Author丨Chase lifeEditor丨Fruitful封面來源丨Unsplash

Once upon a time, community group buying, as an emerging retail model, aimed at the new opportunity of combining neighborhood social networking and fresh e-commerce, and became a hot spot for major capitals to chase, comparable to the "Hundred Group War" of the year.

However, the trend of community group buying did not last long. Since the beginning of 2020, a number of community group buying start-ups have been shut down one after another, leaving only Pinduoduo, Meituan, Ali and other large factories are still persistent, but the investment is not as strong as before.

Recently, Alibaba's Taobao Grocery has also officially announced its withdrawal from the community group buying track, and instead focused on the express e-commerce model of "direct delivery to home". So far, only Meituan Optimal and Pinduoduo's Duoduo have been left in the community group buying market to confront each other.

Large factories tried to use capital and technology to reshape the fresh consumption chain, but in the end they collectively regretted leaving.

1

The "pathfinder" of the sinking market

In 300, the community group buying business ushered in a peak, and at that time there were more than 0 community group buying platforms across the country, on the one hand, there were big factories such as Ali and Pinduoduo; On the other side, there are start-up companies represented by Xingsheng Preferential and Shihuituan.

According to IT orange data, at that time, well-known institutions such as Zhen Fund and Gaorong Capital chose to bet heavily, and in 5 years, the amount of community group purchase financing reached 0 billion yuan, and the average amount of investment received by each company was close to 00 million yuan.

Alibaba, Pinduoduo and other large factories have also laid out the community group buying market since 2020, and started the "city grabbing war".

At that time, Dai Shan was in charge of Alibaba's B2C retail business group, and once said"There is no cap on the amount of investment in community group buying"；劉強東也表示要拿出2000萬元獎勵搶佔任意一個地區市場份額第一的團隊，可以看出，巨額補貼成為了大廠“搶市場”的重要手段。

Although the financial strength of the big factories is abundant, is the community group buying market really worth such a cost-free investment? The capital outlet is only one of the reasons, and the key is to occupy the sinking market and the defense of the new retail market.

以阿裡為例，其早從2016年就開始探索線下市場，包括在2017年收購了銀泰百貨。大廠們“俯身向下”，除了因為線下市場擁有巨大的消費潛力和增長空間之外，還希望通過新零售將線上線下市場整合起來，進一步拓寬消費場景和生態價值。

Among them, the desire of large manufacturers for sinking traffic is more urgent, because the user scale of the sinking market accounts for more than 50% of the entire mobile Internet market. However, sinking users have unique consumption habits, are more sensitive to price, rely on acquaintances for socialization, and have more conservative consumption concepts, so it is often more difficult to penetrate.

To this end, social group buying has become an important weapon for large manufacturers to enter the sinking market. Although Pinduoduo's "Duoduo Buy" is named "Grocery Shopping", the core is based on the group business of physical store pickup; Meituan Optimal hopes to further penetrate the sinking market below the fourth tier with the help of fresh food and groceries.

However, no matter what the purpose, the community group buying business is inseparable from the "community scene", and this is the key to the downward penetration of large factories.

The community group purchase pick-up point is often the closest place to the user, coupled with the private domain operation of the group leader, which can transform the traditional e-commerce model of "people looking for goods" into "goods looking for people", and further capture the minds of consumers, dig out more consumer demand from the fulfillment end to the supply chain end, and empower other businesses in the ecosystem of large factories.

As large factories "burn money" to enter the game, the "bubble" of the community group buying market has gradually been punctured. Since the beginning of 2020, platforms such as Meijia Food, Food Enjoyment, and Didi's Orange Heart Preferred have gradually withdrawn from the market.

Although most of the entrepreneurs have withdrawn, the competition in the community group buying market is still fierce, and the high investment has not brought the expected rapid growth and stable profit model.

In the 2022 annual earnings conference, Meituan Wang Xing said frankly: "The market is more difficult than our previous expectations", Meituan has gradually reduced the subsidy for community group buying business from 0; Jingxi Pinpin carried out large-scale layoffs in 0 years and withdrew most cities at the same time.

The closure of Taobao shopping is also a foreshadowing, as early as 2023 years, Ali has integrated and upgraded the next day's self-pickup business Taocai and the hourly home business Taoxianda to Taobao to buy food, after all, from the perspective of its own genes, e-commerce and terminal distribution are Ali's biggest advantages.

2

The "Cabbage War" That Can't Be Saved

Community group buying was once regarded as a revolutionary model to get through the "last mile", but in essence, it is also a game around "low price, human efficiency, and quality".

First of all, the core competitiveness of community group buying lies in the "extremely low price". Consumers sacrifice immediacy and choose to pick up the next day, which is essentially to exchange time for price.

However, although community group buying has less immediate distribution costs, there are also costs such as sorting and fulfillment, group leader commissions, warehousing and distribution, etc., and in order to achieve "extremely low prices", large factories will inevitably have to "burn money" subsidies.

