Following the community O2O, the Internet transformation and upgrading of community commerce has returned under the new retail concept, and has once again become the focus of venture capital and media attention. Real estate, real estate, physical retail and internet e-commerce have increased their investment and poured in:

1. After Poly Real Estate opened Jobe Neighborhood Supermarket, another real estate giant, Country Garden, also joined the development of offline community stores array, and has opened the scale of 1,111 offline stores.

2. In recent years, property has been intensively listed. By the beginning of February 2118, there were more than 111 listed property companies (including A-shares, H-shares and New Third Board), including 8 listed companies in Hong Kong (Greentown, Hengteng Network, China Shipping Property, Colorful Life, Elegant Life, Country Garden, Xinchengyue and Kaisa).

3. Convenience stores and community fresh food stores, the two most prominent formats in physical retail, have also shown rapid growth in the last two years.

data show that the growth rate of convenience stores in 2117 reached 23% year-on-year, an increase of 2111. As the benchmark of new retail, Boxma Xiansheng has increased the speed of opening stores since 2117. It is planned that the total number of stores will reach 2,111 in the future, and the total area of "box houses" in the country will also expand accordingly.

regional community fresh head enterprises, such as Fresh Legend, Aunt Qian and Yunchu No.1 Station, have also announced their short-term opening targets and expansion plans in different places.

4. The most prominent manifestation of the influx of Internet e-commerce into the community-community group buying, which enjoys the reputation of "2 billion investment in 51 days", is spreading in full swing throughout the country.

when the pattern of online traffic centers tends to be stable, the acquisition and migration of offline traffic naturally becomes the focus of various players and capital games.

From community O2O to new retail in the community, the transformation and upgrading of community commerce+Internet has been uninterrupted from beginning to end, and countless entrepreneurs have tried and tried again and again, but they have never found a really effective breakthrough for the Internet to empower community commerce.

The reason lies in the characteristics of the community itself: decentralization, diversity of needs and strong localization.

1. Decentralization is because the community, as the basic unit of the city, is scattered in all areas of the city. Because the topography and urban planning are divided by various commercial buildings, public buildings, roads and bridges, it leads to the dispersion of traffic, logistics and outlets.

2. There are diverse needs. There are people with different occupations, ages and interests living in a residential area. Their needs are different because of their income, occupation, age and interests. When it comes to a certain demand, it seems that the commercial value is insufficient, but when combined, it shows amazing commercial potential, which is a relatively embarrassing existence-eating without meat is a pity to abandon it.

3. strong localization, different folk customs in different regions, and even different communities have different preferences, thus causing some business forms to prosper in a place, but there are no doors in b place, which really hurts people's brains.

all the above problems can be summed up as a fundamental problem: the effective order density in the unit area is insufficient.

how to break through the density bottleneck? The recent rise of community group buying seems to have touched some corners. Although it has achieved the centralized acquisition of multiple orders by community residents (increasing the order density in the unit area), it can not achieve instant experience and instant acquisition, and it is still the operation of e-commerce. It is only optimized in the channel, and the endorsement of trust relies heavily on the product control of the head (community opinion leader). Once the product is defective, personal credit will face collapse, and social e-commerce with the head as the core will encounter embarrassment.

we should not only break through the density bottleneck, but also meet the immediate and safety requirements. Therefore, this commercial entity must first be an offline physical store near the community (to solve the immediate needs and the security needs of seeing is believing), and secondly, it must be able to digest the various needs of community residents (to realize the order concentration of a single store).

what kind of business can meet these two conditions? Farmers' market, community shopping center. But this is back to the original way of commercial real estate, which is obviously not the answer that community entrepreneurs are looking for.

the popularity of mobile internet and mobile payment has made the O2O service of physical retail and virtual real estate a direction, including the earlier regional enjoyment in Nanjing (the project has stopped at present), Ai Convenience, which has just been financed recently (now it is transformed into a to B service provider), and the Jobbi supermarket launched by Poly Real Estate, all of which are exploring this road, and the actual situation is not satisfactory.

on the one hand, the cost of offline stores remains high, on the other hand, the non-standard service of cooperation is only simple traffic import, and the stores can't answer customers' inquiries and control the service quality.

however, the offline entity+online channel O2O path is still valid. What needs to be tackled is: how to achieve the double cost reduction of manpower and physical storefront?

this problem has always been a fundamental problem for the retail industry. However, Box Horse's Internet cross-border play seems to be somewhat effective, but it is not affordable for ordinary people and is not suitable for small-cost operation.

In recent years, through continuous visits and investigations, the author found that three projects are constantly approaching the answer: Tian Mama in Chongqing, Sesame Blossom in Shandong, and One Heart Life in Beijing.

