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The longer I use Meituan , the more I feel that many people underestimate Meituan.
What do you think Meituan is? Is it a group buying platform? Is it a platform for food delivery? A service e-commerce company? Neither
.
It is actually a "local cloud storage solution for goods and services" around users. It can also be understood as a modern version of a space ring and a summoning array.
sounds a bit mysterious, but there are two true stories in it, which I have mentioned in other articles before.
One year, there was bayberry season. A friend of mine wanted to make bayberry wine by himself. He needed bayberry, jars and wine.
She initially placed three orders on the e-commerce platform, but the bayberry arrived first, and the jar and wine had not yet arrived;
After waiting for a while, the wine arrived, and she opened the wine excitedly, and suddenly realized that the jar was still on the way.
I went to pick up the express delivery of the jar a few days later, but it turned out that the bayberry was already broken.
She complained to me and I said why don’t you try Meituan. She searched and found that all the items mentioned above were sold by local merchants on Meituan, and the takeout could be delivered within an hour or two.
The other one is that I have two cats, named Lao Hei and Lao Bai, who can eat and pull.
But cat litter and cat food are all consumables and take up a lot of space, so it is impossible to store too much at one time.
Besides, if I buy a cat litter weighing several dozen kilograms, the merchant will most likely not send to SF Express because the cost is too high.
Normally it takes five or six days, but it’s impossible for a cat to not eat or poop in these days, right? If you dare not give it cat litter, it will dare to find a clean place to deal with it on its own. As for whether it is your bed or the closet, it is hard to say.
My solution is to leave it all to Meituan. There are seven pet supply stores within five kilometers of
.
Three are chains of the same pet store, and four are independent brands. I have ordered takeout from each of them on Meituan.
After a long time, I know very well which store has a good selection of cat litter and which store has a better discount on cat scratching posts .
They are [local] in my life circle, so they can be delivered quickly.
But without Meituan, I may never become their customer - because I don’t like to go out at all, and it is impossible to carry dozens of kilograms of cat litter home.
I still haven’t seen what any of their stores look like, but I am already an old customer of them.
This kind of thing is not an isolated case. More and more people have discovered the retail attributes of Meituan and have become accustomed to using Meituan to purchase [locally supplied] goods.
Meituan solves the contradiction between the unlimited consumer demand and the limited storage space.
There are many things we need to use on a daily basis, and their types and quantities are uncertain, but the space in our homes is limited.
Looking at the house I bought with an area of tens of thousands per square meter, it is quite a loss to use the space to fill it with products on sale.
The fundamental reason for stocking up is that you are worried that you will not be able to buy it in time when you need it, so you have to use space to buy security and certainty.
But if you buy it from Meituan, whenever you need it, it will appear at your doorstep today or even within an hour.
The value of Meituan Retail is that it turns the inventory of all local merchants into your cloud warehouse , which you can access at any time for instant gratification.
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When the immediacy of logistics reaches a certain level and the efficiency of distribution reaches a certain level, quantitative changes will lead to qualitative changes.
If you are used to Meituan’s [What you see is what you get], many of consumers’ shopping habits and even ways of thinking will be subverted, and their lifestyles will be fundamentally changed.
In the past, many consumers had a mindset that they had to wait to buy things online, so some key needs could only be solved offline. After all, these key needs really cannot wait and must be met immediately.
The demand itself also changes over time. If it cannot be done immediately, it is actually meaningless.
For example, I need to buy a mask now. I don’t know how long I will have to wait to buy it from an e-commerce store. This uncertainty is very torturous.
The merchant will deliver the goods today, and the logistics will collect them tomorrow. We pass through many cities along the way, spanning half of China, and every wait is measured in days.
You don’t know how many days it will be delayed, and you don’t know whether you will need it when it arrives.
because it depends on every logistics node in the middle.
This is not buying something, this is falling in love.
But in fact, the supply of these supplies may be sufficient in a medical equipment store a few kilometers away from your home.
If there is no Meituan, you have to ask around where the local store sells what you want - and you may not be able to find it, because there will only be the name of the store on the map, and you cannot search what they sell or how many items they have in stock - and finally you have to go out and buy it in person.
