It is worth noting that pinduoduo is at the bottom of the list of 20 enterprises in e-commerce.
This is not really surprising. Pinduoduo went to the United States last year after the public opinion encountered a large area of attacks, it has been destined to be a long-term walk in a platform to recover the reputation of the development of the road, and had to bear some harsh reputation.
However, its overall score is the lowest, which means that pinduoduo, as a member of the e-commerce platform, has not done a good job in its social responsibility, leading to its lowest ranking among the 20 similar platforms.
In other words, the report’s assessment seems to confirm that while Pinduoduo has put some effort into combating the proliferation of fakes on its platform, it has made little significant progress. At least from the outside world, pinduoduo would not have been designated a “notorious market” in April by the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, which cited “a surge in consumer complaints due to the proliferation of counterfeit goods.”
Pinduoduo is well aware of the fakes on the platform from beginning to end. However, pinduoduo is still facing a serious problem of fake goods on the platform. Why do fake goods prefer Pinduoduo? Is pinduoduo incapable of cracking down on fake goods? Or is there something wrong with pinduoduo’s anti-counterfeiting methods?
Heavy growth to fight more light fake?
When pinduoduo listed in the US last year, CEO Huang Zheng described pinduoduo as a “three-year-old child” and asked for maximum tolerance. A listed “three years old child”, the biggest goal is self-evident, namely high-speed growth.
Whether seen from pinduoduo’s actions in the past year or the data in pinduoduo’s financial statements, pinduoduo’s desire for the growth of GMV on the platform is far greater than other aspects, so pinduoduo has made a crazy investment in marketing, achieved a high growth rate, and suffered huge losses beyond imagination.
The growth data can make the capital market have a good impression on PINDUoduo, which is the fundamental reason why Pinduoduo takes growth as the first goal. As a result, all other preoccupations, such as fighting fakes, seem less important.
And from cracking down on fake itself, it will produce some consequences that are not conducive to the growth of Spelling duo Duo. On the one hand, if Pinduoduo takes anti-counterfeiting as its primary goal, it will inevitably consider increasing the investment in anti-counterfeiting technology and human resources, which will occupy the investment originally in marketing and make pinduoduo unable to achieve predictable growth rate.
In other words, it would disrupt pinduoduo’s growth. This is unacceptable for Pinduoduo, which is eager to prove itself to the capital market. On the contrary, pinduoduo will be subjected to more pressure from the capital market.
On the other hand, counterfeiting naturally to knock off a certain scale of goods, if it is a high intensity of counterfeiting, this scale may let Pinduoduo unimaginable. As a result, trading volume and other relevant data will also be affected by a very big, compared with vigorously crack down on fake, fight duoduo trading data may be a lot of ugly. Natural fight many financial statements will not look good, caused by the chain reaction of the capital market will also make fight many headaches.
On balance, pINDUoduo is unlikely to abandon its primary goal of growth and go all out to fight counterfeits. Since all efforts to fight fake goods will hinder pinduoduo’s growth as usual, we can see that pinduoduo has achieved growth and still suffered huge losses, but the improvement of the epidemic of fake goods on the platform has not been recognized by the outside world.
However, Pinduoduo is very clear about all these. Since it is impossible to crack down on counterfeits as its first goal, pinduoduo has to improve the reputation of the platform in other ways, so pinduoduo began to focus on poverty alleviation.
Fight more fancy poverty alleviation
Poverty alleviation by e-commerce is not a rare thing, but something all industries are doing. But since last year, Pinduoduo has increased its attention and investment in poverty alleviation. From simply providing sales channels and traffic support to proposing poverty alleviation policies throughout the industrial chain, Pinduoduo has gradually developed its own set of poverty alleviation methods, directly or indirectly.
As for the reason why the young Pindong Duo wants to take the corresponding social responsibility to improve its reputation, it is actually the most fundamental reason. In other words, poverty alleviation will help Pinduoduo gain a better reputation in the sinking market, which will offset pinduoduo’s bad reputation in the sinking market to a certain extent. For the outside world, poverty alleviation can earn Pinduoduo goodwill and improve its negative image in people’s minds.
