When an “old thing” begins to decline, it also means a “new thing” emerges, and now new retail is that “new thing”. However, in terms of “e-commerce disrupts traditional physical retail” and “new retail is about to replace e-commerce”, we understand a truth more clearly: First, the era is not immutable; Second, new things appear more quickly than you think.
The term “new retail” was first coined in October 2016, which is technically not that long ago. Because it conforms to the law of social development and the frequent pain points of e-commerce, the emergence of new retail has attracted great attention. In 2017, new retail has been very good development, attracting a lot of capital to start crazy layout of new retail, including Ali, JINGdong, Suning, Gome, Tencent and other e-commerce giants, but also the emergence of wheat convenience store, Guomeimei, seven Koala and other innovative enterprises, the opening of the new retail era is just around the corner.
The new retail market into the new mainstream, wheat commune also actively from the campus express service to the convenience store
Since the concept of new retail was put forward in 2016, new retail has started to become active in the commercial world. Some e-commerce companies have made arrangements for new retail, and some traditional enterprises have made arrangements for new retail. Of course, some innovative enterprises also intend to enter the new retail market before the advent of new retail. Since 2016, the smart convenience store, a new business model, has become popular in the market, becoming the hot property for capital competition.
For example, Myeongchang is an intelligent convenience store that combines unmanned convenience stores and “human touch”. Myeongchang was founded in 2013 as a campus delivery service, but only entered the convenience store market in 2015. During this period, Wheat Commune focused on the connection between campus logistics and e-commerce to promote the realization of the “last mile” as soon as possible. With the advent of new retail, the Wheat Commune began to lay out new retail areas. Since last year, The wheat convenience store has expanded its service scope to all communities in the society, with full efforts to lay out new retail markets and launch the smart convenience store model.
On the one hand, when the new retail outlet came, the Wheat Corporation, which only provided campus express service, faced with the emergence of more and more convenience stores, and the campus market alone could not meet the needs of the wheat Corporation, so in 2015, the Wheat Corporation began to transform into a wheat convenience store. It was not until April last year that Myeongconvenience Store launched its first You+ community smart convenience store, Myeongbo. The Wheat Convenience store is taking its first step on the road to new retail.
Secondly, China’s convenience store market scale is large. According to the forecast of China Convenience Store Industry Sales from 2018 to 2022 by CIC Consultant, China’s convenience store sales in 2016 reached 133.4 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth of 13%. It is expected that from 2018 to 2022, the compound annual growth rate will reach about 11.66%, and in 2018, the sales of convenience stores in China will rise to 164.3 billion yuan, and in 2022, it will rise to 255.4 billion yuan. These data show that there is a huge space for the development of convenience stores in the Chinese market, especially in the new era of retail, intelligent convenience stores will become a new market opening. In this context, the layout of smart convenience stores by the Wheat Corporation is in line with the development of The Times.
On August 10 last year, the wheat corporation and Face++ formally signed a cooperation agreement, which plays an important role in promoting the intelligent development of wheat convenience stores to some extent. On The 23rd, Wheat Convenience Store received the first round of financing of 125 million yuan led by Hongtai Fund and Morning Hill Capital. In September of the same year, Wheat Convenience Store again announced that it had received A pre-A + round of financing from Junzi Capital. In just two months, The convenience store wheat obtained nearly 300 million yuan of financing, providing sufficient operating capital for the convenience store Wheat. In this case, the wheat convenience store in the new retail field is a foothold.
Since April last year, Myeonggi convenience store has launched versions 1.0 to 4.0. Wheat smart convenience stores are gradually strengthening their layout in the new retail field. However, due to various problems, the development of wheat convenience stores has not been smooth sailing.
The sun always comes after the storm, the wheat convenience store must go through some ups and downs before seeing the sun
At the beginning of something new, there is always a rush of copycats in the market. And the capital will rush in quickly before the tuyere comes, intent to be the first to seize the market, have more consumers, get more market advantages, new retail is the same. Wheat Convenience stores have achieved good results in the new retail industry by virtue of “rapid deployment” and “smart shopping”. But that doesn’t mean the Wheat convenience store can rest easy.
