text/Tao Xiaocao
Workdays, in the lattice of an office building in Xicheng District, Beijing, Hanbing (pseudonym) received a bouquet of flowers as usual. Green daisies, purple peacock grass, yellow carnations, light purple forget-me-nots... The fresh combination lit up the whole morning.
Image source: Internet
Since June this year, Hanbing has begun to order flowers on an e-commerce platform called "Seep a Time". is 99 months, four bouquets a week, four surprises. took some time to found it in 2015 and quickly became famous with its special model of spending every Monday. Coincidentally, flower e-commerce platforms such as "Flowerplus Flower Plus " and "Ai Shang Flower" have also launched flower subscription services for every Monday flower, and even launched flower seasonal and annual packages.
In the past, flowers are gifts. Now, flowers are life. People are beginning to like the feeling of ordering flowers on the flower platform.
Early of daily flowers
There are two types of flower products on the market. One category is traditional gift flowers. 80% of the consumers who buy gift flowers in are male . They often buy flowers at some special time nodes, such as the New Year and the birthday of their partners. The familiar Fauvism and roseonly take the route of gift flowers. The price of a bouquet ranges from several hundred to thousands of yuan, and the average customer price is higher, so the consumption frequency is also lower.
Image source: Weibo
Compared with gift flowers, daily consumption of flowers is emerging . The emerging middle class, which is increasingly pursuing quality of life, has increased the frequency of buying flowers, from once a year, to once a quarter, and finally to once a week or even once a day. For them, flowers are no longer a surprise that can only be received during festivals, but a seasoning , an indispensable seasoning in ordinary life.
data shows that the average American spends 186 yuan per person a year to buy flowers, the British spend 428 yuan, and the Japanese spend 280 yuan. The per capita annual flower consumption of , the Netherlands , which has become a country of flowers, is as high as 514 yuan. However, the annual per capita consumption of flowers in my country is only 30 yuan for . From the perspective of consumption structure, the daily flower market in developed countries such as Europe and the United States has reached 40%-60%, while China currently accounts for about 5% (95% is still a gift flower consumption), and the market potential is huge.
The imaginative daily flower demand in the Chinese market has won the favor of capital . In March this year, Taidi Flowers announced that it had received a C round of financing of 150 million yuan; in July, Flowerplus Flowers received a A+ round of financing of over 100 million yuan. Not long before that, the National Goddess Gao Yuanyuan participated in the investment and also received a B round of financing of hundreds of millions of yuan, and the investor was Jingwei China.
The continuous financing of hundreds of millions of enterprises has brought the originally unpopular flower industry into people's vision and turned into a fashionable topic.
Controversy caused by a bouquet of flowers
The first question before people is whether flower e-commerce makes money?
The flower e-commerce platform "Aishang Flowers", which was just listed on the New Third Board at the beginning of last year, was exposed to the quagmire of losses. According to the "Shanghai Aishang Flower Co., Ltd. Public Transfer Instructions", Aishang Flower's net profits from January to July 2015, 2014 and 2013 were -11.8165 million yuan, -10.5414 million yuan and -4.5975 million yuan respectively.
Other flower e-commerce platforms have also reported losses. According to "Frontier Technology Flow", since its establishment in 2015, Flowerplus has accumulated losses of nearly 80 million yuan.
Someone did some calculations for the flower e-commerce company. The fixed cost of a bouquet of flowers is about 20 yuan (calculated based on the minimum of 3 kinds of flowers), the same-city express cost is 10 yuan, the outer packaging cost is 5 yuan, and the cost of packaging paper, labor and other costs, a bouquet of flowers costs at least 50 yuan to make up for the cost. is based on the model of most flower e-commerce (4 bouquets of flowers per month, and 25 yuan per bouquet of flowers on average), not only do they not make money, but they also have to lose money on .
Did the flower e-commerce that loses money and makes a name for itself impress users with its high-quality and low-priced flowers?
She founder once claimed to the media that he would spend some time purchasing flowers on a global scale. To ensure the freshness of the flowers, they even insured the flowers.
White-collar worker Xiaoxi told Zhouchaojun that at the beginning, she was indeed impressed by the novel model of flower monthly, but only a month later she gave up this fresh attempt. "Every time the flowers sent will be broken, lost, damaged, and even smaller in quantity."
On Douban , Dianping and other websites, people's complaints about flower e-commerce are also common: has poor quality, is not fresh, and has poor customer service attitude ... Statistics of iResearch Consulting show that users who are more satisfied with flower e-commerce account for only 36.8%.
Image source: Dianping
Flower e-commerce companies with poor quality and reputation are still facing an unavoidable problem.