Tian Mama is a "catering+"specialty store in a fourth-tier city in Wanzhou, Chongqing. Its storefront is located in a residential area, and it rents an independent building with other merchants.

Catering is its main entry point and IP creation point. Online, online celebrity Store and its founder's personal gourmet IP are created through food programs. Off-line cooking takes smokeless, steaming, healthy ingredients and imported cooking equipment as selling points, and gradually grafts the high-end needs of health care, parenting education and other communities from family banquets and parties.

Therefore, it does not rely heavily on the chef's personal skills, but is more scene-based, becoming a well-known local specialty restaurant in Wanzhou. The cost is small and the income is high. At present, the main difficulty is the proportion of non-standard services, and it is difficult to replicate on a large scale.

Shandong Sesame Blossom is an offline entity+online platform community integrated service provider. The front end absorbs local KOL (key opinion leaders, such as village elders, etc.) and other people with local resources to form a store partner, and the back end provides business incubation and training support to connect with local and even national service providers in sub-sectors.

local partners form an audit team to play the role of investors to audit and evaluate the qualifications of various service providers who have settled in the store.

The store where the line falls adopts the structure of a mini-farmer's market, with fresh food+department stores on the first floor, finance on the second floor, child care+entertainment center for the elderly on the third floor.

The storefront is transformed into idle space in local villages and towns, and the personnel are partners, so the cost is low, but it needs strong local policy and public relations trading ability.

One-minded Life in Beijing is a new community retail project hatched by e-Jiajie, an Internet housekeeping enterprise. It has a typical cross-border style, jumping out of the inherent retail thinking, developing community fresh food shops and public welfare corners through cooperation with property, forming an offline traffic center, connecting online small programs with various community services, and the clerk is composed of cleaning aunts provided by e-Jiajie, thus achieving a "double drop" in manpower and store rental costs.

This project is a successful community business+Internet project with innovative mode and suitable for low-cost operation.

Next, the author will analyze the mode and operation methods of this case in detail, and the specific ideas will be broken down into seven small questions:

1. How to reduce the store rental cost?

Usually, in order to ensure safety and not to be disturbed, residential areas are separated from the outside world by artificial fences, thus forming a world outside the wall and a world inside the wall with different scenery.

The shops outside the wall have high rents, strong specialties and great competitive pressure. Open commercial development is not allowed in the wall, but it can be used as a service point to promote people's livelihood, as long as it does not disturb the normal life of residents (at the same time, the New Deal of convenience stores in Beijing also encourages enterprises to participate in the rational development and utilization of idle space in the community).

wholeheartedly cooperate with the property, make rational use of the idle space in the building, develop convenience service points, and provide convenience services such as fresh fruits and vegetables, drinks and food, household daily necessities, public fitness, book corner, tool room, etc., which facilitates residents' daily life, facilitates residents' access to emergency supplies at any time, and at the same time, the rent of the storefront itself is much lower than that outside the wall.

Take the "Sunshine 111" community store as an example. The convenience stores in the building, which are located at the left and right of the building gate, each store is only 15 square meters, with one on the left and one on the right, respectively supplying fresh fruits and vegetables and daily standardized fast-moving consumer goods. Hundreds of SKUs meet 71% of the daily needs of residents in the community, which has obviously blocked the shops and markets outside the wall.

2. How to reduce labor costs?

convenience stores need clerks to tally goods and register, and labor costs are essential. The advantage of single-minded life is that the mother is e-Jiajie, which fully divides and redistributes the cleaning aunt's time, taking into account the cleaning service at the C-end, the merchant service around the B-end and the store operation of the convenience store, and brings the human effect to the extreme.

if we don't think it's clear enough, let's still take the "Sunshine 111" community store as an example. The left and right spaces of this store need to have 4 shop assistants (rotating mobile cleaning staff) and 1 professional store managers, and each shop assistant has several jobs (household cleaning at C-end, short-distance delivery of fresh food at B-end, and store management at convenience stores). The operating time of the store is allocated according to the free time of the cleaning staff. We use a simulated shift schedule to show the staggered distribution of store operating hours and clerk working hours:

As can be seen from the above figure, in leisure time, the maximum configuration of the store can reach 4 clerks, and in the peak period of domestic service, the configuration of the store is reduced to 2 clerks, and the maximum configuration period is at the peak of users' commuting, and the time is guaranteed to always have clerks on duty during the store operating hours.

This not only ensures the time control of domestic service, but also does not hinder the normal business of the store. More importantly, domestic workers have plenty of time, which fundamentally eliminates the problem of domestic workers jumping orders.

