The practice and operation of the traditional retail enterprises ' transformation electric power business

When it comes to traditional retail businesses doing e-commerce, many traditional retailers like to take the top ten favorite websites of American netizens as a comparison:

1, Amazon (Amazon.com)

2, Wal-Mart (Walmart.com)

3, EBay (ebay.com)

4, Best Buy (bestbuy.com)

5, Penney (jcpenney.com)

6, Target department store (target.com)

7, Cole Department Store (kohls.com)

8, Google (google.com)

9, Overstock.com

10. Sears department Store (sears.com)

In this list, the traditional retail industry accounted for half of the global retail industry, the top 500 Wal-Mart ranked second, after the world's largest pure consumer website-Amazon. This ranking lets have done the shopping website tepid or has not done the shopping website's Chinese traditional retailing industry to be like dozen chicken blood excited unceasingly, each is gearing up, wants with the heaven test ratio!

In fact, this analogy is not very consistent with the traditional Chinese retail industry, after all, the United States retail industry began in the 50 's, developed in the 60 's, the scale of 70, 80, 90, 00 information and after 95 years began to vigorously enter E-commerce. China's retail industry began in the 80 's, developed in the 90 and 00, the real force into E-commerce is in the 2005, many of the traditional retail industry itself in the level of information is in a relatively backward stage, and the Chinese traditional retail chain stores in more than 1000 of 10,000 square meters has not appeared, And the ranking of the five major retail enterprises, operating area of 10,000 square meters above the number of shops in 1000 to 4,000 of the scale, its information level and management level in the world are the highest, with a complete mature supply chain and logistics distribution system.

As a result, Chinese traditional retailers are destined to be filled with more unknown dangers and confusion, and these are not only China's special network market decisions, in addition to the retail enterprises themselves in the Chinese market development process and the main reasons for the current situation, so that China's traditional retail industry in early 21st century began to dabble in E-commerce , only 3, 4 years later than the traditional American retail industry, but we see that until 2010, Suning and Gome began to invest heavily in the sales share of the market to occupy a certain proportion of the traditional line, through increased capital investment and mergers and acquisitions to accelerate the development of the way. Why is this happening? From my years of experience, we all believe that the traditional retail industry to enter E-commerce is very advantageous, these advantages in the first place in the traditional retail enterprises have many years of entity management, integrity and quality of goods and even service quality can make the net purchase users at ease; second, The rich products provided by the traditional retail industry's huge supply chain can also provide users with full choice and more buying opportunities. To form a higher consumption amount; third, traditional retailing can easily use information technology to establish docking with third party logistics, and form the advantage of logistics efficiency and low cost. The last, and most important, is that traditional retailers have a large number of professionals who are familiar with consumer psychology and behavioral habits that are lacking in the current business of business-to-business businesses.

Unfortunately, in the development of E-commerce in China's traditional retail industry, these advantages can not be reflected on the one hand, and on the other hand, these advantages have become a disadvantage! The emergence of such a theory is based on the differences between E-commerce operating mode and traditional offline retailing.

In many people's eyes, has many years of experience in solid business and many retail chain retail stores, its integrity and the quality of goods and service quality is far higher than no physical stores of the pure electric business enterprises, but the actual situation is this:

1, because they believe that their integrity and good quality, confidence, and then ignore the importance of commodity information, a lot of things like doing shop color page general, casually find a digital camera let the unprofessional staff to take pictures without modification and write enough attractive product description on the line sales. For relying on merchandise pictures and text sales of E-commerce, such an attitude obviously makes the online entity shop looks quality and look good merchandise, become difficult to accept the Internet users, but less than the quality of the real commodity professional e-commerce enterprises; The second is that there is no computer experience and only a bit of the basis of the waiter on the Internet as a customer service, the end result is simply do not know how to use network language services netizens, natural service quality also greatly reduced.

2, the traditional retail industry always think that they have a strong supply chain, the supply chain advantage makes the goods richer and more complete, natural sales are higher, but here there are and E-commerce supply chain has two major conflicts:

First, the traditional retail industry is destined to assess the gross margin of goods, because in the site after the promotion cost is lower, the competition is limited to the business district competition, generally this range within 5 kilometers (Wal-Mart has the famous 5 kilometers of Death Circle, that is, Wal-Mart open shop within 5 kilometers, other retail enterprises will die), Plus its Word-of-mouth marketing mainly in commodity prices, quality and service three aspects. and e-commerce in appearance is defined as the price butcher, what commodity prices are below the line, because its operating costs are lower (in fact, the cost of commodity informatization and network channels established very high), and the network of Word-of-mouth due to the goods can not see touch, spread more reason is based on price and promotional efforts, So in order to achieve a wider range of word-of-mouth effect to reduce the largest promotional costs of E-commerce operations, there will be even a loss for several years rely on capital transfusion operation mode, after large-scale search for profit, this practice in the traditional retail industry seems very difficult to understand and accept.

