03. Lessons from History’s Most Brutal 6·18: How We Can Break Free from a Society of Mutual Harm
Summary
The core problem with 2024’s 6·18 was not that discounts stopped working, but that the interest pact among platforms, merchants and consumers broke down. Once consumers became the most valuable stakeholder and platforms refused to injure themselves, the cost landed on merchants. 倪叔 summed it up: “When the platform and the user stand together, the merchant is the sacrifice.”（平台和用户站在一起的时候，商家就是那个牺牲品）Refund-without-return policies, platform price comparison and mandatory low prices were not isolated policies, but the result of profit being redistributed in a buyer’s market.
The clash between 沈浩波 and JD.com exposed, above all, a decline in JD.com’s competitiveness and strategic discipline. JD.com lacks content, livestreaming and topic-generation capabilities, leaving it to answer Pinduoduo with a return to low prices—forcing a roughly 500,000-person heavy-asset system to compete on cost with a platform employing fewer than 10,000 people. 倪叔’s verdict was blunt: “What do I rely on to fight Pinduoduo in a price war? I rely on bleeding merchants to feed consumers.”
Brands pulling back their spending was the real variable behind the cliff-like collapse in major-streamer GMV. 卫诗婕 said first-wave livestream data for every major Douyin streamer fell by more than 70%; 倪叔 then said major-streamer performance was down 90% across the board. Users did not suddenly disappear; brands stopped accepting price cuts, buying traffic and subsidizing transactions. The old GMV boom was a composite of brand resources, streamer trust and platform traffic. Once brands withdrew, the performance that had appeared to belong to streamers evaporated.
The “Pinduoduo-ification of white-collar consumption” means brand premiums are facing a structural headwind. 倪叔 said last year marked a break in the “you get what you pay for” consumer pact: white-collar workers who once disdained Pinduoduo began looking only at price, discovering that “if I give up brands, my life gets better.” As demand shifted from upgrading consumption toward use value, the path of sustained growth through better quality and brand logic was cut off.
The traffic dividend in livestream commerce has shifted from streamers back to platforms, and the larger the scale, the harder it is to sustain margins. Streamers once acquired traffic cheaply, then retailed it to brands; today platforms consume brand budgets first, while streamers must buy traffic at full price—and sometimes cannot buy it even after paying. With domestic e-commerce net margins squeezed to roughly 2 to 3 percentage points, 倪叔 offered the industry’s verdict: “A first-rate industry needs only third-rate talent; a third-rate industry needs first-rate talent to survive.”
An average 80% return rate in women’s apparel is the clearest example of how “mutual harm” becomes self-reinforcing. Merchants delay shipments, circulate returned goods and pass the resulting costs on to legitimate buyers; the more rule-followers lose out, the more likely they are to join the return camp. At the same time, platform price comparison and precision ad targeting let low-quality copies directly intercept the customers of original merchants. “In the end, there are no winners”—only platforms continuously collecting ad fees.
Excess capacity across the economy makes capacity reduction a more important theme than any one-off recovery in consumption. Guangzhou women’s-apparel merchants began clearing inventory and exiting at the first major marketing event after Lunar New Year; the maternity-and-infant market has declined for 5 consecutive years, yet brands still set 30% growth targets and build capacity that takes 3 years to come online. As long as every player treats industry contraction as “someone else’s decline,” price wars, cash-flow collapse and industry shakeout are not accidents but the consequence of growth inertia.
6·18 may not continue in its current form, and the next commercial pact must shift from growth to sustainability. 倪叔 thinks “there may not be a 6·18 next year,” while also saying the probability of having no 6·18 at all is small. The common ground is that, if 6·18 continues, simply copying this year’s model is pointless; the next edition must be a wholly new pact that “just happens to still be called 6·18.” The program ultimately points to the Pangdonglai model of operating at a limited scale and to Japan’s long-lived companies as alternative models: stop expanding without limit, and let employees, customers and operators survive within a manageable scale. “Do not waste any recession.”（不要浪费任何一次萧条）
Deep dive
1. The 沈浩波 Affair Exposed JD.com’s Strategic Anxiety, Not Just a Merchant-Onboarding Dispute
沈浩波, founder of Motie Publishing, publicly accused JD.com of insisting on including his brand in 6·18 after the brand had explicitly declined to participate. Staff said they merely wanted to run the event well and “give the savings back to the people.” In 倪叔’s view, the substance was “being generous with someone else’s money”: the platform was using merchant profits to fulfill its own low-price promise.
