The epidemic has led to a surge in fresh e-commerce orders, and the stock price of Dingdong Buy Vegetables has risen by more than 45%

As of the close of U.S. stocks on April 5, Dingdong Grocery (DDL.NYSE) shares rose 45.96% to $6.86 per share, and Daily Fresh (MF.NASDAQ) shares rose 14.29% to $1.28 per share.

The soaring stock price of the fresh e-commerce platform may be due to the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the recent surge in demand for home materials for Chinese residents, and the order volume of fresh e-commerce platforms such as daily excellent fresh and Dingdong grocery shopping has soared.

"After experiencing the anti-epidemic supply in 2020, this time we are very experienced in both operation management and personnel allocation. Although tired, everyone understands that early delivery can make users eat early, so they are desperately doing it. Wang Yulong, the person in charge of Dingdong Buy Vegetable Rose Station, told the first financial reporter that Rose Station has increased from a large warehouse distribution once a day to 2 times, and the supply is relatively sufficient.

Affected by the epidemic, the number of fresh orders such as Dingdong to buy vegetables and hema has soared. Since April 6, Hema has opened a "self-pick-up emergency channel" in Shanghai, and the first batch of 4 Hema X member stores have been launched, and the service adopts the method of group purchase and self-pick-up, giving priority to ensuring the supply needs of medical groups, volunteer groups and special groups that urgently need materials. Subsequently, the self-pickup emergency channel will be fully rolled out in Shanghai Hema Fresh Store.

Stockpiling and capacity are two major challenges

"Post-95" Wang Yulong is the station manager of Rose Station, and the nearby station Huajing Station is also managed by him.

Order volumes have risen sharply, and stockpile and capacity are two major challenges. In terms of stockpiling, the experience of supply assurance during the concentrated outbreak of the Spring Festival in 2020 has made Dingdong buy vegetables have sufficient response capabilities. The direct procurement and self-built cold chain supply chain of the base of the country's multi-production area can help Dingdong buy vegetables to adjust the supply volume of the whole Shanghai area to 2 times or more in a short period of time. At the same time, Dingdong Buy Vegetables has also quickly listed "anti-epidemic special supply" large-scale dish packaging at various sites affected by the epidemic, which has greatly improved the supply efficiency.

In order to facilitate the residents of the sealed control community to buy vegetables, Dingdong Buy Vegetables launched the "Dingdong Neighborhood Group", which carried out intensive supply assurance, made the basic people's livelihood commodities vegetables, fruits, meat, poultry and eggs into a combination package, and distributed to the self-pick-up point of each community at a regular and fixed point every day, maximizing the distribution efficiency and meeting the needs of the residents' vegetable baskets in the special period as much as possible.

The "Dingdong Neighborhood Group" opens services with the community neighborhood committee as the unit, and has now covered 176 sealed and controlled communities in Shanghai, and is still increasing. The 'Dingdong Neighborhood Group' gives priority to covering key areas with many closed communities and high distribution pressure, such as Jiangchuan Street and Meilong Town in Minhang, Zhangjiang Town and Huamu Street in Pudong, as well as Xuhui District, Putuo District, Songjiang District, Jiading District, Baoshan District and other areas.

On March 18, when it was launched on the first day, there were only more than 100 orders, and as of March 23, more than 10,000 vegetable sets were distributed to more than 10,000 families every day. And the number of new users and orders is still growing exponentially.

Residents of the community who have opened the service can choose and purchase packages through the "Neighborhood Group" WeChat Mini Program, and they can place orders from 9:00 to 7:00 p.m. every morning, and at 9:00 a.m. the next morning, the "Neighborhood Group" will send the packages of the community to the self-pick-up point in the community through the truck, and the residents will arrange for the residents to receive them in an orderly manner by the neighborhood committee.

"At present, what I am most looking forward to is that this wave of epidemic will pass early, and I will go to haircuts when I have some spare time." Wang Yulong said that taking advantage of the warm spring flowers, he wanted to ask his friends to go to Qingqing together.

Hema also launched a community collection order service.

The so-called community collection list refers to the relevant leader of the resident community, in view of the commodity needs of the community residents, centralized orders, handed over to the relevant docking personnel of Hema and distributed by Hema Neighborhood, Hema X member stores, and Hema fresh stores.

