With the rise of instant retail, Meituan flash sales are becoming a new opportunity for offline merchants. Through the digitalization and distributed supply of local retail, Meituan Flash Sale not only improves the shopping experience, but also helps offline merchants regain the business lost due to the rise of online e-commerce.
With Alibaba’s downfall, the war for instant retail is becoming more and more intense.
As the “besieged” party, Meituan has made frequent moves in the past month or so, trying to dig the moat deeper.
One of the actions is to build a membership system that runs through different business lines. At the end of March, Meituan upgraded its membership system to 6 levels from ordinary to black diamond, connecting more than 20 business sectors in the Meituan ecosystem, covering six types of rights and interests such as divine coupons, hotels, travel, life, audio-visual and customer service.
This is the first time that Meituan has integrated multi-terminal business into a membership system, and users can accumulate growth value, upgrade levels, and enjoy cross-category rights and interests when consuming in the Meituan ecosystem.
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At the same time, Meituan continues to improve rider benefits. In early April, Meituan piloted rider pension insurance subsidies in Quanzhou, Fujian Province and Nantong, Jiangsu Province. After riders voluntarily complete the insurance registration and actually pay, Meituan will give a 50% cash subsidy.
Riders running in the streets and alleys of the city are the main body of instant retail. The platform provides more subsidies to help riders solve pension insurance problems, which can make riders feel “bottom”, have a secure life, and work more stable. For the platform, this helps maintain sufficient capacity and fundamentally improves the consumer experience of instant retail.
By mid-April,Meituan released the instant retail brand “Meituan Flash Sale” and opened a first-level entrance in the Meituan APP.According to the official introduction, flash sale is a “new generation of shopping platform that accompanies consumers 24 hours a day”, which can achieve “30 minutes to send everything”, covering more than ten major categories such as vegetables and fruits, wine and beverages, snack food, digital home appliances, beauty and skin care, etc.
Meituan set up a flash sale department as early as 2018. In the past seven years, this business has focused on polishing models, accessing brands and merchants, and expanding flash warehouses. As the platform itself and the conditions on both sides of supply and demand matured, Meituan finally officially launched an independent flash sale brand.
From users and riders to brands and traffic, Meituan has layered a lot of “armor” on the flash sale to resist menacing competitors. In terms of underlying capabilities,Meituan’s longboard precipitated for many years is also the basis for Meituan’s flash sale to participate in long-term competition.
Similar to takeaway, instant retail is not a simple business that “anyone can do”. For more than ten years, Meituan has worked hard around multiple dimensions such as users, merchants, riders, technology, and ecology.
Taking fulfillment capabilities as an example, Meituan has accumulated more than 7 million riders, with an average delivery time of less than 28 minutes and a cost 15% lower than the industry average. At the same time, the platform predicts order demand in real time and dynamically schedules capacity through the intelligent distribution system, reducing the rider’s empty driving rate to 15%, which is also lower than that of competitors.
In contrast, competitors can catch up with Meituan in one or two indicators, such as large-scale subsidies, watering traffic, etc., but it is difficult to compete with the big brothers in the industry in all dimensions in a short period of time.
Meituan’s competitive position is backed by system-level barriers that run through the demand side, supply side and platform side. Today, this barrier is unleashing its power in instant retail.
The question that follows is: what new capabilities has the new e-commerce model represented by instant retail grown?What kind of new species is the flash sale extended from takeaway?
01
Instant retail is one of the most promising consumption tracks at present, although the scale is not as large as e-commerce, but the growth rate in recent years is much higher than the latter, and the substitution effect is becoming more and more obvious.
According to the “Instant Retail Industry Development Report (2024)” released by the Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation of the Ministry of Commerce, our country’s instant retail scale will reach 650 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 28.89%, 17.89 percentage points higher than the growth rate of online retail in the same period;It is expected that the market size will exceed 2 trillion yuan in 2030.
Internet giants such as Meituan have long foreseen the value of instant retail, regarded it as a new growth point, and poured a lot of money and resources into it.
Among them, Meituan has the earliest layout and the largest action, and has cultivated instant retail as one of the new engines of performance. At present, Meituan’s daily retail orders in non-catering categories have exceeded 18 million, maintaining double-digit percentage growth.
The rapid development of instant retail has become the trend of the next stage of social consumption.
The evolution of retail in China is mainly divided into three stages: traditional retail→ express e-commerce → instant retail. Traditional retail represented by supermarkets and shopping centers solves the problem of centralized circulation of goods; Express e-commerce solves the online retail shelves – Taotian is the online of department stores, JD.com is the online of home e-commerce malls, and Pinduoduo is the online of farmers’ markets.
In the past 20 years, the main line of development of the domestic retail industry is that the bulky offline wholesale, distribution and retail chains have undergone Internet transformation; The e-commerce platform eliminates a large amount of intermediate links and invests funds and resources in the demand side and the fulfillment side, especially in the construction of the logistics distribution system, to achieve one-week, three-day, next-day and even same-day delivery, which fundamentally changes the consumer experience.
