At the moment, the “new E-Commerce” boom of fresh E-Commerce, social E-Commerce and so on has not retreated. The community group purchase under the main line has risen, and it has become the “new darling” of retail. Despite the low threshold and rapid development of community group purchases, it attracts a large number of platform to divide cakes. However, as a new business model, there are still bottlenecks in its development.
According to the “Electronic Business Daily”, the community group buying platform “Neighboring Neighbors” announced that it has completed the A-round financing of 10 million US dollars, led by the source capital and Gaochun Capital, and the Sequoia Capital China Fund. According to public information, Neighboring Neighbors was established in July 2018, mainly for community residents, providing users with fruits, casual snacks, drinks, fresh frozen products, grain and oil non-staple foods and other products. Just at the end of August this year, neighboring neighbors have just completed the tens of millions of seed round financing from Sequoia Capital China Fund.
In fact, neighboring neighbors completed two rounds of financing in less than three months, just one of the epitome of the sudden bursting of the community buying industry. Also in October, another community group buying platform “Koala Select” announced the completion of 30 million yuan in financing. Earlier in August, you, me, the food, the radish, the ten gang, the neighbors, the hospice, and the fresh foods announced that they have received more than tens of millions of dollars in financing, including the “Ten Group” and ” The amount of financing for the two food companies will reach 100 million yuan. According to incomplete statistics, up to now, nearly 13 large-scale community group purchase platform financing has reached nearly 2 billion yuan.
From the point of view of business models, community group purchases and social commerce with a focus on acquaintances are similar. It establishes the Wechat group on the line with the real community under the line. With the “Head of the Head” as the hub, the head of the company publishes the information on pre-sales and group purchases in the Wechat group to connect the company and customers.
It is not difficult to find that the same is based on the Wechat ecosystem, but the “spelling group” of the community group purchase is mainly based on the offline community, and obviously focuses more on the offline social circle. This “light line, heavy line down” mode will inevitably become a new outlet for the Internet giants. In September of this year, Ali launched the “Box Community” on the Box Horse App, which provided technical support by nails. Every day, staff members updated the promotion information and other content. This model and the Wechat community were sent by the head of the community. Group purchases have a slight similarity. In view of the fact that Ali had previously emphasized the concept of “box area”, it is not difficult to see that Ali seems to be interested in the box horse as the core to create a community group buying model with box horse as the hub.
At the same time, under the background of continuous increase in online traffic costs, many Internet platforms have also chosen to invest in community group buying companies to make up for the shortcomings of offline drainage. In September of this year, I invested more and more Shanghai Pangmen Neighbourhood Group, and officially entered the community to fight the group; then in October, the US group commented also invested in the community buy-up startup squirrel. As the community group buying market becomes the “Red Sea”, there may be more E-Commerce platforms in the future to choose it as a breakthrough in offline layout.
Near the end of the year, community group buying has become a slogan, which is similar to the sudden red burst of unmanned shelves in 2017. Some insiders said that community group purchases cut through fresh foods, and reached a balance between supply and demand through online “spelling group”, which complemented the short-board of convenience stores in the past. Compared with the unmanned shelves in the previous period, the community buying business model seems to be more able to stand the test.
However, while attracting users through low prices, how community group buying maintains user stickiness still requires the platform to have certain community operations capabilities. In addition, as the industry competition intensifies, the community group buying platform that emphasizes the offline social attributes will face certain bottlenecks in its future development and scale expansion.