Text|Tan Zhiwang.
In fact, from the perspective of retail skills, there is no real obstacle for traditional retail practitioners, but the difficulty is concept and thinking.
Since 2021, Lao Tan has participated in the creation and investment of discount retail enterprises, including community discount stores, big-name discount stores, snack discount stores and other formats, and has successively participated in the investment of more than 10 discount retail chain enterprises of various types.
At that time, the judgment was still very correct, China's discount retail has achieved rapid development, standing in a longer period of time, China's discount retail is a huge track with long slopes and thick snow, and there are many entrepreneurial and investment opportunities, everything today is just beginning, the curtain has just opened.
Looking back on the past 10 years, China's offline retail industry is actually quite embarrassing. Why? Because the world's representative countries have given birth to batches of offline retail giants, but China's offline retail market seems to have fallen under the spell, and none of the offline retail chain sales exceeded 100 billion yuan, and batch after batch after growth and then declined or even fell.
The curse is e-commerce. In the past one or two decades, China's Internet era has given birth to traditional e-commerce platforms such as **, Tmall, and JD.com, and in the mobile Internet era, a new generation of e-commerce platforms such as Pinduoduo, Douyin, and Kuaishou have been born.
But in fact, after 2021, China's e-commerce has actually entered an obvious bottleneck, the penetration rate of e-commerce is already very high, the Internet dividend is gradually exhausted, the traffic cost is getting higher and higher, and the room for improvement in logistics and distribution costs is getting smaller and smaller. China's retail industry has gradually entered a new stage, offline retail and online retail have begun to enter a stage of rebalancing, with the continuous improvement of offline retail operational efficiency, offline retail in food, beverage, fresh food, frozen products and other categories of operational efficiency advantages are still very obvious. From the perspective of the overall market structure, e-commerce is unlikely to account for a large proportion of the entire retail market, and offline retail must still dominate in the long run.
And what will the dominant offline retail look like? Obviously, it will not be the traditional supermarket model, and our conclusion and judgment is that the dominant form of offline retail in the future is discount retail. Since 2021, China has ushered in a wave of discount retail entrepreneurship, and both the new generation of retail entrepreneurs and the older generation of discount retail entrepreneurs have set their sights on the discount retail format, which has become the consensus of the industry.
What is the essence of discount retailing? In fact, it is to return to the essence of retail, retailers should stand in the customer's perspective, help customers spend less money to buy more and better goods, and change from the seller's mindset to the buyer's mindset.
But how do you achieve this? Drawing on the many successful discount retailers overseas, we can see some effective principles and methods.
First of all, less is more. Every retailer can only meet a subset of their customers to meet a portion of their needs. E-commerce platforms are the ones that meet the needs of most people, and offline retailers obviously need to focus on some of the needs of their target customer base. This requires offline retailers to be accurate in positioning, and at the same time, the structure and selection of products must be highly matched to the target customer group, such as streamlining products, but each single product must have strong competitiveness, and uncompetitive products should not be put on the shelves, because it really doesn't make much sense. Fewer single products, better single products, lower **, better meet customer needs.
Secondly, extreme efficiency. Starting from upstream raw materials, to product manufacturing, post-factory logistics and distribution, to all aspects of the store, retailers must force every link in the upstream to improve efficiency and reduce costs as much as possible. For retailers, there are actually countless problems that need to be solved and improved, such as how many single products are managed efficiently enough, how to consider the specifications of each single product, how to design the shelves, how to design the pallets for placing goods, how to plan the display and circulation lines, how to make the store's commodity management efficiency as high as possible, how to improve the speed of cashier, and how to reduce the manual use of the store. These are the details of efficiency one after another.
Finally, diligence and restraint. Don't be greedy to charge all kinds of fees for merchants, don't squeeze the account period of merchants, and don't return goods at will, every penny that retailers want to earn should be a reward for helping customers save money, rather than using the position of the channel to earn easy money. Retailers should restrain their desires and return to the path of small profits and quick turnover, only by helping customers save money, they can make money, and this thing can last for a long time.
In fact, from the perspective of retail skills, there is no real obstacle for traditional retail practitioners, but the difficulty is concept and thinking. The relationship between discount retailers and customers, and the relationship with ** merchants, are different from the past. To paraphrase: all retail formats deserve to be redone in the form of discounts. (Author: Tan Zhiwang, consumer investor).