Author| King?
Edited by | Zirui Zhang
Takeaway, which is a dry business that makes instant noodles and convenient for the lives of urban people, seems to be becoming a business with "resentment".
Consumers complain that takeaway is expensive, merchants complain about the high proportion of commissions, and riders complain about hard work. In the meantime, the takeaway platform connecting consumers, merchants, and riders has become a "bird of fright", and as soon as there is a wind and grass, it may become the "target of everyone".
For example, a few days ago, the National Development and Reform Commission and 14 other departments jointly issued the "Several Policies on Promoting the Recovery and Development of Difficult Industries in the Service Industry" (hereinafter referred to as the "Policy").
The document contains more than 5,000 words of preferential policies, and the words are all concerns for small and medium-sized enterprises, and the main purpose is also to "help difficult industries in the service industry to tide over difficulties and recover development", but only because one of the sentences "guides takeaway and other Internet platform enterprises to further reduce the service fee standards of catering merchants and reduce the operating costs of relevant catering enterprises", it has pushed meituan and other takeaway platforms to the cusp of the storm.
Reflecting on the capital market, the meituan stock price suffered a heavy setback on the same day, closing at 188 Hong Kong dollars per share, a decline of 14.86%, and the market value of 200 billion Hong Kong dollars evaporated.
This is not the first time because of the takeaway commission problem, meituan has become the target of the public, in 2020 the epidemic "first year", the catering industry is struggling, many local catering associations call on meituan such platforms to reduce commissions.
Is the takeaway commission the Achilles heel of the US group?
1. Who is the policy going to "target"?
The takeaway industry is related to the social and people's livelihood, and every market dynamic related to it will bring a lot of movement, and this incident has also attracted the "Economic Daily" comment: the takeaway industry "guidance" is not "order", do not overreact.
"Leopard Change" also noted that the full text of the "Policy" is more than 5,000 words, including 43 specific relief measures, most of which reflects tax reductions, fee reductions, financing support, epidemic prevention and control should not be excessive, etc. For catering merchants, it is also mentioned that property owners should be encouraged to appropriately reduce rents to help catering merchants tide over the difficulties.
Therefore, this is actually a comprehensive bailout plan, rather than a special guidance issued for takeaway platforms. "Boot" also does not come with a mandatory "command". Of course, even if it is not an "order", it will not affect the food delivery platforms to think about how to better help the catering industry tide over the difficulties under the guidance of supervision.
In fact, over the past few years, there has been a lot of debate about how much commission a food delivery platform should charge to be reasonable. Although the platform commission is a mechanism spontaneously generated under the operation of the market, under the joint efforts of all parties, the takeaway platform is either passive or active, and it is making adjustments.
Among them, the far-reaching impact on the industry is a adjustment of the US group in the middle of 2021. The platform has launched a rate transparency, and the fee charged has been changed from the previous fixed rate to "technical service fee (commission) + performance service fee", which has been used to this day: the technical service fee is fixed, according to different cities and different categories, there may be a certain fluctuation, but the guarantee amount is set; the performance service fee is refined into dimensions such as distance, price, and time period, and the charging standard is generated.
Of course, only 1 or 2 sentences of "guidance" policies can arouse such a splash, which also verifies the importance of platform enterprises for social production and life from the side.
Therefore, from a positive point of view, this time the US group "lying guns" is not unjust.
2. How much is the commission reasonable?
The background of the introduction of this policy is that due to the continuous impact of the epidemic, the recovery of catering enterprises is slow, and some merchants are struggling. Among the major social platforms, the proportion of takeaway platforms such as "spitting" meituan has become too high, and some merchants have reflected that this rate will exceed their own operating threshold.
So, how much is the commission reduced to be reasonable? How much room is there for the current commission to be reduced?
Take a salad takeaway as an example (see the figure below), if a merchant on the Meituan platform receives an order with a price of 42 yuan (40 yuan fresh shrimp salad + 2 yuan packaging fee), if the merchant independently sets the amount of preferential activities to the user is 13 yuan, the actual price of this order is 29 yuan.
Among these 29 yuan: the merchant pays the rider 3.5 yuan as a performance service fee, which accounts for 12.06%; the 1.86 yuan paid to the Meituan as a technical service fee, which is what we often call "commission", which accounts for 6.42%; and the last remaining 23.64 yuan is the final income of the merchant, accounting for 81.52%.
Among them, the technical service fees collected by Meituan are mainly used for the platform to promote the construction of digital business models.
The fulfillment service fee is mainly for takeaway riders, but the difference between personnel expenditure and technical expenditure is that the timeliness and regional requirements of takeaway determine that labor costs have always been the "big head" of the cost of a large platform, and cannot be amortized through scale effects. In particular, riders are an extremely important part of the "local life service" and the mainstay of social employment, and if the pressure drop is forced, it is not conducive to the development of the industry.
