China's e-commerce has never lacked concepts. The earliest popular one was "online business". Since 2016, "new retail", "unbounded retail" and "smart retail" have appeared. The hottest thing right now is “instant retail”.
On August 5, 2022, CCTV reported on the case of millions of grocery store owners counterattacking. The concept of "instant retail" immediately surfaced and had a complete definition. After research and interviews with experts, CCTV believes that the core of "instant retail" is: local stores plus instant delivery. It is a new business format created by combining takeout and physical stores. It connects the real economy and consumers and stimulates new consumer demand.
Last year, "trust e-commerce" and "interest e-commerce" emerged in the industry. The proposers of these two concepts were the rising Kuaishou e-commerce and Douyin e-commerce. They need to define to the public how they are different from traditional e-commerce platforms. . Both Kuaishou and Douyin are trying to differentiate themselves from traditional e-commerce.
Every time a new concept is born, it means the rise of a new wave of e-commerce entrepreneurship or a new platform. For e-commerce, the concept is the implementation of the enterprise's strategy and the harbinger of the future trend of the industry. However, unlike previous business models, strictly speaking, "instant retail" is not a wave of e-commerce entrepreneurship, but the beginning of the Internet's feedback on the offline real economy.
The Internet has gone through three stages: the first stage is to gain share from offline; the second stage is to connect online and offline; the third stage is also represented by "instant retail", where online relies on offline and feeds back to offline. .
The concept of online business, born at the beginning of the rise of e-commerce, aims to define the e-commerce group. Later, in 2016, with the introduction of the concept of "new retail", "unbounded retail" and "smart retail" emerged in the next six months, which were also some responses to the entrepreneurial boom of that period.
These concepts have the subtext of being neither broken nor established. For example, "new retail" corresponds to "old retail" or "traditional retail", and "smart retail" also corresponds to traditional retail. Looking at the "retail" concepts in 2016, "unbounded retail" is the most ambiguous, and its value orientation is not easy for consumers to understand.
The birth of "instant retail" also has its value trend. "Instant" defines the value of this retail solution in terms of time - fast, instant, and everything can be delivered to your home in 30 minutes. "Instant retail" corresponds to "delayed retail", or in other words, it is still traditional e-commerce, with half-month delivery, three-day delivery, next-day delivery and other e-commerce traditions that require waiting for packages.
From "new retail" to "instant retail", there are also inadvertent changes in the vocabulary: the foothold of "new retail" is to emphasize the e-commerce platform, and the opposition between the new and old traditions of "I"; the foothold of "instant retail" is Emphasize customer value, the time required for "you" to obtain goods and services, the difference between half-month delivery, three-day delivery, next-day delivery and "instant".
From "online merchants" to "new retail" to the current "instant retail", the real change is that the Internet has changed from grabbing the offline market to truly supporting the offline real economy, especially small businesses. Supermarkets, mom-and-pop convenience stores, etc.
Judging from the speed of logistics and distribution, consumers’ e-commerce shopping shortened from half a month to a week, and later became next-day delivery and same-day delivery. “Instant retail” needs to achieve “30-minute” delivery Door-to-door shopping is the limit of e-commerce shopping.
"Instant retail" solves the balance between efficiency and experience. It has achieved a breakthrough in the category of "everything is at home", and the core of the breakthrough in the category is that its product supply is no longer based on price revitalization in the national industrial belt, but relies on the real economy such as offline convenience stores and mom-and-pop stores. From the supply side, in order to achieve 30-minute home delivery of everything, we must rely on high-density local physical stores to ensure the density and accuracy of supply coverage, thereby enabling consumers to discover the nearest products as quickly as possible and deliver them through takeaways. The ability to fulfill contracts ensures consumers' consumption experience, which further stimulates new consumer demands and achieves faster rotation between offline physical stores and consumers.
In addition to local physical presence, another element of "instant retail" is delivery. Of course, the real threshold of "instant retail" is also in distribution. Instant fulfillment requires network delivery personnel such as riders and intelligent mobilization systems. In the future, there may also be technological applications such as drones and automatic delivery vehicles, which require sufficient transportation capacity and intelligent dispatch. Order mechanism, effective scheduling of order peaks and troughs, and optimal route planning. This series of operations has established an invisible and high barrier through accumulation.
The essence of "instant retail" is a large-scale social division of labor and collaboration based on a technical system - both a socialized supply of goods on the supply side and a socialized distribution support. In fact, looking back at the history of China's e-commerce development, only these two social collaborations can truly support a platform. The success of Taobao is not only due to the large number of merchants, but also to the four-dimensional connection. Even if a self-operated B2C company like JD.com wants to grow, it must open its platform, introduce merchants, and also introduce logistics and distribution. of openness.
As can be seen from the above, there are still essential differences between "instant retail" and traditional e-commerce platforms: first of all, the difference in demand. Traditional e-commerce is more about planned needs, while "instant retail" meets immediate needs . Children When you have a cold and cough, you can’t wait a day or two to buy a bottle of cough syrup. Secondly, the supply is different. Traditional e-commerce supplies supplies from different places across the country. Yiwu’s goods are sold to Inner Mongolia and Sichuan, “instant retail” It is the local supply in the region ; the third difference is in their categories. Traditional e-commerce sells standardized goods such as clothing and 3C, but "instant retail" is more about daily necessities, fresh groceries, and medicines, which are all The most frequently used commodity in daily life.
Traditional e-commerce platforms have benefited from the development of a unified national market, allowing users to buy goods from all over the country, and even from around the world, without leaving home. It solves the problem of product richness, and the emergence of "instant retail" has To benefit from the maturity of local retail, let users buy locally supplied goods faster, solve the problem of immediacy of goods, and let everything arrive at home immediately.
From this point of view, "instant retail" is more like a brand-new retail format, unlike "trust e-commerce" and "interest e-commerce", which put old wine in new bottles.