Why is Shopee getting you to plant virtual trees?

Dear readers,

Much ink has been spilled about the rise of Chinese ecommerce sensation Pinduoduo. But last week, our China reporter Nicole Jao took a different spin: She looked at whether the company’s business model can work in Southeast Asia.

As always, reality rarely offers a simple “yes” or “no” answer. Pinduoduo’s rise has been supported by a mature ecosystem that involves manufacturing, logistics, payments, and social apps – one that’s found nowhere else in the world.

It goes without saying that attempts to copy Pinduoduo are doomed to fail, but there are ways around these hurdles.

In fact, facets of Pinduoduo, especially its social gaming elements, have already made its way into ecommerce apps in Southeast Asia.

The company is famous for its tree-planting game. Here’s how Y Combinator explained it:

The first popular game on Pinduoduo was Duo Duo Orchard. Think of Farmville, except now the rewards are real physical goods. The game is simple – a user creates and nurtures a virtual fruit tree to eventually yield a real box of fruit shipped to his or her address. It already has more than 11M DAUs! Though not multiplayer, Orchard has social cooperation aspects that drive up network engagement as well. Once users choose a tree to create (e.g., mango, lemon, macadamia nut), they need to nurture the tree with water and fertilizer. The more you shop on Pinduoduo, the more water droplets you receive to nurture your tree.

Lo and behold, a similar game is now part of Shopee Games lineup.

Shopee also has a game that’s basically a Candy Crush clone:

These games are designed to be simple, so they won’t replace the mobile games you play. But they appear to do one thing well – driving people to engage with the Shopee app and make purchases.

Pay-to-play

Of 5G and fintech