Either accept the reality and wait patiently for the e-commerce company to send you express delivery. In short, there is no third way.
But with Meituan, you can choose neither path and just wait at home.
My Meituan avatar is a panda head waiting with a bowl and chopsticks. Every time I place an order, I like to watch the rider’s route on Meituan. There is a panda head waiting eagerly at the end.
Looking at the route, you can clearly know where the rider is and how long it will take for delivery - although you still have to wait, it is usually calculated in minutes.
knows where he is, so he will not be anxious or panic.
But if you choose e-commerce, the entire link is too long and there are too many links, so the probability of risks is greater.
From the time you place the order to delivery, logistics, and transfer to various places, any link in the middle will be missed, and all your previous waiting will be in vain.
It may even be stuck at the transit station in your city, but even in the last few kilometers, it cannot be delivered to you.
Especially in the past two years, I have encountered this problem too many times.
Is it the merchant’s fault? No wonder.
monster flow? No wonder.
When you need something right away, Meituan is the only [certainty] and [immediacy].
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The changes brought about by Meituan are not only in the lifestyle of users, but also in giving local businesses and local brands an opportunity to transform.
In the past, when local businesses and local brands faced those online stores and big brands, there has always been a [local paradox]:
Stores with large traffic have high rents, so things have to be sold very expensive, which is not as cost-effective as e-commerce;
Stores with cheap rents are in remote locations, and consumers cannot find them at all, and they are not as convenient as online shopping.
can’t beat the traffic cost, nor can it beat the purchasing experience. Everything is a disadvantage.
Therefore, no matter how good their products are, many local brands have no chance to grow and cannot break out of their own territory.
But the existence of Meituan perfectly solves this [local paradox] -
After local merchants go online with Meituan, it is equivalent to reconstructing a nearby traffic field, which is equivalent to secondary site selection.
Meituan itself is a huge local traffic distribution center. Whether residents living in the south of the city or consumers living in the north, they will browse merchants in the same city on Meituan, regardless of the east or west.
Compared with traditional offline promotion methods such as hiring a waist drum team to parade through the market, or hiring students part-time to distribute flyers for a day, young people may be more likely to discover these small shops around them online.
In terms of purchasing experience, Meituan also helped local merchants win this battlefield.
Buying items from an online store on an e-commerce platform and waiting for them to be delivered by courier has the advantage that you don’t have to spend time on your own, but the disadvantage is that you have to wait for a long time;
buying from a local merchant has the advantage that the waiting time is short, but the disadvantage is that you need to spend your own time.
But when you buy things from local merchants through Meituan, you don’t need to spend your own time, and the waiting time is shorter than that of e-commerce.
Similarly, local brands can also use the power of Meituan to gather scattered local needs, gather together a joint force, and ultimately achieve the goal of "going out".
This is equivalent to creating a bargaining chip for local businesses and local brands, giving them the ability to compete with big brands and online stores and .
Even if it is not said that it has the upper hand now, at least it has come and gone.
Let me give you two typical examples. One is that I have a friend from Huainan, Anhui Province. He recently posted a photo of fresh milk in his circle of friends, called "Yiyi Milk."
This is a time-honored brand with a history of more than 60 years in Anhui. She said that she often drank this brand of milk powder when she was a child. She thought it was the tears of the times, but she did not expect that a lot of Yiyi fresh milk appeared on the streets in recent years.
It stands to reason that milk tea shops are the hardest hit area by cutting leeks. Any businessman who opens a shop would be embarrassed to say that he has ever started a business without losing money in a milk tea shop.
But Yiyi Milk actually opened many milk tea shops in the local area. Even because the stores sell milk drinks made with fresh milk from local dairies, the profit margin is much higher than the previous boxed milk.
From a commercial point of view, this is a very strange counter-trend phenomenon.
Because of the fast-moving consumer goods such as milk drinks, for a long time in the past, the situation has been reversed:
National brands have continued to occupy the market of local and regional brands in various places.
For example, cola, herbal tea and milk are all big national brands that continue to devour the market.
