Since Huang Tengfei discovered and reported on Xiaoxu Daojia in early 2022, within just one year, group stores have experienced budding, advancement, and differentiation. The differentiation is driven on one hand by the incubation, innovation, and fission of track players like local groups, and on the other hand by cross-sector entrants such as fruit stores. Due to differences in team genes, resource endowments, and strategic positioning, group stores have differentiated into numerous sub-schools. Among the emerging forces, chain supermarkets entering group stores, with old players becoming new stars, aim to usher in a second spring. Luoyang Yikelai is precisely the first chain convenience store to do so. Initial Results Founded in 2012, Luoyang Yikelai is positioned as a 24-hour chain convenience store. It currently has over 120 stores in Luoyang, Pingdingshan, and other areas, divided into urban stores (business district stores) and community stores. Among them, there are 40 directly operated stores and 80 franchise stores, with an average store area of 50-60 square meters. It has a 3,000-square-meter warehousing and distribution logistics center, making it the largest chain convenience store in western Henan. In December 2022, Yikelai strategically cooperated with Meilintao to officially enter group stores, positioning itself as a "chain community convenience + group store" model, planning to lay out 200 stores within half a year, mainly through two paths: renovating existing community stores and opening new stores. For Yikelai, it has a core team for convenience store entrepreneurship, with systematic reserves in product selection, warehousing and distribution, site selection, supervision, operations, and store expansion, and strong execution. Laying out group stores also aligns with Yikelai's strategic shift to community stores. Yikelai plans to use group stores as the core model at this stage, deeply cultivating community scenarios. Currently, Yikelai has built 18 group stores, with a single-store user group scale of over 1,800 people, opening 4 products daily, with an average gross margin of about 13%, an order rate as high as 26%, and daily group efficiency reaching 50,000. Innovative Tactics Group stores are a new species integrating community group buying and physical retail, with the genes of physical retail. Therefore, physical retail has a natural foundation for doing group stores in reverse, which is fully reflected in Yikelai. Yikelai's group stores reuse the convenience store system's organization, warehousing and distribution, and supply chain resources, which is the core reason for its rapid results. First, in terms of organizational support, Yikelai's chairman Li Tianxing personally leads, establishing a "Group Store Special Project Team" with five working groups: [1] Headquarters Service Group: Mainly responsible for backend support and project operations, including administration, logistics, group product material production, and group store operation maintenance. [2] Opening Empowerment Group: Mainly responsible for store preheating and opening ground promotion for customer acquisition. [3] Procurement Group: Mainly responsible for product selection, connecting existing product suppliers, and connecting community group buying hit product suppliers. [4] Operations Group: That is, the supervision group, mainly responsible for personnel training, store management, and other work. [5] Distribution Group: Mainly responsible for daily fulfillment and distribution. In warehousing and distribution, it reuses the convenience store system's warehousing and distribution resources. Goods first enter the central warehouse, which completes sorting and distribution, then daily store delivery is completed through its own distribution team. In supply chain, Yikelai fully reuses existing supply chain resources based on combining hit product supply chains from partners like Tuanmeng, achieving online and offline dual product trays and efficient coordination. Currently, since Yikelai has just started group stores, the proportion of direct sourcing from origins and direct supply from manufacturers is relatively low, which is also a direction for future optimization and improvement. In product selection, Yikelai follows the product selection logic of community group buying, viewing the "subtraction" of community convenience store SKU systems from large supermarket SKU systems as the product selection space for community group buying, mainly focusing on fresh products and planned consumer goods. From Yikelai's convenience store perspective, group stores are a supplement and extension of existing community convenience store business, extending from "limited offline shelves" to "unlimited online shelves," upgrading from a fixed product selection strategy to a flexible and agile one, better meeting users' daily needs. Convenience stores satisfy immediate consumption, while group stores satisfy planned consumption. Convenience stores mainly sell in small quantities, while group stores mainly sell in large specifications. Convenience stores have advantages in standard products, while group stores have advantages in non-standard products. In the first phase of Yikelai's group store layout, the main focus is on upgrading and renovating existing community convenience stores. Its existing stores are mainly concentrated in mid-to-high-end communities, basically located in the top three spots at community entrances, which are prime locations for group stores. For future store expansion, based on Yikelai's convenience store system's professional site selection team and its strong leasing capability, it will continue to lay out prime community locations. After selecting a good community store, Yikelai will carry out systematic operations of "violent customer acquisition, seven-day customer locking, and activation and fission." [1] Violent Customer Acquisition: On opening day, Yikelai uses two special-priced fresh products (such as scallions) to open groups, attracting traffic into the group, with the goal of reaching 2,000 people in the store's community group. [2] Seven-Day Customer Locking: Days 2-8 are the customer locking phase. The internet industry believes in the number "7" because people generally form a small habit in seven days. Yikelai will use 4 famous brand products (such as first-tier brand soy sauce), mainly focusing on daily necessities like condiments, offering irresistible high cost-performance hit products at discounted prices (such as 1 yuan per bag of salt, 0.5 yuan special price), guiding users to report and reserve in the group. It is worth noting that while users queue, staff will repeatedly explain to users: "Report and reserve in the group, pick up goods at the store the next day around 5-6 PM after group notification, pay after satisfaction, and if not picked up on time, the goods will be sold normally." [3] Activation and Fission: Starting