Traditional Department Stores Are In The Doldrums, Convenience Stores Are Thriving.

Looking at the current retail industry, apart from 7-11, family, Rosen and other foreign convenience store giants to accelerate the horse race enclosure in China, local retail giants Huarun Wanjia, Zhong Bai warehousing, BBK, Hualian and so on almost have the huge layout of convenience stores. The Internet giant Alibaba, Tencent, Jingdong and even Shun Feng, which started at the end of last year, have used convenience stores as a "sharp weapon" to get through O2O, which has refreshed the re understanding of the retail format of convenience stores.

Take BBK business as an example, behind its cloud monkey platform, it has 3000 convenience stores (iBBG) in the Changsha Zhuzhou Xiangtan area in Hunan through the way of integration. It is expected that by the end of this year, the BBK convenience store will achieve 10 thousand target coverage in Hunan Province, covering the entire rural areas and townships in Hunan province.

Carrefour has also formally promoted the convenience store format. Its first convenience store "Easy Carrefour" in Shanghai has entered the preparatory stage of recruitment. Although he refused to disclose any strategic plan of Carrefour convenience store, Tang Jianian also said that convenience stores in the European retail market are also the fastest growing and most concerned retail formats. He suggested that Chinese retailers should pay more attention to convenience store formats in particular.

According to incomplete statistics, from January to October this year, the main retail enterprises in China closed more than 179 stores in the country, which is 5 times the number of closed stores in 35 stores last year.

Department stores and large supermarkets not only encountered the "clearing" of the crazy horse race enclosure in previous years, but even more deadly, consumers bought goods in the shopping mall, but turned around to buy them online. Department stores and large supermarkets became more and more "commodity exhibition hall", "fitting room" or "electricity business warehouse". As a result, there are even claims in the market that the department store industry will disappear in the next 5 years.

Carrefour Global Vice President and China President Tang Jianian recently attended the sixteenth China chain industry conference, taking the evolution of European retail formats as an example, emphasizing that no one format will perish. All retail formats have their unique market positioning and functions. In the long run, there will be room for survival and development.

At the same time, a more important opportunity is that the innate attributes of convenience store outlets and close to the community are being eyed by many Internet giants. They are seen by city managers. By the logistics express service providers, convenience stores have become one of the best carriers for retail O2O and community services and logistics services. Alibaba, Tencent, Jingdong, No. 1 store, and RT mart are all starting to touch convenience stores, and many other capital also touted convenience store formats.

However, Heung Yu It is also considered that the first expansion of convenience stores is more important than before. Physical dot The extension of "two expansion" at present is not only confined to physical expansion of stores, but also to upgrading and extending products, services and functional boundaries. Specifically, Xiang Yu believes that there are three new trends in service upgrading of convenience stores in China.

First, the spanformation of stores to enhance customer experience, for example, the establishment of a rest area in the store, providing dining services. "At present, the shops of local convenience stores are slightly outdated, and the homogenization of sales of goods and small supermarkets is more serious. It is necessary to reorganize the shops and increase the commodities and services that are suitable for young customers, such as reducing the shelves, increasing the rest area of dining chairs and so on, allowing customers to increase their stay time in convenience stores, strengthening fresh food for young customers, and developing some local dishes such as porridge, steamed stuffed bun and cooked rice. Xiang Yu said.

Second, online and offline integration, extension Store service 。 "Convenience store companies cooperate with large e-commerce websites to better absorb online customers, becoming a regional sales agency cooperation mode, with Chinese characteristics. The convenience store self built e-commerce website is suffering from limited traffic, and gets customers through a large number of customer traffic platforms of the e-commerce website. Enterprises focus on offline procurement, logistics and distribution of online ordering businesses, eliminating the trouble of rebuilding the logistics system and distributing goods in local businesses. "Li Dian" also brings the corresponding business income, and can really achieve the complementary advantages of the two.

Third, the strengthening of community service projects. Heung Yu believes that with the development of intensive urban business district, community convenience stores have increased. Apart from the payment of public utilities, some convenient services such as laundry service, nanny mediation and door-to-door service have begun to test water in some convenience stores.