倪叔 said the more important issue than pressure on merchants was that JD.com itself was weakening. Against Pinduoduo, Douyin and Alibaba, it lacks new weapons in content, livestreaming and topic generation, leaving it to compete through a “big, dumb and brute-force” approach. “It used to be one of the industry’s giants. Today it looks more like someone with no weapons at all.”
卫诗婕 said 刘强东’s decision to pursue low prices was not a matter of personal preference, but a response to Pinduoduo overtaking Alibaba in market cap and to the entire industry shifting its rules and assumptions toward price. 倪叔’s rebuttal was that following a trend is not strategy: “Strategy is deciding what I give up and what I defend.” A company cannot beat its rival by adopting the rival’s rules.
2. JD.com Is Taking a Heavy-Asset System into a Price War—and Giving Up Its Moat
The choice during 徐雷’s tenure was to defend quality, service and delivery experience, retaining high-quality users with lower price sensitivity. JD.com’s stock held up relatively well during the pandemic, which 倪叔 attributed to that strategic discipline: even if market share declined, the users who trusted JD.com most would remain.
After 刘强东 returned, he emphasized starting over, efficiency and price competitiveness. 倪叔 said that in roughly 4 to 5 months, he “destroyed everything 徐雷 had created over 3 years.” His math was straightforward: if market share grows only 1% to 2% while profit falls 50%, that growth has no meaning for the capital markets.
JD.com’s roughly 500,000-person, highly asset-intensive model was built to deliver high-quality fulfillment, not the lowest possible cost. The program puts that against Pinduoduo’s fewer than 10,000 employees and describes the comparison as “using your weakness against someone else’s strength.”
卫诗婕 noted that JD.com’s original advantages are also facing a hostile environment: delivery speeds have converged across platforms, while an economic downturn makes even high-income users want to save money. She called the current approach “completely without a playbook.” 倪叔 acknowledged that defending the old advantages is painful, but said, “Holding on to your advantages may kill you more slowly; giving them up may kill you faster.”
3. JD.com’s Control over Warehousing and Fulfillment Turned Price Friction into a Transaction Merchants Could Not Refuse
JD.com’s self-operated model requires many merchants to place inventory in JD.com warehouses, while the platform can lock the backend and change prices, shipping arrangements and customer-service handling on the merchant’s behalf. Even when a brand rejects the promotional price, the platform may still complete the sale itself. That is the power imbalance behind the 沈浩波 affair.
倪叔 said this practice did not begin this year: it has existed for at least 10 years and may reflect the legacy of aggressive payment-term management in the 3C industry. In the past, markets were growing, merchants could still make money overall and e-commerce was largely controlled by JD.com and Alibaba. Even if a brand took a hit in one area, it would stay after running the total-accounting exercise.
The difference today is that merchants are under far greater pressure, so the same hardball tactics now accelerate their alienation. 倪叔’s conclusion was that merchants can leave JD.com, but if JD.com can prove its price power only by squeezing merchants, “then JD.com has no competitiveness.”
4. Pinduoduo’s Low Prices Also Come Out of Merchants’ Pockets—but Its Rules Preserve a “Willing Participant” Escape Hatch
倪叔 distinguished between 2 low-price mechanisms. Pinduoduo sets a public rule—cut the price and orders will follow—so merchants can supply one product at scale, accept razor-thin unit margins in exchange for volume, or leave. JD.com, by contrast, may lock the backend and make decisions for the brand, “forcing you to bear the cost against your will.”
Pinduoduo’s big sellers are often merchants that cannot win on other platforms and do not depend on complex operations; they simply keep cutting prices. That is still coercive, but merchants at least know what game they have entered. JD.com’s forced price changes turn voluntary competition into mandatory cost-sharing.
The more important difference is how the platforms understand traffic. JD.com has had a WeChat nine-grid entry point for years but never built a meaningful play around it. Pinduoduo turned low prices into distribution through “Bargain for One” and group buying. 倪叔’s view is that low prices also require operating skill, while JD.com’s ability to play the traffic game “is zero.”
5. Price Alone Is No Longer Content; JD.com Cannot Turn Products into Social Conversation
Even if a product is RMB50 cheaper, consumers will not necessarily share it in their social circles by saying, “I saved RMB50 and I’m happy.” Today’s major promotions need content and topics as well as discounts to generate broad distribution. Simply piling on resources and cutting prices cannot recreate the social attention once attached to shopping festivals.
倪叔 contrasted JD.com with 雷军 and Xiaomi SU7. Xiaomi can mobilize a social mood, create hot topics and produce a “one call, a hundred responses” effect. 刘强东 was once viewed as an entrepreneur in the same league, but his digital-human livestreams and decision to put procurement staff in front of the camera have left industry observers asking, “Has Dong-ge been talked into this?”