2024-0 years,美團新業務全年虧損額分別為384億元、284億元、202億元、73億元。京東在收縮京喜之前，2021年京東產發、京喜、海外業務等新業務的營業虧損達到了106億元，虧損率達40%。

Therefore, the "extremely low price" cannot be achieved only by subsidies, but needs to reduce the cost of the whole link from the origin to the performance, for example, Pinduoduo has achieved positive gross profit in most regions of the country by virtue of the gene of direct connection of agricultural products.

However, for Alibaba, although it has the Taobao traffic entrance, it lacks the accumulation of Pinduoduo's agricultural supply chain and Meituan's localized operation capabilities, and it will be difficult to meet consumers' insistence on low prices without subsidies.

In addition, it is not as advantageous as Pinduoduo and Meituan in terms of supply chain and fulfillment services, and once the GMV growth of community group buying is slow, it will also affect the bargaining power of the upstream supply chain, and it will be more disadvantaged in pricing, falling into a negative cycle.

Secondly, another lifeline of community group buying lies in the operation of the group leader, who is not only the traffic entrance, but also the fulfillment node.

However, in recent years, with the gradual shrinkage of the community group buying platform, the commission of the head of the group has also shrunk, from the initial 30% to about 0%, and some head of the group said that "earning 0 yuan a day is not enough for food".

After the income of the group leader is reduced, it will also affect the quality of service, such as neglecting to maintain the community, reducing the response rate, etc., and in the long run, it will affect the purchase enthusiasm of consumers.

To this end, Meituan prefers to transform the head of the group into a stable service node through the "mom-and-pop shop + full-time BD" model; Pinduoduo weakens the role of the head of the group with the strategy of "low price + explosive products", focusing on direct repurchase by users.

Finally, it is difficult to achieve both low prices and word of mouth. Community group buying is mainly based on fresh products, which naturally have the characteristics of high loss and non-standardization, and will not have too high premiums, and to meet the low price demands on this basis, the quality of goods is often difficult to guarantee, resulting in a lower and lower user retention rate.

In recent years, Meituan has also been actively expanding its digital daily necessities and other categories, hoping to achieve profitability by further enriching its product categories and greatly increasing its profit margins and repurchase rate. Taobao has adopted a differentiated strategy, prioritizing product quality and strengthening localized supply.

However, on the whole, compared with the active transformation of other competitors, Taobao's transformation is not active enough, and there are signs of being gradually marginalized by Alibaba, and its market share will inevitably gradually lose.

In the business of community group buying, what is needed is not only the "algorithm gene" of large manufacturers, but also the three major factors of low price and high quality, supply chain efficiency and community stickiness. In order to ensure that every link does not fall off the chain, in addition to the "money ability" of large factories, the business gene also determines the ownership of the track.

3

Big changes in retail

Therefore, whether community group buying is a good business or not, for Ali, who has decided to leave, the answer seems to be very clear, but this does not mean that Ali will fully withdraw from the community retail business.

At present, Ali still retains the relevant entrance, and users can directly jump to the express delivery mode of direct delivery from the origin, and leave the commercial value of its remaining traffic on Taobao as much as possible. JD.com also restarted Jingxi at the end of 2023, and announced at the end of last year that it would be upgraded to "Jingxi self-operated", which became part of JD.com's industrial belt business layout.

Ali and JD.com, which are better at traditional e-commerce models, are trying to avoid the operational burden of community group buying with the B2C model.

It can be said that the contraction of community group buying business by large factories is not an admission of defeat, but a return to commercial rationality. Only by abandoning inefficient battlefields can we focus on high-value tracks.

When the community group buying war was hot in 2020 years, the People's Daily issued a reminder,Internet giants should have more responsibilities and pursuits in scientific and technological innovation, rather than just worrying about the traffic of a few bundles of cabbage and a few catties of fruit.

Looking back now, the "gold content" of this passage is still improving. With the peak of Internet traffic, it is difficult to meet the development needs of enterprises through simple traffic involution, and large manufacturers must not only pursue scale expansion, but also achieve ecological synergy.

Therefore, in recent years, large manufacturers are shifting the main story line to "digital empowerment", trying to reconstruct the retail value chain with technology. Because in the new cycle, consumer demand has shifted from simple price sensitivity to diversification, quality and personalization, which tests the control of commodity power, supply chain and user experience of large manufacturers.

Since last year, Alibaba has successively withdrawn from the physical retail field, further focusing on the two cores of retail and AI, and enhancing the ecological integration and competitiveness of e-commerce platforms.

Pinduoduo continues to focus on the supply chain of agricultural products, and the first-of-its-kind "farmland cloud fighting" model combines scattered agricultural production capacity and agricultural product demand in the "cloud" to help direct connection between production and marketing.

This also means that China's Internet companies have transformed from barbaric growth to rational maturity, and when the big manufacturers put away their ambition to "transform everything" and turn to empowering entities with technology and replacing internal friction with collaboration, each big company will find its own mission.

The rise and fall of community group buying is only one of the pages of "new business", and when large manufacturers pay more attention to the play and complementarity of their core advantages, the entire Internet ecosystem will be healthier and more sustainable. After all, the true meaning of business is never "subversion", but "symbiosis".