With the gradual integration of e-commerce and takeaway forms, Albatross provides brands with one-stop solutions for instant e-commerce

In 2020, the same-city retail war has been fully upgraded.

Near-field e-commerce has become an important strategy for Ali in the next stage: in April this year, Ali upgraded the Tmall supermarket business group to a retail business group in the same city; and Ele.me not only opened up with Taobao, but also allowed Taobao merchants to display stores on the Taobao APP, and recently upgraded from "delivery takeaway" to "send everything"; at the same time, Ali Retail Pass entered the community group buying bureau and will explore the community group buying business with the help of more than 1.3 million small shops it covers.

Meituan has also made frequent moves in the same city retail this year, and has now gathered three carriages of Meituan to buy vegetables, Meituan flash purchase, and Meituan to select three carriages, of which the main "30-minute delivery to the door" Ofetuan flash purchase has set an annual turnover of 100 billion yuan.

In addition, INC also established the Omni-channel Business Group of Large Commercial Supermarket in April this year, integrating JD Supermarket, Consumer Goods Division, Xintong Road Division, 7FRESH and Yihaodian. With the listing of Dada, JD.com has further accelerated the development of retail in the same city.

In this context, brands have ushered in a good opportunity to lay out retail in the same city. However, the same city retail channel and e-commerce channel are completely different operating logic, e-commerce in the whole network is a plate of goods, and the same city retail is for local traffic, for the brand, in the region of marketing, traffic operation, warehousing, logistics and other directions need to be re-explored.

Aiming at the pain points of the brand side, Li Lixun established "Albatross" in July 2019 to focus on providing one-stop retail solutions for brands in the same city. Li Lixun is a member of the original founding team of Ele.me, who left after Ele.me was acquired by Ali, and the reason why he established "Albatross" is because he found that the form of e-commerce and takeaway is gradually merging-

For takeaway platforms, the growth rate of catering has slowed down, the platform needs to accelerate the expansion of new categories to seek increments, and the logistics infrastructure in the field of takeaway has been very perfect; for e-commerce platforms, the past ten years have greatly met the needs of users "more, better, and provincial", but in the dimension of "fast", it can also be done more extremely through the takeaway system.

However, unlike retail and catering, it is difficult to rely entirely on stores to undertake supply in the region. The brand side's offline laying ability is not strong, if the brand offline store is opened, the demand for each store is scattered, the product structure is scattered, and the efficiency of the unit model is not high.

In this regard, the "albatross" hopes to use a new form to organize the supply of regional retail. To sum up, "Albatross" sets up a shared pre-warehouse in the region, and the cooperating brand side only needs to put the goods in this pre-warehouse, and at the same time open a virtual official flagship store on multiple takeaway platforms, which can provide one-hour service for takeaway users of brand goods.

Albatross cooperation case

In addition to the front-loading warehouse, "Albatross" will build a local e-commerce system for the brand side, including Meituan, Ele.me, JD.com, Tmall Supermarket, JD.com", etc., and provide the agency operation services of these channels. In the early days, the cooperation categories of "Albatross" included pet products, ice tasting wine, daily cosmetics, zero⻝, sex toys, etc., and has reached cooperation with more than 20 brands such as Zhong Xuegao, Drunken Goose Lady, Liangpin Shop, Xiao Pei Pet, Mint Health, and Xinliangji.

Compared with the takeaway operation of catering, retail takeaway involves warehousing and other links, and in the case of physical support, it greatly improves the barriers to agency operation. In order to better operate the "store", "Albatross" has independently developed a middle office system that can track inventory, order distribution and logistics information in real time, and guide operations through data analysis.

Li Lixun believes that now that the takeaway user DAU has exceeded 100 million, traffic and logistics are not a problem, and the biggest difficulty lies in the matching of traffic and products. The industry is still in the early stage of development, and it needs to be constantly explored in terms of operation, but the team has long been optimistic about this direction, especially after the epidemic, users have more and more demand for services that are instantly home, and the migration of user habits is only a matter of time.

Speaking of the cost of performance, Li Lixun said that the delivery of catering takeaway is multi-point to multi-point, involving different meal times, while in the "albatross" model, the takeaway orders of retail brands are 1 to more points, and the fulfillment cost will be much lower. On the other hand, takeaway orders are now mainly catering, with about 50 million orders per day, while express parcels are 100-200 million per day. With the increase of order density, there is still a lot of room for optimization in the performance efficiency of takeaway.

At present, "Albatross" has set up dozens of points in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and this year plans to expand the number of points to 100-200 points, increase the number of cooperative brands to 50-100, and the annual GMV is expected to be about 100 million.

The Albatross team currently has more than 40 people and is headquartered in Shanghai. The founding team all have middle and high-level resumes in first-line local e-commerce platforms and have rich experience in Internet operations. Previously, the company had received a 13 million yuan angel round of financing from Yunjiu Capital.