Here we also need to take out the "promotion activities set by the merchant to the user" in the picture and explain it separately.
Whether it is online operation or offline operation, under normal circumstances, most merchants will take out a part of the cost to make profits, through some seconds, special prices and other marketing means to attract users to place orders, the same is true for takeaway operations. However, in recent years, users have basically ordered takeaways through takeaway platforms rather than directly contacting merchants to place orders, so many merchants will naturally include the profit part into the cost of handing over to the platform.
If the takeaway platform is "rich" by taking commissions, it is understandable to be criticized, but from the perspective of financial reports, the commission charged by the takeaway platform is not a net profit, but then turned into many hard cost details. In this regard, not only takeaway platforms, but also many retail platforms and e-commerce platforms.
In 2020, the revenue of Meituan's catering takeaway business was 66.26 billion yuan, but the profit was 2.82 billion yuan and the net profit margin was 4.3%. By the Q3 quarter of 2021, Meituan's catering takeaway business recorded 26.48 billion yuan, an increase of 28% year-on-year; net profit of 880 million yuan, an increase of 14% year-on-year; net profit margin fell to 3.3% from the end of the previous year, a decline of 23.3%.
It is not difficult to see from the financial report that the business revenue and net profit of Meituan's takeaway are growing, but the year-on-year growth rate of net profit is only half of the former, which means that Meituan's operating costs for maintaining consumers, merchants and themselves are also rising rapidly.
Standing in overseas markets, whether it is GrubHub in the United States, Uber Eats or Deliveroo in the United Kingdom, the commission rate is more than 30%, and more than 20% of GrubHub's commission is a delivery fee, 12.5% is a commission, and there are four additional promotion fees, and the overall commission is more than 40%. Far more than the commission ratio of domestic and foreign selling platforms (basically in the range of 6-8%).
3, raw material rent is the bulk of the rescue of businesses
When the market is too focused on a specific problem, many times, it is often forgotten that the "whole picture" of a thing.
During the epidemic prevention and control period, offline physical space activities were restricted, and people had to gather online to solve basic living needs such as eating and drinking, and the order volume of major takeaway platforms soared. Some merchants also lamented to "Leopard Change", "Takeaway income, let their stores barely survive the most difficult days." ”
Li Minyi, a dry mix spicy hot operator named "Huan" in Meishan, Sichuan Province, said: "For dine-in businesses, takeaway is an incremental business, there is no takeaway business, and the cost of rent, labor and raw materials that you have to pay will not be less." Takeaway commission is the incremental cost to pay, the more orders, the sales will be larger and larger, the more profits. ”
"Riding with masks all over the city" is not only a frequent "city scenery", but also pushes the takeaway platform behind the riders into the spotlight, and the takeaway commission has become the tipping point of public opinion. More and more people are beginning to blame platform commissions for being the "culprit" that affects the profitability of merchants, but in fact, the "root" of most merchants in the market is still offline physical.
Under normal circumstances, the business operation mainly includes takeaway + dine-in, except for a few family workshops that only rely on the targeted delivery business to survive, most merchants will still open physical stores offline. To open a store, you have to face the rising costs of rent, decoration, water, electricity, coal, labor costs, daily raw materials and so on.
"In fact, I am more concerned about the price increase of raw materials and the increase in rent than the 6.6% commission." When talking about operating costs, Bao Yi, the operator of Dongguan 'April Cafe', was quite distressed, "The production cost of the store's signature strawberry milk tea and succulent grape lemon tea has been rising. Although we are reluctant to reduce the quality of food and are afraid that price increases will hurt the user experience, the cost is really fast now."
"Another problem is the rent, because the business is better, and the landlord says that he wants to increase the rent by 10% per year." Even if the 6.6% takeaway commission is reduced to 0, the saving is less than 3,000 yuan a month, which is not enough for the salary of a clerk, far less than the pressure on raw materials and rent. Moreover, in the business business, if the takeaway platform cannot operate, then my branch will not be able to open. Bao Yi said.
Takeaway business can be said to be a kind of supplement for business operations, is another "business" channel in the Internet era, the advantage of this channel is that merchants can get orders in a set of systems, hedging the "location" limit. But takeaway is always a means of flexibility, and it is more or less far-fetched to regard this as the only factor that determines the life and death of a merchant.
Of course, it is understandable that merchants require takeaway platforms to adjust commissions, but as for how much to adjust and how to adjust, we cannot listen to any party, this is a complex service network involving the "supply chain - merchants - platforms - riders - consumers", only at a certain point to form a force, Yu Qing, Yu Li is not a "cure" logic.
Whether it is the Ecology of the Ustuan Or other business ecology, the market's understanding of "management" should be reshaped. Going concern has always been a matter of mutual interest between several parties, which in turn has formed a dynamic balance of business, rather than infinite compression for one of them, and the system collapses after breaking through the threshold.
After all, the real law of economics is that the Internet changes the distribution model, but the cost is eternal.