A few days ago, Dongfang Selection launched the "Hour Delivery" service, and has completed the layout of 17 front warehouses in Beijing, covering 80% of the area within the Fifth Ring Road of Beijing.
Yibao.com learned that the partner of Dongfang's selection of the front warehouse is Jingdong Logistics. Dongfang Selection is responsible for the distribution of its own brand, and Jingdong is responsible for the performance of warehousing and logistics.
Dongfang Selection is like a catfish for the live broadcast industry, and there was even news that Jingdong Hao was digging Dong Yuhui before. However, with the help of the traffic effect of "catfish", with the close cooperation between Dongfang Selection and JD Logistics, it may be able to bring more orders to Dada, SF City, and Flash Delivery.
JD.com built a front warehouse for it
At 3 p.m. on April 8th, the "Oriental Selection Hour" account was officially launched, and the anchor Tianquan incarnated as a delivery brother to deliver products to users' homes. At present, the "Hour Reach" product can only be ordered on Douyin, mainly selling its own products, including grilled sausages, chicken breast, etc., and about 50 models will be launched in the first batch.
Yibao.com locates Beijing International Trade and found that the delivery address of the Dongfang selection store is the nearest Jingdong warehouse, and Jingdong and Dada Xiaoge will assume the role of delivery staff. Agricultural products are the core self-operated category of Dongfang Selection, and users in this category have a certain demand for immediacy, which can also increase the frequency of user orders.
And if you want to truly achieve hourly delivery, the front position is indispensable. However, for Dongfang Selection, logistics is still a major pain point, and choosing to cooperate with social express delivery companies such as Jingdong Logistics and SF Express, using their advanced transportation and distribution experience, will undoubtedly greatly reduce the loss of agricultural products.
Whether in Beijing or other cities, JD.com and SF Express have taken advantage of their own operations to create a number of front-end warehouses, some of which are in the outlets and some are cooperating with third parties, so as to meet the immediate delivery needs of merchants, especially during the 618 and Double 11 promotions, these front-end warehouses delivered in minutes show their skills.
Jingdong Logistics insiders revealed that with an integrated supply chain and warehousing and logistics network, Jingdong Logistics cooperated with Dongfang Selection to provide it with flexible and flexible supply chain solutions, including warehousing and live broadcast e-commerce supply chain solutions, hoping to achieve faster speed, more efficiency, and better experience services.
With the help of JD Logistics, Dongfang Selection's e-commerce ecosystem has been further expanded. Industry insiders generally believe that after benchmarking the mainstream e-commerce platform and launching the hourly delivery business, Dongfang Selection is transforming from a single e-commerce seller to an e-commerce ecology, and in this way, it will open up the situation in local services and instant delivery.
According to the data of Cicada Mother, the first live broadcast of "Oriental Selection Hours" on April 8 had a cumulative sales of 50,000-75,000 yuan. Before the official launch of the hourly delivery business, in late February this year, Dongfang Selection tested the waters. At that time, it was only open to the Shilihe area of Beijing and some streets of Hongkou and Xuhui districts of Shanghai.
Yibao.com learned that although there is no asset-heavy logistics field, Dongfang Selection is constantly consolidating its supply chain system. Following the investment of 10 million yuan in Henan at the beginning of 2023 to expand the roast sausage factory, the warehousing network in Qingdao, Kunshan, Xinjiang and other places has been successively increased, and more than 99% of the domestic coverage of room temperature delivery and more than 97% of cold chain delivery have been achieved.
There are many challenges facing Hourda
Behind the fact that Dongfang selected to enter the instant retail market and test the water of the hourly delivery business, on the one hand, it is to get rid of the single sales model of live broadcasting, and on the other hand, it is also to catch up with the business layout of mainstream e-commerce platforms.
According to the data, the market size of instant retail has grown by more than 80% in the past five years, and it is expected that the scale will reach about 1.2 trillion yuan in 2025. In the face of the trillion-dollar market, whether it is Meituan, JD.com, Ele.me, or Douyin and Pinduoduo, they are all in the game and continue to seize market share.
Instant retail is a retail model that relies on offline retail stores or front-end warehouses to provide 30-minute delivery services for nearby consumers. According to the minutes report of Jiuqian Zhongtai, a consulting agency, in terms of GMV, Meituan Flash Sale, Ele.me (non-food and beverage segment) and JD Daojia accounted for 34%, 26% and 15% of the market share in 2022.
In 2023, Meituan announced that it would cooperate with SF Express, Flash Delivery, and UU to improve delivery services and efficiency, and then upgrade its Meituan Grocery to Little Elephant Supermarket to cover more categories. In October last year, Douyin Mall launched an independent entrance to the "Hour Delivery" business, covering fresh vegetables, fruits and flowers, meat, eggs and aquatic products and other categories. Alibaba's Hema and Tmall supermarkets have also accelerated their layouts.
Although there is no absolute leader in the instant retail market, the competition among the top players has become increasingly fierce. During last year's 11.11, more than 800,000 offline stores participated in Meituan's flash sale, more than 400,000 physical stores participated in JD Daojia, and the total order volume of Dada Express reached 200 million, the number of participating merchants of Ele.me increased by 50% year-on-year, and more than 90% of the transaction volume of cooperative brands on Double 11 exceeded the historical peak.
Dongfang Selection, which has always been on the cusp of public opinion, has caused fluctuations in market sentiment with every move. However, testing the waters of instant retail, it is also facing pressure from all sides.
Yibao.com believes that, first of all, compared with its competitors, the richness of the Dongfang selection category, which focuses on self-management, is slightly insufficient, and it is only limited to the field of agricultural products in the early stage, which has a large gap with Internet giants.
In addition, the focus of instant retail is immediate, the purpose is to deliver goods quickly, the requirements for warehousing and distribution are higher, in the context of giants have built their own warehousing and distribution, how to enhance the synergy with JD.com and other third-party logistics, increase the frequency of user consumption, Oriental Selection still faces many challenges.