Produced by Radar Finance and | Zhang Kaijing, editor| deep sea
Suning Tesco's 11,000th retail cloud store is here.
On March 25, Suning Tesco Retail Cloud's first Qianping fusion store was born in Shenmu, Shaanxi, and during the opening period, store sales exceeded 800,000, home appliances and home set purchase orders accounted for more than 20%, and high-end products accounted for nearly 50%. This is also the fifth retail cloud store opened by li Xin, a franchisee of the store, and the first retail cloud store opened by it has exceeded 5 million annual sales.
Suning Tesco Retail Cloud Store began in 2017. At that time, the concept of "new retail" on the Internet was hot, and the upgrading of offline stores became the trend of the times, and Suning Tesco, which was in it, began to think about how to get out of its own "retail service provider" road, and made a preliminary exploration and attempt on the sinking demand of retail channels. In this context, in July of that year, Suning Tesco's first retail cloud store landed in Chuzhou, Anhui Province.
Subsequently, the retail cloud store exceeded 100, 1000, 10000... In the process of continuous store opening, Suning Tesco is also trying to broaden the business boundaries of retail cloud. The current retail cloud stores, in addition to the original county and town home appliances, have also entered the tracks such as home furnishing and quick repair, and are piloting "community sales service stores".
What did Suning Tesco Retail Cloud do right? In this regard, Gu Wei, senior vice president of Suning Tesco, told Radar Finance that channel efficiency is the foundation of the retail cloud, and strengthening retail service capabilities, consolidating the supply chain foundation, and improving the refined operation ability of stores are the keys to the retail cloud to win the "long-term retail value war".
The retail market has changed rapidly, and Suning Tesco has opened 11,000 retail cloud stores
Since the beginning of the new century, affected by changes in the mainland's economic growth rate and the degree of Internet penetration, the home appliance industry has also undergone several changes. In this regard, Ping An Securities roughly divides it into three stages.
The first stage was from 2000 to 2012, when offline retailers were still racing across the country, Suning Tesco and Gome were the protagonists, the two major enterprises have landed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and the main 3C category of Jingdong e-commerce has just started.
With the rapid development of online platforms, the home appliance industry has entered the second stage. From 2012 to 2016, offline traditional retailers fell into a period of development stagnation, the number of stores shrank slightly, and Internet platform companies gradually occupied major markets, forcing traditional retailers to transform at the same time, but also completed the rapid expansion of scale.
The third phase is from 2016 to the present. At the end of 2016, Ali proposed the concept of new retail, advocating the integration of online and offline in the retail industry, with this as a node, Suning Tesco "smart retail", Jingdong "boundless retail" and other concepts have been born, the industry began to try to integrate online and offline retail channels through big data, artificial intelligence and other technical means to better meet consumer needs.
Behind the new trend in the retail industry is the reflection of the changes in the general environment.
On the one hand, the growth rate of Internet retail development began to slow down after the dividend period, and the National Bureau of Statistics data showed that from 2017 to 2019, the growth rate of the total amount of the mainland society was 10.2%, 9.0% and 8.0%, respectively, and the growth rate of online retail sales in the same period was 32.2%, 25.4% and 16.5%. The retail scale of the home appliance industry even fell by 2.2% year-on-year in 2019.
On the other hand, after decades of development of the mainland home appliance industry, there are still large sinking markets to be tapped. According to the data of the Home Appliance Industry Information Center, the total offline market share of the head home appliance chain channel providers does not exceed 30%, and the remaining 70% is composed of some home appliance brand self-operated /franchised stores and a large number of local small single/chain electrical appliance stores.
The 2017 research report of "CICC Dots" shows that benefiting from the return of population and the improvement of consumption levels, the consumption power and market scale of third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities are rising rapidly, and retail enterprises that take the lead in sinking channels to seize third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities are facing growth opportunities.
As a result, going deep into the county and town markets and further laying out offline stores has become the only way for retail enterprises. Taking Suning Tesco as an example, the "Home Appliance 3C Industry White Paper" released by iResearch in March 2018 showed that in 2017, Suning Tesco's share expanded to 20%, ranking first in the channel that year, thanks to the advantages of thousands of offline stores previously mastered and the supply chain built for many years, the company began to explore the retail cloud store expansion model.
In July 2017, the retail cloud was officially born. On September 30, Lianyungang Baitabu, Suzhou Guoxiang and Zhengzhou Baisha were opened together, and the retail cloud project entered the experimental and landing stage. After repeated strategic tests and model corrections, the retail cloud model successfully ran through, and entered the stage of rapid replication and development from the exploration period.
