---
title: "Instant Retail: The 'New Elevator' for Convenience Stores"
description: "In March, property manager Lao Feng noticed changes at his community's convenience store. Despite its remote location and sluggish business, the store now sees a steady stream of delivery riders and more frequent supply deliveries. After talking with the owner, Lao Feng learned the store had added an online sales channel through food delivery platforms, effectively expanding its reach to 3-5 kilometers. This shift reflects a broader trend where convenience stores are embracing instant retail to drive growth."
author: "语叔"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2023-05-16"
language: "en"
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# Instant Retail: The 'New Elevator' for Convenience Stores

> In March, property manager Lao Feng noticed changes at his community's convenience store. Despite its remote location and sluggish business, the store now sees a steady stream of delivery riders and more frequent supply deliveries. After talking with the owner, Lao Feng learned the store had added an online sales channel through food delivery platforms, effectively expanding its reach to 3-5 kilometers. This shift reflects a broader trend where convenience stores are embracing instant retail to drive growth.

In March, property manager Lao Feng noticed changes at the convenience store in his community. Due to the community's remote location, aside from serving local residents, the store's daily business was mostly sluggish outside of commuting hours. In fact, in the second half of last year, the store's operator had even proposed suspending operations due to potential rent increases. However, recently Lao Feng observed that the operator no longer mentioned closure; instead, a growing number of delivery riders were coming and going daily. Crucially, the store's supply truck deliveries increased to nearly once a day, compared to last year when, except for daily perishables, the store often only needed restocking twice a week at most. This piqued Lao Feng's curiosity, as he had accompanied the manager in negotiations with the store operator last year. After speaking with the store owner, Lao Feng discovered that the store had added a new sales channel—delivery platforms. This "second location" online meant the store's physical location was no longer a hindrance, allowing it to sell products to customers 3-5 kilometers away. One storefront, two business models—this is a microcosm of daily operations for many convenience stores. In recent years, the convenience store + delivery model has become increasingly popular, known professionally as a facet of "instant retail." From large chains like 7-Eleven, Lawson, FamilyMart, and Meiyijia, to regional stores like Shanxi Tangjiu, Hunan Xinjiayi, and Guangdong Tianfu, instant retail is becoming a powerful tool for convenience stores to expand their incremental business. This article explores why so many convenience stores are choosing to integrate with delivery systems and how instant retail provides a path to growth.

**New Anxieties for Convenience Stores**
Strictly speaking, since 2020, convenience stores have entered a peak period of development. During the pandemic, many stores benefited from their grasp of nearby consumer traffic and special policies, as community closures and dynamic controls made them vital channels for resource procurement. This year, as life returns to normal and people move around more, consumption has spread across the city, unlike the pandemic era when shopping was confined to home. While this is positive for the overall business environment, it has also pressured convenience store performance by reducing the effective consumer base and lowering revenue. On the other hand, more young people are unwilling to wait for e-commerce deliveries. They grew up in the era of "order online, deliver in 30 minutes," and as this consumption pattern shifts from meals to everything, many store owners are finding success in instant retail. Xu Hui, owner of a convenience store outside Beijing's Fifth Ring Road, believes that convenience stores must combine with delivery to survive. "Once this consumption behavior becomes a habit, I realized I couldn't just sit and wait for customers to come to me." However, she also notes that many stores see little effect from joining delivery platforms because operators still follow traditional retail thinking and fail to recognize that the incremental market corresponds to entirely new consumption scenarios and habits. Why is one storefront two business models? The lack of understanding of new business models is the biggest anxiety for convenience store operators today.

**Seeking New Business Strategies**
7-Eleven founder Toshifumi Suzuki once said that a convenience store cannot be called convenient if it only has a good location and offers products. Only by shifting customer demand from "products" to "services" can breakthroughs be achieved. In the service dimension, chain convenience stores have been meticulous. As early as the 1980s, Japanese giant 7-Eleven defined itself as the "refrigerator at the customer's doorstep." To push service to the extreme, new players are leveraging instant retail to tap into young users who want to "move the refrigerator even closer to home." Here are some lessons from those who have experience in improving services and "going online":

1) **Deeply understand the "new customers" from online, because these incremental orders come from entirely different consumption scenarios and needs.** The same bottle of water: buying it on the street when thirsty is traditional thinking; but at night, when you're home and don't want to go out, don't want to carry water upstairs, aren't sure if the store is open, or can't go offline for some reason—that's another mindset, corresponding to instant retail scenarios.

