Pinduoduo’s fortunes and challenges are bookends worth contemplating with thinking about Blidz: the Chinese platform currently has a market cap of nearly $60 billion (it’s listed on Nasdaq in the U.S.) and nearly 870 million active buyers — although recent growth has been slowing on the back of more competition and the weaker performance of China’s economy overall. That’s reality commerce for you: although there are definitely signs of some startups building business models that nurture more manufacturing and goods production closer to those who are making purchases, China remains a critical supplier for the wider consumer market, and will be for a long time. Using gamification (currently there are four games on Blidz, and there will be more coming), Blidz also uses social hooks (share your deal on your timelines and in messaging to friends and groups!) respectively to engage users, getting them to create their own network effect by recommending products to people they know over other social channels, and for people to be won over to buying goods by seeing how many others are also buying them, and the price lowering as a result.(That indeed has been a trick used in the pre-internet days, too, initially pioneered by home shopping live TV shows where people phoned in to buy goods.)