As major manufacturers such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Tencent have entered the local life service track one after another, the pressure on Meituan has increased dramatically in recent years. In order to cope with such an impact, Meituan tried to benefit merchants and reduce the commission ratio on the one hand, and on the other hand, it invested money and traffic to cultivate the content ecology and introduce live streaming to bring goods, trying to replace defense with offense in the track that competitors are good at.
But these seem to be not enough, Meituan is still "seeking change".
Since the beginning of this year, Meituan has begun to make frequent organizational adjustments. As early as February, Wang Xing, founder and CEO of Meituan, announced that Wang Pu, a member of the S-team, would report directly to him on the business groups of the housekeeper business group, the in-store business group, the Meituan platform, and the basic R&D business group, and the exploratory business in the two directions of internationalization and technology. Then, in March, Meituan's Home and Store Business Group launched a new round of rotation and appointment plans for business leaders.
Later, in early April, Meituan Takeaway launched a new round of organizational structure adjustment, and newly established a number of departments such as the urban operation business department and the chain business department. In mid-April, as the end of the adjustment in February, Meituan officially integrated the store business group, Daojia business group, Meituan platform and basic R&D platform as the core local business segments, with Wang Puzhong as CEO.
It is not difficult to find that one of the cores of Meituan's adjustment is to promote the integration of home delivery and store delivery business. Furthermore, Meituan's move may be hoping to use the home delivery business to drive the store business to resist the offensive of competitors. After all, thanks to the delivery network composed of millions of takeaway brothers, Meituan's home delivery business, represented by takeaway, is not unruly in the moat.
In contrast, Meituan's in-store business is clearly under more pressure today. With high subsidies for both supply and demand, as well as a growing in-store video content ecosystem, Douyin's in-store business has grown rapidly in recent years. Although Meituan has also opened subsidies and cultivated a content ecosystem, on the whole, this series of follow-up measures has not been so satisfactory, and may have brought a lot of cost burden.
Previously, at the beginning of January this year, Zhang Chuan, then president of Meituan's in-store business group, admitted in an internal letter that this business was in "a cruel and torturous trench war". At the same time, Haitong International's research report also shows that in 2023, Douyin's local life GTV will reach 200 billion yuan, which has reached 1/3 of Meituan, most of which is completed by in-store business.
After this integration, the two businesses have more opportunities to pull each other. For Meituan's in-store business, it can more conveniently divert traffic from the home-to-home scene, thereby reducing operating costs. However, in order to make the home and store business better coordinated, in addition to the organizational structure, Meituan obviously needs more hands. Now it seems that membership service may be one of the answers given by Meituan.
A few days ago, a source revealed that Meituan may carry out a comprehensive upgrade of its membership system in the near future, that is, the "God Members" who only covered the takeaway business in the past will begin to gradually expand to the in-store business. At the same time, the source also said that Meituan's goal of member services is not only to cover home and store services, "if it goes well, this membership system will gradually cover all sub-businesses of Meituan in the future."
It is said that this plan is designated as an "S-level" project within Meituan, initiated by Wang Puzhong, and Zhou Mo, head of the user growth and operation department of Meituan's platform, is in charge, and has selected elite soldiers from various business lines to join, with the goal of completing the connection between in-store and home-based members in 2-3 months.
Moreover, it is reported that at present, Meituan's investment promotion work for in-store merchants has been fully opened, and the early stage is mainly focused on dining merchants, "because compared with Zonghe wine and tourism, the overlap between catering and takeaway merchants is high, and the synergy is also stronger, which is conducive to the early members to get through as soon as possible." According to relevant reports, citing Meituan BD, the leading chain merchants are more willing to participate, because "many merchants are also eager to realize the linkage between food delivery and home delivery business as soon as possible."
In fact, in the Internet industry, Meituan is not the only one that is trying to connect its various business lines with membership services, such as Amazon's Prime membership and Taobao's 88VIP. The reason for this is nothing more than that this move can bring stronger user stickiness, and it also helps the diversion and collaboration between various business lines, providing assistance for less competitive businesses to better resist market competition.
36Kr once quoted some Ele.me users as saying in a related report that the main reason why they chose to use Ele.me instead of Meituan Takeaway is that 88VIP issues enough coupons every month, "you can continue to pick wool".
On the other side of the coin, Meituan wants to strengthen the synergy between home and store, and even other businesses through membership services, but it also faces many challenges.
In fact, Meituan had previously tried to launch this kind of omni-channel membership service, but it failed to do so due to reasons such as the fact that many businesses were not fully profitable at that time, the in-store and home-to-home businesses were independent of each other and had their own goals, and the user stickiness was not strong. Although with the establishment of the core local business sector, the division and rule of the in-store and home-to-home business groups has become a thing of the past, opening up business systems and data, and removing obstacles at the organizational level, even if Meituan's own internal data and systems can be connected, how can it convince merchants to "contribute" membership data?
On the other hand, how to balance the interests of the B-end and the C-end is obviously also the difficulty of Meituan's promotion of membership service expansion. If the discount is too small, it will be difficult to capture users, but if the discount is too large, the cost of the merchant will also rise.
Further, referring to Amazon Prime membership and Taobao 88VIP, it is not difficult to find that the essence of this kind of omni-channel membership service is actually "casting a long-term line to catch a big fish", and even if it is only from the perspective of direct income, it is very likely to be a loss-making transaction. This means that it is destined to be a long-term plan, and it is difficult to pay off in the short term.
[The picture in this article comes from the Internet]