With the rapid development of the mobile Internet, the traditional catering industry has ushered in a digital transformation. At the operational level, the addition of the digital catering OA system optimizes the store business statistics, membership management and ordering management processes, and at the level of ordering and payment, the scanning code payment and online ordering mode simplify the traditional manual service process, but some merchants pay too much attention to online public account ordering, making the whole model taste bad.
As an important part of consumers' offline dining, ordering food is used by some merchants as a channel for user information collection, requiring users to pay attention to the WeChat public account before ordering. In the face of industry chaos, Tencent recently personally issued a notice to developers on the problem of self-inspection of "scanning codes and ordering food mandatory attention to public accounts", requiring businesses with problems to rectify in a timely manner, if similar problems still occur during verification, the illegal public accounts will be restricted from scanning the code to open the public account.
The original intention of the development of the scanning code ordering service is to improve the efficiency of store services and enrich the experience of different users to order food, and now it is good, some merchants mistakenly take the means as the purpose, affecting the user's dining experience.
Is scanning the code to order food a must?
From the perspective of service forms, scanning code ordering can be roughly divided into the following three types, namely scanning code direct ordering, scanning code to pay attention to public number ordering, and scanning code jump WeChat Mini Program ordering. The main difference between the three is that the first and third ways are only to use the scan code as an entrance to jump to the electronic menu, while the second way increases the link of paying attention to the public number and logging in, and generally needs to fill in the mobile phone number to complete the login.
The most popular thing for consumers to pay attention to the public account ordering model is that it increases the probability of receiving "spam information". Paying attention to the official account means that if you do not take the initiative to close the customs in the future, or close the "receive article push" option in the public account settings, you will receive a new article push from the restaurant public account in the future, which will undoubtedly increase the cost of user screening information in this era when the information push is becoming more and more chaotic.
What's more outrageous is that if the restaurant you often go to adopts the scanning code to force the public number to order food, you can only exchange the customs for a moment of silence, and then you need to repeat the process of scanning the code, paying attention to, and logging in. For some office workers and college students, if there are not many restaurants to choose from near the company or school, they can only swallow their anger and passively accept.
In the vicinity of the author's company, a popular chain restaurant has adopted the practice of scanning the code to pay attention to the public account ordering, entering the official account details page found that at present, 8 WeChat friends pay attention to the account, and the drainage efficiency is much higher than the publicity method of the ordinary public account, which directly converts the users who go to the restaurant into their own private domain traffic, which can be described as both earning money from on-site dining users, and improving the attention of the public account, squeezing the user's residual value as much as possible.
There are many similar services that can only be used by mandatory attention to public accounts, including mobile phone online song ordering in KTV and weighing scales at the entrance of pharmacies, etc., and some even send masks on the street to attract user attention, all for the purpose of draining.
Compared with the content creator accounts of other platforms, the most prominent feature of the WeChat public account is the "strong subscription system", and unlike the content platform pushed by the algorithm, the difference point of the strong subscription system attribute of the public account is to let the user "actively choose the account he wants to subscribe to", only the user will receive the official account message push by his own subscription, emphasizing the information screening attribute. In the 2019 WeChat open class, Zhang Xiaolong also said when recalling the design concept of the public account that based on the subscription system model, to avoid users being harassed and scammed, "naturally there is no spam message".
The strong subscription system model makes the WeChat public account naturally have a strong private domain attribute, but also the main stage for merchants to cultivate private domain traffic, in a report on Tech Planet wrote, "There is such an unwritten chain of contempt circulating in the industry: the value of platform fans is ranked as, weChat public account > Xiaohongshu > B station> Douyin> Kuaishou > know > Weibo. "In the case of the same number of fans, the higher the value of the platform fans, which means that the higher the advertising promotion fee that the account operator can receive, making the merchant more enthusiastic about draining their own public account."
Not only that, some drainage public accounts are only a temporary "vest", or users must pay attention to other public accounts to receive benefits after paying attention to them, playing a role in drainage for other public accounts, or waiting for the number of fans of the public account to reach a certain number, and then selling the number.
Merchants force users to scan the code to pay attention to the public account, which not only affects the user experience, but also violates the original intention of the WeChat public account design. On the one hand, the official account has changed from the user's independent subscription to the merchant's mandatory user subscription, increasing the possibility of spam information push, on the other hand, the compulsory subscription drainage is easy to breed the "selling number economy" and destroy the ecological balance of the public account.
