Meituan met Pinduoduo again on the e-commerce track.

"later LatePost" learned that with the war situation of the main business takeout basically stable, Meituan to the home business group will group good goods as one of the business priorities in 2021.

There has also been a change in organization. At the end of 2020, the flash purchase business department was divided into three independent business departments: flash purchase, medicine and group good goods, all of which reported directly to Wang Puzhong, senior vice president of Meituan and president of the home business group, and upgraded their strategic position. Prior to this, the flash purchase business department was the business department where Meituan did the incubation of innovative business.

Among them, the regiment good goods business department is led by Wang Puzhong himself.

Before the community group purchase, the intersection of Meituan and Pinduoduo, the two new giants, is not obvious. Now, both Tuan good goods and Meituan optimal selection will face Pinduoduo's competition directly: Meituan has always regarded Pinduoduo as the biggest competitor, while the group good goods business has directly targeted many bids, grabbing the market in the form of low prices and group purchases.

At present, the daily order of the group is more than 100,000, the flash purchase is more than 2 million, and Meituan is preferred about 25 million pieces.

Meituan preferred to be a community group purchase business established in July 2020, which uses the "pre-sale + pick-up" mode to do fresh retail business. compared with the traditional large position and pre-position mode, community group purchase further reduces the cost of obtaining customers and fulfilling the contract. Group good goods will be launched in August 2020, unlike community group purchases, which need to build their own supply chain, group good goods do platform (B2C) business.

An Meituan analysis, in the main battlefield Meituan preferred to fight a lot of shopping at the same time, the regiment of good goods can take the initiative to attack from the side to contain part of Pinduoduo's energy.

Another Meituan personage said that the group good goods did not match the bid, and did not want to fight too much. "Let's just try. "

Meituan and Pinduoduo meet again

Group good goods to become a separate business department means Meituan further increased investment in e-commerce business.

E-commerce capacity needs to be accumulated over a long time. Pinduoduo is not Huang Zheng's first entrepreneurial project, nor is it Huang Zheng's first e-commerce entrepreneurial project. The previous experience of running the business on behalf of Pinduoduo allowed the team to accumulate an understanding of e-commerce.

The above-mentioned Meituan person said that they want to formally test the waters of B2C through group good goods, in order to accumulate the ability to better serve consumers and brands. It's not exactly a competitive idea.

Resources began to tilt towards the group of good goods. In terms of products, the group good goods have been placed at the second entrance to "e-commerce / mall" in the function bar at the bottom of the home page of Meituan App (App). In addition, Meituan also launched an independent regiment good application.

At present, the group good goods are mainly standard goods and low gross profit goods. But there are also Apple Inc, Dyson and other high-end products, covering digital appliances, clothing, food, medicine, fresh and so on. The page and App are divided into 18 categories, with a unit price ranging from 0.01yuan paper drawing to brand digital products worth nearly 10,000 yuan. The main play of group good goods is also similar to that of Pinduoduo, and there is a discount for group purchase.

Group good merchants overlap with Taobao and Pinduoduo, but some merchants only open stores on group good goods. According to a number of merchants, they have offline physical stores, and this is the first time they have opened online stores. The group good goods newcomer discount, the brand second kill discount and so on, are all undertaken by the platform. However, compared with Taobao and Pinduoduo, there are few large stores with more than 100 items.

At the front end, Pinduoduo mainly uses the way of social fission, and there are also options of "buying separately" and "initiating group purchase" on the group good goods page, but basically all ready-made groups can join the group to buy, and there is no need to invite friends. Group good goods can be purchased directly on App, without the need to open a group to join. A person close to the group of good goods believes that social fission is indeed a way to get customers at a low price at the beginning, but it is not mainstream, and it is not very new now, and it needs to be made up in other ways in the long run.

In terms of logistics, at present, the express delivery of group good goods is completed by the third-party logistics companies such as Ji Rabbit, Shun Feng and so on. A Meituan person said that the logistics and distribution team of community group buying may cooperate with the group good goods in the future.

Community group buying is the track where Pinduoduo and Meituan meet head-on for the first time. In the view of a number of Meituan personages, Pinduoduo is Meituan's preferred biggest opponent in the community group buying battlefield. Although Meituan has caught up with many indicators such as Kaesong quantity and unit quantity, Pinduoduo is flexible in organization and strong in combat effectiveness. Is an opponent that can't be ignored.

With the rise of community group buying, the boundary between e-commerce and local life will gradually blur. A community group buying entrepreneur said that the community group buying business can be extended to local life, such as asking the leader to recommend amusement projects such as water parks and local hotels, and when there is a certain amount of traffic. in the future, we will certainly compete with mainstream e-commerce platforms for the price and quality of products.