2) **Product variety is a big plus, but for community stores, precise selection is sometimes more important.** This Mid-Autumn Festival, a small store in Hangzhou's best-selling items were not mooncakes but mooncake syrup and trays—the owner noticed residents' urge to make mooncakes at home and order online, something large supermarkets couldn't react to in time. A pet store in Wuhan, seeing a short video trend, stocked up on the product the next day, offering nearby residents fast delivery and even dog bathing services—something ordinary convenience stores can't do.

3) **Adjust marketing strategies, appropriately discount traffic-driving items, ensure most orders are profitable, and the overall business will be profitable.** In an interview, a traditional store owner reviewed operations by counting sales, never selling at a loss. His friend, a new-style store owner using instant retail, calculates by orders, aiming to increase average order value rather than per-item profit. He says it's now common for supermarkets and convenience stores to join online platforms, and to stay competitive, "0.1 yuan traffic items" and "9.9 yuan minimum order" are standard.

**Why Instant Retail?**
So, what exactly is instant retail? "Local stores plus instant delivery are the two core elements of instant retail," as defined by CCTV in a nearly ten-minute special report last August. For convenience stores, it's simply a store + delivery model. As an all-weather, all-channel business, instant retail activates nighttime consumption, meeting residents' needs during off-peak hours (10 PM to 8 AM). Spatially, it expands a store's reach from 1 kilometer to 5 kilometers, broadening the customer base. According to research by Dongwu Securities and China Merchants Securities, instant retail consumers have strong purchase intent, with conversion rates (15%-20%) higher than traditional e-commerce small stores (5%-10%), meaning higher sales conversion and increased revenue and profit for merchants. Based on these advantages, instant retail has become a key direction in the retail industry. Meituan Research Institute data also shows that instant retail generates an average revenue increase of about 32.8% per store, indicating a significant incremental boost to overall consumption and effectively activating local demand. Therefore, **instant retail is not a replacement for convenience stores but an expansion of their business, helping them solve current pain points and anxieties.**

**Do Online and Offline Conflict?**
Many operators think that going online means e-commerce, which inevitably squeezes offline sales. This is because in retail history, online and offline have often been parallel lines that don't intersect and compress each other's space, as e-commerce shifted consumption from offline to online, obscuring local, fragmented, and long-tail demand. **Instant retail, for the first time, fully connects offline and online, allowing offline convenience stores to become one of the biggest beneficiaries of change.** A good example is the cooperation between Lawson and Meituan. Previously, convenience stores were limited by geography, with a radius of no more than 1 kilometer, and time constraints of peak and off-peak hours. Through instant retail platforms, stores can break these limits, forming a service network with broad coverage and flexible hours, even receiving orders late at night. Ryohei Yoshida, General Manager of Lawson China Business Promotion Headquarters, said in a media interview that sales generated by platforms like Meituan account for 10% of Lawson's total store sales, exceeding the industry average of 7% for chain convenience stores. In regions like Sichuan and Chongqing, due to strong weekend promotions, this share can reach around 15%. Currently, the overlap between Lawson's online and offline consumers is less than 10%, and the two groups show significant differences in purchase volume, with online average order value more than double that of offline—in other words, online orders are largely incremental, strongly boosting Lawson's performance. Wu Teng, Vice President of Hebei 36524 Convenience Store, stated that instant retail is a source of new orders and new customers. "The most extreme case: on a street in Shijiazhuang with 7 stores, the nearest order was placed just 30 meters across the road, with delivery distance under 100 meters. That order was for iced drinks and snacks. Without instant retail, that order definitely wouldn't have been ours." **Instant retail precisely meets users' needs for products and services anytime, anywhere, and this means that user value must be treated as a core strategy for enterprises to thrive in the current environment. After all, as enterprises shift from incremental to stock markets, convenience stores can only create new value by deeply understanding these online 'new customers,' avoiding involution and zero-sum competition.** A report by Accenture, "Focusing on China's Post-95s Consumer Group," shows that younger consumers prioritize "speed," with over 50% of post-95s wanting same-day delivery, making instant retail habits increasingly common. Economic principles tell us that success comes from understanding consumer psychology and needs—the foundation of customer value theory. And to understand customer needs, user-centric thinking must be placed at the core of strategy. This is the most important significance of instant retail for convenience store transformation.

**Conclusion**
Instant retail feeds online traffic back to offline physical retail, anchoring incremental consumption locally. In fact, instant retail is closer to the operational logic of physical retail than the traffic-first mainstream internet business model. If we distill it to methodology, the path to incremental growth is simply: respect "nearby." In other words, decentralize and open boundaries. On one hand, capture the trend of consumers "returning to the neighborhood" and meet their immediate needs with better and faster service. On the other hand, use a honeycomb network to maximize benefits for every community store operator in the city. Only then can value symbiosis be achieved, and local business ecosystems thrive together.

*Note: Images in the article are from Shetu.com, under the VRF agreement.*


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