Most flower e-commerce companies mainly focus on the "monthly flowers" model. Most of the flower materials are common and easy-to-live varieties such as roses, carnations, and platycodon, and there are few types to choose from. Many netizens expressed their confusion on social networking websites. They couldn't tell the difference between each flower e-commerce company at all because they all looked the same.
What makes flower e-commerce worse is the various security crises that have occurred recently .
Some time ago, a netizen revealed that the monthly flowers ordered by the flowers and order contain "toxic flower materials" milkweed , which also triggered a rare flower recall incident.
According to the introduction of Wikipedia , the whole plant of milkweed is toxic, especially because milk is more toxic. Incorrectly consuming milkweed will cause symptoms such as weakness, swelling, and dilated pupils. has news reports and even compared the "flowers plus poisonous flowers" incident with "Baidu Wei Zexi" and "BOSS Direct Recruitment Li Wenxing" .
If you get into trouble, take some time. In April this year, a Weibo about taking some time suspected of fraud spread online, and took some time to claim that consumers can use coupons from their online flower shops without any threshold. However, after receiving the coupon, consumers encountered problems after placing an order: the coupon was only for Level 7 users with order amounts of more than 3,999 yuan. If they were not Level 7 users, the order would be cancelled. Some netizens questioned that they took some time to deceive attention through this method, and even misappropriate user personal information.
Flower e-commerce that repeatedly exposes product quality and safety issues, making flower consumers who focus on experience dare not love anymore.
difficult business
"The poor user experience is just an appearance," senior O2O analyst Huang Yuanpu told Zhouzaojun, "'s inefficient logistics and distribution link is the crux of ."
flowers are non-standardized products, prone to rot and have a short shelf life. From the moment flowers are picked from the plant, their freshness enters the countdown. Like fresh food e-commerce, flower e-commerce is affected by factors such as warehousing and logistics. If merchants want to ensure the freshness of goods, they need to pay high costs .
According to Zhouchaojun, most flower e-commerce companies currently use professional flower cold chain transportation at the front end of the platform, so the flower loss is not large. However, in terms of on-site delivery in cities, most flower e-commerce companies often use third-party logistics companies to complete delivery, and the risks are obvious: flower packaging is squeezed, logistics time is uncertain, and rough loading and unloading. Most flowers cannot control the quality when they reach people's "last mile" .
has two factors that determine the construction of the cold chain logistics system: capital support and scale threshold, and the flower industry based on flower e-commerce is really not very large. Data from Sutu Research Institute shows that the scale of flower e-commerce transactions in my country in 2016 was about 17.2 billion. In comparison, the overall transaction volume of domestic fresh food e-commerce in 2016 was about 90 billion yuan, 4 times that of flower e-commerce. is based on its current scale. Any flower e-commerce company that wants to establish a cold chain logistics system covering the whole country and master the right to speak for upstream flower production and planting is impossible to achieve.
Nowadays, some flower e-commerce companies adopt prices lower than the offline retail market standards, trying to gather users and expand their scale in a short period of time, but ignore the most critical factor - the quality of flowers. If the flower e-commerce cannot even use the word "fresh" of flowers, it may not be able to gain people's trust and loyalty.
The bumpy future
A report released by iMedia Consulting shows that in the first quarter of 2017, the size of China's flower e-commerce market reached 5.14 billion yuan, and will exceed 60 billion yuan in 2019.
Flower e-commerce is still in the early stage of cultivating users, and the cost of acquiring customers is high; the logistics and supply chain systems are weak and lack industry standards. 's existing flower e-commerce platforms, such as spending some time and flower add, are likely to not be able to do it, and become the "martyr" of flower e-commerce .
In the commercial field, the process of a product from appearance to hitting the market is called "discovering the third-eyed beauty". The products in the first stage are innovative and very emotional, but there are many problems. Only people who are particularly sensitive to technology will pay attention to and use them; the products in the second stage solve most of the problems in the first stage, but are expensive and only rich people will use them; the products in the third stage solve the price problem, can they become popular among the public and exist for a long time. The three stages of most products are led by different companies. Companies in the first two stages may not be successful in business, but are just preparing for the third stage.
Huang Yuanpu told Zhouchaojun that the flower e-commerce market may be very beautiful, and there will be many emerging people to explore, but those who can really dig the first pot of gold from this emerging market are often not pioneers. will only be possible for a big brand of flower e-commerce in 5 years or even 10 years. Once it appears, its size and scale will be several times that of today's flower e-commerce.
This article only represents the author's views and does not represent the position of this magazine
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