His explanation points not only to capability, but also to the founder’s current state. 刘强东 has spent long periods outside China and is believed to be directing the company remotely, detached from the front line. The early entrepreneur who slept on warehouse floors, personally delivered packages and understood how to give couriers dignity and pride now stands in sharp contrast to the “super boss” who will not listen to advice and is trying to overturn common sense.
6. 2024’s 6·18 Marked the Formal Shift from a Three-Way Win-Win to One-Sided Merchant Pain
倪叔 said he had changed his mind. Before last year, he still viewed major promotions from the perspective of the platform organizer, believing they could concentrate demand so platforms and merchants could serve consumers and make money together. The format had grown stale, but its original intent “really was a two-way effort to make something work.”
After Pinduoduo’s market cap surpassed Alibaba’s, the industry answered anew the question of who mattered most: consumers who continued to spend during an economic downturn. Consumers had to be favored, while platforms could not damage themselves. So the question became, “Who should the platform’s knife point at?” The answer was merchants.
Refund-without-return became the clearest signal of the reshuffling. 卫诗婕 asked: “If the product is bad, then return the product to me. What does it mean that you neither refund the money nor return the goods?” The policy had previously earned e-commerce the label “Somali e-commerce”; the program also noted that Xinhua News Agency supported refund-without-return, showing that consumer protection had become a major policy direction.
Brands used to publish their own major-promotion scorecards. After the pandemic, only platforms did so; in 2024, “the platforms and the brands all fell silent.” To 倪叔, the silence showed that merchants no longer viewed the event as an incremental opportunity, but as an exercise built around damaging their own interests.
7. The Collapse in Major-Streamer GMV Revealed the True Contribution of Brand Subsidies to the Boom
卫诗婕 said first-wave livestream data for every major Douyin streamer fell by more than 70%; 倪叔 went further, saying major-streamer performance was down 90% across the board. He rejected the idea that streamer capability had suddenly vanished. The user base could not simply go to zero; what had actually exited was brand participation.
The old GMV boom was jointly manufactured by brand price cuts, traffic-buying budgets, the 6·18 mechanism and trust between streamers and users. Brands today are unwilling both to cut prices and to continue spending enormous sums on traffic, so the transaction volume once attributed to streamer capability has quickly disappeared.
Screenshots from a JD.com alcohol-merchants’ group showed a separate sample: multiple brands were down 70% to 80%, while some well-known liquor brands were down roughly 90%. Procurement staff asked why everyone was “lying flat” and refusing to cooperate with the event. 倪叔 saw something else: aside from publicly breaking with the platform, brands had already launched a comprehensive boycott through their actions.
卫诗婕 summarized the helplessness: profits had thinned every year, but all sides could at least still burn money in exchange for growth. Today’s major promotions are “everyone spending money in a knife fight.” Brands are not withholding investment because they do not know how to participate; the event no longer offers participants an economic benefit.
8. The Break in “You Get What You Pay For” Is Driving White-Collar Consumers Away from Brands
倪叔 called last year’s deeper change a “break in the pact” between consumers and merchants. Demand failed to recover after the pandemic and expectations continued to deteriorate. Consumers moved from caring about quality to “looking only at price and not asking about quality,” breaking the “you get what you pay for” logic on which brands depend.
His central observation was the “Pinduoduo-ification of white-collar consumption.” After years of customer acquisition, Pinduoduo should have already reached everyone willing to use it. But economic contraction pushed white-collar consumers who once looked down on the platform across their psychological threshold, putting low prices ahead of quality.
The most counterintuitive discovery was: “If I give up brands, my life gets better.” 倪叔 used an extreme but clear formulation to describe the return of use value: “I don’t care whether it’s 雷碧 or Sprite, as long as I can drink it. I also don’t care whether it’s Gree or Haier, as long as it’s a refrigerator and works properly.”
He compared the shift with changes in Japanese consumption after the 2008 economic crisis. As social expectations fell, products carrying large logos and status associations gave way to choices that were simple, comfortable and free of premium pricing. Muji and Uniqlo illustrate the shift in consumption attitudes; they do not prove that quality itself has ceased to matter.
9. Brands Can No Longer Pass Through Costs—but Must Feed the Entire E-Commerce Chain
Platforms, streamers, content teams, media, data tools and matchmaking agencies all need to make money, and the money ultimately comes from brands. Brands once passed those costs on to consumers through product upgrades and pricing power. When purchasing power can no longer absorb a premium, brands have to swallow the entire chain’s costs themselves.
