Most early e-commerce providers in Guangzhou closed down

In early June of this year, Amazon China launched the "fresh port" of the seafood channel. In July, Jingdong, COFCO and ICN will also launch live channels. In the previous March, No. 1 Store has announced that its No. 1 orchard has officially entered the fresh field, and in October 2011, the Taobao Fresh Channel went online. It can be seen that the fresh food market tends to be homogenized in all types of commodities today. It has once again become an e-commerce competition. The industry speculated that the biggest challenge should be the cold chain logistics system. However, a survey by the reporter found that most of the early fresh e-commerce companies in Guangzhou had already closed down, but the reason for the collapse was far more than this one.

Most of the first batch of fresh e-commerce providers in Guangzhou failed. In fact, fresh e-commerce providers are not a new topic in Guangzhou. As early as in 2009, when Dongchuan New Market was used to debug water “online food baskets,” this topic has been discussed by countless people. Over. Afterwards, a large number of followers tested the fresh electricity supplier, but mainly concentrated on sales of fruits and vegetables. At that time, Guangzhou's fresh e-commerce website had three main forms. One was led by the government, one was a private enterprise that had its roots in the administrative sub-district, and the other was the value-added development of organic meat suppliers who took the high-end route. service.

However, by the end of 2011, due to various reasons such as supply chain, logistics, management, distribution, etc., the websites of the “good helper” and “Yiwanjia” that had been booming had been closed down one after another. “Online food basket” was one of the few “survivors” at the time. "But the daily orders have shrunk from more than 20 to 89.

At the end of 2012, a few months before the launch of the “Xiaoxian e Station” with government background, the “Online Food Basket” announced the suspension of the distribution service. Now this webpage cannot be opened. "Xiao Xian e station" is still operating normally, but fresh products are not the mainstay, and more are mainly daily life products. Some insiders speculated: "It (the "Xiaoxian e-station") can continue to maintain because of government support, because you simply can not see its daily orders."

The reasons for bankruptcy were mostly among the first batch of fresh e-commerce providers. As the first online e-commerce platform for selling vegetables in Guangzhou, "online food baskets" is naturally a typical case.

Wu Zhongqi, former director of Dongchuan New Market Marketing Department, and Jiang Yubo, general manager of Cobwebs, are the founders of the “Online Food Basket”. They analyzed the reasons for the failure during the interview. Three of them are particularly important: First, there is not enough delivery staff. , resulting in distribution costs even with the same price of dishes. However, in the past, with the backward mode of physical store employees acting as couriers, there were long-term solutions. Second, profitability was more difficult. Wu Zhongqi once calculated that “the annual earnings amount is less than 1 million and basically all have to be a loss”; the third is the purchase of the public. The habits have not yet been cultivated and matured. It is always unacceptable for the freshness of “invisible”. In addition, the freshness of fresh products is often unsatisfactory to consumers. "The same is food, fresh and no more than nuts or biscuits, it has a different shelf life specifications, most of the time can not achieve a high degree of unity in quality," a consumer who once tried to buy online fresh products told reporters that he still Would rather take a few more steps. This is also a headache for the new players.

The presence of fresh e-commerce in the market requires a strong capital. Wu Zhongqi once said that the original intention of the online food market was to create the supporting services for the physical market, not for the purpose of making profits. "Only, anyone who loses money will not do business." However, for online e-commerce, it may be "even if the business loses money to do."

Fresh produce is a necessity for people. It has a strong consumer stickiness. As the category with the highest repeat purchase rate and activity level, fresh produce is not only a profit, but also a continuous consumption, attention and stable popularity. This kind of consumer stickiness is a golden key for businesses to attract customers and increase the unit price of customers. It is a magic weapon for online and offline supermarkets to really begin to be evenly matched.

From the perspective of e-commerce competition, various categories of e-commerce have gradually become saturated. The decline in the growth rate of apparel and 3C has placed the fresh market in a huge demand market, but its online sales model is still in the initial stages of exploration and development.

Just to be a "lossy" business, no strong capital is no doubt a moth. This is not surprising why most of the e-commerce vendors who started entering the fresh field from last year are "Big Boss" (big players).

Among them are JD.com, Amazon.com, Taobao, and No.1 stores, which are large-scale online shopping platforms for finding new profit growth points. This point, Yu Gang, chairman of the online supermarket No. 1 shop, said clearly in an interview. The online supermarket, if it is not fresh, is certainly incomplete.” There are SF Express, a logistics company that claims to have a full cold chain model and tries to transform into an e-commerce field with strong warehousing; and in order to retain the original consumer Regarding fresh delivery as the last traditional retailer to save straw, such as Wal-Mart and Metro. Vertical electricity suppliers, such as fresh vegetables, which focus on fresh food, are easily overlooked.

Why does the fresh electricity supplier of the curtain call "get favored"?

This is a general trend for industry analysts. If it is said that shopping on the Internet is something new, then it is no longer "fresh" today.

Although people’s consumption patterns are changing, there are still two ways to keep fresh: one is to take the high-end category of the organic route, and the other is to take the easy-route parity category. Convenient parity classes are not considered realistic. However, in the high-end areas, there are habits of the online shopping army, there is enough room for profit, online replacement of the line is promising. With Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Tesco and many other entities faced with huge pressure of rents rising several times, withdrawing from prime locations in cities and reducing the number of stores has become a predictable future for large-scale supermarkets, and order-based business models can be reduced as much as possible. Loss, the convenience and attractiveness of online fresh sales platform will gradually increase.

In 2011, Tian Xian vegetables, known as the “Rich People Food Basket”, belonged to the promising group. However, according to insiders, they are currently facing difficulties. “There are high level leaders who have left and people are paralyzed.” He thinks that doing high-end atmosphere online The concept of selling vegetables is a success. Every business node is also very popular. However, vegetables are not moon cakes and dumplings. They can't just wait for the festival to “get riches.” “If Guangzhou Restaurant Lights do moon cakes, it will already collapse.” Another The important reason is that everyone is talking about the cold chain logistics system. According to insiders, “How fresh and fresh fruit and vegetables are preserved and transported is also a cause of their difficulties.” However, the reporter saw on his website that the operation is still normal and he opened a store on Taobao.

The industry generally believes that the cold chain home delivery market has great potential. However, it is an urgent issue to solve the problem of who has to pay for high-cost cold chain delivery and how to find a better model to guarantee fresh “last mile”. In the future, with the improvement of people's living standards and quality requirements, the establishment of a complete set of delivery system will greatly reduce the circulation time of fresh delivery services.