Fresh e-commerce is mainly divided into traditional vertical e-commerce, traditional platform e-commerce, store warehouse integration, front warehouse and community group purchase. Among them, the latter three belong to community fresh e-commerce, which realize the distribution coverage of 1-3km around by setting up community terminal stores / warehouses; In terms of sales, fresh food is used as the channel commodity to realize the drainage, supplemented by high gross profit daily necessities as its profit source. In 2020, the scale of China’s fresh food market is about 5 trillion, and the online penetration rate is about 8%; The daily 100 market scale is about 6 trillion, and the online penetration rate is about 28%. The rise and development of community fresh e-commerce is an important reason for the rapid increase of fresh online penetration in recent years.
The development of fresh e-commerce has gone through four stages, gradually iterating in the direction of “community”. 1) During the embryonic exploration period from 2005 to 2010, with the development of e-commerce of PC Internet, a number of vertical fresh e-commerce with fruit as the selling point were established sporadically. 2) From 2011 to 2015, platform e-commerce giants intervened. In the early stage of mobile Internet, e-commerce giants and industrial chain giants successively entered the fresh e-commerce track. At this stage, platform e-commerce such as Maochao fresh and JD fresh gradually became the first tier of fresh e-commerce with the advantages of flow, subsidy and logistics. 3) During the new retail o2o period from 2016 to 2018, with the outbreak of mobile Internet traffic, online consumers further sank, and fresh e-commerce entered the era of community e-commerce. The strongest development momentum at this stage is the Wuxi Online Offline Communication Information Technology Co.Ltd(300959) integrated new retail model represented by HEMA fresh. 4) Since 2019, during the community e-commerce race, the heavy assets and high cost of new retail are difficult to support its high growth. The new community retail models such as mini store warehouse integration, front warehouse and community group purchase, which are relatively “light”, are favored. However, with the promotion of the supervision of “platform economy antitrust”, the capital boom began to subside in Q2 of 2021q, with platform thunderstorms and withdrawal from operation one after another.
Store warehouse integration, front warehouse and community group purchase are the relatively mainstream models of community e-commerce. Their customer positioning is reduced in turn, and their operation efficiency has its own advantages and disadvantages. The first two modes are upgraded from the traditional fresh food platform e-commerce to real-time distribution, in which the integration of store and warehouse is a high-end positioning, characterized by the comprehensive upgrading of high-quality goods + consumers’ store experience + real-time distribution to home; The front warehouse is a public positioning, focusing on commodity cost performance + real-time delivery home service. The community group purchase is an expansion from the traditional group purchase e-commerce to the fresh category. It realizes the low price of goods through the way of professional head organization, group quantity + unified distribution + community self delivery. At the same time, the pre-sale + grid warehouse mode can avoid the disadvantage that the traditional group purchase E-commerce is easy to lose fresh.
The analysis framework of fresh e-commerce includes three dimensions: online traffic, performance efficiency and supply chain. In the field of fresh food sales, the simple online traffic sales platform model is almost uncompetitive. It requires “online sales platform” + “full link efficiency”. The current community fresh e-commerce industry is still in the stage of burning money and developing scale. Although the performance efficiency and supply chain capacity have improved to a certain extent with the growth of scale, it has not yet reached the stage of fine management.
