---
title: "Three Key Factors: Why Waima Wine Delivery Attracts Entrepreneurs"
description: "Meituan's Waima Wine Delivery, piloted in June 2021, now covers over 40 cities across six provinces and has opened more than 400 stores nationwide. In 2023, its transaction volume grew 600% year-on-year. Behind this impressive data, New Distribution believes the core question is: why has Waima been able to open so many stores and achieve such rapid growth? The answer may be seen from Waima's partner merchants."
author: "周群"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2024-03-26"
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# Three Key Factors: Why Waima Wine Delivery Attracts Entrepreneurs

> Meituan's Waima Wine Delivery, piloted in June 2021, now covers over 40 cities across six provinces and has opened more than 400 stores nationwide. In 2023, its transaction volume grew 600% year-on-year. Behind this impressive data, New Distribution believes the core question is: why has Waima been able to open so many stores and achieve such rapid growth? The answer may be seen from Waima's partner merchants.

Meituan's Waima Wine Delivery was piloted in June 2021 and has now covered more than 40 cities across six provinces including Guangdong, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Chongqing, Beijing, and Hunan, with over 400 stores nationwide. In 2023, transaction volume grew 600% year-on-year.
Behind the impressive data, New Distribution believes the core question to consider is: **Why has Waima been able to open so many stores and achieve such rapid growth?**
The answer to this question may be seen from Waima's partner merchants.
There are two typical partner merchant cases: one is Guangzhou Shuntong Technology, which opened its first store in October 2022 and now has 26 stores with annual GMV of 40 million yuan; the other is the Yingde store in Qingyuan City, Guangdong Province, which achieved daily GMV of over 10,000 yuan within six months of launch.
This article explores the underlying logic of Waima's growth from the perspective of two Waima partner merchants, through their thinking and practice.
******Trillion-Yuan Wine Market**
**Instant Retail Remains a Blue Ocean**
In the FMCG market, alcoholic beverages, especially high-proof spirits, still rely on traditional channels, with offline sales dominating and online penetration relatively low.
However, with the rise of instant retail, the wine sales landscape is gradually changing. In recent years, instant retail for alcoholic beverages has developed particularly rapidly.
Why has instant retail for alcoholic beverages risen quickly?
Chen Weifeng, Chairman of Guangzhou Shuntong Technology, mentioned that the wine market itself is huge, nearly 1.4 trillion yuan in scale, with online sales accounting for less than 10%, and further segmented to instant retail accounting for about 1.3%.
From a track perspective, the trillion-yuan wine market itself is a good track, and instant retail for alcoholic beverages has emerged as a high-growth sector, making it a blue ocean market.
Some friends may wonder: B2C e-commerce has developed for over a decade, yet online wine sales remain low. Can instant retail really succeed in wine?
To analyze this, we need to look at wine consumption scenarios. In the past, the low online share of wine was mainly due to consumption scenarios being offline, such as business banquets, casual gatherings with friends, etc.
The characteristic of these consumption scenarios is **immediacy**. Consumers, especially younger ones, need their demands met quickly; they want to buy and drink immediately. These demands are "satisfied or disappear." Meeting these needs hinges on two points: **timely fulfillment response and efficient supply.**
In most cases, consumers are only satisfied on the first point. For example, when dining at a restaurant, they can only buy in-store or at a convenience store. Even if the in-store products are not what consumers prefer, they have no other choice. These stores that can respond quickly often have limited product selection, with a very low proportion of alcoholic beverages. Specialized liquor stores, on the other hand, struggle to achieve quick response.
Traditional e-commerce also has obvious drawbacks: it can efficiently supply, but it struggles with fulfillment efficiency. The fastest traditional e-commerce requires half-day delivery, and often by the time the wine arrives, the consumption scenario is gone.
Instant retail, however, effectively **solves the problems of fulfillment efficiency and product supply** to meet wine consumption scenarios. Taking Waima Wine Delivery as an example, on one hand, it recruits its own employees for delivery, eliminating the time for riders to reach the merchant, shortening delivery time, and solving fulfillment efficiency; on the other hand, it uses a front-warehouse model to solve product supply.
Therefore, whether from the track scale or the perspective of consumer supply-demand matching, instant retail for alcoholic beverages is a blue ocean market with huge potential opportunities.
**********Many Instant Retail Platforms for Wine**
**Why Does Waima Win Favor?**
In the instant retail track for alcoholic beverages, there are many competitors. For entrepreneurs, there are many choices for opening stores.
So why did these two merchants choose Waima?
From the merchant's perspective, the key factors in choosing a platform are:
>   1. **Profitability**
>
>   2. **Sustainability**
>
>   3. **Strong Support**
>
>
**First, profitability.** Alcoholic beverages are a high-margin category. For merchants, product profit is not a concern; as long as there are stable orders and sales velocity, making money is not a big issue.
In instant retail for alcoholic beverages, the core of profitability is online order volume. In the instant retail field, Meituan's traffic is absolutely the industry leader; with traffic, there is order conversion.
Chen Weifeng, Chairman of Guangzhou Shuntong Technology, shared at the meeting that Meituan's brand endorsement brings trust traffic. Many consumers have had stable delivery dining experiences on Meituan and know that Meituan's service is reliable, creating natural trust.
