A set of electronic commerce that includes social networking, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to help online shopping and marketing of goods and services.

Social Commerce or S-Commerce is the use of social networking platforms to sell and promote products and services to consumers.

• Businesses use UGC (User Generated Content) to drive their marketing pitch and create new buyers with brand advocates.
• These consumer-based experts give recommendations, share an opinion and also interact with potential customers via social media.

Companies encourage comments and discussions on social media platforms and spread online or electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to promote brand awareness and gain shoppers insights.

Pinduoduo is the most popular social commerce platform in China. It has created a unique digital space that connects retailers and consumers directly through its interactive shopping experience.

Moreover, Pinduoduo has become one of China’s preferred e-commerce app and has also inspired western markets to adopt S-Commerce strategies. Its shoppers are enticed by deals on a large assortment of products.

As of September 30, 2020, Pinduoduo has generated over RMB (Chinese Yuan) 1.45 trillion gross merchandise value (GMV) in the last twelve months.

731.3 million active buyers in the last twelve months, 643.4 million average monthly active users in the 3rd quarter of 2020. (Source – Yahoo Finance)

Pinduoduo’s business model is customer-to-manufacturer (C2M), operating all the intermediaries — except themselves, of course.

The app’s users will secure group discounts on products by shopping with one another and buy in bulk, straight from the makers.

Shoppers have two value options when they buy an item:

• at a standard value or
• at a reduced value.

So for users to unlock heavy discounts they need at least a minimum of two people or more to build a team.

Pinduoduo social commerce mobile app has a unique set of innovative features that attract shoppers and other business owners.

We will discuss one by one all the core features that makes Pinduoduo an ideal social commerce app.

Group buying or collective buying or team purchases is an activity where products are offered at reduced prices on the condition that a minimum number of shoppers buy that product from the same seller.

This is beneficial for both sellers and customers, as this expedites the volume of purchases.

Image Source: Pinduoduo © 2020

On Pinduoduo, every item has a standard price and a team price. To use the discounted value, the shopper needs to join or build a team.

A shopper can invite friends, family, social contacts via. various available social networks like WeChat, QQ, or voice chat.

Once the team is confirmed, everyone can enjoy the attractive prices and get the goods shipped to their individual addresses.

Image Source: Pinduoduo © 2020

Buyers on Pinduoduo actively share products and their shopping experiences within their social circle.

New buyers in turn refer the platform to their family and social networks, generating low-cost organic traffic and active interactions and leading to an exponential growth of our buyer base.

In a market like China, it is also a culture where family and friends influence purchase decisions.

How can you facilitate the Team Purchase in existing your online store or simply create a dedicated group buying e-commerce platform?

For this feature, Webkul has made ready to use solution to provide group-buying functionality for

• Magento 2
• WooCommerce
• Bagisto Laravel eCommerce

With this, shoppers can create or join the existing teams to enjoy reduced pricing.

Moreover, the shoppers can share the group deals through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or Email.

An e-commerce marketplace is like a virtual market or a mall where you can buy different brands of products sold by multiple vendors, retailers, or sellers.

There are many business models of the marketplace.

The marketplace owner maintains the entire e-commerce website, process transactions, send payouts, or may manage shipments.

Whereas third-party merchants focus on product listings, order fulfilment, sales assistance to buyers.

An online marketplace acts as a digital meeting ground through one portal, where the manufacturers or suppliers and vendors can meet and transact with end-consumers.

Pinduoduo started in 2015 to become the biggest online marketplace for agricultural products in China.

They work with millions of farmers and their communities, helping them to go digital and be able to sell online.

Further, Pinduoduo is improving the productivity and efficiency of the agriculture industry supply chain.

By making agricultural produce more easily discoverable and enable the aggregation of demand.

Image Source: Pinduoduo © 2020

Besides agricultural produce, Pinduoduo offers anyone to open their virtual shop on its platform without any commission.

Shoppers can browse different categories of products from daily groceries, apparel, electronics, home appliances, and more.

But how do you create an online marketplace to enable vendors to signup and sell on your existing e-commerce platform?

To do that, you will require a multi-vendor listings solution like Webkul Multi-Vendor Marketplace, converting one seller shop into a multi-seller shopping mall.

