With the development of China's economy, the changes in the field of large consumption are accelerating, and the trend of quality of consumer goods is becoming more and more obvious. Structural consumption is changing to service consumption. The upgrading of consumption will bring more opportunities to vertical industries. So many people who want to engage in the retail industry want to know what the current situation of the retail industry is? What changes will the new retail industry bring to the traditional retail industry? This article brings you an analysis of the development trend of the retail industry. Let's have a look.
Current situation of retail industry
2018 is a transition year for the retail industry. In the past two or three decades, China's retail industry has been driven by real estate. As long as real estate operators occupy a good geographical location, consumers will come, which leads to the extensive development of the retail industry.
Online is accelerating its penetration into offline, and the development of mobile payment and other technologies has gradually integrated online and offline retail. The millennials, as the 'Internet aborigines', are becoming the object of retailers. Traditional retailers are trying to use the way of we media operation to establish a membership system, build a mobile mall, increase experiential consumption scenes and other measures to jointly build new consumption scenes.
If we say that the way of offline selection and offline acquisition of goods in traditional retail supermarkets is the era of one-dimensional shopping; In the PC era, the mode of e-commerce online selection and express logistics delivery is the era of two-dimensional shopping; So now the attempt of online and offline integrated shopping is an exploration of a new dimension.
Structural opportunities
From the perspective of foreign models, Japanese retailers are used to subdividing consumer groups, and different stores have specific consumer groups; British retailers will create unique retail stores according to different scenarios. From the domestic model, in the past few years, physical stores have been greatly impacted by online retail, and the e-commerce model has been familiar and accepted by consumers.
Online mode has many advantages, but due to the imperfect scene and the instability of service quality, it is often unable to provide consumers with a satisfactory user experience; Due to the limitations of operation time and space, the offline mode can not meet the needs of consumers to shop anytime and anywhere, and the relative operation cost is high.
If online and offline are operated separately, it does not meet the internal needs of consumption upgrading in essence. Therefore, with the disappearance of online demographic dividend, online and offline integration has become an irresistible trend. Consumption upgrading is both an opportunity and a challenge for retail entities. With the demand side becoming more and more difficult to meet, retail entities have spent more attention on commodity presentation, shopping experience and services, and gradually formed new characteristics. Specifically:
① Retail channels are facing changes, and offline small and beautiful formats are gradually entering the mainstream
The demographic dividend of e-commerce is gradually disappearing, it is difficult to have new development space, and its competition for users begins to shift offline. At the same time, with the saturation of large stores, traditional hypermarkets encounter growth bottlenecks, and innovative retail are transforming to miniaturization. Reducing the operating area is one aspect, accompanied by the reduction of SKU.
Convenience stores have become the first offline battlefield to be detonated due to their low investment cost, short store maturity cycle, higher user viscosity and a wide variety of formats.
The data show that the penetration rate of convenience stores has increased by 38% by 2017, which is 3% higher than that of online shopping. Consumers' high demand for convenience shows an upward trend, and their consumption will be further transferred from large stores and e-commerce to small convenience stores.
With the characteristics of dense outlets and close to consumers, convenience stores can be regarded as an excellent scene for online and offline links. At the same time, the characteristics of 'small' make its business model more flexible. Many retail enterprises are willing to choose convenience stores as their test ground for new models and technologies.
The huge growth potential and unlimited imagination combined with the Internet make people inside and outside the convenience store restless. If the upsurge of convenience stores only stayed within the industry a few years ago, in the past year, the fire has burned outside the industry. The Internet, capital and even real estate developers have begun to covet convenience stores and want to take a share.
② With the rise of self-service shopping, the pain points in the field of unmanned retail need to be solved
Since 2017, with the rise of new retail concepts, the substantial growth of rent and labor costs and the increasing maturity of mobile payment and other technical means, unmanned retail has gradually sprung up. From unmanned convenience stores to unmanned shelves, not only a large number of entrants, but also won the favor of capital. At present, the three main forms of unmanned retail - unmanned convenience stores, self-service vending machines and convenience shelves have giants into the layout, and more entrepreneurial rookies have emerged.
Data show that as of September this year, at least 16 unmanned shelves have received investment, with the highest reaching 330 million yuan and the total financing of more than 2.5 billion yuan.
Behind the tuyere, unmanned retail provides consumers with a new shopping experience. Compared with traditional retail, the advantages of unmanned retail are mainly reflected in large-scale data application, operation efficiency, automation, IP, etc. The advantage is that there is no shopping guide, no settlement, automatic identification and take it and go, which is not only efficiency, but also the fun brought by technological change.
However, at this stage, the technical barrier of unmanned retail has not been completely broken through. At present, the mainstream model still relies on the code scanning scheme of the Internet of things and the Internet, or the scheme of 'online and offline integration + logistics', without realizing intelligent unmanned.
In addition, unmanned retail also puts forward higher requirements for the logistics distribution system, and it also needs the construction of a big credit system with data sharing and clear punishment.
③ Service consumption increased, and retail + catering brought new growth points
In recent years, the proportion of service consumption has increased. The data show that, taking Beijing as an example, in 2017, the zero amount of Beijing society accounted for 55% of the total consumption, while the service consumption accounted for 45% of the total consumption. At the same time, the increase of service consumption was 3.6 percentage points higher than that of commodity consumption, and the service consumption accounted for almost half of the total consumption.
Under the pressure of emerging economic models such as e-commerce and overseas shopping, the proportion of experience formats such as catering, entertainment and educational services in shopping centers is becoming higher and higher. The retail proportion of some projects has decreased from 70% in the past to 50% or even lower. Some commercial projects have no clothing brands except supermarkets, catering and daily groceries, which are jokingly called food and entertainment centers.
In contrast, in the field of convenience stores with increasing popularity, fresh food such as Kanto cooking and steamed stuffed buns are also star commodities, and 60% - 70% of consumers entering the store will buy fresh food.
With the advent of the focus era, personalization, customization and optimization have become the direction.
In the past, suppliers only needed to produce unified products and sell them to all consumers. Now the trend is that suppliers will receive personalized demand orders from consumers before production, and then produce different types of products according to the orders.
Reducing the time cost for consumers to choose goods and enjoy services is consumption upgrading. The opportunity of retailing lies in whether it can save consumers more money and time. Giving consumers the same quality products without brand premium at a lower price is a model of the primary stage of consumption upgrading.