倪叔 recalled that platforms in the BAT era still operated with an “ecosystem” concept: the platform made platform money, merchants made merchant money, and every link had to be profitable for the system to last. Newer platforms chasing the giants often have to do what the older platforms would not. “They don’t care whether you make money; there are plenty of Chinese merchants anyway.”
Data products also changed purpose. Alibaba’s merchant data once showed sellers their operating performance and position within the industry. Later entrants began proactively pushing competitors’ data to merchants, encouraging both sides to escalate because “when the 2 of you start fighting, the platform benefits most.”
This created a new profit model. Before, the larger the merchant, the larger the platform became as well. Today it is: “I will get bigger first, no matter what happens to merchants.” Consumers became “the platform’s dad,” while refund-without-return and low prices continued to intensify, leaving merchants to absorb the pressure from every link in the chain.
10. Excess Capacity Has Convinced Platforms That Merchants Can Always Be Replaced
卫诗婕 attributed many of the industry’s aggressive terms to excess capacity. The number of factories in China’s industrial clusters is enormous; after one group of merchants exits, another group is ready to enter. Pinduoduo can therefore turn the platform’s mission from helping merchants find consumers to helping consumers screen an oversupplied pool of merchants.
Chinese e-commerce initially grew on the back of powerful manufacturing and capacity that could not find buyers. The same foundation now weakens merchant bargaining power. “Anyway, you people can never be killed off,” is the premise that lets platforms keep cutting prices without preserving any individual operator’s ability to survive.
倪叔 expanded the issue to every industry. Far more people are starting businesses and trading than in the past; in a 500-person group, perhaps 300 are entrepreneurs. It is impossible for everyone to demand growth at the same time. Only when enough people leave the track can the ROI of those who remain return to normal levels.
The current cycle therefore looks more like broad-based capacity reduction than a simple contest among consumer platforms. Major promotions are difficult to stop even when they become painful, but once merchants broadly refuse to invest, the events themselves begin to fail.
11. Traffic Shifted from a Subsidy Tool to a Spot Auction, Stripping Major Streamers of Their Intermediary Margin
Platforms once gave streamers priority access to traffic. Streamers could buy traffic wholesale from Douyin at a lower cost, then retail it to brands and keep the spread. The mechanism helped platforms build a livestream ecosystem while giving top streamers excess profits.
Today brands widely operate their own livestreams, allowing platforms to sell traffic directly to them without streamers performing their historical intermediary role. The ad system consumes merchant budgets first and streamer budgets second, leaving streamers to buy traffic at full price and sometimes “unable to buy traffic even after spending money.”
Once platforms fix the ROI math, higher GMV does not necessarily produce profit. The program cited companies including 优凡, 东兴日盛 and 欧拉密码 that had scale and sales but suffered cash-flow blowups. Their problem was not insufficient size, but shrinking profit and an expanding number of parties taking a share, eventually making cash flow impossible to sustain.
12. Xiaohongshu Has So Far Avoided the Low-Price War—but Its Edge Rests on Small Scale
卫诗婕 observed that some Xiaohongshu bloggers and buyers were still doing well during 6·18. 倪叔’s first explanation was that the platform’s pool is small: its total e-commerce volume remains materially below that of the other platforms. Precisely because its scale is still limited, it can temporarily choose not to compete through ever-lower prices.
The disagreement is about the future. 卫诗婕 believes the capabilities Xiaohongshu developed among non-mainstream users could help it expand if conditions improve. 倪叔 warns that all of its advantages were built on a small model; as scale grows, it moves closer to the market average. After an ROI of 1 to 20, the inevitable next question is: “How big is your pool?”
13. An 80% Apparel Return Rate Made Rule-Followers the Last Ones to Bear the Cost
The program put the average return rate in women’s apparel at roughly 80%. Merchants therefore ship later and later: first giving consumers time to change their minds, then sending limited inventory in batches and waiting for the first batch to come back before forwarding it again. Preparing all the stock at once could otherwise destroy cash flow.
Circulating returned inventory produced surreal outcomes. Goods later sent to consumers might still contain student ID cards, bank cards or even underwear. Merchants cannot afford to inspect every item at high cost, but they also cannot carry an 80% return rate without recirculating inventory.
Only 20% of buyers ultimately keep their purchases, so return costs are embedded in the transaction price and paid by normal buyers who do not return goods. Once rule-followers realize they are losing out, they too begin returning items, producing a negative equilibrium in which “no one follows the rules.”
Refund-without-return spreads in much the same way. Consumers once avoided openly admitting that they had taken advantage of a merchant. Today, some share methods for spending nothing on shopping for 6 months and even teach refund techniques in paid courses. Individually rational attempts to save money accumulate into a steady erosion of transactional trust.
