On October 23, the 2024 Instant E-commerce Future Business Summit was held in Shanghai. At the event, Ele.me CEO Han Liu stated that over the next three years, Ele.me will firmly adhere to its "1+2" long-term strategy and make strategic investments for merchants. Here, "1" represents Ele.me's commitment to becoming a healthy-growth, consumer-centric food delivery platform, while "2" signifies a focus on building two new tracks: "instant retail with Ele.me characteristics" and "an instant logistics network extended for market value."
What exactly is instant retail with Ele.me characteristics? Hu Qiugen, Senior Vice President of Ele.me and Head of Same-City Retail Business, provided the answer: Ele.me will strategically invest in instant retail, firmly commit to mutual growth with the ecosystem, and resolutely avoid competing with merchants in the supply chain. Within the Alibaba ecosystem, Ele.me will resonate with Taobao, Alipay, Amap, and other platforms to break through the time and space constraints of instant retail, better assist merchants in serving consumers, and create a new paradigm for "time-space" scenario-based operations.
At the same time, at the summit, Ele.me officially released its latest strategic project—the Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store. Through the brand official flagship store, brand merchants will build more efficient brand interaction positions in instant e-commerce operations. Ele.me will also use this to help merchants improve operational efficiency, bring structural growth dividends, and "turn traffic into retention, and increase orders to increase profits."
From the information Ele.me conveyed externally, it is evident that Ele.me places great importance on instant retail. As an observer of the FMCG industry, New Distribution today takes a third-party perspective to interpret the value of the "Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store" for FMCG brands. What does the launch of the Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store truly mean? What specific practical value does it bring to brands, and how can brands seize the platform dividend from Ele.me's strategic investment?
Instant Retail Becomes Key to Driving Brand Growth Clearly, the introduction of the Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store concept marks that instant retail has become a persistent, long-term, and certain consumption habit among mainstream consumers. Consumers have shifted from an initial emergency need for delivery platforms to a stable consumption demand. It can be said that "going to stores, going online, and going home" have now become the three mainstream lifestyles of consumers. I think several sets of data can provide supporting evidence. According to public data from the National Bureau of Statistics, from January to August 2024, the growth rate of instant retail scale reached 26.2%. According to NielsenIQ Retail Research data, the penetration rate of third-party delivery platforms among online shoppers reached 59%. Additionally, instant retail sales accounted for 8% of the modern trade channel (MAT2408).
Behind the scale growth is a change in consumer preferences. Take the trend of smaller family structures as an example. In the NielsenIQ "2024 Online Shopper Survey," the proportion of consumers choosing "replenish immediately at any time, without waiting for discounts" reached 29%, a 9% increase from last year. The purchasing patterns of consumers in smaller family structures have gradually shifted from "one-time large purchases and stockpiling" to "replenish on demand, avoid waste," "buy appropriate 'small packages'," and "replenish immediately at any time." The report shows that in instant retail channels, the sales share of "multi-pack" products such as ambient milk and yogurt is significantly higher than in offline modern trade channels.
Given this, in the face of the definitive trend of instant retail, all brand owners must pay attention. How exactly should they pay attention? I think it cannot be like before, simply using basic operational promotional methods such as discount coupons or gift coupons, but rather treating it as a new business format and a new channel. It can be said that instant retail has now entered the 2.0 stage. For all brands, it must be incorporated into the strategic framework of operations.
It is for this reason that Ele.me, leveraging its position within the Alibaba ecosystem and its advantages of multi-platform resonance with Taobao, Alipay, Amap, and others, creates distinctive instant retail and engages in deep cooperation and co-creation with brands.
Ele.me Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store The Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store launched by Ele.me, I believe, is the optimal carrier for brand merchants to build a D2C position on Ele.me's instant retail platform and conduct deep autonomous operations.
The Value of the Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store to Brands Where is deep autonomous operation specifically reflected? I have summarized three points:
First, autonomous operation, precise matching Second, direct connection with users, precise insight Third, private domain position, precise marketing
Let's interpret them one by one.
First, autonomous operation, precise cognition. What does this mean? The traditional instant retail model is that brands do business through the platform, based on LBS location, linking to offline stores, and consumers enter the store to purchase needed products. The Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store launched by Ele.me: It is equivalent to the platform opening a dedicated retail channel and brand zone for the brand, and the brand has direct operational authority.
Describe a scenario: A consumer opens the Ele.me platform, searches for "milk" or searches for "**brand", and when an official flagship store appears, the consumer's awareness, trust, and even favorability toward the brand are completely different. Of course, this leads to higher purchase conversion rates. Perhaps in terms of the path, from search to browsing, to adding to cart, to payment, to fulfillment and delivery, the path has not changed, but the consumer's perception of the brand has completely changed, leading to better mindshare, more user retention, and ultimately stronger brand repurchase. Mengniu Group's Daily Fresh launched a brand official flagship store on a trial basis in June 2023. After more than a year of operation, Sales General Manager Chen Jiangchun believes that through the official flagship store, the brand can build a private domain position and truly achieve user retention.
