Meituan Flash Sale has moved from instant delivery to service upgrade, and launched the “Safe Flash Sale” plan, covering 14 rights and interests of service, delivery and after-sales, uniting with the top 100 brands to improve the consumer experience, meet users’ high requirements for instant retail certainty, and promote the standardization of the industry.
Attentive users can easily find that Meituan Flash Sale not only has seven days of no-reason returns, but also has corresponding service guarantees on the product detail pages under different categories.
Caption: Screenshot of some product protection
For example, beer “will be compensated if it is not frozen”, ice cream “melted must be compensated”, fruit “bad must be compensated” and other flash sales unique services, these services are labeled with seven-day no-reason returns. According to “the more adjectives, the more restrictions”, the refinement of the service shows a flash sale turn: from emphasizing immediacy to taking into account service certainty.
Perhaps in order to roll out the above-mentioned differentiated services, or to establish a complete set of standardized service systems, on May 9, Flash Sale, together with the top 100 brands and physical merchants, jointly launched the first full-process service guarantee plan of instant retail, “Peace of Mind Flash Sale”, involving a total of 14 rights and interests under the three links of service, distribution and after-sales.
As a new shopping platform, flash sales create a faster consumption experience than e-commerce. After this upgrade, it means that Meituan Flash Sale has begun to make efforts in personalized and refined services.
With the acceleration of retail real-time, the consumer market’s awareness of flash sales has gradually spread from health scenarios to all aspects of life, and at this time, flash sales are also exploring new service forms.
01 Flash sale “stacked BUFF”
Ten years ago, a supermarket opened a store on Meituan Takeaway on a whim, inadvertently opening another door to retail, and then with the two-way boost of supply and demand, it finally gave birth to a new species of “flash sale”.
In the past decade, the development of flash sales has been inseparable from takeaway, and the relationship between the two is like railroad tracks to high-speed rail.
B-end product manager’s ability model and learning improvement
The first challenge faced by B-end product managers is how to correctly analyze and diagnose business problems. This is also the most difficult part, product design knowledge is basically not helpful for this part of the work, if you want to do a good job in business analysis and diagnosis, you must have a solid …
View details >
With the continuous improvement of the intra-city distribution network, the performance time from hours to half an hour, infinitely close to the process of “immediate delivery”, flash sales have spread from undertaking immediate needs, such as gift-giving, emergency, travel, etc., to daily consumption, and have gradually become a consumption channel different from traditional e-commerce and offline supermarkets.
Especially this year, traditional e-commerce giants have come down one after another, and after entering instant retail, it has objectively accelerated the migration of users’ consumption behavior from e-commerce to instant retail.
At the same time, flash sales not only create a faster consumption experience than e-commerce, but also build and improve their own service guarantee capabilities in the process of becoming a more deterministic lifestyle for users.
The most important driving force actually comes from demand.
Traditional e-commerce mainly solves the needs of delay and “shopping”, because of the immediacy, the user’s consumption behavior is planned, so the service tolerance is very high. Flash sales mainly undertake immediate demand, and users’ certainty about service is actually much higher than that of e-commerce.
Just imagine such a situation: on Valentine’s Day, a boy who forgets to prepare a gift, if he wants to give his girlfriend a bouquet of flowers, he not only asks for speed, but also has high expectations for freshness and packaging.
There is another complex feature of instant retail services – it needs to work with local merchants and brands to make services and guarantees happen locally.
Classic B2C e-commerce is a tripartite relationship: consumers, platforms, and merchants, while the platform model of flash sales – consumers, platforms, local merchants, and brands, but because it involves offline, it is more complex than traditional e-commerce.
To give a simple example: consumers use Meituan flash sales to place an order for a certain brand of craft beer in a chain supermarket, from pick-up to delivery to after-sales in the three main links, if there is any problem, it will directly involve the chain supermarket as a merchant, and Meituan flash sale as a platform.
Due to the existence of the four-corner relationship, flash sales are inseparable from the support of the brand if they want to improve their services.
“A slap doesn’t make a sound”, the rapid development of instant retail represented by flash sales in recent years has become the third pole after traditional e-commerce and live broadcast e-commerce, which is an incremental market that cannot be missed for brands. What’s more, many brands realize that even if the goods enter the hands of consumers from the end retailer, for consumers, the quality of the service experience is directly linked to the brand.
Because of this, the top 100 brands will cooperate with Meituan flash sales to upgrade to “safe flash sales”. The launch of the Anxin flash sale reflects an upgraded iteration of instant retail.
Every year, users compete for the release of new phones from various brands, which will become the highlight of the flash sale, and this stage allows the brand and the flash sale to jointly complete the construction of instant fulfillment capabilities.
