12 In mid-February, an article entitled "Did Internet companies rob vegetable vendors?" was thrown into a test tube like a catalyst, which immediately caused a violent chemical reaction. As a result, questions such as "Does community group buying lack dreams and technical content" and "Why Internet companies in China don't have a big pattern" have been extended, and the crusade against community group buying is endless. Followed by the People's Daily, a stone stirred up a thousand waves. "Don't just think about the flow of a few bundles of cabbage and a few pounds of fruit, the sea of stars in technological innovation, and the infinite possibilities in the future are actually more exciting." Pushed public opinion to a climax. Community group buying has changed from a capital outlet to a national issue, and from a commercial issue to a moral issue.
65438+In late February, the State Administration of Market Supervision and the Ministry of Commerce held an administrative guidance meeting to regulate the order of community group buying, with the participation of six Internet platform enterprises including Ali, Tencent, JD.COM, Meituan, Pinduoduo and Didi. The meeting fully affirmed the positive significance and role of the Internet platform in promoting economic development, but also seriously pointed out the outstanding problems such as low-price dumping and the resulting employment squeeze in community group buying, and demanded that Internet platform enterprises strictly abide by the principle of not abusing their independent pricing power, not illegally reaching monopoly agreements, not abusing their dominant market position, not illegally implementing the concentration of operators, not violating the principle of fair competition, not using big data to "kill", not charging unreasonable fees to operators, not illegally collecting personal information, not selling fake goods, and not selling fake goods.
The noisy minority before represents the silent majority, and the definition and boundary of community group buying are blurred in everyone's hot discussion. But in the discussion, there is a clear outline: that is, what people oppose is not necessarily the new format of community group buying, but the uncontrolled expansion of capital, unlimited "dumping" and unconstrained monopoly; What the people are worried about is that food is the most important thing for the people, and capital is greedy and plundered, which is a future that can be trampled on by others.
The crazy feast is coming to an end. Community group buying is the most important role in the whole process. Once the hottest leader, his enthusiasm has faded and he is seeking to leave collectively.
The "leader" became a "leader" with the anxiety that no one else could fall behind, but found that things were far more complicated than they thought.
The first is not to make money. A screenshot of the head office circulating on the Internet shows that Hezhou can rank first in the city with the daily commission of 85 yuan, and a head office only gets the commission of 1.23 yuan when it sells six goods, and the head office with daily income exceeding 100 yuan is rare. According to a survey report of China Merchants Securities, 5 ~ 10% of the head contributed 80 ~ 90% of the sales.
Secondly, the responsibilities of the head of the team are quite complicated. The basic work is manual labor such as sorting and packaging of each order, and more complicated is the invisible work that consumes energy such as operating group buying, handling after-sales and dealing with every customer. After-sales problems caused by unstable platform product quality, overtime problems caused by unstable logistics system, etc. The reputation accumulated by the colonel for many years is facing collapse.
Those who have no use value can only give up. The next series of actions of Meituan and Didi also made the head feel chilling. It is understood that the US Mission has begun to cut off the number of heads in areas where the head distribution is too dense, and the heads that do not pay or pay less are facing elimination; It is best for Orange Heart to open its own shop in the community. The leaders think that this is "burning down the bridge" and using the word-of-mouth accumulated by the leaders to "stand on their own feet".
The head-end crisis appeared, followed by the disadvantages of overheated competition in the community group buying market.
