For example, the front warehouse is on fire. Since it is a warehouse, it is related to logistics, but in the eyes of an old logistics person, it is a risky move for the front warehouse to touch fresh food; Similarly, there are several "fanatics" who open stores in the industry. Ruixing plans to open 11111 coffee shops in 2121, but Starbucks said it didn't understand. Then a group of people who do convenience stores exclaimed that they were not hitting Starbucks, but hitting us. Be careful! No one in the convenience store circle will publicly comment on the rapid opening of Suning store. The community fresh food store has not been idle. Aunt Qian has quietly entered Shanghai, while Yipin Fresh has recently entered the Beijing market in a low-key manner.

all these new changes can be said to be transitional formats in the drastic changes of retail industry. They may not be the future, or they may be the future, so opinions vary. Today, Tiger Sniffer wants to discuss a question. All these people seem to cut in from different angles. What are their similarities?

*** The same thing is that it's like a treasure hunt. All the participants have different backgrounds, different equipment and different accents, but they are aiming at the same treasure. This treasure is the community flow of China city. They cut in from different categories and different tracks, fighting for the redistribution right of community traffic, and they all want to be the entrance of community traffic in the new era.

here comes the question, who will be the final winner? The concept of this winner may not be a company, but may be all the survivors on a track. In my opinion, this war is actually a war between legions, not a war between companies. It is not a question of who can be the leader of the pre-warehouse between Ding-dong grocery shopping and daily fresh food, nor is it a question of who can win the breakfast market between Luckin Coffee and the convenience store legion.

Anyone who makes a prediction is tantamount to digging a hole and filling it himself, trying to see the future through time, which is doomed to be impossible. However, at this stage, we can still make some judgments according to the situation of the whole industry and the laws of business.

the first question, when everyone is talking about community, what is community? There is a mini shopping center just across the street from my house. There are Starbucks and Adidas under our office, and then across the street is a historic residential area in Beijing, where the Chaoyang aunt is also online celebrity. So, is Starbucks in the same community as Adidas and Chaoyang aunts across the street?

this question can be asked in another way: is the business district near the community a part of the community? Or is it just a community based on the boundary between residence and bottom business? In many cities now, the dividing line between residence and business circle is blurring. Except for some special landmark urban business districts, such as Xidan in Beijing and Nanjing West Road in Shanghai, many of them are in a mixed state. If you go to Beijing Sanlitun Bar Street, Sanlitun also has aborigines!

the significance of this point is that we need to re-examine, is the position of the retail industry still important?

traditional retail industry thinks location is important, because location is traffic. How far your position can radiate, and how many people in this range often pass by your door, which is basically your flow pool. But even in the physical retail industry, this only exists in the case of insufficient competition. Food and beverage convenience store industries have encountered door-to-door business, as well as a situation similar to a hot pot street, which means that the so-called traffic within a certain community is not exclusive to you, but enjoyed by * * *, depending on who has the ability to occupy more. Therefore, there is also a jargon in the retail industry, "three steps to death", which means that one store is only three steps away from another, or people may be crowded and you will die.

So at the beginning of new retail, we actually want to change the way of traffic distribution in the past. Boxma Xiansheng's online and offline omni-channel operation, on the surface, is to transform physical retail by means of the Internet, which actually affects the direction of traffic first. Once, Mr. Hou Yi publicly said several "no longer important" in a speech, one of which was that with the box horse, the position was no longer important.

really? At that time, when Hou Yi made this remark, several sleepy people next to the author were immediately awakened, refreshed and began to whisper.

the author's own understanding of this problem has gone through three stages: seeing a mountain as a mountain, not seeing a mountain, and looking like a mountain.

location doesn't matter. Look at Box Horse's own location. Which store dares to open in the middle of nowhere? Of course, the first store in Suzhou, where the box pony was located later, was indeed very off-center. Someone had to take three buses to see the store.

But as more and more online home-to-home platforms begin to get involved in this game, Tiger Sniffer suddenly finds that the rules of the game are quietly changing. Within the three-kilometer distribution range where Box Horse was first implanted in the minds of peers, the micro-location of different stores on the same street is really not that important. Because as long as it is within the scope of distribution, it is delivered to the door, and the differentiation is reflected in the quality, richness and service efficiency of the goods.

