The most concerned problem of physical store owners: the new retail era

Under the wave of Industry 4.0, the traditional manufacturing industry has continuously increased the innovation of openness, digitalization, networking and intelligence, and the deep integration of the new generation of information technology and manufacturing industry has brought about far-reaching industrial changes. Large-scale personalized customization, global collaborative design, and smart factories based on physical information system (CPS) and car networking are reshaping the industrial value chain, forming new production methods, industrial forms, business models and economic growth points.

China is a big manufacturing country, producing global15 products. There are more than 20 million manufacturing enterprises, accounting for 3000 trillion market share, but 90% of them are made up of small and medium-sized enterprises. At present, the competitiveness of these small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises is declining day by day, and it is urgent to expand online sales capabilities, actively interact with customers, truly achieve rapid contact with customers, and realize online and offline multi-channel sales models; At the same time, collect and analyze consumers' new needs, preferences and consumption behaviors, so as to guide product design and provide products that are more in line with market demand; And provide customers with a better experience and meet the individual needs of consumers.

The biggest contradiction in these links is that small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises are unable to establish their own intelligent manufacturing service applications and intelligent manufacturing ecological chains to link physical stores and consumers. Therefore, no matter for small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises, physical stores or consumers, a platform is needed to help them link data and provide them with more professional and diversified services.

New retail concept;

With the development of manufacturing transformation, the retail industry is also being impacted, thus giving birth to a new word "new retail". So who is this new retail that stands at the forefront?

New retail can be interpreted as "Internet plus retail" or "people plus retail". In an exclusive interview with Caijing magazine, Huang Zheng, chairman of Pinduoduo, a social e-commerce, once said: "The key to the post-traffic era is to take people as the core and find the essential gameplay that is more suitable for this era and consumers, so as to find new business breakthroughs in a saturated field that seems to have no chance."

The new retail, which emphasizes the reconstruction of "people, goods and fields", is undoubtedly based on this idea and takes the people-centered route. The scene of traditional retail is a supermarket full of goods, and customers enter the store to find the goods they need. Of course, due to the increasingly fierce competition, the price war is inevitable, so the killer of every business is price reduction promotion. The sales scene of the new retail is that offline, we already know what products these customers are interested in through online big data. I display the products these customers need in the store in a targeted manner, avoiding the time cost of customers' search, and customers are willing to pay for this experience. Better service; Even offline stores can cater to customers' social and leisure needs and are built to integrate comfort and shopping; Online, customers can order products directly, and the products will be delivered by the nearest store. This is the operation mode of "box horse". For more small-scale or even self-operated stores, how can we enter the new retail era? It can only be called "new" if it is combined with online and the conditions such as drainage mode, supply access, consumer service upgrade, data access and intelligent management are truly realized.

So the core idea of new retail is that I know what customers want and deliver it to customers with the fastest speed and the best experience. Compared with traditional retail, new retail is more targeted. To sum up, we can see that the new retail has several key words: consumption upgrade, new technology, online and offline, big data ... The new retail is a revolution triggered by new technology in the context of consumption upgrade, from online and offline to big data cloud computing, efficient logistics, and the innovation of the entire retail industry chain.

Features of new retail:

What changes have the new retail brought to the retail industry and what are its characteristics? In my opinion, compared with traditional retail, new retail driven by new consumption and new technology mainly has the following characteristics:

First of all, online and offline access, e-commerce and physical stores get through, which means there is not much difference between e-commerce and physical stores. Take Ali's box horse as an example. Box Horse has an APP e-commerce platform and a physical store. As long as it is within three kilometers of a physical store, you can place an order online and deliver (or eat) to your door in 30 minutes. Of course, consumers can also go to the nearest store for consumption, such as seafood from Box Horse. Consumers can buy on the spot, eat on the spot, or place an order online after fancy. Clothing stores, hypermarkets and even shopping centers in the future are all such models, and this feature is called online and offline integration.

Followed by data, a lot of data, called big data. Data of consumers' last online visit will be collected, as will where they lived when they bought things, men and women, how old they are, whether they are single or married, and whether they are a family with three or four generations living under the same roof. This is when you brush your mobile phone. Shopping can't escape the collected data. Since the consumer entered the shopping center, what gender and age will be collected by the sensor, how long the consumer stayed in the shopping center, what he bought, what he ate and what movies he watched will be collected. Over time, the data becomes big data, and then through the calculation and analysis of the data, businesses can sell goods at will. What are the benefits of this? For merchants, they can sell more goods, get more profits, reduce inventory, and also promote the real economy. Take the garment factory as an example. With big data computing, there won't be so many stocks in the warehouse. This feature is called big data, and of course there is another saying that everything is consumer-centric.

Another feature of new retail is that it greatly improves efficiency. Take the Double Eleven as an example, this manual shopping festival is refreshing the fastest and highest turnover every year, and the figures are very scary. Foreign media marveled at the spending power and speed appointed by China. Why faster and faster? In addition to building more warehouses than before, in addition to more delivery trucks, the most important thing is the high efficiency brought by new technology. Take the fast delivery of double 1 1 for example, because Taobao has already started to deliver the goods at the moment when consumers join the shopping cart, and when consumers place an order, the goods have already arrived near the receiving place. How efficient do you think this is?

The last feature is that the format of offline stores is disrupted and then regrouped. Take box horse fresh life as an example. It is called "four unlike", which is characterized by the reorganization of the format of supermarkets and restaurants, and the improvement of efficiency by opening up online and offline. We can see that more and more business formats are beginning to reorganize. The integration of coffee in traditional bookstores and home soft clothes in traditional home stores is the representative of the reorganization of commercial formats. There will be more business restructuring in the future. Those who sell clothes will not only sell clothes, and those who sell homes will not only sell homes, and all formats will be reorganized.

Online and offline comparison:

This reminds us of the very popular online shopping mall. Is online shopping mall better than offline? Actually, it is not. Online has advantages and disadvantages. Advantages are convenience and cheapness. The disadvantage is that logistics is too slow, lacking more important experience, and traditional consumption habits and crowds are the same. Offline also has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you can get what you want quickly, but the disadvantage is that you have to go to the store. So overall, the combination of offline and online is actually a very good idea and a big selling point of new retail in the future.

Ma Yun also said that the combination of online and offline can generate new retail. In the next ten or twenty years, there will be no e-commerce, only new retail.

As far as the whole retail industry is concerned, competition is no longer an online and offline mode dispute, but should return to the essence of retail: serving consumers more efficiently and with high quality is the last word to obtain the market. The new retail of big data integration will not change the essence of retail, and its ultimate success depends on cost efficiency and shopping experience. From the concept of new retail, it is more consistent. The new retail focuses on user experience and maximizes transaction and production efficiency with the help of big data in the Internet economy, so the prospect is optimistic.