Of course, forcing users to scan the code to pay attention to the official account ordering, not only affects the dining experience and the ecology of the public account of some users, but also affects the entire offline dining atmosphere. The "one-track system" of mandatory code scanning is also a negation of the appropriate aging of products or services, which increases the difficulty and cost of dining for elderly users.
Under the impact of scanning code ordering, the traditional offline dining mode has changed its taste?
In some restaurants in the past, ordering is a very important part, and the menu is an important way for consumers to get a preliminary understanding of the restaurant. However, with the development of mobile Internet and the acceleration of people's pace of life, the two-dimensional code in the restaurant has gradually replaced the traditional paper menu and become the only two or even only way for users to order food.
Scanning code ordering is the product of the development of today's information-based society, but it does not mean that scanning code ordering can completely replace the traditional ordering mode. For the elderly who are not familiar with smart phones, the cost of learning WeChat to scan the payment is high enough, but now they have to learn to pay attention to public accounts, registered members and online orders, etc., increasing the resistance of elderly users to the Internet.
In fact, scanning code ordering is more suitable for the fast food industry, improving the order receiving and settlement efficiency of merchants during the peak period of dining, and ordinary restaurants do not need to copy fast food restaurants to learn, and enhance the so-called "all-digital dining experience" of restaurants. The key is that some restaurants also learn to be very magical, advocating mobile phone scanning code to place orders, but when checking out, you have to go to the front desk to scan the code to pay, and the two-dimensional code on the table only has an electronic menu and a fee settlement reminder function.
On the other hand, new ordering methods, including scanning code ordering and machine ordering, seem to be forming a special chain of discrimination in ordering food. In some restaurants, even if you can order food through a paper menu, in terms of quantity, the number of dishes on the paper menu may be less than the dishes that scan the code to order, and in terms of discounts, some of the scan code ordering services can also enjoy online order discounts. When the author went to a chain fried chicken restaurant to order food, he encountered a similar situation, and as soon as he entered the door, he reminded the scan code to order a discount.
Through the number of dishes and preferential treatment formed by the online ordering advantage, to attract users as much as possible through the online order, at the same time, make the traditional offline ordering mode become more and more chicken ribs, the same restaurant the same dishes, only the different ways of placing orders are treated differently, it seems that offline ordering is lower than online ordering.
The author believes that scanning code ordering is the need of the development of the times, for some fast-paced dining scenes, scanning code ordering greatly simplifies the user's dining process, improves the utilization efficiency of catering resources, and is one of the future development directions of the catering industry. However, the pursuit of too much of a single way of ordering food, will only dampen the consumption enthusiasm of some users, just as in the gradual popularization of mobile payment today, many shopping malls and chain convenience stores do not emphasize the scan code payment, but only as a way to enrich the user's payment, swipe card, mobile phone NFC virtual card and cash payment can be used.
In March this year, the China Consumers Association personally issued a document saying that only providing "scanning code ordering" infringes on consumers' right to fair trade, does not provide on-site menus, undermines consumers' right to know, and the application of new technologies should not become a consumption obstacle for special consumer groups. Take the essence of its dross, different ordering and payment methods should be respected, and the "dual-track" (online and offline) model allows different users to choose.
The necessity of the development of the "dual-track system"
The development of science and technology has brought convenience to most people, but also brought new troubles to some users. Technological innovation is to improve efficiency, scanning code orders and payment is no exception, but unfortunately this innovation has been used incorrectly by some merchants, making it evolve into a complex way of "scanning code to pay attention to public number ordering", which not only increases the user ordering process, but also becomes the main channel for bad businesses to obtain user privacy information, the development of the Internet does not need these "secondary innovations", and these innovations are not allowed to become popular in the market.
Judging from the development process of many technologies, these troubles are only temporary, just like emerging industries will take a crooked road, and the maturity of the industry will be backward compatible to meet the actual needs of different types of users.
"Dual-track system" not only refers to the ordering and payment scenarios in catering, many products and services in life have applied the concept of dual-track system, including the App's ageing interface, Braille, narration and color filters in the mobile phone system, aimed at the elderly, blind and colorblind users.
The concept of technology for good represents the inclusiveness of technology products and services to different users. The author believes that with the development of AI technology, the future ordering will be more insensitive, with only a simple click to complete the order, and support different forms of payment methods such as cash and network payment. The future of paper menus will not necessarily continue to exist, but the concept of offline service that replaces paper menus and waiters will continue to survive through robots and other ways, you know, the trend of technological development is inclusive, not abandoned.