The phenomenon of excessive competition in offline community group buying is very obvious. Tik Tok netizens shared that some places have developed more than 50 self-promotion points within one kilometer, and barbershops, stationery stores, restaurants and dry cleaners have all developed into heads as long as they are shops. In Xi 'an ancient city, a hot land in the west where the community buys food, the food shopping business has burned to colleges and universities, and you can feel more and more crazy in the ivory tower. A friend of Xi Jiaotong University expressed doubts about this. "There was only one at first, and then three or four came one after another. Vegetables from other places are also available for sale. The competition is fierce. How can an industry selling vegetables be so involved? "
The fresh quality of fruits and vegetables purchased by community group purchase is uneven. Shopkeepers of some community stores said that the reason why the price of community group buying dishes is cheap is that on the one hand, the Internet giant did use the mode of group buying plus pre-sale to get relatively low-priced goods from the agricultural batch market. On the other hand, those vegetables are fresh and low-end products, and most vendors will not choose them. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and the reason for the low price is also the dealer's consideration of handling inventory.
Since the second half of the year, with the spread of community group buying from key cities to the whole country, the whole fresh food trading market has been turned upside down. Overheated community group buying really needs a pot of cold water to cool down, and rules and regulations are needed to regulate the market order.
The game of exchanging subsidies for traffic is the first stage of the game. With the popularization of community group buying mode in China, if we still emphasize traffic acquisition and ignore supply chain operation, quality control and logistics norms, it will be self-destructive and a disaster to the whole community group buying industry.
The second phase focusing on warehousing and logistics kicked off.
Community group buying promotes new species of logistics. In the first stage of grabbing traffic, everything that should come has come, so don't come again if it doesn't. The second stage of the "Thousand Group Wars" in community group buying is a link of warehousing, logistics and supply chain construction that needs careful layout, heavy investment and steady progress.
At this stage, there are still many opportunities. For enterprises that are optimistic about the trillion-dollar market of community group buying and want to cut through the logistics and supply chain links, there is always nothing wrong with paving the way.
Because community group buying requires higher logistics response speed and performance speed, companies such as Meituan, Shengxing Youxuan and Didi also want to quickly spread the network of community group buying with the help of express terminal system. Express companies can cooperate with internet companies to build the whole performance link of community group buying.
With the help of transit, some express delivery companies, such as Zhongtong, SF Express and Cainiao, are trying to take the terminal outlets, post stations, venues, transportation capacity and other resources in the huge sinking market as a breakthrough, but in different ways. Some choose to access the community group buying platform to become the delivery point, while others cooperate with the head of the delegation to reach consumers by renting venues.
The complexity is that although the logistics network of community group purchase is also a sinking network with dense outlets, it is essentially different from the existing distribution networks such as express delivery, take-out and home appliance distribution, and cannot be directly borrowed. The rise of community group buying will build a new logistics network and give birth to large logistics companies.
Send a courier, send a takeaway, send a dish, as if it were a delivery. What's the difference between community group buying network, express delivery network and home appliance distribution network? The main difference lies in the service scope and order density.
E-commerce is divided into wide-area e-commerce and near-field e-commerce according to the different demand frequency of consumer goods. Express delivery has built a long network system of layer-by-layer distribution, while one end of community group purchase is agricultural products big warehouse, and the other end is directly connected with consumers. Its three-level network of "central warehouse-grid warehouse-self-lifting point" is essentially a regional distribution network.
A typical express delivery network can extend to distribution stations in more than 30,000 towns and villages across the country. This is a nationwide network with an average distance of over 1000 km. From the perspective of site distribution breadth and density, it is similar to the network built by community group buying, but it is slightly inferior in usage frequency compared with the network built by community group buying. After all, people's demand for express delivery does not exist every day, but the demand for food shopping does exist every day.
The regional network in the field of home appliance distribution is usually sent from the factory to the dealer's store, and then distributed to a county and township by the dealer. However, household appliances are not daily consumer goods. Although it spreads widely, it is not as high as the demand for food, so it is a sparse network.
The difference with the take-away distribution network is that the take-away rider takes the meal from the store and delivers it directly to the consumers, without warehousing and direct delivery. The network structure of community group buying is "central warehouse-grid warehouse-self-lifting point", and the warehouse needs to be processed and repackaged before delivery.
Community group buying is mainly based on high-frequency consumption, with high order density in the region, and a dense high-frequency transportation network is built.