First, it is small in scale and difficult to make profits: it only takes 4 hours to set up a wheat convenience store and covers an area of 20 square meters, which reduces operating costs to a certain extent. But at the same time to the “shop surface” set restrictions, resulting in the profit of wheat convenience store in a small scale of revenue, narrow range of users in the circle. Both in terms of product categories and SKU, the wheat store is not as good as the traditional convenience stores, and the service scope is relatively simple. 7-Eleven, for example, already has 2,800 categories, compared with Wheat’s 600. Many consumers said that unmanned convenience stores have few categories, and they would choose to go to traditional supermarkets unless they are in urgent need.
Two, strong enemies: now is the new retail boom, the crazy influx of capital to wheat convenience store brought a lot of strong rivals. Strong enemy 1, there are giant products such as Alibaba’s Hema Xiansheng, JINGdong Million convenience store, Suning Store, these industry giants do not have to worry about capital, technology and user data and other issues; In addition to these giants, the Wheat Convenience store also faces the influx of innovative enterprises such as the fruit box and seven koalas. The rise of unmanned shelves has also brought a sense of crisis to unmanned convenience stores.
Third, technology is difficult: Jack Ma, the founder of new retail, once said: “There is no business without technology.” For intelligent convenience stores, the most important thing is the problem of technology, it is not too much to say that technology is the key to support the survival of intelligent convenience stores. And now, wheat convenience store in anti theft, settlement and other technical aspects are not quite perfect. Even “Little FAN AI”, which has developed a large scale of bingo Box and launched an efficient collection of data, can’t guarantee 100% accuracy. As an innovative enterprise, wheat convenience store needs to constantly improve itself in technology.
In addition, wheat convenience store in the landing of certain difficulties. Different from other unmanned convenience stores, wheat store is a kind of convenience store that can be “moved and assembled at any time” in a short time, which makes it have no fixed users and there is not much stickiness between consumers and convenience stores. Therefore, wheat convenience stores have many shortcomings.
Nowadays, the layout of the new retail has gradually stepped forward from the exploration stage to the mature stage. At the advent of the comprehensive new retail era, wheat convenience stores want to take root and grow in the new retail field, but also need some baptism.
Refuse to be eliminated, wheat convenience store how to break the jam?
Today, the development of new retail has received a lot of capital support, and its market size is growing. However, with the increasing popularity of new retail, more and more people enter the game, wheat convenience store how to stand out in such a fierce new retail market, still need to plan well.
First of all, for unmanned convenience stores, enterprise scale is difficult to expand, small profit is one of the most important problems. Therefore, wheat convenience stores can build an industrial ecosystem, through narrowing the gap between stores, get through the convenience store product “real-time communication” distribution, in order to increase the product category.
Secondly, strengthen community service and establish a more perfect online and offline service system. Nowadays, unmanned convenience stores have too many brands, and unmanned shelves, unmanned supermarkets and other emerging and more popular circumstances, unmanned convenience stores can only win by “wisdom”. This “wisdom” does not mean intelligence alone, but refers to the layout of unmanned convenience stores enterprises should grasp the relationship between “people and technology”, “consumption and scene”, “people and scene”, and put consumer experience first.
Finally, build diversified vertical high-end brands and advocate “new” changes. For wheat convenience stores, how to successfully break out of the siege and stand firm in the new retail market is the key. What new retail emphasizes is nothing more than “new”. In addition to technological innovation, the most important thing is how to reflect the “new” in the consumption scene. Diversified consumption scenarios can attract consumers’ attention. With the development of The Times, the time for people to go shopping in the future may gradually shorten, and in the era of high-tech, consumers pay more and more attention to the consumption scene. Therefore, when wheat convenience stores innovate and develop high-tech, they should attach importance to the interaction between people in the consumption scene, and create a new retail scene of thousands of stores in the community.
In addition, in view of the shortcomings of unmanned convenience store technology, enterprises can cooperate with intelligent technology companies to achieve the purpose of operation, and start to layout intelligent technology in this field. After all, for innovative unmanned convenience store enterprises, in order to develop in the long term, the “hard requirements” of intelligent technology are essential.
Now, in the market, unmanned convenience store market is not as fierce as 2016 and 2017, followed by a boom of unmanned shelves, unmanned supermarkets, etc. Under this circumstance, the development of wheat convenience store is still difficult to guarantee. However, as a whole, the unmanned convenience store market has yet to be polished. As long as the wheat convenience store solves the problems of small profit scale and insufficient technology, it is not difficult to occupy a place in the new retail market.
Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110