For the brand itself, leveraging the platform's resource advantages in regional and other diverse offline channels, it can also use the near-field flagship store to directly help the brand increase channel distribution, stabilize product pricing, and boost sales growth. For example, Nanjing local fresh milk brand Weigang, after cooperating with Ele.me to launch an official flagship store, has successively expanded to multiple cities including Wuhan. With the presence of the official flagship store, more urban consumers have gained greater awareness of this regional fresh milk brand.
With precise matching, let's look at precise insight. Through direct connection with users, the brand official flagship store can directly see when and where users purchased which products. Based on big data aggregation and analysis insights, it can determine what needs my products meet in what scenarios. With accurate demand scenarios, the brand can amplify promotion in the future. In the past, when a consumer bought a bag of chips offline, the brand only knew the consumer had a craving, but did not know who bought it, when, where, whether it was for evening binge-watching or weekend outings, what flavor preferences, or what size preferences. When buying a bag of chips online, although the brand knows who the person is, what flavors and sizes they prefer, it does not know what scenario triggered the need. But through the Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store, the brand can see it at a glance. Through Ele.me's Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store, the matching of supply and demand can be more precise and efficient in both time and space. At this point, the brand needs to precisely identify consumer consumption scenarios. For example, based on platform data insights, targeting specific customer groups, Bright Dairy, in collaboration with Ele.me, launched 185ml Youbei fresh milk tailored for students in Wuhan, achieving a concentrated explosion of single-item orders at the regional official flagship store, also bringing more young consumers to the brand. In the view of Chen Yanfeng, Vice President of Ele.me and Head of Retail Brands and Supermarket Convenience Industry, in the past, many brands without stores lacked direct channels to communicate with consumers, unable to directly connect with consumer needs and precisely identify consumer groups. The official flagship store can achieve direct brand-to-consumer services and simplified circulation channels, improve channel profitability, and bring sustainable growth.
Ele.me Vice President Chen Yanfeng At the meeting, Ele.me revealed plans to open 100,000 official flagship stores within the next three years.
Finally, private domain position, precise marketing. In the past, brand marketing activities were often roughly correct, but if truly quantified, it was difficult. For example, the conversion rate and effectiveness of display fees, end-cap fees, and promotional fees invested in supermarket stores often took a long time to receive feedback. But with the Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store, brands can very intuitively understand how their marketing activities at downstream authorized stores are performing. From clicks and browsing to transaction completion, the entire chain has complete data. Marketing investment is more precise, using data to drive improved brand marketing effectiveness. This is not limited to marketing activities alone; it can also extend to other areas, such as new product launch testing and incubation, and optimization and iteration of existing marketing strategies. "As a platform, we can link time, space, and categories by identifying suitable products, helping brands place them in suitable channels, and reaching suitable consumers, providing brands with consumer operation capabilities in time-space scenarios," introduced Chen Yanfeng, Vice President of Ele.me. "Through market, channel, and user behavior trend changes, we can provide brands with a series of services including positioning target audiences, identifying market opportunities, assisting new product launches, and optimizing marketing strategies." Recently, Ele.me also tailored a scenario-based consumer asset operation model "OAIPL" for brands. This model presents the progressively deepening relationship between consumers and brands at each stage, identifying the scale of the audience the brand can cover, and depicting the audience segmentation from "opportunity → awareness → interest → purchase → loyalty" from far to near.
Ele.me Consumer Asset Operation Model "OAIPL" From a marketing perspective, this model can help brands find potential users who have supply but have not been reached before, and through scenario insights, combined with dimensions such as time, space, and category, expand the user pool for core and incremental scenarios, achieving effective accumulation of consumer assets; provide broader traffic operations covering both inside and outside the platform, as well as intelligent tagging and selection mechanisms, effectively improving the activity and purchase frequency of core users.
Building a private domain position, autonomous and flexible operation, brands can directly connect with consumers based on their own strategic marketing needs. For FMCG brands, this can truly achieve a consumer-centric business strategy.
Summary After reading the above interpretation, for brands, I think the value is already very clear. Additionally, with 100,000 official flagship stores within three years, Ele.me's firm strategic investment in instant retail is undoubtedly a huge dividend. Instant retail breaks the limitations of time and space. At the same time, with the support of Ele.me's Near-field Brand Official Flagship Store and direct connection with consumers, brands can explore more new scenarios, new demands, and even new consumer groups, thereby bringing new growth.