Ten billions of subsidies have attracted high-end users, and Pinduoduo is trying his best to retain them.
Text|Li Xin
Edit | Cecilia Xu
Online travel, fight a lot of secrets spontaneously.
Following the launch of the train ticket service at the end of last year, it was discovered that recently Pinduoduo has launched a low-profile “air ticket” service on the App side. What abacus is Pinduoduo playing?
At present, it seems that Pinduoduo is outside the e-commerce business, and may also aim at the online travel business, using train tickets and air tickets to enter the board, and then attacking the highly profitable wine travel products.
Pinduoduo’s layout of online travel may reproduce its business logic of aligning with Gome and selling cars in large amounts—whoever has difficulty, aligns with whom.
Air tickets that cannot make big money, but they must be sold
Similar to train tickets, the entrance to the air ticket business is also located in the “Recharge Center” on the homepage of Pinduoduo App. However, at present, there is no entrance to the air ticket business in the “Recharge Center” on the homepage of the applet.
The difference is that in addition to the internal entrance of the “Recharge Center” on the homepage of the App and applet, the train ticket of Pinduoduo also has an independent entrance in the recharge column of the app/applet terminal classification/search channel, and in the ” The central location of the “Duo Duo Travel” page has the “Train Tickets Online!” promotion section.
The left side is the App side; the right side is the applet side
In terms of price, the flight information of the same date and route is randomly selected for query. Comparing with the prices of the two apps of Ctrip and Feizhu, it is found that the lowest price of Pinduoduo is relatively cheaper. strong>This shows that Pinduoduo has more or less subsidized the airline ticket business.
From left to right: Pin Duoduo, Flying Pig, Ctrip
In April this year, 51BOOK, an air travel B2B trading platform, announced a strategic cooperation with Pinduoduo.Sharing products, freight rates, technical resources and supply chain, 51BOOK will provide Pinduoduo with a one-stop, full-process online ticket booking solution. Now it seems that the alliance with 51BOOK may be the prerequisite for Pinduoduo to sell air tickets, and it does not rule out that the launch of the air ticket business is the landing of the strategic cooperation between the two. It is understood that 51BOOK is also a ticket supplier for vertical OTA platforms such as Ctrip, and has helped JD.com, Donkey Mom, Tenpay and other platforms to launch ticket services and provide agency services.
However, as far as the airline ticket business is concerned, it is not possible to make a lot of money by fighting a lot. As mentioned in the report on the train ticket for Pinduoduo, an OTA industry person said that the air ticket The commission is between 2 and 3 points, and the train ticket is completely 0 commission and does not make money. That is to say, although it seems that train tickets are not profitable at all, the commission rate of 2 to 3 points for airline tickets is really not high.
At the same time, the online air ticket booking field has already formed a “giant monopoly” pattern. According to Analysys data, taking the second quarter of 2019 as an example, China’s online air ticket booking market was jointly occupied by Ctrip, Qunar, and Feizhu over 70% of the market share.
Source: Analysys
Can’t make big money and have no market share advantage. What is the plan to sell a lot of airline tickets?
Obviously, compared with train tickets, the unit price of air tickets is higher, and it is more able to enter the high-consumption group. Although Pinduoduo further expands the user base through tens of billions of subsidies, subsidized products alone are not enough. If you want to develop user stickiness to the platform, Pinduoduo will come up with corresponding services.
It can be seen that whether it is to sell cars with the Automobile Group, to get through Gome appliances, or to start air tickets now, it is all a move to keep high consumer groups. After the tens of billions of subsidies were renewed, Pinduoduo has been working hard to retain users.
Wine travel is the ultimate goal?
Will Pinduoduo’s bigger purpose be online travel?
In addition to the vertical OTA platform, e-commerce that gathers huge traffic