Webkul Marketplace has been awarded as the top-selling extension by Magento Adobe Commerce many times and has been critiqued to be the world’s best multi-vendor solution.

With full-native apps, the shoppers and sellers can have complete features to the virtual store without needing to visit the web platform.

Many popular retailers like Sephora and marketplaces like Amazon, FlipKart, are using ML and AI-driven product recommendations algorithms.

So instead of manually curating the products and relying on A/B testing, online shop owners are now able to deliver a more personalized shopping experience to every customer.

On Pinduoduo it engages its shoppers with limitless personalized recommendations of items that are shown based on their past user activity and interactions.

Further, on the Pinduoduo app, to promote product discovery and window-shopping activity, earlier the search bar was moved from the top to the lower section.

This model replicates the joy of product discovery that is generally associated when we go offline shopping. With this, Pinduoduo is creating a virtual window shopping experience that makes buyers come again and again.

Amazon Personalize – A real-time personalization and machine learning recommendation by AWS. The same service is also running for its own Amazon.com e-commerce marketplace.

You can also integrate Amazon Personalize for Magento 2 or any other e-commerce store and suggest products based on customer demographics, past behaviour, and user activity.

Live streaming shopping is a trending marketing activity through which e-commerce retailers, influencers, and brands advertise and endorse products via online video streaming services. Further, the video presenter interacts with the live audience with comments, answer questions in real-time.

Livestream sessions can occur on an eCommerce website or a social media platform or on a native mobile app. It can be store or brand-specific where influencers may also host livestream events promoting items from any vendor.

It’s really useful and attractive during this activity to raise inquiries and study the goods from the experience of a specific product.

You can have the live stream video broadcasting feature in your existing online store or native mobile app. Webkul has already built livestream extensions for:

• Magento 2
• Bagisto Laravel eCommerce Shop
• Bagisto Laravel eCommerce Marketplace
• (SaaS) Bagisto Laravel eCommerce Marketplace

Furthermore, in case your existing online store is built on a different platform like Opencart, WoooCommerce, Shopware etc, you can contact the Webkul sales team.

Refer and earn program allows you to earn a commission from every new customer who makes a purchase through your reference.

Affiliate promoting is comparable as affiliates generally aren’t customers of yours. They generally promote your product exclusively for the payout. It’s a man-made recommendation, not a natural one.

On Pinduoduo, shoppers can get free products, depending on the conditions set. Such as sharing a product link with several friends within 24 hrs to claim the free reward.

However the condition each friend gets the link and engages with it via WeChat and QQ, users can further invite their contacts to form a shopping team to get a lower price for their purchase.

Refer & Earn feature is not natively available on the e-commerce platforms, but Webkul has built ready to use solution for affiliate marketing:

• Magento 2 Affiliate System
• Opencart Refer & Earn
• Prestashop Affiliate Program
• Odoo Affiliate Management

In-app play, which mixes gaming and searching, obtaining several discounts, coupons to activate significant offers.

The game is simple, a user creates and supports a virtual tree till it is a true box of fruit, which might then be shipped to their address.

The more they search, the additional water droplets they receive to grow their tree.

Webkul can also help you to develop an in-app mini-game for your e-commerce social app. Where shoppers can spend time playing mini-games and puzzles to earn some coupons and discounts.

Like such Spin to Win is quite popular these days, where shoppers can spin the virtual wheel and get lucky to earn coupons. Spin to Win extensions are available for:

• Magento 2 Spin to Win
• CS-Cart Spin to Win
• Prestashop Spin to Win
• WooCommerce Spin to Win
• Odoo Spin to Win

Webkul is the leading e-commerce development agency in the world. Mobikul is our M-Commerce division consisting of a dedicated team of more than 50 full-stack Android and iOS developers.

Mobikul offers complete on-demand white-label mobile app development services with open-source code customization. We have published more than 1500 live apps on Google Play and App Store.

Mobikul team works on all the latest mobile app development technologies like Kotlin, React Native, Swift, Flutter and provides custom features such as:

• Multilingual language compatibility
• Social login integration
• Shipment & payment gateway integrations
• Custom web-end feature development
• Machine Learning visual and voice search
• Virtual Try-on with Augmented Reality

Mobikul team is ready to build your next social commerce mobile app. Share your thoughts with us and let us know what features you are looking for in your next-generation Pinduoduo like social commerce app.