A total of agricultural products worth more than RMB 6.7 billion (nearly USD 1 billion) were sold on Pinduoduo between June 1 and June 12, up 310% year-on-year, said the e-commerce company in a press release.
70% of this produce, which includes oranges and salted duck eggs, were bought by consumers living in China’s first-to-second tier cities, the firm said.
Consumers in these large cities have turned out to be the largest consumer group for such products because of affordability and better taste, which is made possible because they are directly from production bases, said Wang Tao, chief analyst of Pinduoduo’s big data analysis center.
Pinduoduo’s in-house data on agricultural product sales in this particular promotional period mirrored the demographic change market research firm Jiguang detected in Pinduoduo’s consumer base.
Jiguang data shows that 44.2% of Pinduoduo’s newly-acquired users in the first quarter came from first-and-second-tier cities, said Pinduduo in the press release.
Pinduoduo’s financial reports show that it had 444.3 million monthly active users in the first quarter while in the last quarter of 2018, it had 418.5 million.
Both Pinduoduo’s own data and Jiguang’s data signal that the e-commerce company is also gaining popularity in large cities, in addition to third-to-six-tier cities where Pinduoduo first found its niche.
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