**Second, sustainability.** From the partner merchant's perspective, they certainly hope their business not only thrives in the short term but also maintains long-term stability and sustained growth potential.
If one metric measures sustainability, the most direct is repurchase rate. Chen Weifeng shared a case: one user placed over 300 orders a year, almost ordering every day.
Behind the high repurchase rate are **three important guarantees**:
**Product supply.** Waima offers 600-800 SKUs including beer, baijiu, foreign liquor, and red wine, covering low-alcohol drinks and fruit wines preferred by women, tonic wines favored by the elderly, and high-end spirits for business banquets, basically covering the needs of different consumer groups.
Moreover, Waima has a professional procurement team that cooperates with brands, with goods supplied directly by brands, designated distributors, or authorized dealers. Through full-chain digital control, every bottle is guaranteed authentic, giving consumers peace of mind.
**Efficient fulfillment.** As mentioned above, fulfillment efficiency is a key factor in wine consumption. Waima stores are located in small business districts with concentrated user demand, serving consumers within a 3-kilometer radius. The service radius determines that fulfillment difficulty is not too high.
On one hand, with the digital capability of Meituan's Morning Glory system, picking and packing is controlled within 4 minutes. On the other hand, all Waima delivery personnel are in-house employees dedicated to store delivery, eliminating the time for riders to reach the merchant. Orders are delivered immediately, greatly improving delivery efficiency. Waima provides consumers with an ultimate experience of average 15-minute delivery.
**Value-added services.** For example, in summer, consumers need cold beer. Waima ensures 100% ice retention through measures such as guaranteeing delivery time, stocking sufficient ice-keeping materials, and setting up cold storage rooms, even offering refined services like "half iced, half room temperature."
**Finally, strong platform support.** Many entrepreneurs know the business model is good but worry about lacking relevant experience and failing to operate the store.
The Waima team considered this issue at the beginning of the pilot.
Waima has summarized a clear set of store operation ideas and tactics.
From initial site selection and product assortment to later store operations, customer acquisition, and data analysis, the Meituan professional team provides one-stop entrepreneurial guidance. This allows merchants not to worry about daily operations and focus more on future development plans. This is the solid experience accumulated from opening over 400 stores.
Chen Weifeng gave an example: in site selection, a store originally considered a local market rent of 4,000 yuan/month, but the Meituan team helped find a lower-cost rent of 2,000 yuan/month based on calculations. They even provided guidance on how to compare prices and negotiate.
Feng Jianzhong, partner of the Yingde store in Qingyuan City, Guangdong Province, also felt deeply. Feng was originally in the cement transportation industry with no experience in wine or retail, but under Meituan's guidance, he operated the store successfully. After six months online, it reached over 100 orders per day, with an average order value exceeding 100 yuan and daily turnover exceeding 10,000 yuan.
**********For Partners**
**What Are the Key Points in Doing Waima?**
Of course, strong platform support does not mean merchants can be completely hands-off and not take it seriously. As a merchant, after choosing a good platform, what else needs to be done?
Chen Weifeng and Feng Jianzhong shared three key points based on their practical experience.
**First, early promotion.** To trigger consumer purchase behavior, the key is to make them aware of the platform's existence and the store's accessibility.
Guangzhou Shuntong Technology's approach is to build awareness around high-traffic core business districts, using advertising screens, banners, gift giveaways, etc., to maximize exposure to people within a 3-kilometer radius of the store.
The Yingde store in Qingyuan City combines online and offline exposure: online, mobilizing friends and family for WeChat Moments promotion; offline, distributing flyers in crowded areas to drive initial traffic.
**Second, store operations.** Waima provides operational guidance, but the specific implementation is up to the merchant. Online operations require attention; merchants must take it seriously.
For example, fulfillment management: to achieve ultimate delivery efficiency, it is necessary to manage personnel allocation, combining full-time and part-time staff during peak and off-peak seasons, and also manage shelf layout, clearly planning the position of each wine to allow pickers to complete tasks in the shortest time.
**Third, user experience.** Consumer satisfaction leads to high repurchase rates. Alcoholic beverages have social attributes; good user experience can generate proactive word-of-mouth.
Pre-sale experience: respond promptly to consumer questions. After-sale experience: address personalized needs such as cold drinks, bottle openers, sommelier knives, etc.
**Conclusion**
**For traditional FMCG distributors and retailers, the current market is already an "involution" market.** How to maintain core competitiveness in local business and continuously find new growth points is a deep question for distributors, retailers, and entrepreneurs looking to enter the wine industry.
According to statistics from the "2023 Instant Retail Wine White Paper," from 2020 to 2022, the instant retail market saw significant growth in alcoholic beverages. Beer instant retail market size grew 83%, foreign liquor grew 628%, and baijiu grew 554%, far exceeding the overall category growth.
This data is sufficient to illustrate the growth potential of instant retail for alcoholic beverages, and Meituan, as a leader in the instant retail field, has obvious opportunities in this area.
Waima Wine Delivery essentially operates a localized wine business. Its operational capabilities, combined with distributors' and retailers' local product capabilities and customer relationships, can quickly turn this business into a new growth point for distributors and retailers.
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