Unexpectedly, just after his store went online, he caught up with the release of new industry policies. This made Ding Jian, the co-founder of "Near Pear·Super Selection Convenience" who is fully committed to "instant retail", full of greater expectations for the future. expect.
At the end of October, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the Ministry of Civil Affairs jointly issued the "Notice on Carrying out the Pilot Work of Complete Community Construction", clearly encouraging pilot communities to vigorously build convenience stores, vegetable shops, canteens, mail and express delivery based on adapting to the daily needs of residents. Service facilities, barber shops, laundries, pharmacies, maintenance points, housekeeping service outlets and other convenient commercial service facilities.
This also means that "instant retail" that fully meets the conditions of the "Notice" will officially usher in a full-scale market explosion. With the issuance of the "Notice", it is certain that with the influx of major giants such as communities, real estate companies, major convenience stores, e-commerce platforms, express delivery companies, etc., instant retail, which has just begun to take off slowly, will be fully With the "involution" of all the people ushering in, what is worth looking forward to is, who will become the "king of involution"? will be the biggest highlight of the market.
It is worth mentioning that according to Meituan’s latest data, in the first 10 months of this year, the number of merchants on the platform that both “sells goods” and provides convenient life services has increased by 127%.
Become the involution king of instant retail
Theoretically, the "involution" of instant retail will be carried out first between e-commerce platforms and traditional supermarkets/convenience stores, and then between terminal store owners. However, in this process, players who understand both online and offline are expected to become the first wave of market dividend beneficiaries. Why do you say that?
Let’s first answer why the biggest involution of instant retail must be between e-commerce platforms, and also between traditional supermarkets/convenience stores?
In recent years, the originally surging e-commerce market has already approached the ceiling of the industry. You can look at the relevant data released by the National Bureau of Statistics in the past five years. For the whole of 2018, national online retail sales were 9,006.5 billion yuan, an increase of 23.9% over the previous year. In 2019, the national online retail sales reached 10.6 trillion yuan, an increase of 16.5% over the previous year. In 2020, the national online retail sales totaled 11.76 trillion yuan, an increase of 10.9% over the previous year. In 2021, national online retail sales reached 13.1 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 14.1%. Overall, 2018 was the highlight moment for the entire e-commerce market, but after entering 2020, the entire growth declined sharply. In the first half of the year, my country's online retail sales reached 6.3 trillion yuan, a year-on-year growth of only 3.1%. The growth of the market has gone from surge to steady growth, which means that major e-commerce platforms will face unprecedented business growth challenges and urgently need to find new dairy business.
Compared with the shopping experience of e-commerce overnight delivery and one-week delivery, the unique "30-minute delivery" service of instant retail is obviously particularly lovable and has been sought after by netizens. Under the general trend of "everything at home", no e-commerce platform can afford to miss the dividends of this new consumer market. It can be seen that leading platforms including Meituan, Alibaba, JD.com, and Suning.com are all Completely finished.
In addition, community ultra-chains are also seen, including Sun Art, Yonghui, Jiajiayue, Zhongbai Group, Bubugao, Hongqi Chain, Hualian Supermarket, Renrenle, Sanjiang Shopping, Xinhuadu, as well as Carrefour, Wal-Mart, Auchan Foreign supermarket chains such as , Trust-Mart, Tesco, Metro, E-Chow Lotus, etc. have also vigorously deployed on-the-fly retail.
It is not impossible for small and medium-sized players to win by lying down
With the swarming of these leading players, the entire instant retail ecosystem will become more and more sound. First of all, when there are more and more players, it means that each platform must devote more resources to seize the market, otherwise it may To become the cannon fodder of this new trend, under this pressure, every company must also fully participate in the "involution", including the establishment of online commodity supply chain, the operation of stores, the timeliness of offline instant delivery, and the operation of private domains. For example, so far, JD Supermarket’s hourly shopping has covered more than 87,000 supermarket physical stores and more than 29,000 supermarket fast-moving consumer goods brands, and can provide instant consumption services to consumers in more than 400 cities across the country. . At the same time, on Meituan, the GMV of Meituan flash sales in 2021 has reached approximately 81.4 billion yuan, with services covering 2,800 counties, districts and cities, and 2.36 million cooperative merchants.
At the same time, Community Unchained also discovered that Meituan is vigorously building "flash warehouses". Up to now, the flash warehouse business has covered more than 100 cities across the country, with more than 1,000 stores, and is developing very fast. In addition, Meituan also proposed a plan to "invest 5 billion in three years to support Meituan Flash Warehouse", announcing that it will support more than 1,000 tens of millions of merchants, more than 200 billion-level merchants, and more than 10 Billion-level business. It cannot be seen that under the grand vision lies Meituan’s fanatical ambition and full confidence in the flash warehouse model.
Faced with the onslaught of major e-commerce and supermarket chain giants, Ding Jian, co-founder of Jinjianli, believes that compared with policy dividends, the involution among these giants will also bring traffic dividends and service benefits to the industry. Dividends and efficiency dividends. Generally speaking, the competition between giants brings about a more complete industry infrastructure system and the completion of consumer education in a larger market. For other players, they only need to join the game and do a good job in store operation, which is enough to survive. It’s getting better, and there are huge opportunities to do even better. After all, in the trillion-level market, the major giants have eaten up 900 billion, and the remaining 100 billion is enough for other players to share.
Ding Jian said that a friend heard that we had opened an online convenience store and jokingly asked if we wanted to be the "convenience store king"? That's exactly what happened. Jianjing Pear must have a "king of volume" attitude to carve out a path in the new field of instant retail. The current instant retail is still in its early stages of development, and the market is in a state of chaos. On the one hand, we have to compete with the mom-and-pop supermarkets around the community. , we also have to compete with chain convenience stores such as Meiyijia and Lawson, as well as large supermarkets with instant delivery services such as Wumart and Hema. We have to compete in terms of traffic and customer acquisition, and we have to compete in terms of SKU richness. Competition must be based on the timeliness of delivery. The just-in-time retail industry is not yet mature, but the competitive atmosphere is already very fierce. If we don’t take the initiative to “get involved”, we will be “taken up” by others. Of course, the essential purpose of our “involvement” is, Or to serve consumers, full competition in instant retail will ultimately benefit users.