from day 9, it enters the normalized operation phase, with four group products daily: one special-priced product and three normal gross margin products. If there are special-priced hit products, temporary groups will also be opened. Seizing the First-Mover Advantage Yikelai's entry into community group buying through group stores marks a new breakthrough for chain supermarkets to counter-harvest community group buying. Previously, chain supermarkets also tried to integrate community group buying, but no model that could quickly yield results and be fully rolled out emerged, mainly due to two reasons: On one hand, they did not grasp the key indicators of the underlying logic of supermarket group buying operations. Store group construction should be based on target users, creating effective groups of reasonable scale (generally 2,000-3,000 people). Online and offline are mutually traffic-generating relationships: online mainly for retention and activation, offline mainly for conversion and transactions. On the other hand, they did not master the coordinated online-offline tactics. Traditional customer acquisition tactics often separate acquisition from subsequent actions. Basically, after customer acquisition, there are no subsequent series of actions for locking and activation, nor are they connected with offline business, causing acquisition actions to be superficial and not solve substantive problems, with online communities degenerating into advertising groups. Now, the group store model is gradually becoming the mainstream tactic for group buying innovation, and chain supermarkets have natural advantages for entering group stores, including location advantages, supply chain advantages, professional teams, and so on. Compared with mainstream group stores, Yikelai's group stores inherit their effective tactics and have unique advantages. Specifically, Yikelai has shifted its strategy to "deeply cultivating communities, serving families," continuing the core tactics of "violent customer acquisition, seven-day customer locking, retention and activation," using group reporting for reservations, and adopting the "narrow SKU, wide traffic" operation strategy of opening 2-4 group products daily. In the future, it will also deeply cultivate the region through franchise recruitment and rapid expansion, seizing the first-mover advantage. Yikelai's unique advantages are reflected in five aspects: [1] Model Advantage: Compared with the homogenized involution of mainstream group stores, Yikelai can meet customers' multi-dimensional needs of "immediate consumption + planned consumption" through the "convenience store + group store" dual product tray. In addition, since Yikelai is a directly operated group store, the platform reaches users directly, further reducing intermediate costs. Moreover, due to strong team control, execution efficiency is higher, and stores implement unified service standards. [2] Location Advantage: Compared with mainstream group stores, Yikelai has stronger leasing capability and can select better locations. [3] Brand Advantage: Yikelai has years of reputation and brand accumulation, making it easier to build user trust and word-of-mouth in group stores. [4] Supply Chain Advantage: The convenience store system itself has long-term resource accumulation, making it easier to achieve structural profitability. [5] Expansion Advantage: The convenience store system itself has a complete franchise recruitment system. With the group store model, it can achieve integrated online and offline store operations. Through early model store construction and upgrading existing community stores, it accumulates more beneficial results, making franchise recruitment more credible. Of course, compared with the entrepreneurial store managers of mainstream group stores, Yikelai is also optimizing store manager incentive mechanisms. In the future, in the directly operated store segment, Yikelai plans to allocate 10% of gross margin for store incentives. Since starting group stores in December 2022, Yikelai has set a goal of 200 group stores within half a year, mainly focusing on mid-to-high-end communities. In the future, once the group store model is fully validated and mature, Yikelai will begin comprehensive expansion through franchise recruitment, penetrating more communities in Luoyang until basically covering the entire Luoyang urban area. It will deeply cultivate Luoyang and radiate to the western Henan market. At this stage, Yikelai's core goal is to seize the time window, accelerate layout, seize the first-mover advantage, raise the entry threshold for competitors, and increase their customer acquisition and locking costs. As the saying goes, "first come, first served." Like two armies facing off, the side that occupies the hill first has a "position" advantage; the opposing army's attack is an uphill battle, and to take the hill, the cost and price are extremely high. Specifically, what Yikelai needs to do is become one of the daily choices for community users. In users' language, they will say: "I buy digital products on Taobao because the big platform is reliable; I order groceries and food in the Yikelai group because the quality is good and the price is fair." From Yikelai's perspective, it must do well in every detail of operations, because different customers have different focuses: young users value service and experience, middle-aged and elderly users value quality and cost-performance, and mothers care about timely delivery (so as not to delay cooking). Integrating into users' daily lives and becoming their basic shopping choice will become the first indicator for evaluating group store operation effectiveness. Conclusion: With the lifting of pandemic restrictions, closed communities will almost never reappear. How to recapture traffic has become the core issue for community group buying, which is also the driving force behind various players entering group stores. Teacher Chen Haichao predicts that 2023 will see a new round of the Thousand Group War, with the main battlefield in the group store field. Group stores will also become the main front of the Thousand Group War, promoting the extension of the community group buying front from online to offline, from group leaders to stores. From the perspective of the retail industry, new retail has changed the business logic from "people finding goods" to "goods finding people." In core tactics, it upgrades mass marketing to precision marketing. Group stores change the retail logic from "people finding stores" to "stores finding people." In core tactics, they upgrade the "pre-sale" of community group buying to "reservation." Now it seems, there is a small trend of retail transformation hidden within: retail servitization, changing from selling goods to consumers to serving consumers, making sales come naturally. Yikelai's group store practice is bringing new inspiration to group buying innovation.