---
title: "Group Wholesale: The Rebirth and Reconstruction of Community E-commerce"
description: "Community e-commerce is severely involuted, with major platforms trapped in a prisoner's dilemma. The 'group wholesale' (团批) model, driven by团长's private domain traffic and differentiated products, offers a path to rebirth by reshaping the supply chain and achieving BC integration."
author: "任小东"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2021-06-04"
language: "en"
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---

# Group Wholesale: The Rebirth and Reconstruction of Community E-commerce

> Community e-commerce is severely involuted, with major platforms trapped in a prisoner's dilemma. The 'group wholesale' (团批) model, driven by团长's private domain traffic and differentiated products, offers a path to rebirth by reshaping the supply chain and achieving BC integration.

**-01-**
**Community E-commerce Track Involution** Community e-commerce is currently severely involuted. According to rumors, the heads of the three major community e-commerce platforms have all "changed posts," which is a different signal. Since last year, capital has been like an aphrodisiac, making giants compete in subsidies, breaking large orders into small ones, competing in salary multiples to poach teams, competing in who has worse operations, who doesn't follow basic business principles, and whose procurement and sales are more corrupt.
Involution, severe involution! Without prior agreement, the giants have fallen into a prisoner's dilemma, and the group leaders (团长) have been dragged into a mess. **The giants' de-group-leaderization, turning group leaders into pickup points, has changed group leaders from core marketing roles to fulfillment roles, making them dispensable, with commissions reduced from 13-15% to 3-5%.**
What does such involution bring? **
For consumers, they repeatedly receive counterfeit goods, short weights, mismatched products, and inferior substitutes.
For distributors, they are tricked into various front warehouses and central warehouses, increasing transaction links and costs. The deceived are forced to accept only "digital returns" without actual returns. They compete to offer lower supply prices, accept longer payment terms, and provide higher kickbacks to platform procurement.
Community e-commerce, an advanced business model, has been involuted into a model where brand owners block it, platforms don't make money, consumer complaints grow, group leaders are marginalized, and platforms are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma.
**It's like four people playing mahjong, and three are cheating. What do you do? Only flip the table and start over!**

**-02-**
**The Three Musketeers** On May 28, at the community e-commerce theme conference in Changsha, the leading platforms surprisingly didn't attend, while some regional community group buying platforms shone.
For example, Changsha Cai Shilong's Zhihua Zhiguo, Zhengzhou Wang Shouren's Youjing Youtian, Daqing Lao Lu's Jiubaijie, and Henan Li Bingyuan's Youle Pi brought the latest practices of the group wholesale model, giving everyone a fresh perspective.
Simple understanding of "group wholesale" (团批): **Using the group leader's private domain traffic and personal IP as the entry point, adopting a group buying model, centered on high-reputation, high-margin differentiated products, with density in a city or province, and starting with multi-city alliances and joint operations as the scale.**
**A multi-role interactive model where brand owners, platforms, group leaders, consumers, industry product experts, KOLs, etc., participate in product R&D co-creation, packaging co-creation, and co-create specifications, pricing, promotions, media publicity, selling points, copywriting, and fulfillment.**
**Using the demand chain to force supply chain innovation and revolution, moving from separation of production and sales to integration of production, supply, and sales, achieving two-way drive of the production-sales link through F2B2Bc community commerce (as Professor Bao Zheng said), thereby reducing full-link marketing costs, improving full-link marketing efficiency, and enhancing full-link marketing experience.**
In a sense, this is a Chinese practice of DTC brand building marketing channels. From this perspective, the group brand is no longer based on channel brand but a DTC brand based on consumer co-creation, channel co-creation, and BC integration.
This definition was given by Ren Xiaodong, chief consultant of Mofang Yunxiao Consulting, to a group wholesale client, and was highly recognized by the client.
**Group wholesale turns previous deep distribution from "winning at the terminal" to "winning at the group leader," and finds a win-win approach for production, supply, and sales.** Each link has reasonable profits, stabilizes the price system, achieves efficient shipment, can promote new products, and combines high-value sales with bestsellers.
Regional community group buying platforms achieve rebirth by downgrading their platform identity to modules and industry connectors, and their business model becomes assisting brand owners and third-party warehousing and distribution to co-create intelligent distribution networks and efficiently distribute innovative products through short links.
This is a model different from the giants' total cost leadership (actually total subsidy leadership); it's a full-link differentiation business model. **Return to the original intention, provide warm community services.** In a way, whether group wholesale or group alliance, the essence is supply chain differentiation + BC integration. I recall in 2017, I had in-depth communication with Zhou Yingjie, CEO of Xingsheng Youxuan, and COO Liu Huiyu. They answered me: **"The essence of community e-commerce is a supply chain revolution!"**
Five years have passed, and now I recall these words and our discussions about community e-commerce scenarios vividly. **Capital, sometimes, is really not a good thing.** Many community e-commerce platforms, after being hit by capital, have become traffic-centric. Alas!

