Community group buying is essentially a wholesale-plus-retail model, where each group leader is essentially a 'small shop owner.' Can group leaders be retained through persuasion? All community group buying platforms always try to win over group leaders because user assets are in their hands. Despite various methods to attract group leaders, as buyers for community residents, they consider more how to provide better products for their customers from a business development perspective. Therefore, two problems arise: On one hand, if a group leader operates well, they will negotiate with the platform; on the other hand, as competitors enter and aggressively poach, group leader loyalty drops sharply. Platforms trying to lock in group leaders are challenging human nature and the essence of business. To understand why group leaders cannot be retained, consider the over 2 million secondary distributors in the FMCG industry. Who do secondary distributors serve? They serve small shop owners, not brand owners. Essentially, secondary distributors are shared warehouses for small shops, helping with aggregation, inventory, financing, and logistics. Brand owners and distributors have never succeeded in winning over secondary distributors exclusively, given the 5.2 million mom-and-pop shops in China. Tang Guangliang, CEO of Kaola Select, believes: The relationship between platforms and group leaders is very similar to that between brand owners and distributors, or between China and the U.S.—interdependent and mutually selective. Group leaders will not be loyal to any platform, but they will be loyal to the industry, especially convenience stores. No platform can hold group leaders hostage; their disloyalty is not due to platform incompetence. Ultimately, it comes down to product, service, and supply chain efficiency If platforms cannot lock in group leaders, a second problem arises: platforms cannot accumulate user assets or build user account systems. Without user asset accumulation, it's hard to migrate users from WeChat groups to apps. If migration fails, the group buying model struggles to build barriers, leading to long-term competition. In a prolonged competitive environment, the same products compete on price, the same price on quality, the same quality on service, and the same service on supply chain. Eventually, it becomes a supply chain business, competing on product, service, and supply chain efficiency. Self-operated community group buying has scale boundaries Currently, community group buying focuses mainly on fresh produce, but most fresh produce is non-standardized or hard to standardize. This makes supply chain management very difficult. Companies like Meicai succeed because they sell vegetables to restaurant kitchens, not directly to consumers, so standardization requirements are lower. Community group buying platforms selling to consumers must ensure quality control, and because they need to constantly introduce new products for consumer experience, procurement, quality control, processes, management, logistics, and delivery are extremely complex. As scale expands, supply chain management difficulty increases exponentially. If management lags, backend costs spiral out of control, making the business diseconomies of scale. Achieving profitable scale is very difficult for group buying platforms. Therefore, self-operation has scale boundaries, leading to diseconomies of scale. Pure platform model is not viable Fresh produce directly facing consumers makes it nearly impossible to build a mega-scale 2C business; only local strength or density is possible. Some might argue: If so, why not avoid self-operation and be a pure platform, letting capable procurement and delivery service providers handle the backend, while focusing on resource aggregation? Then problems arise: As SKUs expand infinitely, once a critical point is reached, product quality control may fail; on the C-end, there's already the massive platform Taobao. Looking at current operations, platforms mainly use hit products to quickly drive traffic and activate users; on the other hand, a small number of SKUs effectively controls supply chain management difficulty. Tang Guangliang, CEO of Kaola Select, believes: Community group buying must select single items from vast categories, keeping SKUs within 500; otherwise, it's not group buying. The focus is on single-item volume explosion. (Fresh produce needs even fewer items.) Additionally, Wang Yidong of Meipinshu believes: Although community group buying SKUs can expand infinitely, it doesn't mean massive SKUs become a competitive advantage. Selection should be tailored to each group, from ultra-low-price hits, novel items, to high-quality, high-margin products. Daily selections must meet user needs and local life scenarios. The selection logic is not B2B but 'steward logic.' Localized platforms have low ceilings Regional group buying companies are more profitable than national platforms because they have smaller backends and deeply cultivate local markets, using 'Van Fleet ammunition' for higher user stickiness and service efficiency. However, localized platforms have obvious ceilings: resources, capital, and talent are limited locally, making significant scale-up difficult. Regional platform owners often think from a business perspective, rarely making strategic investments. Thus, they struggle to gain scale procurement price advantages, and deeper, broader traffic monetization is hard. Current hidden dangers in community group buying Community group buying expert Ren Xiaodong identifies three hidden dangers: 1. Traffic logic vs. value logic: Currently, under capital pressure, companies push GMV, many inflate orders, focusing on easy-volume vegetables and fruits—this is quenching thirst with poison, still traffic logic. Can community group buying return to value logic, operate each city well, differentiate product selection based on community needs, and increase average order value? 2. Rapid expansion vs. organizational building: Head platforms are expanding rapidly, hiring many new staff. Reports indicate many newcomers lack knowledge of product selection and community operations, are clueless when dealing with suppliers, and counterfeit goods may enter platforms unnoticed. Like 'radishes washed without cleaning mud,' platforms neglect organizational building. If expansion outpaces organizational capability, control over subsidiaries faces significant risks. 3. Indigestion and acquisition of small platforms: 'Community group buying: he who gets group leaders gets the world.' Some companies use capital to harvest group leader resources, facing departure of founding teams, dual IT systems, cultural clashes, and no significant GMV growth—indigestion. Localized operations + national supply chain is the way out Hu Xiaoyin of Keke Select believes: For community group buying to succeed, it must be both a localized platform and a national brand, ensuring sufficient sales scale for advantages in procurement and consumption. The real model is localized operations combined with a national supply chain. In operations, gene combination is crucial. From Keke Select's experience, combining mothers with micro-business experience and fresh produce categories increases success probability. Regarding group leader control issues, Keke Select separates group leaders from pickup points. This allows multiple group leaders to share a pickup point, building city-wide relationships. Consumers buy in recommendation groups and pick up at nearby points, expanding boundaries and curbing any single group leader's dominance. Extended reading on community group buying series: Tips adopted will pay 400-2000 yuan. China FMCG + Internet Professional New Media Dedicated to FMCG manufacturer transformation and channel digital solutions