Initially, the community collection order service was only carried out in some of the hema neighborhood self-pick-up points, manually recorded by the self-pick-up point manager according to the telephone and WeChat, and later, it developed into the community leader to take the initiative to solitaire and collect orders in the residents' WeChat group, and as the public (especially the sealed control community) demand for large-packaged goods and fresh goods became larger and larger, Hema X member stores and Hema fresh stores also joined the community collection order service.

On March 23, the community set list was just launched in the Yanggao South Road store, and in less than half a day, it had exceeded 2,000 people set order. As of March 28, 47 Hema fresh stores, 4 X member stores, and hundreds of Hema neighborhood pick-up points in the sealed area in Shanghai have launched community collection order services.

The front warehouse VS warehouse store are integrated

After several years of exploration, at the product level, the category of the fresh e-commerce platform has expanded from a single fruit in the past to vegetables, meat, fish, rice and flour grain and oil, etc.; at the logistics level, from the long-radius transportation of "cold chain home delivery" in the past, it has expanded to the short-radius transportation represented by the previous warehouse and mini stores.

At the beginning of 2020, the sudden epidemic made people can only stay at home, the number of purchases has been greatly reduced, and the traffic dividend during the epidemic has solved the problems of low purchase frequency, customer unit price, and repurchase rate of fresh e-commerce for a long time, and also provided an opportunity for fresh e-commerce to explore a feasible profit model.

At present, the players of the fresh business are mainly divided into two types: self-operated type and platform type, of which the self-operated mode is divided into pre-warehouse (such as daily excellent fresh, Meituan buying vegetables, Dingdong buying vegetables) and warehouse store integration (Hema and Yonghui), while Pinduoduo belongs to the platform type.

The core difference between the front warehouse and the warehouse store integration model is that the former completely abandons offline drainage, and catches the high cost of pure online customer acquisition by compressing the ground rent cost; the latter bears the higher ground rent cost, and the store has the function of offline drainage, while obtaining customers from online and offline.

For the cost of the pre-warehouse model, Liang Changlin, founder and CEO of Dingdong Grocery, told the first financial reporter: "The construction cost of the warehouse, the water and electricity cost of the warehouse, the sorter, safety officer, quality control personnel in the warehouse, the cost of delivery to the home, and the return and replacement of goods, all the expenses account for about 15% of the sales revenue." Now the better community stores can do 15% to 20%, because the community store rent is more expensive, to recruit clerks, to consider the customer into the store environment comfort and other factors. ”

"Platform players can only operate some categories with long shelf life, such as fruits and root vegetables; in addition to categories with long shelf life, self-operated players can also operate some categories with short shelf life, such as fresh meat and leafy vegetables." Yun Yangzi, the founder of the new retail internal reference, told the first financial reporter that the current fresh e-commerce has become a must for various Internet giants.

Whatever the model, they need to solve the most basic problems such as traffic, supply, and distribution. In order to obtain a stable supply of goods, Hema, Daily Excellent Fresh, Dingdong Buy Vegetables, etc. have cooperated with various vegetable production bases. In terms of logistics and distribution, each company uses the smart supply chain to minimize the circulation from the field to the table and redistribute value.

From the product level, the products sold by fresh e-commerce companies are basically homogeneous, but the agricultural products across the country are not easy to sell, and the deeper reason for this phenomenon is that the cooperation between upstream fresh brands, production areas and channels has not been very mature.

Taking the "Chu Orange" that was originally incubated by life as an example, after becoming a net red fruit, it is now sold through various channels, which is not fair to the original trader's life. Under this delicate relationship, how much motivation the channel provider has to support the real fresh brand, or establish their own advantageous varieties, is the core issue involving the more upstream fresh supply chain.

"Every independent organization in business is going up, the most important thing is how much value you create for him, the real value is your irreplaceable part, is there any?" If you can be replaced, why does it have to follow you? Liang Changlin took the company's support of the net red fruit "Wuming Huang Qinghua's Wo Mandarin" as an example, the company provided great help to the latter in the grading of Wo Citrus, if there are other fresh e-commerce companies to grab goods in the future, the price war is also difficult to avoid.

As for whether the supply chain can be bound through investment, Liang Changlin believes that if it is tied too tightly, it may lose vitality, and I believe that different individuals are "loosely coupled" and everyone is developing in their own best direction.