**-03-**
**The Environment for Group Wholesale**
**Opportunity 1:**
**The competition and subsidy wars among leading community group buying companies deviate from user value and group leader value. Group leaders are reduced to traffic entrances, and users do not enjoy high-quality, trustworthy product services.**
**From the user's perspective,** they have accepted the habit of group buying, but different user segments are dissatisfied with the products offered. Users continuously seek high-quality, story-driven, cost-effective products, but large platforms cannot attend to these needs.
**From the group leader's perspective,** high commissions rely on high product margins, but the current fresh produce business cannot support high margins. Once platform subsidies are removed, the significance and value of group leader operations will not be guaranteed.
**Opportunity 2:**
**Group leaders are increasingly independent, professional, and specialized, becoming infrastructure for social marketing.**
**How to incorporate, utilize, and integrate this independent force, turning traffic into retention, and retention into continuous operation of user mindshare, thereby enabling the rapid rise of new consumer brands and customized products in this channel, is a new direction.**
**Opportunity 3:**
Various internet tools, accounts, and operational methods give group leaders the attributes of "human-store integration" as human apps, enabling retail, wholesale, distribution, promotion, and seeding, thus making compound profitability possible for platforms.
**Opportunity 4:**
Analysis of industry supply chain cooperation shows that many good products and brands cannot scale through mainstream community group buying platforms. They hope to improve the efficiency and experience of the entire supply chain through deep binding, marketing co-creation, and C2B2F models, using the demand chain to drive supply chain efficiency and experience. They urgently need to bypass multi-level intermediaries and cooperate directly with platforms to drive sales growth.
**Opportunity 5:**
The maturity of fresh produce and full-temperature cold chain warehousing and distribution networks has made independent third-party cooperation possible and will soon become industry infrastructure.

**-04-**
**Strategic Vision for Group Wholesale**
**1. Group wholesale, when done big, is redoing the original B2B e-commerce.** Upstream, co-create with manufacturers; downstream, provide new product assortment solutions; in the middle, have regional liaison and co-creation mechanisms.
**2.** Return to the original intention of community group buying and the original Pinhaohuo function, break down platform functions, and build an online-offline production-consumption integrated community commerce approach from the perspective of R&D, production, supply, sales, and consumption integration.
Respect user value, redo the community group buying business, move from red ocean competition to blue ocean competition, compete in full-industry-chain supply-demand efficiency and full-value-chain marketing efficiency, and achieve total cost leadership through short-link DTC models.
But must leave reasonable profit margins for partners at each node, thereby re-igniting group leaders' uprising, improving distribution efficiency, enhancing platform value, and achieving bestseller, long-term sales, and high-value sales centered on large SKUs.
**3. Group wholesale must resolutely not touch standard products or disrupt their price system.** Provide an efficient marketing and distribution system for white-label products, new consumer brands, and source goods, achieving BC integration in one step. Such a short link requires careful planning of the entire price system and product line.
**4. Group wholesale still depends on regional density and group leader fulfillment. Sparse distribution points determine population penetration and low-cost fulfillment. If fulfillment costs exceed 3.5%-5.5%, it indicates insufficient density.**
**5. Currently, 80% of the 2 million group leaders nationwide are "fake group leaders."**
These group leaders, who came in for subsidies, wool pulling, and pickup points, are not core group leaders for group wholesale. Core group leaders must have IP attributes, fan bases, operational strategies, service and business awareness—independent, professional, and specialized group leaders.
**6. Under the overall DTC brand marketing pattern of brand owners, consider regional density distribution and deep distribution models.**
From the perspective of deep distribution, group wholesale is vibrant and full of life; this is a true marketing channel revolution. The three basic criteria for such a revolution remain: mindshare relevance (awareness, recognition, purchase), purchase convenience (social group buying, community group buying, big single product breakthrough), and fulfillment stability (warehousing, service, product selection).
**7. The group wholesale model, in the early stage, is channel alliance and collective procurement; in the mid-term, it's building a production-supply-marketing highway and joint marketing; in the long term, it's an incubator for marketing big single products, a bomb-making bureau.** It uses demand to trigger, stimulate, and support a strong supply chain, ultimately improving industry efficiency.
Therefore, **in the early stage, it should be dominated by strong channel sales companies, with the scale to support a 10-20 billion yuan market.**
**In the mid-term, align with brothers who share values and career views, integrate through equity, and achieve two-way binding of channels and brands through co-creation mechanisms of industry resource companies, industry operation companies, channel distribution companies, and third-party supporting companies, sharing money, responsibilities, and tasks.**
**In the long term, achieve secondary monetization through capital markets.**
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**Invite you to the New Distribution~Group Wholesale Exchange Group**


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