Nov. 26 (NBD) -- Amazon.com Inc (Amazon, Nasdaq: AMZN)) on Monday launched a pop-up store on Pinduoduo (Nasdaq: PDD), a fast growing e-commerce platform in China, seeking a growing sales volume in the country during Black Friday shopping spree.

National Business Daily (NBD) noticed that the share prices of both Amazon and Pinduoduo rose on the day, by 1.61 percent and 7.44 percent, respectively.

Photo/VCG

According to Amazon, the shop will stay open until the end of next month and sell about 1,000 products that are also available on the company's Japanese, U.K., U.S. and German sites. 

Besides, the store carries out promotion activities to provide coupons and discounts from both Amazon and Pinduoduo.

By running an online store on Pinduoduo, Amazon is to enrich the shopping channels for consumers, leveraging its advantages on the overseas goods and cross-border logistics, and Pinduoduo's large user base in the third-tier and below cities and rural markets, stated Amazon China.

Pinduoduo, which began operation in September 2015, reported 536.3 million active users for the past 12 months, up 39 percent year over year, and the GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) reached 840.2 billion yuan (119.4 billion U.S. dollars) during the period, with a year-on-year surge of 144 percent.

Some held Amazon's new move indicates its shifting focus on the cross-border business in Chinese marketplace after it closed the Chinese website for domestic merchants in late July.

Li Yanchuan, vice-president of Amazon China, note that overseas shopping service and Prime membership are the two pillars for Amazon's cross-border e-commerce business in China, which help the company differentiate itself from its counterparts. The U.S. firm's sales volume for this year's Double Eleven Shopping Festival doubled compared to the amount for the same period of 2018.

NBD noticed that Amazon is facing cut-throat competition in the Chinese market. A report released by research company Analysys showed the top three players Tmall International, NetEase Kaola and JD Worldwide grabbed 34.1 percent, 26.2 percent and 12.6 percent of market share, respectively, in the cross-border e-commerce sector in the third quarter of 2019, in contrast to 5.5 percent for Amazon which stood at the fifth spot.

Partnering with the rising domestic platform thus becomes part of Amazon's strategy to scramble for more market share in China.

For Pinduoduo, the collaboration with Amazon is believed to further diversify product ranges of the Chinese e-commerce platform and to enhance its competitiveness against other online cross-border apps.

Pinduoduo announced last Friday its foray into the cross-border shopping market, saying that it has set up international sites in the U.S., UK, Germany and Japan. The platform is to launch over 20,000 imported products from around 500 international brands from November 28 to December 3.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn