The driving force behind the transformation of brick-and-mortar retail

In the spring festival holiday that has just passed, whether it is the local New Year or the journey back home, for young people, "New Year goods" is an unavoidable topic.

In the spirit of people arriving home without arriving home, even if they are in a different place, young people still need to open their wallets and send milk, cooking oil and other New Year gift packages to relatives and friends; fruits such as cherries, strawberries, sugar oranges and so on must be bought in boxes for themselves and their families to show off.

In the past, how to buy New Year goods for parents in their hometown was the biggest problem for young people. If the old man personally goes to the supermarket to buy, rice flour grain and oil to buy dozens of pounds at a time, boxes of fruit is not easy to carry, in case of twisting the waist and hurting the foot, it is not easy to do; the courier is sent home and is worried that once the time is not good, the courier brother will return home to deliver after the year; the receipt of multiple goods is also quite cumbersome.

But in the past two years, the rise of instant retail channels has become a new choice for young people. Chunlian and Fuzi alone sold more than 200,000 copies on the single platform of Meituan Flash Sale.

Not limited to New Year's consumption, according to Accenture's "Focus on China's Post-95 Consumer Groups" report, post-95s pay more attention to delivery speed than millennials, more than 50% of post-95 consumers hope to receive goods on the same day or even half a day, and 7% of consumers hope to receive goods within two hours.

Ten years ago, players began to lay out; two years ago, it was considered one of the most important retail channels in the future; after being "pushed forward for three years" by the epidemic, the trillion-dollar real-time retail track has begun to take shape.

A new increment of supermarkets and brands

The reason why I observe the instant retail track at the node of this Spring Festival promotion is because the shopping scene during the Spring Festival is extremely compatible with instant retail.

An instant retail platform that integrates online orders with offline stores can play a role in revitalizing the entire consumer plate.

For traditional supermarkets, instant retail brings pure crowd increments. Young people who originally did not visit traditional supermarkets will click into supermarket stores when searching for goods on the instant retail platform, resulting in high customer unit price purchase behavior and multiple repurchases, thereby increasing the brand recognition of the supermarket, and even being diverted to offline stores in the future.

Instant retail can also reduce the consumption threshold of existing users of supermarkets, even if there is not enough time to go to the supermarket, you can also buy goods through online orders, increasing the frequency and stickiness of consumer consumption.

Second, because of differences in shopping decision-making, instant retail can also bring new demand increments. This is mainly reflected in emergency consumption and impulse consumption, if the current consumer demand is not met, the follow-up will not be purchased through other channels.

The increase in orders brought by instant retail to offline supermarkets is more obvious during the Spring Festival. According to the staff of a chain supermarket in Beijing, "In previous years, the Spring Festival was actually an off-season for supermarket operations, but last year's Spring Festival we participated in the Meituan Flash Sale 'Spring Festival No Closing' activity, and the effect was particularly good." So this year we began to prepare for the New Year Goods Festival very early, and since the opening of the New Year Goods Festival on January 6, as of now, the order volume has increased by two or three times compared with last year. ”

The relevant person in charge of Yonghui Supermarket believes that consumers' demand for instant delivery of New Year goods has allowed offline supermarkets to find a new scene for business growth. In the three days of New Year's Day at the beginning of 2022, the transaction volume of Yonghui Supermarket in meituan flash sale reached more than three times that of the same period last year, and the order volume exceeded 336,000, of which cherries, liquor, dairy products, leisure snacks, grain and oil and other commodities were the most popular among consumers.

It can be seen that the order increment brought by the instant retail platform to the traditional supermarket is higher, and the ultimate convenience makes consumers less sensitive to price. The above-mentioned Yonghui person in charge revealed that in the first weekend after the start of the New Year Festival, Yonghui Supermarket sold more than 15,000 boxes of cheli on the Meituan flash sale.

Therefore, the major traditional chain supermarkets have a strong willingness to cooperate with instant retail platforms. This year, the number of merchants participating in the Meituan Flash Sale "New Year Goods Festival" increased by nearly 30% over last year.

For brands, the instant retail platform not only brings new passenger flows and orders, but also provides them with more efficient supply chain roads and richer marketing methods.

The most typical example is liquor, taking Tsingtao Beer as an example, the unit price of beer customers is low, the goods are very heavy, and it is not cost-effective to do point-to-point long-distance delivery of the traditional e-commerce model; and the offline traditional channel passenger flow is difficult to grow, which is the pain point encountered by Tsingtao Beer when doing growth.