In fact, this kind of position is not important, which is no different from the argument that the world is flat when the Internet comes. But the problem is that the world is never flat, and the bigger the market, the more rugged it is. Back to the community scene, a new topic is highlighted within three kilometers, localization and personalization.

no matter how the word community is defined, there are two meanings that must be included. First, territoriality, and second, life.

In the past, people often said that Chongqing, this side of the street looks like Hong Kong, and when it is turned over, it is a slum. Whether this statement is accurate or not is another question, but it at least shows that even in a relatively narrow living space, people's living levels are also diverse. Due to the differences in living habits and spending power, people in the same building may lead different lives.

So, to answer this question again, is the location important? Everyone who has done retail honestly admits it's still important. Your understanding of the local community basically determines your location and commodity structure. Getting home in 31 minutes is nothing more than solving the problem of "three steps to death", but it can't solve the consumption level and structure of the whole community.

to put it bluntly, when you choose to open a store in community A instead of community B, no matter what your form, the gross profit space of the store has been decided from that moment.

only by making this clear can we continue to discuss the issue of community traffic portals.

The complexity and diversity of China market determines the diversity and variety of business players in China. From this point of view, China's retail industry is indeed a rare paradise in the world, and there has never been such a different or even contradictory model that it can appear in one market at the same time.

According to my previous theory, the appearance of Luckin Coffee is a very strange thing.

Luckin Coffee's subversion of the traditional retail industry lies not only in his way of doing business, but also in his opportunistic ability, which completely overturns the traditional retail industry's values of intensive cultivation. But on the other hand, we must admit that the way of opening a shop in Luckin Coffee is actually based on community thinking. For the understanding and cognition of urban communities, this is the basis for Ruixing to dare to open a shop quickly. However, their products are standardized and there is no community difference.

this model provides standardized goods or services for different communities, and at the same time, it can also harvest some community users. One more thing, they don't pursue the full coverage of community consumption demand, but pursue a single breakthrough, find categories with gross profit space, and try to absorb the traffic of this community. The same types include fruit chain stores, baking shops and so on. Community fresh food stores are not included in this list, and we will talk about it later. (The new tea with the rise of new retail can actually be counted in this type. However, at this stage, many new teas still drive into shopping centers and take the flow of business circles. )

The advantage of this style of play is that as long as the back-end supply chain is stable enough, the front-end can be copied quickly, not only in stores, but also in the goods themselves. Ruixing's ingenuity lies in that it chooses a category that is less difficult than fruit and cake, and uses omni-channel method to get as much online traffic as possible at the lowest opening cost.

There are similarities and differences between them. Box Horse uses the relatively high cost of opening a store in exchange for an advantageous position, so as to obtain as much entrance traffic as possible and then convert it into online traffic.

but what they have in common is that the store is really just an entrance. They use mobile Internet and standardization to maximize community traffic. And they also have the same characteristics, and the traffic they get has become a closed loop of themselves. This can be regarded as the first genre of community traffic war.

This standardization is a commodity in Ruixing; In Box Horse, it takes 31 minutes to get home. Standardize the service, and this move was later done by Ding Dong to buy food.

But the question for Ruixing is, when it chooses a highly standardized and reproducible category to cut into the community and absorb its traffic, can its repurchase habits obtained through high subsidies be transformed into other categories? The author believes that the difficulty of transformation still exists. The paradox of the Ruixing model is that when the basic traffic of a community is converted from offline to online one day, and the traffic pool returns to online, the frequency of repurchase has stabilized, and the value of offline stores has finally been simplified and symbolized. What is the significance of its existence? Will it be a waste to maintain the daily cost of its stores?

Today, in the era of mobile Internet, there are still many people who are superstitious about the winner-take-all theory in the era of PC Internet. Of course, the social field in the era of mobile Internet has won all. But does the winner-take-all exist in the weak social attribute trading scenario with goods as the link? This is debatable. We see that even in the department store industry with strong social attributes, there is no dawn of winner-take-all at present.