In 2018, the retail cloud expanded nationwide at a rate of 185.8 new stores per month, creating an industry miracle of opening 3650 stores in 18 consecutive months.
During the epidemic in 2020, the retail cloud bucked the trend, launched the industry-leading "online" strategy, and helped county and town stores successfully get out of the haze of the epidemic period through the digital tools of "live broadcast + community + pusher", with an overall growth of more than 100% in 2020, the highest GMV in a single month was as high as 2.8 billion, and 3200 new stores were built, running out of the "acceleration" of development.
In October 2021, the retail cloud entered the "era of ten thousand stores" and accelerated into the home and quick repair of two new tracks.
According to Gu Wei, in 2022, the retail cloud will enter the stage of refined deep cultivation, and will focus on creating a retail cloud dedicated supply machine product matrix to enhance the localization operation ability of stores.
How does retail cloud empower brick-and-mortar stores?
In his book The Non-Disappearing Store, David Bell mentions that the essence of retail is "to give consumers a seamless shopping experience whenever and wherever they want." The closer they are to users, the better their experience, and the better they have, the more likely they are to seize the market. ”
In recent years, the iteration of Suning Tesco's retail cloud physical store has also followed this trajectory.
Usually, in most township areas, the local awareness of residents is very strong, and some of them, such as small shops, "century-old stores", and mom-and-pop shops, although there are problems such as insufficient brand power, serious homogenization, single category, and low turnover rate, are still stubbornly "alive" because they are highly familiar with the local market. In this context, the "rebound" brought about by the direct airborne landing of giants will also be huge.
In this regard, the method of Suning Tesco Retail Cloud is to try to reach a relationship of franchise cooperation with these small stores, and to create a multi-category brand integration and development, home appliances and home appliances by providing store renovation and decoration for these stores, as well as multiple guarantees of asset-light, IT systems, supply chains, financial services, logistics and after-sales, to create a multi-category brand integration and development, home appliances and home appliances, and seek the development and long-term profitability of the store.
At the same time, as a franchisee, the owner retains the control of the daily operation of the store, and its own localization attributes can also help Suning Tesco enhance its brand influence in the township area.
It is worth noting that although it is a franchised store, the retail cloud still adopts "direct management" and strives to standardize the whole process of pre-sale, sale and after-sales of stores, so that the service becomes a "standard product".
According to the planning of Suning Tesco Retail Cloud, it hopes to solve three core problems for the county and town markets: one is to expand massive SKUs and greatly improve inventory turnover; the other is to improve retail operation capabilities; and the third is to share brands and marketing resources.
Specifically, on the commodity side, consumers can independently purchase a large number of goods on the Suning Tesco cloud shelf, and at the same time, after placing an order online based on the store Mini Program, they can be delivered directly to their homes, and Suning Tesco's national logistics warehouse system ensures the performance of the goods, so that the 200-square-meter store can also accommodate tens of thousands of SKUs.
"We can sell what customers need, and the brands and products we can choose from can't be compared before." This is the biggest feeling of Chen Jianfeng, the retail cloud owner of Simen Town, Ningbo, after joining the retail cloud.
On the operational side, the retail cloud performs a combination of "scene social + community + live broadcast". Its "micro-store tool" can help merchants gather private domain traffic, and digital management tools such as store invoicing, sales and inventory can give store owners a comprehensive insight into store inventory and operation.
Zhu Guangcai, who runs a Dehong Suning Tesco retail cloud store in Ruili, Yunnan, made full use of more than 7,000 friends on WeChat to establish five communities within four months of opening, during which the store's cumulative push sales exceeded 2 million yuan. During the Double 11 period in 2020, Suning Tesco also linked 7,000 retail cloud stores and 71 spelling factories to open the "factory broadcast" and "store broadcast" modes.
According to the statistics of the stores that have been opened, the average single store sales of retail cloud stores have increased by more than twice, the capital turnover rate has increased by 5-6 times, and the repurchase rate has increased by 100%. A Suning Tesco retail cloud store with an area of about 200 square meters can achieve an annual retail sales of about 3 million yuan.
More importantly, the user consumption habits and preferences obtained from these stores can be transformed into big data to predict the possible consumption trends of users in the future, and joint factories to create a retail cloud supply machine product matrix to form a differentiated supply chain competitiveness.
In addition, it can also achieve large-scale high-speed and accurate matching between supply and demand, and further promote the development of the C2M path of sales and procurement.
It is reported that in 2021, the sales of many air conditioners, ice washing, and water heaters such as Midea and Haier will exceed the 100,000 unit mark, and the proportion of special supply machine product channels will continue to rise.
