In 2024, the choice of campus takeaway entrepreneurs

Author: Sun Ling (10 years of full-time college student work, former head of college student business for Meituan Takeaway, Zhaopin, Beike Housing, JD Retail), title picture from: Visual China

In the three years of 2020~2022, a number of localized takeaway platforms have emerged in the regional market represented by universities.

In the university market, more vertical categories of takeaway platforms have emerged, such as fruit takeaway business, through the construction of private domain user pools, as well as delivery to bed delivery services, colleges and universities with more than 10,000 people can make profits, and multi-school replication has been carried out.

However, with the opening of colleges and universities in 2023, the order volume of most local takeaway platforms has shrunk, and the most direct reason is that students' living expenses are fixed, but they have more consumption scenarios.

At present, food delivery practitioners are faced with two choices, continue to operate independently, or embrace the big platform.

1. The subsidy strategy of the platform

Taking the fruit business as an example, after the school gate is opened, when students spend part of their living expenses on off-campus scenes, the cost of buying fruits will be significantly reduced, after all, this is not a rigid need for most students, and the business will naturally shrink.

At the same time, with a series of red envelope subsidies for Meituan Takeaway and Ele.me, it is difficult for localized takeaway platforms to resist, including new products such as Meituan Pinhaofan, which makes the price even worse by hitting the price to a few yuan.

As for the user experience of the product, the UI interface, etc., are not the core decision-making factors.

In 2014, I tested the food delivery business while I was in college, and purchased a third-party system and printer to configure for the merchant.

Since the takeaway business is just in demand and profitable, it was initially a commission model, and the distribution is also a self-closed loop of merchants, and the advantage of the student team is to acquire customers and divert traffic through the traffic of campus online media.

However, in May and June of that year, Meituan Takeaway vigorously entered the Wuhan market, and Ele.me followed up with a red envelope subsidy war, which made the small platform have no room to survive. Many people no longer have an impression, Ali and Baidu also entered the game back then, and launched word-of-mouth takeaway and Baidu takeaway projects.

At that time, the best result for takeaway entrepreneurs was to sell to big platforms, and several big platforms were fighting for orders to get better financing and valuation, and they were very fast, so there were also some localized platforms that sold themselves at high prices to get the first pot of gold.

In other words, when takeaway was just emerging, it was unknown who would eventually become the new giant. But now the situation is very different, when the big platforms start subsidies, the impact is undoubtedly huge, and many local food delivery platform orders have dropped by 80%.

2. Campus takeaway, delivery is king

On campus, we still see that there are localized campus food delivery platforms that survive, and existence is justified.

One background is that for Meituan and Ele.me, the profits of the campus takeaway business are very meager, and the targeted large red envelope subsidies have almost stagnated in recent years, especially Meituan Takeaway, and the deduction points of merchants have also been searched many times.

In the takeaway business, the core barrier lies in the supply and distribution capacity of the merchants, while in the university market, the supply of merchants is usually a surrounding commercial street, which is easier to BD, and the competition point is mainly focused on distribution.

Local teams often have the ability to deliver to schools and even to dormitories.

In the campus scene, the difference between delivery to the dormitory and delivery downstairs to the user's experience must not be underestimated.

When I worked at Meituan's food delivery headquarters in 2016, some colleges and universities banned food delivery from entering the campus, and Meituan's response strategy was to give up, and at that time, there was almost no dedicated school-enterprise BD work. Until now, in 2024, especially in the sinking area, Meituan will still have about 700~800 colleges and universities, which lack the ability to enter the school and deliver to the school.

For student teams engaged in takeaway business, it is a later story to set up a delivery team relying on takeaway to carry out errand business, such as picking up express delivery, printing, snacks, etc.

In 2016, I led the team to select two cells for errand business testing to verify that this direction was feasible. However, in terms of management, it is more inclined to join the form, because the student's distribution team is too random, and the relationship maintenance of one school and one policy requires the operator to be fine enough to have a certain profit margin.