14. Price Comparison and Precision Ad Targeting Force Original Merchants to Acquire Customers for Inferior Copies
Douyin launched a price-comparison system to prevent traffic from flowing to Pinduoduo. The platform had a self-preservation rationale, but the damage to livestream merchants was severe. A livestream room needs at least 5 people and paid traffic; after a merchant acquires an order at high cost, the system recommends a cheaper version of the same product to the user, directly prompting cancellations and returns.
Women’s apparel is particularly easy to copy by changing the fabric or other materials. Once a merchant spends heavily to make a design successful, competitors quickly produce a half-price imitation with inferior materials and target users who have already purchased the original. The original merchant has effectively completed the market education and customer screening for its copycat.
The copycat does not truly win either, because a third merchant will use even worse quality and a lower price to take the second merchant’s customers. “In the end, there are no winners,” but the platform continues collecting ad fees from the original merchant, the copycat and the next round of competitors.
The mechanism shifts competition from product capability to a race toward the lowest possible line: “You fight a price war, I skirt the rules; you skirt the rules, I break the law.” In a mature market, the contest ultimately becomes a question of whose bottom line is lower and who can avoid punishment.
15. Post-Lunar-New-Year Clearance in Guangzhou Was Not Destocking; It Was a Mass Permanent Exit
Women’s-apparel merchants usually place orders 6 months in advance, leaving capital tied up in materials, packaging and inventory until year-end clearance allows them to calculate annual profit. In 2024, however, large-scale clearance began at the first major marketing event after Lunar New Year. That meant merchants were recovering their cash and then leaving e-commerce rather than continuing to operate.
卫诗婕 initially understood the move as “not doing Singles’ Day.” 倪叔 corrected her: it was “not doing e-commerce anymore.” Merchants were switching careers, possibly into cross-border commerce. He described the simultaneous clearance by Guangzhou’s women’s-apparel merchants as an “apocalyptic scene,” because this was not seasonal inventory rotation but a decision to end the capital cycle permanently.
The program cited a brand with annual sales of more than RMB1B that bought inventory for roughly RMB20, sold it for RMB25 and absorbed shipping insurance costs. The aim was no longer profit, but to convert inventory into cash quickly and leave without settling with the supply chain and factories. With existing holes in their finances, operators were reduced to 2 options: “scam this wave” or go bankrupt.
Douyin apparel streamer 欧拉密码, who had roughly 5M followers, chose to shut down. Its content capabilities remained intact, but the share of paid traffic had risen to 35%; combined with the high return rate, survival would have required selling extremely low-cost junk. Exiting before “ruining its reputation or ending up in prison” was the rational choice.
16. The Most Brutal 6·18 Is Forcing Commerce to Move from Infinite Growth to Sustainable Survival
When 倪叔 entered a VIP meeting room for a Douyin local-lifestyle event, he found that roughly 80% of the attendees knew one another, and all were in e-commerce. They had moved into local services because “e-commerce has become too painful.” Some shifted into cross-border commerce and explained it in one line: “A first-rate industry needs only third-rate talent; a third-rate industry needs first-rate talent to survive.”
For next year, 倪叔 both believes “there may not be a 6·18 next year” and thinks the probability of having no 6·18 at all is small, because it would be difficult for JD.com to abandon a festival it created. The common ground is that, if 6·18 continues, copying this year’s mechanism is pointless. The next edition must be a new pact that “just happens to still be called 6·18.”
The milk-powder industry shows why the old growth inertia is so difficult to stop. Total maternity-and-infant demand has declined and the market has contracted for 5 consecutive years, yet every brand still sets a 30% growth target in its 3-year plan and builds farms and capacity that take roughly 3 years to come online. Every owner believes “the decline belongs to someone else.” When products cannot sell, the only remaining answer is a price war; even Starbucks and Heytea have offered products or promotions at RMB9.9.
倪叔 described an entrepreneur who had raised RMB100M and built more than 30 hotpot restaurants in Shanghai. During the pandemic, pressure from wages and rent left him suffering from chronic insomnia and alopecia. After watching speeches by 于东来 and Pangdonglai, he returned the money to investors and chose a limited scale at which employees, customers and the operator himself could be happy.
Japan’s long-lived companies offer another answer: even excellent businesses may operate only around 10 stores, using reservations to control whom they serve and developing over the long term in a steady state. The program attributes mutual harm to everyone trying only to stay alive and believing that personal wealth offers an escape. A genuinely new pact must recognize that growth has limits, allow every link in the ecosystem to remain sustainable, and “not waste any recession.”