Taking advantage of the Spring Festival gift box consumption boom, express delivery companies want to take advantage of traffic. On January 17, a reporter from Beijing Business Daily learned from YTO that YTO has launched the "Ruyi Neighborhood" WeChat mini program at nearly 70,000 terminal mother stations, trying to feed the e-commerce business with the traffic of sending and picking up goods. However, at this stage, the richness of the platform's commodity categories is not only relatively weak, but also the difficulty of home delivery also limits the user's willingness to place an order. For more than a decade, there have been countless cases of cross-border failures of express delivery companies, can YTO step on the point this time?
Challenge the Community Mall again
As the year draws to a close, YTO has launched a new mall. On January 17, a reporter from Beijing Business Daily browsed and found that this WeChat mini program called "Ruyi Neighborhood" integrated two major scenarios of sending and picking up and e-commerce shopping. In terms of shipping, the platform will display the information of packages sent and picked up by users, and you can also choose international shipments and corporate shipments. Click International Shipping, and users will be redirected to the "YTO International" mini program.
And the entrance to the shopping is as conspicuous as the shipping function. It is understood that the "Mother's Choice" channel mainly provides local specialties, New Year gift boxes, fruits and daily necessities. The goods are all delivered by YTO by express, and users can choose a nearby mother station for self-pickup. In order to strengthen the promotion of the mini program at the station, "Ruyi Neighborhood" also sells posters and other related materials.
An employee of the mother station who delivered goods on the "Ruyi Neighborhood" told the Beijing Business Daily reporter that the local products on the platform are mainly local post stations and farmers or suppliers cooperate, and the post station carries out off-site packaging and delivery, under normal circumstances, the time limit is about 3 days, "the amount of user consumption will be directly sent to the YTO headquarters, and the post station is not divided."
So, in the future, will YTO replace and integrate the existing single express delivery and pickup platform "YTO Express +" WeChat mini program with "Ruyi Neighborhood"? In response, the relevant person in charge of YTO responded to the Beijing Business Daily reporter that the two platforms will operate in parallel, and the "Ruyi Neighborhood" mini program is defined as a "service-oriented" online mall, hoping to connect Yuantong's existing nearly 70,000 mother stations scattered across the country into a standardized and integrated online network.
However, from the perspective of the number of goods, category richness and brand power, the attractiveness of "Ruyi Neighborhood" is still relatively lacking. In addition, the self-pickup mode also puts forward high requirements for the density of the city where the terminal station of the express delivery company is located. If the station is difficult to deliver to the door, it will also affect the user's shopping enthusiasm. A reporter from Beijing Business Daily took home as the location and found that the distance between the nearest mother's station reached 2.7 kilometers.
The end crosses several times
In fact, this is not the first time YTO has tried to do retail. According to past media reports, in February 2017, YTO introduced daily necessities sales in a newly opened mother's post in Pudong, Shanghai. In April, YTO launched the "Mother Mall", which uses 100% overseas direct procurement as the slogan to do cross-border e-commerce, selling maternal and baby products, beauty makeup, personal care, etc., but the business was taken down before it lived for a month.
YTO has also challenged the convenience store business. In July 2017, YTO Commerce's first "Mama Jingxuan" fresh convenience store landed in Xinhu Pearl City, a mid-to-high-end community in Putuo District, Shanghai. According to the description of China Post Express News, the Mama Jingxuan store is about 50 square meters, providing about 600 product categories such as fish, poultry, eggs, meat, fruits, vegetables and dairy products, grain, oil and rice noodles, snacks and drinks, and personal care products. It is worth mentioning that the store has also reached a cooperation with Alibaba's fresh food platform Yiguo to realize the system docking of online and offline collaborative marketing.
However, time has passed, and "Mother Selection" has almost lost its voice in the market, and the store's customer service phone is no longer available. As early as October 2020, Yiguo Xianxian, which cooperated with it, was exposed that the company was bankrupt, with debts of up to 2.3 billion yuan. The Beijing Business Daily reporter also noticed that the current WeChat public account "Mama Jingxuan Store" stopped updating after the end of February 2020.
Today, the "Mama Jingxuan" convenience store that can be searched on Baidu Maps and Dianping is located near Gloria Plaza Hotel Shanghai New Hongqiao. According to a former YTO employee who has been in contact with the business, the convenience store is currently located at YTO headquarters and is only available for internal employees to consume and shop.
Does express have retail genes?
For more than a decade, express delivery companies have not been fighting in the retail business, and they have also encountered a nose of ashes. As early as 2011, SF launched the convenience store brand "Hey Customer" and opened nearly 2,000 stores in 2014, but changed the brand name during two years. In 2019, the convenience store business, which was renamed "SF Preferred", was shut down nationwide. According to SF's financial report, from 2013 to 2015, SF's e-commerce business lost more than 1.6 billion yuan. At the end of 2022, the affiliate of the cross-border e-commerce business "Fengqu Haitao" applied for bankruptcy liquidation.
Playing retail does burn money. Best Group's commercial project Best Store Plus was also established in 2015 to develop its business as two lines, S2B2C platform Best Neighborhood and offline store WOWO convenience store. From 2017 to 2019, Best Store added a total loss of 617 million yuan in three years. In November 2020, Best Group abandoned Best Store Plus business. In addition to Best at the same time, Yunda and Shentong have also tried cross-border e-commerce, post station + life supermarket and other models, but they have not ended up and it is difficult to stir up splashes.
"Compared with e-commerce companies, express delivery companies are weak in user traffic and marketing capabilities, and there are few people who understand procurement, how can they reduce prices at the production end to form an advantage?" Some goods are so expensive that even internal employees are reluctant to buy them. A senior express delivery practitioner told a reporter from Beijing Business Daily frankly.
Another senior retailer believes that express delivery companies have great challenges in both product selection and supply chain, "How to select market-needed, competitive and differentiated goods is retail capability." Second, logistics capabilities are not the same as supply chain capabilities, which involve the entire process of procurement, storage, and distribution."
Although it has been difficult to step on the retail wind for many years, the current express delivery companies are still reluctant to leave. For example, SF changed its capital to intervene in the original life and necessary mall of the e-commerce platform, and its unmanned retail business "Feng E Food" received 300 million yuan in financing in 2022; In September 2022, China Post opened a store called Suxihang Fresh Supermarket in Jiangsu, with a total of 317 square meters, selling vegetables and fruits, rice, flour, grain and oil and other products; In November 2022, Shentong began to carry out grid warehouses and trunk line transportation in some areas of Zhejiang to attract investment to do community group buying business...
There are also various formats such as live broadcast in the warehouse, laundry housekeeping, and coffee shops tried by express delivery companies, all of which have re-emerged in recent years. Zhuang Shuai, an expert in the retail e-commerce industry and founder of Bailian Consulting, believes that there are always risks for enterprises to expand new businesses, but as long as the opportunities are large enough and the risk of trial and error investment can be controlled, enterprises must expand new businesses to obtain incremental regrowth and obtain greater voice in the upstream of the industry.
"YTO has accumulated a large amount of C-end user data and supplier data, created a dense distribution of goods, and has certain advantages in doing e-commerce, but I personally believe that what YTO should do next should not be e-commerce platforms like Ali, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, but commodity circulation service providers based on the Internet of Things, big data and location services, providing manufacturers with a series of services from suppliers to consumers." Zhao Zhenying, a researcher at the National Engineering Laboratory for E-commerce Transaction Technology, judged to a reporter from Beijing Business Daily.
Beijing Business Daily reporter He Qian