In 2024, the real-time retail "focus battle" is underway.
On July 3rd, it was reported that the homepage of the Taobao App has been redesigned and updated, with a new level one traffic entry added to the top tab labeled "Houda". This means that merchants within the Houda channel will receive a large wave of public domain traffic from Taobao apps. It is understood that from then on, Houda will be open to all brands and merchants on Taobao and Tmall. As long as there is a local warehouse that can meet the real-time delivery needs of users, they can register and join.
According to official information, there are two ways for merchants to register for Taobao Houda: one is to directly open a Houda flagship store, and the other is to open Houda services on the basis of Taobao and Tmall stores. This also means that the weight of instant retail on Taobao has further increased.
Prior to Taobao's aggressive actions, earlier this year, JD.com set three must win battles for 2024, namely Content Ecology, Open Ecology, and Instant Retail. On May 16th, JD.com announced a comprehensive upgrade of its real-time retail business and launched a new brand image of "instant delivery". Literally speaking, compared to the original "hourly delivery" and "JD to home", "second delivery" emphasizes "faster" and has been directly upgraded from "hourly level" to "second era".
Instant retail has always been filled with gunpowder, and this year has been particularly lively. Meituan CFO Chen Shaohui stated during this year's first quarter financial report conference call that it is expected that Meituan's flash purchase order volume growth in the second quarter and throughout the year will be much higher than that of takeout orders, and even more than twice the growth rate of takeout orders. Meituan rushed ahead, Alibaba Jingdong continued to increase its weight, coupled with the disturbance of emerging forces such as Tiktok and Oriental Selection, making instant retail once again the center of public opinion.
In fact, Alibaba, Meituan, and JD.com have been operating in real-time retail for many years. From the actions of mainstream players, they are all making new moves based on their own advantages. In the long run, real-time retail will not only further accelerate, but also expand the coverage of categories, and even become the future of e-commerce.
Taobao Comprehensive Upgrade "Houda": Deepening Integration of O2O and B2C
In addition to being open to all brands and merchants on Taobao and Tmall, there are also several areas worth paying attention to in the upgrade of Taobao's "Houda" business.
Taobao App homepage has been redesigned, with a new "Hourly Delivery" entrance added next to the "Recommended" tab on Taobao
Entering the "Houda" channel, you can see that in addition to convenience stores such as Hema, RT Mart, and Tencent, brands such as Nongfu Spring, Heineken Beer, and Nature Hall have also opened "Houda flagship stores".
In addition, Taobao Houda has also reached a deep cooperation with Ele.me, covering supermarket convenience, pharmacies, vegetables and fruits, alcoholic beverages, flowers and plants, and other categories of supply, providing users with 24-hour local living services. According to Taobao, since the pilot launch of the channel, the number of orders for users using Houda to purchase medicine and various emergency daily necessities has grown rapidly.
According to Taobao, taking a Tmall Apple authorized exclusive store as an example, when users see a product on the hourly delivery channel and click to enter, they will be redirected to the Tmall store. When placing an order, they can choose between regular delivery or hourly delivery.
The reporter casually clicked into an Apple authorized exclusive store on the Houda channel, and the delivery service is regular delivery, with a delivery fee of 5 yuan and optional time. The fastest delivery time is half an hour. It is worth mentioning that when searching on Taobao's Houda channel, you can see the products offered by JD convenience stores.
Taobao told reporters that the fulfillment ability of Houda is socialized, and Ele.me mainly provides high-quality retail merchant supply this time.
It can be seen from the upgrade of this hourly delivery that the integration of O2O and B2C e-commerce is deepening.
As early as October 2021, the JD hourly shopping business jointly created by JD and Dada Group was officially launched. Hougou is a unified brand of JD's real-time retail business aimed at consumers, corresponding to the retail model of "online ordering, store shipping, hourly and even minute level delivery". From then on, the hourly purchasing business, which was originally scattered across various business lines, has a unified centralized entrance.
On the morning of May 16th this year, JD.com announced that it would integrate the original JD hourly delivery and JD home delivery services, and officially upgrade JD's real-time retail business to JD instant delivery. In terms of delivery time, the fastest delivery time is 9 minutes.
Zhuang Shuai, founder of Bailian Consulting, said in an interview with Daily Economic News that currently, the upgrade of Taobao's hourly reach business mainly increases its traffic entry.
