Ali'S City Wide Retail Has Another "Ao Xiang" To Enter The Upstream Of B End

On May 26, Alibaba released the digital intelligence SaaS "Aoxiang" to serve the real retail industry, providing merchants with solutions such as online and offline integrated operation, consumer demand insight, and commodity operation efficiency improvement. Zhou Tianmu, general manager of the ecological business department of Ali supermarket, served as Aoxiang's CEO.

"Aoxiang club can fully integrate people, goods and markets by building deep digital intelligence insight based on users, commodities, categories, LBS (geographical location) and other basic SaaS capabilities such as member marketing, so as to effectively promote the business operation ability of merchants." Zhou Tianmu revealed in an interview with the 21st century economic report that Aoxiang supports businesses to access the major third-party home service platforms at one time, realizes one click multi-channel shop opening, saves the operating costs of the supermarket headquarters and stores, and provides private domain traffic operation function.

After years of fierce competition of e-commerce, the market scale and flow dividend ceiling of online consumption have been clearly visible, and the next retail battlefield is back to offline. This is also the battlefield closest to consumers. Driven by big data and intelligent collaborative supply chain, offline stores have more possibilities.

In this track, dada Jingdong has been working hard for a long time“ At this stage, the role of the business is limited, we are anxious about the flow problem, if the tool side, there is always better than none. " A local retail online service provider told the 21st century economic reporter.

At present, the e-commerce model has penetrated from the far field to the near field, and the fast-moving fresh products are growing continuously and the competition is fierce. How to continue to penetrate into the ecology and improve the efficiency of b-end businesses has become an important breakthrough point for the platforms.

Add code and enable offline

Since Alibaba released the "five new" strategy in 2016, new retail has become a pioneer in exploring the digitalization of physical retail. In Zhou Tianmu's opinion, "Aoxiang" focuses on the new retail experience and technical ability accumulated by Alibaba in the past six years in the exploration of RT mart, HEMA and other modes. It also contributes to the long-term digital and intelligent growth of physical retail in the form of ecological opening and cooperative services.

"All tools of Aoxiang should be implemented to businesses, whether they can produce actual business effect." Zhou Tianmu explained, "is Gmv growing, users growing, user stickiness and activity increasing, and for the management efficiency and operation level, we are building a complete set of operation mechanism.".

Affected by the epidemic situation and the rise of new consumption formats, the development of some supermarkets will face challenges in 2020. Zhou Tianmu predicted that in 2021, the further transformation of physical retail enterprises will continue to focus on digitization, layout and upgrading. In addition, users' habits will migrate in the era of epidemic, and the online and offline integration of retail industry will continue to accelerate. This is the best time for the digital and intelligent transformation of retail enterprises.

The near field and online migration of channel shopping has become a trend, and the physical retail enterprises are accelerating the digital transformation. This is not only the transformation crisis of traditional offline supermarket, but also the competition opportunity with new Internet retail such as community group buying.

"It's certainly hard for the supermarket now, including the live broadcast online, which has accelerated the online shopping habits of consumers during the epidemic period. Another thing is that group buying in communities will divert the original share of supermarkets." Zhang yuepeng, general manager of Handan sunshine supermarket, expressed his concern about the 21st century economic reporter. As a regional supermarket, they do not have digital ability and relevant talents.

To this end, the company began to cooperate with Aoxiang“ Through the online Aoxiang system, we have now opened four platforms in Handan, namely taoxianda, Jingdong Jiajia, hungry Mo and meituan. There are more than 8000 online categories, basically achieving the consistency between online and offline. Online sales from January to April this year have doubled. "

In the past six months, in addition to Handan sunshine, four enterprises, including Zhejiang renben, wangzhongwang, Sichuan Jixuan and Taizhou Hualian, have also tried to use Aoxiang. According to the official data, after using "Aoxiang", the online single volume of single merchant increased by 25% on average, and the efficiency of picking goods in warehouse increased by 15%, driving Gmv to exceed 550 million yuan. So far, nearly 60 retailers and ecological partners have signed contracts with Aoxiang, covering nearly 7500 stores.

At present, there is no lack of product service tools in the market. Both dada Jingdong home and meituan have been in the market for a long time. Zhou Tianmu explained that the service objects of Aoxiang will first consider the businesses with relatively weak digital foundation and urgent need of online operation and integration capability model“ Small and medium-sized retail enterprises encounter some difficulties in the process of digital promotion, and we may put them in the first priority. "

Speed up the retail process in the same city

For entering the nearest kilometer away from consumers, Alibaba has always had a different way of entering into the private domain of community group buying. The key is how to attract more local life businesses.

As early as 2018, Lin Xiaohai, vice president of Alibaba group and general manager of Retail communication business department, revealed that after more than four years of development, retail link has covered 1.5 million retail stores and more than 95% of well-known FMCG brands, becoming China's largest FMCG B2B platform.

In the capital and platform crazy investment, community group buying catch-up, Alibaba's pace is also accelerating. In April 2020, Alibaba upgraded the tmall supermarket business group to the local retail business group. The positioning of the business group was introduced as "based on providing customers with one-stop shopping service in the city's life circle, at the same time, based on empowering businesses, improving the overall supply chain efficiency".

Almost at the same time, Jingdong and meituan also adjusted their organizational structures and focused their business on local life services. Jingdong has set up an omni channel business group of dashangchao, integrating the original consumer goods division, new channel business unit, 7fresh and shop 1. Meituan has broken through the catering delivery business and set up an e-commerce platform for everything home in 30 minutes.

Just two months ago, Ali lost his son again and set up MMC business group, which was in charge of Ali partner Dai Shan. Alibaba MMC claims to invest "no upper limit" to upgrade 6 million husband and wife stores in China. From husband and wife stores to regional brand supermarkets, Ali's urban retail empowerment businesses have now entered the deep water area.

However, different from the group buyers pushing goods in the community and adopting the fission dumping mode of the head of the team, Ali realized the mode of "distribution of goods and people" in both the digital upgrading of small stores and the online marketing of supermarkets.

"In addition, we are accelerating, not only focusing on the format of Shangchao, but also making more attempts and deduction." Zhou Tianmu disclosed that he hoped that the targeted business, convenience store business and vertical brand monopoly business could be granted to these industries as soon as possible in the second half of the year.

Industry insiders point out that intra city retail is essentially an iteration of Alibaba's retail capability upgrading based on its own supply chain, logistics, capital and brand influence. At the same time, the further application of big data and the iteration of retail infrastructure have brought about the re upgrading of new retail cost, efficiency and experience. The new balance of competition pattern still needs time to establish.