Therefore, Pinduoduo is betting on poverty alleviation to improve the platform’s reputation. As a result, Pinduoduo vigorously publicized its poverty alleviation deeds. In many news reports, Pinduoduo helped farmers, agriculture and rural areas with the attitude of enabler.
However, pinduoduo’s fancy poverty alleviation seems to be showing cracks. On June 10, Xinhuanet mentioned problems in pinduoduo’s poverty alleviation event and questioned it as “poverty alleviation by running away” in an article titled “Pinduoduo Zhongmou Garlic Premium poverty Alleviation”. Pinduoduo later responded that it had been “viciously attacked by an organized group”.
The article specifically mentioned that Pinduoduo had some unreasonable behaviors during the acquisition, resulting in poverty alleviation not really implemented. From this incident, Pinduoduo seems to have fallen into the poverty alleviation show storm. It has to be said that Pinduoduo’s attitude towards poverty alleviation may be the cause of this result.
Poverty alleviation can indeed help Pinduoduo improve its reputation to some extent, but poverty alleviation will undoubtedly deteriorate once it loses its most fundamental belief. There is no problem with Pinduoduo focusing on poverty alleviation, but now there are some problems that should not exist, which is enough to prove that Pinduoduo has not touched the way of poverty alleviation.
From the perspective of improving platform word-of-mouth, the problem of poverty alleviation may also indicate that PDD’s method of improving platform word-of-mouth through poverty alleviation is losing some key effectiveness. In other words, it may become increasingly difficult for Pindoduo to improve its image through poverty alleviation.
Moreover, from the perspective of poverty alleviation itself, if poverty alleviation is not done well, but botched, it will in turn cause a second blow to pinduoduo’s reputation.
The reputation of poverty alleviation
Back to the problem itself, why the word of mouth is so bad, even in the eyes of many people, more is the pronoun of fake. Quite simply, there are many fake products on pinduoduo platform, which is the root cause of the criticism of pinduoduo.
It was previously estimated that pinduoduo could guarantee that all the food enterprises opened on the platform had legal subject qualification and food production license as long as it took less than 10,000 people to check for a month. This shows that Pinduoduo has ways to eradicate or significantly improve the fakes problem on its platform, such as increasing investment in AI technology and human resources for auditing.
So, pinduoduo to improve their reputation, and fight against counterfeiting, and is vigorously, is the only way. Other ways, such as poverty alleviation, are far from satisfying immediate needs.
What Pinduoduo needs to understand is that poverty alleviation can only help pinduoduo build a certain reputation in terms of corporate responsibility, but not a better reputation in terms of the quality of products on the platform. Because poverty alleviation has nothing to do with the quality of products on the platform, poverty alleviation cannot strengthen pinduoduo’s anti-counterfeiting ability, nor can it reduce the number of fake goods on pinduoduo.
Moreover, pinduoduo’s poverty alleviation is still controversial and more or less questioned by the outside world, which is quite unfavorable to pinduoduo.
All kinds of fancy ways to help the poor no matter how many, it is not as good as the direct anti-counterfeiting effect, come quickly. Because the anti-counterfeiting ability can not only directly improve the reputation of Pinduoduo, but also for the long-term development of Pinduoduo to remove some obstacles, alleviate some of the pressure it faces in the capital market.
However, pinduoduo’s inability to crack down on counterfeits has been obvious to all. The fake products on the platform are still a “cancer” that cannot be removed. Therefore, Pinduoduo has become a “rock” in the heart of consumers and e-commerce market. It is true that four-year-old Pinduoduo needs to grow, but pinduoduo should learn the correct values of development and take cracking down on counterfeits as a key task, because poverty alleviation alone cannot make Pinduoduo gain a better reputation in the eyes of the public.
If Pinduoduo fails to find the focus of improving the reputation of the platform, make up its mind and increase investment to solve the problem of rampant fake products on the platform from the source, pinduoduo will never escape the label of fake products platform and become the object of consumer aversion. As a result, the label of fake platform will become the lingering shadow of Pinduoduo.