Taking the spare time of domestic workers into account in convenience stores can greatly reduce the employment cost of convenience stores.

3. How to reduce the cost of fresh food loss?

Fresh food is a sharp tool for convenience store drainage, but it also faces the problem of loss because of its short shelf life, especially leafy fresh agricultural products.

Generally, convenience stores adopt different storage, different packaging, different estimation, different marketing and other control measures for fresh fruits and vegetables to adjust the cost pressure caused by the loss of fresh products on store operations.

For example, in Beijing Xinfadi Fresh Supermarket, a special water mist spraying device is used for leafy vegetables (spraying for more than 11 hours) to prolong the fresh-keeping time of leafy vegetables. However, such a device itself is a high-cost investment, which is basically a negative asset if it is allocated to the revenue of leafy vegetables.

Ms. Qian in Guangzhou sells at a discount in different periods to solve the daily loss of fresh products.

Similarly, the introduction of fresh food into life will inevitably face the problem of loss. As mentioned above, the business structure of single-minded life is to B+to C. In addition to enterprise cleaning and hourly work, the B-end business also provides daily delivery services for fresh agricultural products for surrounding catering merchants.

fresh products with unattractive appearance will be transported to the surrounding catering merchants to digest the inventory and reduce the loss.

4. how to control the terminal logistics cost?

since it involves the distribution business of neighboring merchants, it is bound to increase the distribution cost. On the scale of fresh chain stores will basically have their own logistics team, commodity retail is its main business.

The single-minded retail of goods mainly undertakes the function of diverting users and increasing stickiness, so it is inevitable that the cost related to goods should not be too high.

so how can we keep this cost down and meet the needs of commodity distribution of neighboring merchants at the same time?

As mentioned above, the mother who lives wholeheartedly is e-Jiajie, which has abundant labor resources. The key to the scheduling of transportation capacity lies in the allocation of time periods, that is, the main business of domestic workers-cleaning service, which co-ordinates and integrates the spare time of domestic workers without being affected.

generally speaking, the time periods of enterprise cleaning and home cleaning are staggered: the enterprise cleaning time is mostly completed before the morning shift (usually 9: 11 a.m.), and the home cleaning time period is usually after the family members go to work (after 9: 11 a.m.), so the staggered peak time period can completely realize the time scheduling of domestic workers.

If there are some domestic workers who are not satisfied with their time, they can be fully tapped to participate in the short-distance delivery service of local merchants, which not only improves the efficiency of time use, but also fills the vacancy of short-distance delivery capacity, and at the same time, the domestic workers themselves increase their extra income, and many parties win.

5. how to build an offline traffic center?

The goods and services that accumulate traffic are mainly concentrated in fresh food and catering. As far as retail is concerned, typical representatives are farmers' markets and convenience stores.

The fresh area (fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk, meat and poultry) is the most drainage area in farmers' markets, and the food and beverage (bento, cooked food, packaged food, drinks, etc.) is the most drainage product structure in convenience stores.

The selection of convenience stores in Yixin Life Building will miniaturize the farmer's market and combine with the fast-moving products of convenience stores, mainly focusing on fruits, vegetables, packaged food, drinking water, fresh milk and other high-frequency daily necessities, which basically meet most of the daily needs of users. This became the first wave of drainage goods.

Secondly, the residents' public welfare corner (public welfare fitness equipment rental, magazine and periodical lending, household tools rental) will be established, where residents can get related equipment, books and tools for free, and these areas will become the second wave of traffic concentration.

these traffic pools are developed in different ways, such as public fitness equipment, and placed in offline convenience stores to enhance users' impression of offline convenience stores and enhance users' stickiness.

The book corner and the intelligent express cabinet are placed in one place, and the flow of both sides is complementary, which can be developed into an advertising display area; In addition to the display tools, there are also green plants and flowers in the tool room, which has become an important place for traffic development and conversion transactions of green plants users.

6. How to cross the retail management fence?

how does a domestic enterprise manage physical retail well? This is like a box horse. How can a retail e-commerce operator manage a good restaurant? And this is the terrible thing about cross-border: the pillar you live on is just a tool for others to open the market.

The value of a convenience store in a single-minded life building is the offline flow center. Through the convenience store+public welfare corner, the frequency of users' contact with household cleaning, nursing, flowers, green plants, etc. is increased, the psychological distance and physical distance are improved-the grapes delivered to their mouths are not considered a troublesome thing to eat-and the consumption threshold is lowered.

Moreover, although the convenience store opened in the community is not as professional as the convenience store outside the wall, it is similar to that in the community.