promotion and word-of-mouth building.
03 Express station melee, who can be the first to break the game
At the moment when the e-commerce industry is deeply involuted, logistics services have become one of the core battlefields of e-commerce platform competition.
With its huge user base and high-frequency transaction scenarios, Pinduoduo essentially takes the express station business as the key to reshaping the logistics ecology, trying to break the traditional express collection industry pattern, build a closed-loop ecology of “e-commerce + community group buying + express delivery”, and seek new breakthroughs.
In addition to Pinduoduo, industry giant Alibaba also made major adjustments to its Cainiao Station at the beginning of this year.
On January 15, Cainiao Group made organizational structure adjustments, including Cainiao’s domestic e-commerce supply chain solution team and electronic face sheet team will also be transferred to Taotian Group, as well as the transfer of Cainiao Station to Alibaba Holding Group, and the person in charge, Xiong Jian, reported to Wu Yongming, CEO of the group.
According to LatePost, these adjustments mean that Alibaba continues to focus on its core e-commerce strategy, and Alibaba e-commerce may explore door-to-door delivery business through Cainiao Station. This will also further improve service quality and form differentiation.
Therefore, Alibaba’s e-commerce and express delivery business are more deeply bound. Alibaba expects to use Cainiao Station’s huge network foundation to integrate resources and realize the optimization of the whole link of parcels from warehousing to terminal distribution, so as to enhance the user shopping experience and consolidate its leading position in the e-commerce market.
At the same time, established companies in the express delivery industry have also laid out post stations.
For example, the Tuxi Station built by ZTO provides users with diversified services such as parcel collection and delivery in the form of an “express supermarket”, and at the same time realizes the efficient operation of parcels with the help of ZTO’s huge logistics network; YTO’s mother station, relying on YTO’s logistics outlets across the country, is widely deployed in the community, not only serving YTO Express, but also accessing other express brands to expand the scope of services; Yunda’s express supermarket focuses on convenience services, providing one-stop services such as parcel storage and living payment through cooperation with merchants around the community; Shentong launched a meow station to improve parcel processing efficiency and user pickup experience through an intelligent management system.
Even the outsider J&T has quickly obtained offline network resources by acquiring Best Neighborhood, and entered the field of express delivery stations, trying to get a piece of the red sea.
Next, the competition of express stations will be a contest of the comprehensive strength of e-commerce platforms. Whether Pinduoduo can build a differentiated logistics service system with its post station business is not only related to its own success or failure in the express collection market, but may also affect its competition in the e-commerce industry.
With the accelerated layout of Pinduoduo Station across the country, a new e-commerce logistics ecology oriented by user needs and with community scenarios as the core is gradually taking shape, and its final direction deserves the continued attention of the entire industry.
