"Competition Upgrading" Of Fresh E-Commerce: Who Is In Charge Of Home, Group Purchase And E-Commerce?

Fresh e-commerce, once dying in 2019, unexpectedly ushered in a different start in 2020. Under the risk of the epidemic, fresh e-commerce completed the layout of consumer education.

The suspension of daily life has brought about the explosive growth of "contactless + online" fresh e-commerce. According to Fastdata, the transaction volume of fresh e-commerce in the first half of 2020 will reach 182.12 billion yuan, with a year-on-year increase of 137.6%, which has exceeded that of the whole year of 2019.

Capital is also coming. Fresh e-commerce will reach the top in 2020 and become a "crowded" track. According to qixinbao data, as of October 2020, there are 16800 fresh e-commerce entities in operation and existing in China. At the same time, there will be 33 financing cases in the fresh e-commerce industry in 2020, and the industry market scale is expected to reach 404.7 billion yuan. On this track, not only all the leading enterprises of the Internet entered the end, but also the formats began to compete.

"Fresh online has become a very prominent trend, which seems unstoppable." Wang Jing, vice president of Jingdong group, pointed out to the reporter of the 21st century economic report that in the past, people thought it was the competition between stores, but suddenly they found that there was a large-scale appearance of front-end warehouse and group business. Now the structure of competition has changed a lot. It may be the competition between stores and groups, the competition between stores and front-end warehouses, or the competition between different formats of stores.

The three modes of home, group buying and e-commerce developed before have also accelerated enclosure in their respective battlefields.

Capital "home"

Due to the inconvenience of going out during the epidemic period, the first emerging platform is fresh food home, which is most convenient to "knock" consumers' home. Questmobile data shows that the Mau of fresh home is close to 70 million one month after the Spring Festival in 2020, and 44 million in the same period in 2019. Meanwhile, the average daily usage times and duration increase by more than 20%.

Or affected by this, many fresh e-commerce companies have become the favorite of the capital market since 2020. A number of large amount of financing continued to increase the number of old brand fresh e-commerce enterprises. Dingdong will complete the c-round financing of $300 million in May 2020. Daily Youxian will complete the strategic financing of 495 million US dollars in July 2020. On December 9, 2020, Youxian daily obtained another 2 billion yuan of strategic investment, which once again refreshed the current largest financing scale of fresh food home industry.

At present, the home mode is mainly divided into self operated and platform type.

Among them, self operated mode includes two types of models: front end warehouse and store + home. Daily Youxian is the pioneer of "front-end warehouse" mode of China's fresh e-commerce. Through the "front-end warehouse" mode, the loss of fresh goods is reduced, the distribution efficiency is improved, and the fresh goods can be delivered 1-3 km / h in the surrounding area through the network sales mode.

"The most difficult problem of fresh food is the loss and turnover problem. The daily excellent fresh now through data and algorithm, more than 1000 stores chain management, loss less than 1%, inventory turnover is 1.5 days." Liu Zhidan, vice president of daily Youxian commodities, told reporters of the 21st century economic report that the front-end warehouses are all over the country, which not only extends the tentacles to the consumer end, but also virtually enhances the trust of users in the form of entity. "Front warehouse" mode was later adopted by many fresh e-commerce enterprises.

The platform type refers to the third-party open platform that enables offline stores and provides instant home delivery service. According to the survey of fresh food users by iResearch, users expect a faster delivery experience in terms of delivery time. Among them, 28.8% of users hope to receive goods within 30min-1h, and 16.7% of users hope to receive goods within 30min.

At present, the instant distribution market is in a tripartite situation. Ali's line is "hungry", "hummingbird", "HEMA" and "dianyida". Meituan takes delivery of meituan to win. Jingdong is dada express from dada group, which covers more than 2000 counties and cities. Among them, the average daily order volume of meituan takeout is about 27.2 million. The perfect instant distribution network also provides the basis for fresh food home service.

Subsidy war, supervision on stage

Another noteworthy thing is that the "wind" of group buying in the community has risen again, from the original not to be optimistic, to now it has become the most popular circuit of fresh e-commerce.

At present, Alibaba, meituan, Didi, pinduoduo, Jingdong and other giants have stepped down to participate in the war. Didi's "orange heart optimization" was launched in June 2020, meituan launched meituan optimization in July, and pinduoduo launched "buy more vegetables" online in August It took less than a year for community group buying to switch from small private domain traffic to giant melee.

According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 200 community group buying enterprises in China. From January 2019 to November 26, 2020, a total of 26 investment and financing events occurred in the domestic community group purchase e-commerce field, with a total financing of more than 11.7 billion yuan. Some organizations predict that the market size will exceed 100 billion yuan in 2022.

The influx of hot money has also disrupted the market competition order. On the one hand, the platform can quickly complete the accumulation of original customers in a short period of time through the form of attracting community store franchise leaders through subsidies. According to a BD internal training material obtained by the 21st century economic report, the subsidy that the US regiment needs to pay to attract a new leader is 100-120 yuan.

