Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Right next to it though is a big, bright, saturated, and bold red color of the team buying button, which also happens to be a price that is typically about 40% lower than the individual buying button. Which is interesting because that's set by the retailer. The retailer—I don't know if it's a contractual obligation—as a term of listing on Pinduoduo, you set two prices. There was the individual price and then the team buying price. Interestingly, (I think it was something like) the team size had to be 20 people, originally. If you can go and get 20 people to come together, then you would have access. I think the retailer would control this too and say, if you bring 20 people, then it becomes 10 people, and now it's all the way down to 2 people. This idea that if you can self-organize, if you can do some demand aggregation for us, then you get a break. Yeah, totally. I don't know if this is how it was in the beginning, now the retailer sets the team size—the minimum team size. I say retailer, I mean seller. We'll get into that in a minute. What happens when you click that button, this is just genius because it all runs on WeChat. We'll get in the social aspects of WeChat in a minute. But it runs on WeChat Pay—WeChat's payment system. You are instantly charged that price, the team price, the minute you hit that button. That dollar value gets transferred to Pinduoduo immediately. They get the money the second you hit that button. The transaction doesn't go through. You have 24 hours to hit the minimum team size. There are two ways that you could hit the minimum team size to buy this item. You could, one, join an existing team that's out there and Pinduoduo, right in the UI, surfaces a bunch of other people that are also trying to buy this app, have also formed teams. You can join up their teams. Seems pretty simple. You'll get the discount that way. If you want extra discounts, you can form your own team and you can recruit your own people to come in and join you. It's all natively baked right into WeChat. You can just super easily post this item that you're buying into your family, friends, or whatever WeChat group or post it publicly in WeChat stories or whatever and recruit people to come join you. What is this kind of stuff? It's fruit, obviously, but it's also shoes, jeans. I think, still, the number one product—…

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