The commonality I have seen in many local takeaway projects is that almost all delivery personnel use non-college students, and even if they use college students, they only undertake one part of the segmented delivery.

3. The core barriers of practitioners

We continue to deduce, what are the core barriers of campus food delivery practitioners?

On the one hand, of course, the ability to enter the school, which depends on relational resources; On the other hand, there is the ability to operate and distribute.

No matter how direct I talked, no matter how well the relationship was maintained, it would ultimately fall on the "money", and only by improving the operational capacity could we obtain better profits, so as to come up with enough expenses for relationship maintenance.

Therefore, the core barrier of the campus takeaway business, in my opinion, is the difference in delivery capacity, which is reflected in the difference of 0.1 yuan in the cost of a single delivery.

This is completely necessary to practice, and the "one school, one policy" I proposed in 2020 is to set up different distribution models according to the distribution of merchants and dormitories in each school to maximize the efficiency of transportation capacity.

What I wrote was just a few lines on paper, but it wasn't easy to do, and it involved a series of strategies for the management of the delivery team.

In the face of the subsidy restart of large platforms, the strategy I gave was also very modest: embrace the platform as soon as possible and become a delivery service provider, while retaining its own platform, especially for the precipitation of private domain users.

For example, a takeaway platform has given three cooperation paths for the sinking market:

1. Relationship with the school + distribution + supply;

2. Relationship with the school + delivery;

3. Establish a distribution system for student teams.

Of these three paths, the first one is preferred.

As Peng Wei, the private director of the campus, shared, the distribution agent has been verified to have no future, although the distribution is the uncrowned king, but the pure distribution is very passive, unless the distribution, platform, merchant alliance, at least two, can have the initiative.

Fourth, the extension of the takeaway business

Before talking about the extension business of campus takeaway, I need to remind new campus entrepreneurs that they must do something to make money right now, and extension business is just the icing on the cake.

Previously, under the bubble of capital, a large number of entrepreneurs entered the same pit, that is, to do traffic first, and then consider profits, but the college student market has a strong cyclicality.

On the one hand, there will be user updates every year with graduation, and on the other hand, due to the influence of winter and summer vacations, students are not on campus for 3~4 months a year, so it is urgent to monetize.

In addition, through the takeaway business, it is indeed good to accumulate a pool of private domain users, but in addition to low-cost use, private domain traffic also has a characteristic, that is, the traffic attribute is fixed.

I'll give you an example, in the campus fruit business mentioned at the beginning of this article, as the number of orders declined, the project team started a shoe washing business and reused the existing distribution system.

However, when the private domain is converted, the number of orders is very small, and it is difficult for students to place an order to wash shoes in a fruit group, even if the group name has been changed from "fruit group" to "fruit shoe washing group".

Therefore, it is best to extend the business based on its own core competence, that is, the distribution ability, to make relevant attempts, and even through the analysis of the order situation, to supply some products by yourself, such as snacks and light food.

From the perspective of my business of large companies, there is an extremely headache in the campus market, that is, it is difficult to copy, it seems that there are 3,000 colleges and universities, and the standardized (college sample) is placed here, but it cannot be achieved in one place.

But isn't this an opportunity for innovators and small companies? When the big platform desperately wants to standardize, I roll up personalized services and constantly use emotional value as a moat.

For the takeaway business of college students, it is necessary to grasp their core competencies, and it is not pure competition with large platforms, but on the contrary, they can cooperate to a certain extent.

Author: Sun Ling (Engaged in college student work full-time for ten years, former head of college student business in Meituan Takeaway, Zhaopin, Beike Real Estate, and JD Retail)

This content is the author's independent view and does not represent the position of Tiger Sniff. May not be reproduced without permission, please contact [email protected] for authorization

People who are changing and want to change the world are all in the Tiger Sniff APP