On the other hand, the prices of some dishes sold on the platform also broke through the cost under subsidies. What's more, among the fresh products with ultra-low prices, there are also standardized, easy to store and transport products such as normal temperature milk, cereals and oils, which are also subsidized, far lower than the normal retail prices on the market.

This has undoubtedly disrupted the distribution system and price system of the original Japanese products industry chain. Upstream manufacturers took the lead to resist. Cangzhou Huahai Shunda grain and oil seasoning Co., Ltd. recently issued the notice on forbidding supply to community group purchase platform. In addition to Huahai Shunda, Yihai Jiali (Urumqi) Food Co., Ltd., Xinjiang Tianrun dairy sales company and other enterprises have also issued similar notices and announcements.

But before the market structure is formed, the subsidy war will continue. Buying vegetables is not only a rigid demand in daily life, but also a high-frequency consumption scenario. Once the user habits can be cultivated and consumption stickiness is established, the user's activity can be greatly improved, the user's time can be occupied to a greater extent, and the consumption of other products and services on the platform can be driven.

But under the giant subsidy, it also virtually squeezed the living space of individual traders. In this regard, public opinion, supervision and so on have also given high attention. "People's Daily" took the lead in commenting, "don't just think about the flow of a few bundles of cabbage and a few catties of fruit. The stars of scientific and technological innovation and the unlimited possibilities of the future are actually more exciting."

The regulatory authorities followed up quickly. The General Administration of market supervision and the Ministry of Commerce organized an administrative guidance meeting on standardizing the order of group buying in communities. Six Internet platform enterprises, including Alibaba, Tencent, Jingdong, meituan, pinduoduo and Didi, attended the meeting.

At the meeting, it was proposed that Internet platform enterprises should strictly abide by the "nine no's" new regulations, and should not abuse their independent pricing power by means of low-cost dumping, price collusion, price promotion, price fraud, etc.; they should not illegally reach or implement any form of monopoly agreements, such as fixing prices, restricting the production or sales of commodities, and dividing the market; and they should not "kill the ripe" by taking advantage of data advantages to damage consumption It is not allowed to illegally collect and use personal information of consumers, which may bring potential safety hazards to consumers.

These nine regulations not only regulate the group buying in the community and avoid vicious competition, but also imply the intention of allowing the development after the industry standard. Digital community retail is still the trend of the future.

Return to commercial rationality

"What the platform wants to do is not a single business of buying vegetables. In fact, it is still to do a large amount of traffic to pave the way for the layout of other categories in the future." Zhu danpeng, an analyst of China's food industry, said in an interview with the 21st century economic reporter. For example, mature Internet platform players, such as Alibaba, once again stir up the market when they enter the arena with huge user scale and data capability. "Fresh e-commerce must be a game played by giants. The Internet model must be burning money. It's only when the scale effect, brand effect and fan effect come out at the end of the fire, then there will be a chance to turn a loss into a profit. "

For a long time, the Survival Logic of China's Internet companies is: relying on subsidies to compete for sales and market share, those who win the leading position will be able to obtain venture capital and continue to work hard until the day when the winner is king. To a certain extent, the pursuit of long-term doctrine can not be separated from the factors such as favorable weather, favorable location and harmonious people.

In this war, the home, group buying, e-commerce and other modes are not good or bad, but each has its own advantages and disadvantages. From the point of delivery timeliness, home is more advantageous, but from the store cost and distribution cost, group buying is better. While the front-end warehouse is efficient in distribution, it also raises the cost. Group buying relies on the intervention of the team leader and the joint community stores, which has an absolute advantage in the store cost and distribution cost, but at the cost of sacrificing the distribution effectiveness.

It is an open secret of the industry to "burn money" for fresh e-commerce. It is undeniable that it is necessary to attract consumers through various marketing. However, the epidemic situation has accelerated the process of consumer education. More importantly, it is necessary to establish infrastructure such as supply chain and cold chain logistics.

Liu Zhidan further explained that "online fresh food will become the main purchasing channel for the mainstream population. In the past, what we want is convenience. When we become the main purchasing channel for the mainstream people, we need to change from convenience to one-stop shopping, which is the competition of the supply chain. In the next five years, the competition of supply chain will become the new competition point of the industry. "

At the same time, with the continuous improvement of logistics infrastructure, channels, distribution, performance methods will also change with the progress of technology, and the competition pattern is still changing. "So far, I personally think that there is still no mature model, and there is still no model that can be said to have run through. If you blindly believe that more market development is success, then I believe that in the future, how fast we will run and how fast we will lose. " Wang Wei, founder of fresh legend, said.

It is not long-term to rely on capital transfusion and exchange 10 billion subsidies for flow. Fresh e-commerce still needs to return to rationality and explore a sustainable and self generating business model. In the future, the competition will be more intense and the industry may reshuffle. Whether there will be a more effective mode than home, group buying and so on, further catalyzing the development of fresh e-commerce still needs continuous exploration of the industry.