Produced by |At the forefront of entrepreneurship.
Author |Mandarin.
Edit |Lightning.
American Editor |Wu Yizhong.
Audit |Ode.
For the instant retail industry, 2023 is an extremely unquiet year: the industry is in the limelight, many players continue to increase their weight, the market is becoming more and more volatile, and the competition is becoming more and more fierce. The new trend not only includes changes in the market environment, but also reflects new trends in consumer demand.
According to the latest data released by the Ministry of Commerce at the end of September, instant retail orders will exceed 40 billion orders in 2022, and the market size will reach 5,0428.6 billion yuan, and the latter is expected to triple in 2025.
The prosperity of the domestic instant retail industry can be said to be the result of technological progress, policy support and consumer demand.
In recent years, as digital technology continues to empower the innovation of China's retail formats, retail trading activities continue to break through time and space constraints, instant retail, as one of the new retail formats, has improved the local retail capacity by opening up online and offline sales channels and shortening delivery time, becoming an important boost for the quality and expansion of the consumer market and the smooth domestic circulation.
At the policy level, at the beginning of 2023, Document No. 1 clearly proposed for the first time to "vigorously develop new models such as joint distribution and instant retail".
The change in consumer demand is more pronounced. Management consulting firm McKinsey pointed out in a research report that Chinese consumers are increasingly demanding the timeliness of shopping delivery, with 60% of post-90s and 85% of post-80s expecting online shopping to arrive on the same day. This new trend provides a foundation for instant retail compensation to meet the needs of some e-commerce retailers.
With the superposition of many benefits, it is inevitable that instant retail will usher in a big explosion in 2023.
The business model of retail has been "reshaped" - from small stores, supermarkets, supermarket chains, shopping malls, e-commerce, live streaming ......
So, what is just-in-time retail?
This term may seem lofty, but from the perspective of consumer perception, it has actually existed for a long time. For example, O2O, which was popular more than ten years ago, later developed into a branch of takeaway. After the emergence of the new retail concept, supermarkets have appeared at home. These models are essentially in the realm of just-in-time retail. It's just that among the many models, only takeaway makes big plates, and other categories are tepid.
Changes are coming in 2023, and many brands and platforms have already tasted the sweetness of instant retail.
In October this year, when Apple's new products were released, JD Daojia, Meituan, and Ele.me, three super players in the instant retail industry, all showed off their "muscles". The red, yellow, and blue camps in Apple's mobile phone stores have been talked about by the outside world so far.
By Double 11, the layout and harvest of major platforms in the instant retail market have become more obvious.
On the day of Double 11, more than ninety percent of Ele.me's cooperative brands exceeded the historical peak, and the turnover of nearly 100 brands doubled compared with last yearThe transaction volume and user scale have reached a record high, and the number of merchants participating in Double 11 has increased by 50% year-on-year.
Third- and fourth-tier consumers increased by 60% year-on-year.
JD.com renamed its instant retail service as "Hourda". According to the battle report data released by JD Daojia, more than 400,000 physical stores have settled in JD Daojia to participate in JD 1111. Among them, the platform has more than 45 million kinds of products on sale, providing consumers in more than 2,200+ counties, districts and cities with full-category hourly and fastest minute delivery services.
Meituan's flash sales continued to grow at a high rate, with a 56% increase in the number of items available for purchase during this year's 11.11 compared to last year. According to Meituan, consumers can get it in 30 minutes at the earliest after placing an order to pull weeds.
Figure: Photo.com, based on VRF protocol).
Obviously, since the beginning of this year, various players have finally seen results in the field of instant retail. This model is also attracting more offline entities to join, and more and more supermarkets, brand owners, convenience stores, etc., are expanding their service radius through instant retail.
