Since this year the country has strengthened anti-monopoly investigations on e-commerce platforms and issued multiple fines to companies that violate the regulations. Users familiar with community group buying will find that in many cities, the usual community group buying platform can’t buy food. Single out.
The City Life was closed in July. This is considered the first large-scale community group buying platform to announce the closure of the shop. In the second half of the previous year, City Life, which has received multiple rounds of financing, has also raised US$100 million in investment. But within two years, it declared bankruptcy.
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When the shop closed, there was even negative news that employees were resigned without compensation.Now in many areas, Shihui Group has changed its business model, all fresh vegetables have been removed from the shelves, and began to sell daily necessities and whole pieces of fruit, grain and oil, etc. The next day delivery is also changed to 48 hours delivery , Has become a Taobao model.
At the end of last month, announced a full contraction of the front, from 31 provinces, covering the whole country, shrinking to 9 provinces, but the specific layout of Zhengzhou has not been announced. It is no longer possible to place an order.
It seems that the community group buying of fresh food that has been caught in the epidemic in the past two years is going to cool down, and it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars but can’t do a small business selling vegetables. Why can’t community group buying be sustained so quickly? Up?
State shots, the platform can not use money to sell below cost. platform through huge subsidies, to quickly attract users is the idiomatic way of the Internet. At the beginning, the community group buying platform also gained a large number of registered users through similar activities such as "a penny a pound of eggs". However, the country has paid attention to the dangers of Internet companies relying on their capital advantages to quickly expand customers and suppress the small and micro economy. Behind the decisive move is that the platform lacks the means to quickly attract customers after being punished.
's own model is flawed and violates the laws of the market. The advantage of large Internet companies lies in the use of technical means to shorten the commodity supply chain, improve efficiency and reduce circulation costs. However, the community group buying platform has more group leader distribution links than traditional offline sales, which lengthens the supply chain. Decentralized distribution reduces the efficiency of circulation, increases the marketing cost of , and loses its competitive advantage.
Fresh is a non-standard product, and it is more difficult for large platforms to gain trust. fresh and industrial products are different,The freshness, appearance, and taste are not uniform, and the standardization of industrial products cannot be realized. Customers have higher expectations for the quality of fresh produce, and it is difficult to ensure that the quality meets consumer expectations with a large platform and multi-category operation. This caused distrust of users and gradually lost the market.
The large-scale procurement model of caused a vicious circle of bad money driving out good money. purchases on a large platform cannot achieve unified quality control, and there are no national standards and grades for vegetables. In order to gain advantages and profits, large platforms adopt an open price comparison purchasing model for suppliers. Suppliers can only cooperate if the price is the lowest, which objectively creates the reason for the low quality of the dishes.
All of these have a lot to do with the special properties of fresh produce. Therefore, Shihui Group, which was in the crisis of closing stores, began to try to explore new ways of community group buying by avoiding fresh food and using express delivery.
However, it has left the market with huge consumer demand for fresh food, deviated from the convenience of door-to-door delivery, and became the ecology of Taobao e-commerce. It is still not promising in the future.
In fact, in addition to these, there are still many criticisms of the community group buying model. You are welcome to leave a message and share your views.