He said that in the strategy of instant retail, Alibaba and JD are the same model, and their advantage is the combination of e-commerce and instant retail. He believes that the synergy and complementarity between real-time retail business and e-commerce business, as well as the more mature system integration and connection links between platforms, retailers, and brand merchants, are all part of B2C+O2O's stronger supply chain capabilities and services than takeout+O2O.
As far as Taobao is concerned, adding to instant retail is beneficial and harmless. Previously, Zhuang Shuai stated that instant retail is a business that uses existing users for incremental growth. After all, this is a market that cannot be missed. The 2023 White Paper on the Development Trends of Instant Retail shows that instant retail is a new blue ocean in both online and offline markets. In 2022, the scale of China's real-time retail market exceeded 590 billion yuan, equivalent to 1.4% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in society; It is expected that by 2030, the size of the real-time retail market will increase to 3.6 trillion yuan, equivalent to 6% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in the same period.
Snatching instant retail cakes? Giant Crazy Roll Minute Delivery
The potential for the scale of the instant retail market is enormous, attracting more enterprises to enter and increase their investment. Since 2023, in addition to Meituan, JD Home and Taobao, Tiktok App Mall has also opened an independent entrance to "Houda", making the competition on this track more intense.
Recently, some market news said that the "Tiktok Store · Home" page on the business terminal of Dithering E-commerce was open to some businesses for instant retail settlement by way of invitation test, which is expected to be officially launched on July 14 as soon as possible. According to the business settlement process, the business end of Tiktok e-commerce has completed the preliminary integration with the delivery business end. For businesses that have registered "Tiktok Customers" at the business end of Tiktok Bioservices, there is no need to register "Diaoyin" again.
This is also interpreted as Tiktok's strategic focus on the real-time retail track after giving up the take away battlefield. Tiktok has not publicly responded to this rumor. Dongfang Zhenxuan also announced in April this year the launch of its "hourly delivery" service in Beijing, and also launched live delivery.
The flash sale business has also been highly anticipated by Meituan, which is also the main means for Meituan to leverage the real-time retail market and obtain more order increments besides takeout. In the first quarter financial report of this year, Meituan disclosed that its flash sale business has grown rapidly, with more and more food and beverage delivery users converting into Meituan flash sale users. Meituan's average daily order volume for flash sale reached 8.4 million, and the number of active users and transaction frequency have achieved strong growth annually. Meituan Flash Buy has disclosed to the public that it plans to have 30000 stores with daily sales exceeding 10000 yuan and 100 brands worth 1 billion yuan by 2026.
For these main players on the current track, Zhuang Shuai analyzed that Alibaba and JD are the same model, with the advantage of combining e-commerce and real-time retail; Meituan's users have the strongest mental state, followed by the integration with local life's in store business; Tiktok is the combination of the scale advantage of the content platform's Daily Life users and the operation advantage of the content platform. He analyzed that the competition in the real-time retail battlefield between JD.com, Meituan Flash Buy, and Ele.me will mainly revolve around four aspects: supply, transportation capacity, price, and model innovation.
From the perspective of the industry, Meituan has an absolute advantage in the takeaway market, but in the instant retail market, the current advantage is not obvious, which is also the reason why new forces, including Tiktok, chose to enter the instant retail market after entering the takeaway market without achieving the expected effect.
Yin Sheng, an Internet analyst, once told the reporter of the Daily Economic News that the economies of scale of real-time retail of physical products are very obvious, which can give full play to the platform's advantages of user aggregation and timeliness. In contrast, the economies of scale of the traditional life service industry are not so obvious, because each merchant's service ability is limited within a certain period of time, which also means that real-time retail is a business that all local life platforms must do.
"Compared with the traditional logistics service serving remote e-commerce, real-time distribution has a higher degree of refinement. Through distributed warehouse design, urban logistics networks can more flexibly meet the discrete, sudden and socialized consumption needs in cities. As a small number of high-frequency businesses that have not been fully developed in the track, it is also a growth point that each platform must seize. Seizing the retail business in the same city is equivalent to seizing the consumption habits of Internet users over the age of 20. High frequency band and low frequency, sediment user data, and continue to strengthen the platform's competitive barrier." Yin Sheng said.
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