In the view of Interface News and Entrepreneurship Frontline, the activity of the market is related to the continuous increase of the market plate. According to the "2023 Instant Retail Development Trend" jointly released by the China International Electronic Commerce Center and the Jingdong Consumption and Development Research Institute, it is expected that by 2030, the scale of China's instant retail market will increase to about 36 trillion yuan, equivalent to 6% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in the same period.
At the same time, whether it is the investment market or the giants, there is already a consensus on the market size expectation of instant retail - for this new track that can develop to the trillion level after live streaming, the future is worth investing in, and the prospects are worth looking forward to.
For a market with such huge potential, players who have already played will naturally not let the opportunity slip away. However, the specific layout of the route chosen by each company has its own emphasis, which also gives birth to a new story of different tracks.
Going back, it can be seen that JD.com is the "first person to eat crabs" in the field of instant retail. In 2012, it began to lay out real-time retail. At first, it tested the water with fresh food and became the first in the industry to start instant retail. At that time, the industry's hottest daily fresh had not yet been established. It's just that at that time, consumers did not have a general urgent demand for "online orders and 1-hour delivery".
By 2020, the concept of "everything can be delivered" has been popularized, the growth rate of online traffic has slowed down, e-commerce giants need new increments, and consumers need instant retail. In addition, instant retail has also been written into the first document for the first time.
Industry players have smelled business opportunities and begun to accelerate.
Figure Interface News Gallery).
As a player with a keen sense of smell, JD Retail has already made instant retail one of the four must-win battles in 2023, and officially released JD Instant Retail's "Three Kilometers of Happiness" model on the eve of Double 11, focusing on helping entities, stabilizing employment, and promoting consumption, and put forward a "five-year action plan".
Obviously, this is a new signal that JD.com is determined to launch a continuous offensive towards instant retail. This long-term practice has indeed paid off. 1111. With the differentiated competitive advantage of "1 hour delivery for all categories", it has achieved strong growth. According to the data, JD's hourly delivery volume increased by 45% year-on-year, and the turnover of JD Daojia's live broadcast increased by more than 10 times compared with 618. In addition, the total order volume of Dada Express delivery reached 200 million, and the fastest order delivery in JD instant retail in the country was only 9 minutes.
In October this year, the three major breakthrough directions announced by JD Daojia in 2024 and the development plan for the next three years have clearly pointed out: in the future, JD Daojia will make breakthroughs in all categories, hours and platforms for people, goods and places on the cornerstone of digitalization.
Relatively speaking, Ele.me, which is also one of the players with an earlier layout and strong comprehensive strength in the instant retail track, started from takeaway and adhered to the core route of "home", and its playing style is more refined.
Chen Weiye, COO of Ele.me, once calculated an account: "The total consumption amount of catering takeaway services + instant retail services is less than 1 trillion yuan, and the average person is 1,600 yuan." The food and daily necessities of urban residents in China add up to an average of 10,700 yuan, and even if the annual users do not grow, the instant service market still has at least 1 trillion yuan of room for growth. ”
It seems that the supermarket has become one of the important grasps of Ele.me instant retail at this stage. Taking this year's Double 11 as an example, under the trend of "everything can be delivered to your home", local merchants, offline supermarkets, and some brand merchants who previously specialized in e-commerce and hypermarket channels have begun to use Ele.me's local user traffic and rider capacity to gain new increments.
Lianhua Supermarket's attempt at this year's Double 11 is also more representative, during this year's Double 11, the overall sales of Lianhua on the Ele.me platform increased by more than 90% year-on-year.
For this layout of Ele.me, Shi Wei, a senior practitioner in the community, analyzed that merchants and brands have obtained new customers, new traffic, and high sales from local life scenes, and Ele.me can use the store layout and brand voice of merchants and brands to expand users' consumption minds and transfer the shopping needs of more categories to Ele.me.
In addition to the players running on the front line, the acceleration of the instant delivery platform is also visible to the naked eye. In the past few years, flash delivery is an instant delivery platform for emergency delivery, direct delivery, one-to-one urgent delivery, and refusal to spell orders. Nowadays, "flash delivery" has become synonymous with the instant delivery industry in the same city, and has won wide praise from users for its professional, efficient and reliable service.