With the incomparable price advantages of traditional offline retail, 24-hour shopping convenience, infinitely expanded product selection, personalized recommendations, and convenient after-sales service, express e-commerce has gradually become the mainstream of social retail.
But at the same time, the shortcomings of express e-commerce are also increasingly exposed: centralized supply based on centralized supply and fulfillment network cannot cover everything; The delivery speed is still slow, which does not match the needs of the younger generation of consumers “soon”. In this sense, traditional retail and express e-commerce belong to “centralized retail”.
In contrast, instant retail passesThe digitalization of local retail and the “distributed supply” of goods, which has improved retail efficiency, upgraded service timeliness and upgraded supply.
As a representative of this model, Meituan flash sale is not a takeaway, but can replace the daily shopping method of express e-commerce, creating a 30-minute experience of getting everything in hand. For consumers, the biggest attraction of flash sales is “fast” and “more”, which is also the focus of competition on major platforms in the track.
Taking 3C Digital as an example, whenever Apple, Huami OV and other manufacturers release blockbuster new products, many consumers, especially young people, are eager to get their hands on the new machine as soon as possible. However, traditional e-commerce platforms often require next-day delivery, prompting consumers to turn to instant retail platforms such as flash sales.
In September last year, after the iPhone 16 was released, some consumers placed orders directly from nearby stores at Meituan flash sale, and it only took 10 minutes to get the new mobile phone from the takeaway brother.
On the other hand, with the “door-to-door delivery half an hour after placing an order” is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people,Consumers who used to buy non-urgent items from traditional e-commerce platforms have begun to switch to instant retail platforms, which in turn prompts platforms and merchants to work “more”.
Instant retail was originally aimed at emergency needs, such as beer and snacks for watching football late at night, data cables and disposable underwear for business trips, or antipyretics and contraceptives in emergencies. But nowadays, many consumers also shop for flash sales when they are not urgently needed, using instant retail as a “universal store”.
In response to this change on the demand side, the platform has expanded the merchant matrix and product categories, most of which have achieved full coverage of major categories, and even include large home appliances such as air conditioners, refrigerators, and washing machines.
Faster delivery and more SKUs than traditional supermarkets and express e-commerce are outstanding advantages of instant retail. Instant retail platforms such as Meituan Flash Sale are not onlyIt has opened up new scenarios, discovered and met new needs, and also posed an alternative challenge to the traditional retail ecosystem.
02
In addition to revolutionizing the consumer experience on the demand side, instant retail is also driving merchants to capture new customers on the supply side and improve their own supply capacity and supply and demand matching efficiency.
Instant retail is the first shopping model to improve the efficiency of online and offline retail at the same time.Taking Meituan Flash Sale as an example, the platform improves online transaction efficiency and offline supply optimization to the extreme through “massive local merchants + national warehouse network + riders 30-minute performance”, and promotes merchants to improve and change themselves.
From the supply side, in recent years, flash sales have made significant progress in supply richness and quality.
On the one hand, the platform continues to introduce big brands, Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Midea, Wal-Mart, Decathlon, MUJI and other well-known brands continue to settle in and increase cooperation, driving the rapid improvement of core categories such as 3C home appliances and daily necessities, and the supply is greatly enriched.
Take Apple, for example,Since 2020, flash sales have supported Apple’s new product pre-sales every year； As of September 2024, there are nearly 7,000 Apple authorized franchise stores in Meituan’s flash sale, covering more than 2,000 counties and municipalities across the country; Huawei stores have also increased to more than 4,500.
Even the air conditioning refrigerator and washing machine that requires the integration of delivery and installation, etc., the flash sale has also realized that all major appliances can also be flash delivered and installed simultaneously through cooperation with Suning, Midea, Oaks, etc., and the experience is almost the same as that of traditional e-commerce.
In addition to large chain merchants, small and medium-sized merchants are also the key puzzle of instant retail supply.
At present, in addition to reaching cooperation with more than 570 brands and more than 5,600 large chain retailers, the flash sale has also connected to 410,000 local small and medium-sized businesses in nearly 3,000 counties and cities across the country.
On the other hand, flash sales incubatedThe flash warehouse model has also made better-than-expected progress。
Meituan launched a flash warehouse in September 2020, opening a small warehouse of one or two hundred square meters in a remote location in a densely populated area, mainly on the shelves of daily necessities, FMCG, beauty and other categories, with a single warehouse SKU of about 5,000~1,000, far exceeding the SKU scale of ordinary small and medium-sized supermarkets, and adjusting in a timely manner according to platform data.
The flash warehouse not only alleviates the problem of insufficient local supply, but also reshapes the supply chain of instant retail. The range of goods that consumers can choose has expanded from the inventory of surrounding shops to suppliers across the country, and has extended from “one-click buy three kilometers” to “one-click buy nationwide”. Coupled with the user experience of half-hour delivery, instant retail has the potential to partially replace traditional e-commerce.
Many merchants have noticed the incremental value of the flash warehouse and see it as a new channel. Many merchants have opened online stores and now hope to access the lightning warehouse again. In addition, many digital home appliance brands have built their own online and offline sales channels, but they still have to actively open and enter warehouses to obtain new customer flow and new orders outside the traditional e-commerce scenario.
