Double 11 has passed, and various e-commerce platforms are reporting on the war. As a typical representative of instant retail, Meituan's flash sale performance can give a glimpse of the direction and future of instant retail development.
There are two points worth paying attention to in the official information disclosed by Meituan Flash Sale.
According to the figures disclosed by the official, more than 800,000 offline stores participated in this year's Double 11. According to public statistics, at the end of 2021, the total number of retail stores in China exceeded 6.1 million, and the coverage rate of Meituan flash sales was already quite high.
In addition, in terms of the categories covered, Meituan flash sales have broken out of the pan-food category and attacked the strong categories of traditional e-commerce such as "clothing, food, housing and transportation". And the sales figures of the covered categories are also quite impressive, most of them are hundreds of percent growth, and the most exaggerated thing is that the sales of outdoor shoes and apparel increased by 1742% year-on-year.
Meituan has strong traffic potential and strong fulfillment and delivery capabilities, and its development is also the vane of instant retail development.
What changes and trends can we see in this data?
New opportunities brought about by changes in consumption concepts
On the consumer side, an obvious change in recent years is that it has begun to return to rational consumption.
This Double 11, there are more and more voices of rational consumption. Users have shifted from planned hoarding to on-demand shopping. This change in shopping concept will bring changes to the retail side, and this is a great opportunity for instant retail.
In the first decade of the last century, during the economic slowdown in European and American countries, rational consumption prevailed, and retail brands such as Wal-Mart and Costco rose. Behind the rise of these new retail brands is the optimization and improvement of the first chain and management efficiency.
The domestic retail industry, facing the trend of consumers shopping on demand, is the only way to improve the efficiency of the first chain and management operations.
Just-in-time retail, on the other hand, can drive the digital transformation of brick-and-mortar retailers.
Just-in-time retail is also receiving more and more attention at the ** level. In the "2022 Report on the Development of China's Online Retail Market", the Ministry of Commerce summarized instant retail and live-streaming e-commerce as new sales formats, believing that these two are one of the characteristics of the online retail market.
On the user side, there has been a big change in the mental cognition of instant retail.
Taking mobile phones as an example, according to the 2023 mobile phone instant retail industry research report released by iResearch, instant retail has become a new way for users to buy new and replace phones. According to iResearch's survey, 34% of users purchase machines through instant retail and replace them with new ones, and 21% of users try new products through instant retail, and only 14% of users choose instant retail because of sudden emergencies.
In mid-September, at the Meituan 2023 Instant Retail Industry Conference, the relevant person in charge of Meituan also said that instant retail is not emergency retail, but a high-certainty way of life. According to iResearch, this high-certainty lifestyle is indeed slowly taking shape.
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