Instant delivery is a key part of instant retail, and it can even be called the core "infrastructure" of the industry. As users, we increasingly value our emotional value, i.e., when an immediate need arises, the user craves a solution full of certainty. In the words of Yu Hongjian, co-founder and CEO of FlashDelivery: "FlashSend is not actually a porter from point A to point B, but to bring users a beautiful emotional value experience through the delivery of items." ”
According to a survey by PwC, 86% of customers are willing to pay a premium for a better experienceAnd 32% of customers say they stop accepting the company's products and services after experiencing a bad customer experience. In China, a whopping 87% of consumers say they are influenced by the user experience when making a purchase.
The popularity of the experience economy has made the user's demand for flash delivery also shift from the passive demand of "Jianghu emergency" to the active demand of "emotional link", and more and more people pass on emotions for their families, friends, lovers, and customers through the flash service, and express their care and love. Especially in the fields of high-end catering, cakes, flower distribution, etc., flash delivery has become the first choice of many users, with its fast and considerate service, and constantly meet the user's pursuit of a better life.
On the surface, players have their own rhythms, but in fact, the real-time retail competition in the middle of the game has entered a new stage of "fighting for internal strength".
Indeed, the final competition of instant retail is the improvement of efficiency, experience and merchandise. And in the final analysis, the internal power of the platform needs to be hard enough.
Digitalization, local chain integration and instant delivery have become the three cores of the instant retail competition.
In this regard, JD.com's approach is to focus on digitalization and local ** chain integration. In JD.com's words, only by intervening enough can the water be squeezed dry.
Figure: Photo.com, based on VRF protocol).
For example, at the digital level, JD.com's layout is representative of the entire industry.
As early as 2015, when Jingdong Daojia was launched, it was the first to connect with big supermarkets and big brands. The large number of SKUs on the other side forced JD Daojia to optimize the picking process and improve efficiency. JD Daojia's "Picking Assistant" was born at that time. Through app positioning, route planning, and product information entry, the picking time of an order can be shortened from 30 minutes to 3 minutes.
Of course, it's not enough to take care of yourself. Subsequently, a Haibo system to help retailers improve the efficiency of the whole chain was launched. It is said that after connecting to the system, merchants can solve the core pain points. If it is standard or non-standard, information entry is worry-free;Whether it is an order from Meituan, Ele.me or JD Daojia, inventory management, activity reporting, and order fulfillment operations can be completed in the Haibo system in the background of the systemFinally, sellers who connect with multiple delivery services can use intelligent scheduling to reduce delivery costs and improve the efficiency of riders.
Dada Group's financial report shows that in the fourth quarter of 2022, the "intelligent order scheduling" function of the Haibo system has given merchants a lot of surprises, such as a 75% increase in operator efficiency, a 6% increase in order timeliness, and a reduction in distribution costs by more than 3%.
Ele.me's approach to real-time retail looks more "front-end". Specifically, Ele.me focuses on "ecology" and helps brands achieve more controllable, powerful and sustainable growth by providing them with better product tools, data insights, marketing planning and other system support.
In fact, within Alibaba, the local life business has always been a highly valued sector. On November 16, at the earnings conference, Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group, planned for the local life group that "it will continue to have a chemical reaction with the 360 lines, not only in the industries that everyone is currently concerned about, such as takeaway, catering, and travel." At the same time, he also said: "It is expected that the demand for location-based technology services in the TOB industry will also grow rapidly in the future." ”
The trumpet of instant retail has been sounded, and the stories of each family have been told halfway. After the completion of the rapid development stage, the industry began to rush to a more refined and deeper field, and the real street battles of the players participating in the competition opened the curtain.
Note: The title image in the article is from the photo network and is based on the VRF protocol.