From retailers to retail service providers
Suning Tesco, which empowers retail cloud stores, has also changed its own positioning.
As early as the end of 2020, Suning Tesco's positioning has been upgraded from "retailer" to "retail service provider". The company said that as a model for the retail service providers of Suning Tesco Group, the retail cloud aims to help small and medium-sized retailers successfully complete digital transformation and explore industry opportunities with integration value and space in the modern circulation link, the core of which is efficiency and altruism.
At the business conference for the fourth anniversary of Suning Tesco Retail Cloud in 2021, Gu Wei, senior vice president of Suning Tesco, mentioned that the retail cloud is accelerating into the home track, and it also announced the "store 3.0 model" of Suning Tesco Retail Cloud in counties and towns. In short, it is to rent the shops next to suning Tesco stores or on the second floor as a home appliance, home, bathroom integration experience hall.
In the words of Gu Wei: "The first floor sells electricity, and the second floor sells home bathrooms; because consumers have one-stop purchase needs, they also hope to get lower discounts by buying more products at one time, so the survival state of this format is very good." ”
From the information disclosed by franchisees, the first floor and two layers of packaging and leasing can greatly reduce the rent of the second floor, which allows Suning Tesco Fusion Store to achieve a significant increase in sales scale without increasing too much cost.
One case is that in the home of a newly promoted second-born father after 85 in Nanjing, the kitchen decoration style is outdated, and the refrigerator needs to store breast milk and baby ingredients, and the capacity is not enough. So Suning Tesco gave a proposal to make a modern kitchen, changing the home appliances to embedded, adding disinfection and dishwashing functions. The design of this light reform and light equipment, the purchase of sets, are all done by Suning Tesco one-stop.
However, it is not easy to break through from the home furnishing market. Due to the unique attributes of "heavy offline", the industry has been difficult to achieve standardized replication of products and services, and has formed a pattern of "large market, small industry".
However, Suning Tesco believes that this industry characteristic also means that it has the value and space for integration and reconstruction. On the basis of Unicom's upstream head home and bathroom brands, such as Chivas, Wrigley, and Four Seasons Muge, the company can reuse and graft the retail cloud to tailor the retail infrastructure for the home appliance industry, and guide stores to carry out integrated marketing activities for home appliances and home categories, and output one-stop retail solutions.
In addition to the integration of home appliances and homes, the quick repair track is also the focus of Suning Tesco Retail Cloud.
Data show that the current annual scale of domestic mobile phones, tablets, notebook computers and other 3C products has exceeded 100 billion. Taking mobile phones as an example, in 2021, China's mobile phone stock is 1.5 billion units, and the replacement cycle is extended from 18 months to 32 months, and a large number of repairs are just needed by the market. However, due to the opaque price of the maintenance industry, poor user experience, and unsafe quality of accessories, the industry needs to be upgraded to change the status quo of supply and demand mismatch.
According to this, the retail cloud light repair shop based on the shopping center came into being. Suning Tesco revealed to Radar Finance that its retail cloud fast repair store focuses on the core business districts of first- and second-tier cities, providing consumers with services such as maintenance, recycling, filming, 3C fashion retail, etc., and is currently accelerating the completion of point coverage of mainstream business districts in high-tier cities.
At the end of 2021, the retail cloud also opened a one-stop community sales service store that collects "home appliance sales + delivery and maintenance + cleaning and testing + recycling and replacement". According to Gu Wei, the new "sales and service integrated store" of retail cloud is service-centric, and has completed the running and landing of the model in Nanjing, Shanghai, Chongqing and other places.
It is understood that the underlying logic of this model is: enhance the reputation of stores through services, link more consumers, and thus reverse sales. The franchisee owner of the first sales service store said that within one month of opening publicity, hundreds of service orders were received through the community expansion customers, old customer patronage and acquaintance recommendations, just home appliance cleaning, home improvement and replacement.
Gu Wei also revealed in an interview that in addition to the store model shown, Suning Tesco is also trying various forms of store solutions, not limited to home appliances, nor limited to the sinking market.
Suning Tesco does all this, based on the company's strong organizational capabilities. According to Gu Wei, with the help of nearly 700 areas and professional operation teams across the country, the company has given accompanying assistance to stores in products, training and operation links, so that store terminals can always keep up with the rhythm of market evolution.
Gu Wei said that no matter what form of attempt, channel efficiency is always the foundation of the retail cloud, strengthening retail service capabilities, consolidating the supply chain foundation, and improving the refined operation capabilities of stores, which is also the key to the retail cloud to better meet the needs of consumers and thus win the "long-term value war of retail".
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