In third-and fourth-tier cities, such a denser distribution network has not yet appeared. After the battle of community group buying, no matter whether it will be a chicken feather in the end, it will leave a deep warehouse with the national network, which is also the most precious wealth.
Whoever can seize the opportunity of the logistics network corresponding to community group purchase and develop into a deep distribution network operator covering the whole community may become an emerging unicorn with a scale far exceeding that of the current express delivery company.
This company may be born from traditional e-commerce, Internet companies such as Meituan and Pinduoduo, companies focusing on supply chain such as SF Shuang Jie, or it may be hatched from traditional consumer goods distribution companies such as catering, clothing and household appliances.
Conclusion Opening a new city and starting delivery from the first order means that the sunk cost in the early stage is already a lot. Talk about suppliers at the front end and lay a logistics network in the middle. The operation seems to be as simple as the operation on the APP, but everything invisible behind it is paved with money.
Without a large number of front-end orders to support the operation of the logistics network, the supporting logistics network and supply chain system will become meaningless. Only when the quantity increases can the front-end procurement have more bargaining space, the procurement cost can be reduced, the logistics utilization rate can be improved, and the whole business system can run.
This is also evidence to some extent. The giants burn money to make the war big enough, which is not only a matter of competing for financial resources to show their muscles, but also a matter that they have to do.
Amazon flywheel theory: the lower the front-end price, the happier the consumers and the lower the logistics cost, which is the tangent point to enter a virtuous circle.
At present, there is a "pseudo-community group buying" model, "fresh food is used as the flow entrance, high frequency plays low frequency, and wool is on pigs. The main business does not make money, and has no intention of ploughing. Fresh subsidies lose customers and high-margin goods make money. " This "pseudo-community group purchase" model makes money online and offline, and does not touch the two hard bones of logistics and supply chain. If the efficiency problem is not really solved, it will be unsustainable in the end, or even die of vicious competition or regulatory pressure.
Real community group buying will improve commodity circulation efficiency, reduce costs and increase efficiency through technological revolution;
(1) Starting from improving the circulation efficiency, it is consistent with the government's policy on agriculture, rural areas and farmers, digesting inventory, helping the poor and reducing the circulation cost.
(2) Empowering socialized sales force and transportation capacity through informationization, so that "new employment" can replace "old employment" and enable it to support rather than stifle it. It is the inefficient employment environment and operating efficiency that are eliminated, not the vegetable sellers. How many old jobs are eliminated should bring as many new jobs as possible.
(3) On the supply side, it is consistent with the national policy to improve efficiency and reduce costs through technological revolution and solve the problems of long production supply, low efficiency, waste of resources and insufficient information, rather than through unsustainable price wars. Remodeling the supply chain of agricultural products with science and technology, from C2B to C2M, to provide high-quality supply.
The light mode of "pseudo-community group buying" has no vitality and will not be welcomed and supported by the policy. On the contrary, it will be hit by supervision. The prospect of "heavy-mode community group buying" is also a sea of stars. It is necessary to do dirty work and hard work, truly solve the industry efficiency from the production end to the circulation end, empower the industrial chain more than imperial thinking, and connect more than monopoly is the real winner.
Flow is a double-edged sword, which can carry a boat or overturn it. If Internet companies do not have solid basic skills and strengthen logistics and supply chain links, the future will inevitably be swallowed up by huge traffic.
We don't have to worry that community group buying will replace the business of small vendors.
Two days ago, a fruit shop that had been open for five years at the entrance of the community closed. The boss is husband and wife. In the past five years, their family's life has developed slowly around this small shop. From the establishment of small families to the age of soy sauce, it is inevitable to close the door now. But instead of complaining, the proprietress breathed a sigh of relief. She said that this year can finally be a good year.
What will you do in the future? The proprietress is not confused. She said, as long as you have hands and feet and work hard, where can you not settle down?