In this era, many people are saying that consumers are personalized, but many people don't look at this problem the other way around. In the eyes of consumers, businesses are becoming more and more personalized. No matter how merchants flaunt themselves, what can enter consumers' minds is only a part of the sticky attribute labels that match consumers' immediate needs. The miniaturization and fragmentation of mobile orders have led to the recognition of different businesses in the eyes of consumers being given many personalized labels.

the author thinks that this reverse personalization of consumers may make it difficult to reproduce the winner-take-all rule in the past in the era of mobile internet. Of course, if it is dominated by capital, it is another matter to make the supply-side businesses highly concentrated.

in the current emerging formats, the most typical example is the pre-warehouse format, which can give consideration to both standardized expansion and personalized face.

there are many reasons for the rise of pre-warehouse, and the personalized factor is definitely one of them. At the same time, the cost of pre-warehouse expansion is relatively lower than that of community fresh food stores.

however, the model of the front bin is not final yet. Moreover, it is worth careful consideration that from the discovery trend, due to the gross profit pressure brought by the main fresh food, expanding the category has become a mainstream choice in the industry. Is this a good choice?

the richer the variety of a merchant, the weaker the ability of the merchant to deeply develop the commodity power, and the less likely it is to be labeled as personalized by consumers. Some people say that Wal-Mart didn't do very well before, and many small businesses could not survive in its coverage. Please note that Wal-Mart, like the core competitiveness of large-scale e-commerce platforms in the PC era, focuses on "more" and "province" in the four words "more, faster, better and cheaper".

In the past, consumers were not without individuality, but in the past, the retail channel structure made "one-stop shopping" become the mainstream, family shopping dominated, and personalization was submerged. In the era of mobile Internet and the popularity of 31-minute home arrival, the demand and habit of one-stop procurement have been greatly weakened, and personal consumption has risen, which will make it easier to highlight the personalization of buyers in fragmented orders.

if not, what's the point of digital transformation that many retailers are keen on?

in other words, if the pre-warehouse model cannot maintain the core value recognized by consumers, but hopes to return to the road of big e-commerce platform to solve the profit problem, then why is the ultimate winner not the existing super e-commerce platform? Since it is also a comprehensive platform, isn't it easier for these super players to reduce their dimensions?

Of course, among the eaters of community traffic, there is also the figure of community group buying. The author thinks that the core competitiveness of community group buying is similar to that of the front warehouse, and it is based on the community fission of the community to do business. If they are not willing to deepen the community, make differentiation, and want to go to the so-called big e-commerce platform, the end will be the same.

Pre-warehouse, together with community group buying, can be regarded as the second genre.

At the Cainiao 2119 Global Smart Logistics Summit held in Hangzhou not long ago, Cainiao released a brand upgrade plan, and the new distribution brand "Danniao" surfaced. Due to different industries, many people in the retail industry may not notice this information.

The core of Danniao Plan is to provide various solutions for merchants and create the ultimate logistics experience of local life for consumers by integrating the national landing distribution business.

Li Wuchang, CEO of Danniao, said: "In the 1.1 stage, Danniao focused on the fields of fresh food, flowers, mother and baby, focusing on the service of Chinese parts, accumulating application scenarios and users through service contacts, and aggregating the distribution capacity model." Distributing flowers and cakes is nothing new, but pay attention to rookie and rookie post office. Also on May 28th, Wanlin, the president of Cainiao, announced that Cainiao's digitalization plan for the next three years includes building 11 million community-level sites with express delivery partner * * *.

Local life, middleware service, and millions of community-level sites are all vague descriptions, but they are also the places where novices leave their successors.

I believe that big players who focus on real-time urban distribution will have some associations when they see these plans. Before the city's instant delivery, it was a three-legged pattern (JD.COM arrived home, the US delegation, and hungry). Today, we can make up a table of mahjong. It's just the new one at the table, and there are offline outlets (the US Mission has a front position).

in addition to receiving and delivering parcels, community sites may also provide more community-derived services on the basis of basic business.

Historically, the model of community+service has always been an attractive cake. In the 1.1 era of O2O, community service attracted countless heroes. Today, this is still a fascinating battlefield. In the convenience store industry, derivative services have always been considered as a revenue source alongside commodity sales.

why do you want to do community service? Compared with Ruixing's skillful upward drainage, this is a very hard and meager track.

in my opinion, there may be two reasons.

first, in the community retail war, the so-called omni-channel is that you can't have your cake and eat it.

The word omni-channel is widely used now, and some people don't like it and use "pan-channel". There is a word difference, and there is still a difference. One of the meanings of "all" is "no difference", such as globalization, which is often followed by "integration". The pan-channel means "can be regarded as".

to put it bluntly, everyone who is omni-channel, which one of you thinks that your offline order ratio can be 51% to 51%?

this is my opinion. In the so-called omni-channel era, online and offline fish and bear's paw