Chen Ting, senior vice president of DiDi Global Inc. and CEO of Orange Heart, once said internally that what DiDi Global Inc. does is not community group buying, but community retail, which requires enough platform categories and stable products, while the larger territory is to seize the e-commerce market.

Pinduoduo is also entering the field of local life. In March 2020, Pinduoduo announced the launch of an offline group purchase tool, "Kuaituan", which uses Mini Program to collect consumers' demand for fresh food and daily necessities online, pays online, and then provides distribution services by merchants. At present, on Pinduoduo App, you can also buy coupons for renting rooms, offline food and beverage, hotel advance tickets, scenic spot tickets, and so on.

An industry source close to Pinduoduo said that for e-commerce, community group buying is an upgrade of consumer experience and can also enhance user stickiness, but it is more difficult to attack e-commerce from community group buying. At present, the field of e-commerce is highly competitive, and for Meituan, the cost of getting customers will be very high.

The potential of Meituan as an e-commerce is that in the future, e-commerce may converge and one portal can buy products with different transportation distances and different delivery methods, according to an Internet analyst.

At present, the mode, commodity and play of the group good goods are all similar to those of Pinduoduo, but Meituan cannot surpass Pinduoduo by imitating Pinduoduo. An insider said that the group good goods project is still in its early stage and a new round of adjustment will be carried out soon. At present, the internal consensus is that we will not open the market with subsidies, but explore more from the perspective of changes in supply and user value-- how to do B2C in a new mode.

"later LatePost" learned that the group's good goods reached hundreds of thousands of orders at the peak of the Spring Festival, and the daily order volume is now more than 100, 000.

Meituan's e-commerce tries the road.

In July 2018, Meituan flash purchase launched an independent brand, and the flash purchase division was officially established in the same period. Flash purchase is regarded as the bridgehead for Meituan to try physical e-commerce. Internally, it is defined as helping offline retailers to make online business. It is the e-commerce platform of LBS (location-based service). The categories are mainly fresh and daily department stores.

Meituan tried the retail business as early as 2015, but retail is an extremely difficult part of the business. A former head of flash shopping believes that if it were not for the epidemic, fresh supermarket business is still not entirely online rigid demand. There are too many ways for ordinary people to choose.

Internally, "We didn't fully see this part of the business at that time." "there is not much resource support, and there is no offline team. "it doesn't even have independent R & D and sales, it just depends on operation. "said the above-mentioned person.

During the flash purchase, there were several responsible persons. Ma Hongbin, a former senior director of takeout, and Han Jiandu, head of the research and development platform of the Jijia business group, brought the predecessor of flash buying, the Shang Chao fresh operation team, until Wang Puzhong took over in 2018.

In the business direction, Flash Buy has also tried a direction similar to Tmall Mall, in the second half of 2017, it cooperated with Hailan House to pilot clothing categories, but users are not used to buying clothes on Meituan.

At present, Meituan has the largest volume of flash purchases and the fastest growth in this field, with a growth rate of nearly 100% to tens of billions of GMV in four years. The above Meituan to home business group management said that the flash purchase independent, in the hope that the team can make faster decisions and better growth.

When the person in charge took over the flash purchase business in 2015, there were only 20,000 or 30,000 daily orders. By talking about important merchants, doing fine operations to the head cities, doing subsidy activities, etc., by mid-2018, the average daily volume of flash purchases has risen to 700,000. In July of the same year, flash purchase became an independent brand and the flash purchase division was officially established.

Both BABA and JD.com began to explore retail in the same city in the same year. In August 2018, JD.com announced that he had covered nearly 40 major cities, with a peak daily volume of more than 1 million.

In December 2020, the daily orders of the other two retailers, JD.com, who specialize in retail in the same city, were about 500,000, while those of ele.me were about 800,000. By January 2021, the daily order volume of ele.me 's new retail sales rose to 1.4 million (excluding medicine) at its peak due to the activities and subsidies of the New year cargo Festival.

Meituan has been basically stable on the battlefield of takeout, and the importance of retail e-commerce business has been advanced, which is a favorable factor for flash purchases and group good goods business.

Instacart, an American flash purchase company, is about to go public, specializing in online fresh grocery delivery, providing same-day delivery and pick-up services. The market could value it at more than $50 billion. Founded in 2000, Instacart2012 has partnered with more than 500 retailers to cover more than 5500 cities in North America, including 85% of American households and 70% of Canadian households.

The above-mentioned Meituan said that the exploration of flash purchases has made them deeply realize that the transformation of traditional retail supply is difficult and long.

The progress of retail in the same city is still slow after many years, mainly for two reasons: one is whether the consumer demand of "30 minutes" really exists, excluding fresh, medicine and other individual categories; second, compared with traditional e-commerce, the logistics cost of real-time distribution in the same city is high, which means that each family should continue to invest in a low-profit business.