The instant retail platform Meituan Flash Sale has recently vigorously developed the convenience store front warehouse business to solve these pain points, Tsingtao Beer and these front warehouse cooperation, on the one hand, save logistics costs, on the other hand, can continue to absorb new young users.

At the Meituan flash sale digital retail conference in September last year, Shi Yonggang, deputy general manager of Tsingtao Beer's innovative marketing headquarters, introduced that before cooperating with Meituan Flash, Tsingtao Beer entered a prefecture-level city to lay out tens of thousands of supermarket stores, and in the future, Tsingtao Beer laid out dozens of front-end warehouses of Meituan flash sale, which could occupy a market like Chengdu.

It can be seen that with the increasing number of young users of instant retail channels, chain supermarkets and brands have begun to lay out as soon as possible, and they are eager to eat the consumer dividends brought by this wave of lifestyle changes.

The track pattern is beginning to emerge

This close-field business model, which amplifies the characteristics of "convenience" to the extreme, has run several leading and good athletes in the track after nearly 8 years of model exploration and infrastructure construction.

At present, the head players of the track are ali, JD.com and Meituan, and the three have entered the power period.

From the perspective of market share, there is not much difference between Jingdong Dajia and Meituan Flash Sale, but from the perspective of comprehensive strength, Meituan Flash Sale is more advanced in terms of user mentality, performance ability and all-ecological linkage.

In terms of user mentality, compared with the other two players, Meituan Flash Sale is the only business that does not have a strong sense of separation from the group's main retail platform. Consistent with the use of takeaway, the category is broadened, so that consumers will naturally expand their impression of Meituan from the takeaway platform to the whole category.

At present, the advantage category of Meituan Flash Sale is all high-frequency supplies, including various snacks and water drinks around "eating", as well as daily necessities. In fact, Meituan implanted the minds of consumers very early, as early as the rise of instant retail in the past two years, if you lack a screwdriver or nail clipper, etc., the first shopping channel that comes to mind is through Meituan, half an hour to deliver to your door.

The second is the ability to fulfill the contract, which is the key to determining the repurchase rate of platform consumers, which is particularly important in the instant retail platform with the ultimate user experience as the core.

All of the above-mentioned user quality experiences are based on the ideal model that platform goods can meet the needs and can be delivered on time as a prerequisite. Self-built self-operated platforms such as Dingdong Grocery Shopping, Hema and Qixian have pain points of poor performance experience, sometimes even exceeding the estimated time by four hours.

And the meituan's ability to match in the same city can be said to be a top student. With a large number of riders as the basis and 2800 urban counties covering, the hard strength of these Meituan is well known, but the meituan's ability to match in the same city has been iterated to the stage of providing personalized customization services for different businesses. For example, for Yonghui Supermarket, Meituan has tailored industry solutions such as stationed circle, customized aging services, and the formulation of rider pick-up processes.

Optimization of the pick-up process and delivery route requires a large enough order volume to be achieved. At present, only the US group may have this volume.

The last point is the all-ecological linkage. Rather than looking at it alone, meituan's business has always been placed in the whole ecology in order to show its value.

"At the time of the winter solstice, I swept the Meituan bicycle and saw the dumpling pattern on the map, and realized that it was the winter solstice that day." Ms. Zhang, who works in Beijing, said, "Just when I saw that the Meituan flash sale and Miss had a joint activity, I ordered a bag of quick-frozen dumplings and cooked them at home to complete the ritual of the winter solstice." ”

The activity that attracted Ms. Zhang to place an order was a cross-ecological linkage activity jointly initiated by Meituan Flash Sale and Meituan Bicycle and Miss Food under the ecology of Meituan. Through all-ecological multi-dimensional marketing, many unexpected shopping decision points can be created. In addition to bicycles, Meituan Flash Sale can also cooperate with multiple types of business ecosystems such as takeaway and wine tourism.

Instant retail is an important direction for the future development of retail. By reviewing the actions and layout of the head player Meituan Flash Sale in the past two years, it can be seen that the threshold for instant retail is extremely high.

This is reflected in the fact that the distribution capabilities, digital capabilities, warehousing and logistics capabilities, merchant resources, and user traffic that are indispensable for instant retailing cannot be established overnight by throwing money, but require years of precipitation and accumulation.

From this point of view, the current instant retail track, whether it is a platform, or a brand and a traditional supermarket, needs to enter the game as soon as possible and seize the opportunity in order to occupy a place in the future development.