By the end of 2024, merchants have opened more than 30,000 Meituan flash warehouses across the country through flash sales, which are expected to increase to 100,000 in 2027. The flash warehouse, which is three to five kilometers away from consumers and receives orders 24 hours a day, is one of the cornerstones of flash sales “everything is in hand in 30 minutes”.
In addition to small and medium-sized businesses, brands in the fields of home appliances and daily necessities have increased their cooperation with flash sales and actively deployed flash warehouses. Flash sales have gradually surpassed traditional e-commerce and become the most important online channel for many big brands.
In January 2024, Meituan and MINISO opened the first online “24-hour superstore” in the form of a flash warehouse. After 10 months, the number of stores reached about 500, and the cumulative performance exceeded 100 million yuan. In the same month, MINISO announced that it will launch more than 800 “24-hour superstores” in the form of lightning warehouses on Meituan in 2024.
In addition, instant retail brings more accurate and timely market demand intelligence, allowing large and small merchants to improve SKU matrix and improve operational efficiency.
Taking beer as an example, generally speaking, the supply of offline channels focuses on Budweiser, Qingdao, and Snowflake, while the online demand is craft beer, Dawusu, fresh beer, etc., and the feedback from offline channels to market demand is relatively lagging behind.
On the one hand, the flash sale model is based on the platform and supplemented by direct sales, on the one hand, it improves the operational efficiency of merchants with more efficient flash warehouses, and on the other hand, it solves the problem of “matching people and goods” and helps offline merchants capture user needs.
As an effective supplement to high-quality supply, flash sales are using demand to force offline supply to quickly adapt and upgrade in terms of improving experience and services and cultivating users’ consumption habits of instant retail.
From group buying, takeaway to flash sales, Meituan has taken root offline and has been standing on the side of offline entities, moving the collected online traffic to offline stores, and then transporting the goods and vegetables in the store back to the user’s home within half an hour. Whether it is takeaway or flash sales, Meituan’s fundamental characteristics can allow merchants to expand their service radius, reduce costs and increase efficiency. Compared with traditional retail, the real value of Meituan flash sales is realized by helping offline small and medium-sized businesses to increase increments.
03
In the past 20 years, the general trend of social retail has been online; But the latest data shows thatThe long-term trend of offline business counterattack online e-commerce has begun.
The basic logic of offline business online is that rents are expensive, online traffic costs are high, and online retail operating costs and operating efficiency have long suppressed offline. Today, rents in major cities are falling, resulting in offline cost cuts; On the contrary, the price of online traffic has risen.
Under the influence of multiple factors, the “counterattack” of offline retail has quietly begun. The data shows thatThe growth rate of offline physical retail above designated size has gradually caught up with the growth rate of online physical sales.
In March this year, our country’s total social zero was 409 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5.9%, higher than the 4.0% growth rate in February and higher than the Wind consensus expectation of 4.4%, which is the largest single month in which the year-on-year growth rate of social zero exceeds the consensus expectation since 2024, which shows that consumer domestic demand is recovering significantly.
In terms of channels, online and offline channels have accelerated growth, offline channels have grown significantly, and convenience stores and supermarkets have grown higher than average. In January ~ March, convenience store retail sales increased by 9.9% year-on-year.
In the face of recovering offline retail, merchants hope to rely on instant retail platforms to seize opportunities. Instant retail has become an incremental channel for local entities through distributed supply, and the delivery time has been shortened to 30 minutes, making the accessibility of goods and other experiences far exceed that of traditional online e-commerce.
This is why when Meituan’s flash sale brand upgrade, hundreds of brands have “stood on the platform”, and behind it is the hope of retail channelsFrom online e-commerce to local revenue, we will gain real business increments from the local area.
At the same time, Meituan has spent many years and spent a lot of money to establish an instant delivery network through catering, which can be applied to the instant retail sector to help offline merchants get more business. Those businesses that should have been better satisfied offline, or could be satisfied offline, but were lost due to online siphoning, are being “returned” to offline merchants by Meituan flash sales.
The service boundaries of flash sales are also expanding. In the past, due to relatively limited supply, consumers mainly purchased emergency goods through flash sales, such as data cables, disposable underwear, medicines, etc.; Nowadays, with the continuous improvement of the flash warehouse network, flash sales are moving from emergency to daily and becoming a daily shopping platform.
At the same time, due to the shortening of the offline chain, the convergence of offline rent and online traffic costs, and the conscious guidance of brands to make mistakes online and offline or the same price of the same model, the online and offline price difference has narrowed. Instant retail not only delivers quickly and has many categories, but also cheaper and cheaper.
In the long run, flash sales are expected to help countless offline small businesses get back 20%~30% of their business from online e-commerce. For offline merchants, this is not a stock switch, not a subsidy for consumers, but a real increase in cash flow.With instant retail as a new lever, what Meituan is promoting may be the rebalancing of the social benefits of e-commerce and the benefits of offline merchants.
