Pinju.com, a late comer to the extremely competitive Chinese ecommerce market curated by Shanda made its debut yesterday with – I knew this will caught many people by surprise – several group buying deals while the site was reportedly positioned itself as an online general store with catalogues ranging from cosmetics, clothes, maternity and baby products, electric appliance, home supplies, health products, 3C products to luxurious brands including Hermes, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Armani, Gucci and so on.
According to its founder Ge Binbin, “We’re doing so to test out our platform and payment system. It looks we have something to improve on. ”
On the first day of its operation, Pinju.com pulled in only RMB 75k (US$ 11k) in sales.
Ge disclosed that starting this November the campaign budget for the new born B2C marketplace will be more than US$ 1.5 million while it’s now looking to raise Series A round of funding.
The marketplace is counting on charging service fee as well as taking between 1% and 4% cut from every transaction it facilitates to make profit.
As we wrote earlier, Tencent is also conducting a trial run of its super B2C platform dubbed QQ Wanggou in Guangdong province.
Competition is good for we customers:)