Immediacy is a standardization capability that cannot solve the problem of differentiated attributes of goods. Therefore, another system is needed to solve the problem of commodity differentiation. This is the case with many of the services provided for different products mentioned at the beginning, and the safe flash sale is a system formed on the basis of these services.
02 Set “standards” for service and “heart” for brands
Demand growth is an important driving force for flash sales to complete the shift to fine services.
As of April this year, Meituan’s instant retail daily orders, mainly Meituan flash sales, have exceeded 18 million orders. Different from meals and milk tea coffee, the categories covered by flash sales range from home appliances to sorbets, and the categories are extremely complex.
This has led to flash sales covering many standard products, but instant retail is in a non-standard state due to the lack of service standards. Therefore, Meituan researched and tested the standardized instant retail service system before releasing the “flash sale” brand.
The flash sale is a phased result of past service capacity building explorations, and it is also a set of transparent implementation standards for instant retail.
Up to now, Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo, HP, Dyson, Supor, Philips, Nike, Adidas, and Lego brand official certifications have been launched to ensure that the products come from the brand’s officially certified flash sale stores. And it is linked to the relevant protection of the brand’s official after-sales certification, such as high-priced goods are fake 10 and fake 1 is 4.
Anxin flash sale is a service guarantee system that grows together with instant retail consumption, and its core can be simply summarized as fast, complete and new.
In addition to the fast performance experience, the same is true for services and guarantees, such as flash refunds and 48-hour worry-free returns for fresh and perishable frozen goods.
The Anxin flash sale plan covers the whole process from service to distribution to after-sales, and the “full” is also reflected in the formulation of corresponding service guarantees for multiple categories, such as the “half-day delivery” of major appliance brands such as Gree, Midea, Oaks, and TCL. The plan is based on the “localized, minute-level service” of instant retail and further penetrates into the service link.
The “new” is reflected in the subdivision categories, and the protection innovation in many small details, such as “no ice must be compensated” for iced goods, “bad must compensate” for fresh fruits, and “melting must be compensated” for sorbets.
Another thing worth paying attention to is service innovation. For example, for national subsidies, Anxin Flash Sale provides digital home appliances and national subsidy products delivered to their homes in 30 minutes in response to the pain points of users who need to go to the store to verify their qualifications, so that they can enjoy national subsidy discounts without leaving home. For adult products and feminine care products, privacy packaging services are provided in the safe flash sale.
According to the characteristics of goods, the formulation of corresponding service standards will not only help promote the standardization of instant retail services, but also benefit consumers and brand merchants. For consumers, the certainty of purchase extends from timeliness to service; For brands and merchants, instant retail not only expands the radius of offline stores, but also extends a more reliable service radius from the standard, thereby bringing new increments to the business.
In particular, high-customer unit price products with low instant retail penetration, such as liquor, home appliances, etc. The service system built by the Anxin Flash Sale Program covers all aspects such as brand authentication, different proportions of compensation, and privacy protection, indirectly creating a “third store” for these categories.
Before instant retail, brands mainly reached consumers through e-commerce “official flag stores” and offline official experience stores, while conversion mostly relied on marketing materials and in-store experience. However, these two channels seem a little overwhelmed in the face of the immediate needs that can be seen everywhere in life.
If instant retail fills the gap in demand, then Anxin Flash Sale upgrades the service standard.
03 Raise the service standard of instant retail
The transition from e-commerce to instant retail reflects the switch of the consumer market from supply-oriented to demand-oriented.
A typical feature is that 20 years ago, due to lack of supply, a number of B2B e-commerce companies were born, simply putting as many goods on the “shelf” as possible. As the penetration rate of online retail continues to grow and the supply continues to be abundant, the balance naturally falls from the supply side to the demand side. In recent years, many brands have begun to rack their brains to revitalize inventory, as evidenced by the shift from scale to quality.
When the market transitions to the stage where demand is king, it puts forward all-round requirements for the supply side, such as immediacy, personalization, service refinement, etc. The core element behind it is who covers the needs of consumers more, who can grow.
On the one hand, more and more brands are beginning to tilt resources to instant retail, and on the other hand, flash sales themselves are also changing.
Fulfillment has entered from the hour level to the minute level, the timeliness needs have been met, and the contradiction has shifted to the service side. After continuous exploration, flash sales have formed many complex standards and formed a service standard system of “safe flash sales”.
The formation of the system means that flash sales will drive the improvement of industry service levels and experience standards, thereby improving the competitiveness of instant retail and forming a better and faster shopping experience than e-commerce.
Although there is a consensus in the industry on traditional e-commerce, live e-commerce, and instant retail for online retail, instant retail will have higher challenges and ceilings because it is closer to demand.
