Since the second half of 2015, community O2O has gradually turned to the offline battlefield. The online traffic dividend has faded and capital is indifferent. This is the first development bottleneck faced by community O2O. Therefore, various participants have established offline service centers to facilitate the existence of stores or vertical service stores. Through the gradual superposition of store functions, we strive to create a center for offline life consumption scenarios. It seems that a new dawn is about to appear, but the good times are not long. The ideal service center has encountered the dilemma of single-point profitability, the number of stores continues to increase, and the overall cost continues to rise. Where is the critical point of revenue balance? When does it appear? These are unknowns, but there is a light ahead, like a horizon - it prompts us not to give up. The new bottlenecks faced by
community O2O are mainly reflected in four aspects:
① The cost of online traffic acquisition remains high, and there are many difficulties in user precipitation and stickiness improvement. Users who get obtained through promotions, scanning codes and giving gifts can eventually become active users, and there will be little trace of them without activities.
② For non-standard services, we can only seek cooperation from third-party service providers. However, in terms of service quality control, the platform has always been relatively weak. If it is just diversion, it is difficult to form a closed consumption loop of APP; if a trading system is established on the platform, in addition to whether a third party is willing to accept it, the system development of hundreds of non-standard services is a big project, and the understanding of these services is limited to the superficial (of course, there is a third option, which is the platform party’s strategic investment in vertical suppliers).
③The user choices are diverse, and the community platform is willing to concentrate all community residents in offline stores, but there are too many participants participating in the division of life services. Online e-commerce channels include Tmall, JD.com and various vertical e-commerce (such as maternal and infant, fresh food), and offline community stores and chain stores. The professionalism is not as good as that of vertical merchants, the traffic is not as good as BAT, and the third-party payment cannot be abandoned in transactions. The advantages of single products are difficult to highlight, and the overall benefits are not formed.
④ The store coverage radius is natural defective. In theory, a store can cover all residential buildings within a radius of 3-5 kilometers, but in fact, as long as other stores appear within its radius, such as husband and wife stores, some of them will be intercepted. If one or even several stores come from all directions, the coverage radius may only be reduced to 1 kilometer or even 500 meters. Except for the slightly wider coverage of differentiated products and special services, other homogeneous services, such as the supply of fast-moving consumer goods, have almost no advantages. What should be considered in the offline traffic center of
community O2O?
① Offline stores should create high viscosity. If there is no considerable number of differentiated products and services, high-frequency supply of products is essential, such as fresh food (vegetables, fruits, meat, eggs and milk) and fast-moving consumer goods sales. This involves a series of work on the management, operation and product supply of retail stores. Without chain stores' management experience, many pitfalls will be trampled.
② The choice of the location of the store is better if it can be built in the community or surrounded by residential buildings on all sides. Street shops, especially for cities like Beijing with wide roads, cover only half a street - a radius of 500 meters behind the store and on both sides, which is a huge waste of store resources. For such stores, especially consider how to attract residents from farther away to stay in the store through other special services, such as parent-child activities with higher participation or catering and food teaching. These special services can attract residents from farther away.
③ The area of the store determines the richness of the service to a certain extent. Users hope to see it as a reality. If the interactive project covers too large an area, the display of other services will be limited, affecting the presentation and performance of the overall effect.
④ Stores must have the advantages of single products. Stores without characteristics will be difficult to form deep memories in the hearts of users. The advantages of single products are to solve user memory, and the second is to build user trust. Once users have a good impression of the main services provided by the store, other services provided by the store will automatically be included in the user's vision.
⑤ Store service staff should have a real sense of neighborhood. Why do husband and wife stores last forever? In addition to the labor costs being automatically ignored, it is also the acquaintance relationship established by the store owner and surrounding residents, which makes users emotionally turn to the husband and wife store and spontaneously willing to take care of the husband and wife store business.
Therefore, in summary, community O2O faces a new bottleneck, and the breakthrough point is the refined management and operation of offline stores, with at least 5 years of gap. When the Internet of Things and smart terminals become popular in the future, a new pattern of smart communities will be created. At this time, community O2O entrepreneurs and practitioners need to do a good job in store management, accumulate consumption data in life scenarios, and prepare the necessary foundation for the explosion of the Internet of Things and smart terminals.