Compared with these big brands, local and regional brands do not have the advantages of capital and scale. Their only feature is "localization".
Take milk for example. The national milk brands of milk have achieved the ultimate in product research and development and cost control, but local dairy companies have only one advantage:
freshness.
So if there is a model that can continuously amplify the "freshness" advantage of local brands, they will have the opportunity to regain the market.
Yiyi Dairy’s official website information shows that
they have a local ranch in Huainan, and it only takes 30 minutes for fresh milk to go from the ranch to the factory. Put it in the store to make milk tea or turn it into fresh milk, and it only takes 30 minutes for Meituan to deliver it to consumers.
No matter how powerful your brand is, I directly raise cattle locally. How can you be faster, fresher, and understand the tastes of local residents than me?
In the field of fresh milk, local brands are the only gods.
The "closeness" of local products and the "fastness" of takeaways have unexpectedly created new opportunities for local and regional brands.
Not only are local merchants using Meituan in small mainland cities, but even local merchants in the remote pastoral areas of Inner Mongolia are using Meituan to sell unique local [New Year products].
Herdsmen will buy [Sheep Licking Bricks], a must-have for their sheep in the winter, on Meituan. This item can add subtle elements to the sheep and help them survive the minus 30-degree winter in the grasslands.
When using cattle and sheep dung for heating in winter, a large amount of smoke and dust will be produced. Herders have become accustomed to buying special anti-shake and anti-frost [induced draft fans] on Meituan to discharge the smoke and dust out of the yurt.
Meituan and the strange local products on Meituan have been integrated into the pastoral areas and into the lives of the herdsmen in a form [which seems strange at first glance, but makes sense when you think about it]. The importance of
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[local] actually changes with the times.
In the pre-e-commerce era, there were not many types of products and the supply was not sufficient. The first thing consumers considered was the question of "availability".
Those were also the most prosperous years for physical stores. It was common for families to go shopping and buy things. [Big purchase] was even a memorable family ceremony.
In the era of e-commerce, consumption has become more and more lightweight, and [having many choices] has become a more important thing.
Merchants do not even need to have a physical store, and of course they do not need to be rooted locally.
But at that time, consumers could still afford to wait. It was common to wait ten days and a half for a package.
Because consumers in this period will subconsciously distinguish online shopping from offline shopping psychologically, and only things that are not urgent will be bought online.
But now is the post-e-commerce era. Many young people of the new generation have been shopping online for as long as they can remember. In turn, their requirements will become higher and higher.
More and more consumers realize that online and local should not be distinct.
Why do I have to wait so long for something I buy online?
Why can’t what I see is what I get?
Now, what everyone is struggling with is the question of [fast or not].
And this is not an excessive request -
What e-commerce cannot do, instant retail can easily solve.
Meituan’s unique [local supply] not only transforms [closeness] in space into [fast] in time, but also combines the richness and smoothness of online shopping.
It is much faster than e-commerce, and much more convenient than going out to the store at the door, and the range of options is much wider.
’s residence is within five hundred meters and within five kilometers of Meituan’s territory.
In fact, Meituan is a very interesting company. Both the company's own direction and its positioning in the hearts of users have gone through many changes before finally evolving into what it is today.
started out as a group purchase, then as a food and beverage delivery service, then as an instant retail service that can deliver “everything”, and even as a community retail system that sells local brands across the country.
But no matter how it changes, Meituan’s most important asset and its most irreplaceable attribute is [locality].
This kind of local management even makes it less like an Internet company.
The core of the Internet should be zero-cost or low-cost replicas and light assets. However, Meituan’s merchants and riders in each city operate independently. Riders in Shanghai cannot deliver takeaways from Beijing, and Meituan cannot manage a huge team of riders solely online.
From this perspective, Meituan is more like a retail company that understands the Internet than an Internet company.
As the times evolve, [local] is becoming the protagonist of consumption again.
Perhaps, this will also be an opportunity to change our lives:
Only by giving businesses near residents’ living circles and local brands more opportunities to stand in the center of the stage, will those forgotten fireworks of life gradually return to us.
life is never far away.
