倪叔

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）