As millions of Chinese shoppers prepared for the Lunar New Year, bargain-focused e-commerce platform Pinduoduo launched a “Spring Festival Never Closes” campaign aimed at both steadying supply and shoring up consumer confidence. The initiative pairs deeper subsidies on essentials such as fresh fruit, staples, dairy and meat with heightened platform policing: more frequent verification of seller licences, algorithmic product sweeps, and instant takedowns for non‑compliant listings.
The platform has refined its compliance checks, requiring more detailed documentary evidence from food sellers. For instance, merchants selling cold‑processed pastries must now supply not only a general food production or business licence but also an explicit product‑variety schedule that lists “cold‑processed pastry” as a permitted category; shops with irregular or missing documentation face immediate delisting and store closures.
Pinduoduo is also expanding real‑time monitoring of advertising and product imagery, including AI‑generated pictures, promising sanctions that range from demotion in search results to removal and closure depending on the severity of violations. The company will coordinate brand sampling and authentication, offering a high penalty to merchants who peddle proven counterfeits—an arrangement intended to reassure consumers and protect brand owners.
Regulatory pressure is an important backdrop. China’s new Live E‑commerce Supervision Measures, jointly issued by the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Cyberspace Administration and effective from February 1, 2026, give platforms clearer duties to police livestreamed commerce. Pinduoduo says it will step up governance of food‑category live streams, tightening rules on product standards, on‑air scripts, and host conduct to reduce misleading claims and unsafe sales.
The company is bolstering technical infrastructure too: it plans to deepen its food databases for certificate numbers and trademarks, expand a dedicated intellectual‑property complaints channel, and run weekly and monthly lab sampling with nationally accredited testing agencies. A “minor mode” will bar sales of alcohol to underage users, and a special food governance team will grow to increase the manpower behind enforcement.
Taken together, the measures are pitched as protecting the “菜篮子” — the Chinese household food basket — during the highest‑demand season. Pinduoduo frames the campaign as both a logistical commitment to keep deliveries moving through the holiday and a consumer‑protection push to make purchases “safe and reassuring.”
For shoppers, the changes could mean fewer dodgy listings and faster removal of violators; for brands they offer greater protection against counterfeiting. But the tighter rules will raise compliance costs for smaller sellers and could speed consolidation in supply chains, favouring merchants with formal licences and traceable product documentation.
The move also illustrates a wider trend: major platforms are increasingly acting as quasi‑regulators, deploying algorithms, databases and administrative teams to absorb responsibilities that once belonged primarily to state agencies. That recalibration reduces regulatory unpredictability for platforms but embeds new operational burdens and liability risks into their core business model.