Second, the replenishment cycle requirements are different, the traditional retail sales after the shelves can be supplemented by other goods, replenishment cycle of slow sales impact. Can e-commerce sales model is through pictures and text, that is to say that you have only one item can be photographed after the sale, and then according to sales to purchase, but will require replenishment cycle shortened to one or two days or even half a day, which is often said E-commerce "rapid supply Chain" response, this obviously requires the traditional retail industry to further adjust.

3, China's traditional retail industry has a good information technology, so as to achieve logistics efficiency and low cost of operation. Now we know that many of the traditional retail industry will adopt a mature ERP system, POS system, and then a strong and independent CRM system. For these systems, improve the traditional retail logistics efficiency and reduce operating costs do play a very important role, but they do not apply to E-commerce, docking E-commerce system is very difficult, the input is generally millions, and in the docking completed after the continued reduction of operating costs is feasible, Improve logistics efficiency has become somewhat complicated, not only through the docking of information technology can be completed. The traditional retail logistics mode is the Transfer warehouse mode, all goods in the distribution to the warehouse, will be in a very short period of time distribution to the store for sale, this distribution is the way of bulk distribution, and E-commerce warehouse more times the equivalent of no customer store (courier replacement for customers to take goods), The speed of goods sales determines the turnover rate of the goods in the warehouse, then the warehouse complexity is much higher than the traditional retail industry, the cost is correspondingly higher. In addition, the distribution mode belongs to 0 single forms and is obviously more complex. In addition to the electronic commerce after the informatization of the backend, the informatization degree of front-end operation promotion is much higher than that of traditional retailing, including real-time monitoring and analysis, various media delivery methods, customer behavior that can be monitored and analyzed in real time, which makes the traditional retailing industry lag behind the informatization degree of electronic commerce.

4, when it comes to talent, the traditional retail industry believes that they have many years of retail experience, with a large number of people who know the retail industry, these talents in the e-commerce operation, but found that not reliable. In fact, these retailers have not been able to play a better role in E-commerce, the above three points of thinking on the difference is the main reason, on the other hand is not understand and adapt to the network market rules, and do not understand the consumer behavior of netizens. After all, the internet itself has very strong media characteristics and entertainment characteristics, only the business acumen and experience of the retail industry in such a market environment, it is inevitable to face the operational thinking of the big adjustment, if not very good adjustment, that not only can not play the original talent, these talents also become obstacles to the development of E-commerce!

Four advantages in the E-commerce road after the start, incredibly become a dilemma, many times not only failed to help speed up the development of E-commerce, but also hindered the process of e-commerce, which has the capital and resources of the traditional retail business situation, can be countless examples have proved that These are the so-called advantages of the real traditional retail business after the start of E-commerce projects facing the dilemma. So what are the ways to solve these dilemmas? From the practice of suning and Gome, they are already in the process of solving them.

A common pattern is to separate e-commerce projects from within the group, to re-establish new companies, to recruit professional managers and electrical business professionals to combine with a small number of traditional enterprises to carry out e-commerce projects in a relatively independent mode. These independent include human resources, financial settlement, warehousing and distribution, system docking and so on. The company is relatively independent, is that it is a priority to use the group's supply chain system and docking a variety of systems to run, on this basis in line with E-commerce mode of operation to develop, while building their own procurement team to create a new e-commerce supply chain system, thus, Not only with the original supply chain to form a complementary, but also with the old supply chain to form a certain competition, to a large extent, the promotion of the offline supply chain, gradually synchronized into a "rapid supply chain" mode. Another model is the direct acquisition of mature e-commerce companies, through the way of capital investment to ensure that they can continue to operate independently, and then phased into the traditional retail supply chain to achieve the expansion of network channels, this way faster to obtain network channels of large-scale expansion, But it will be limited by China's still immature e-commerce companies and exorbitant premium acquisition costs.

As a pure E-commerce enterprises are aware of the traditional retail enterprises such a change, so they have accelerated the category expansion and supply chain upgrade, as well as the city or urban agglomerations of warehousing logistics planning and implementation, Try to catch up with the traditional retailing industry, which adapts to the business mode of e-business and the network market, expands its market scale and establishes the core competitiveness in the logistics distribution to contend with the traditional retailing in the chain stores under the expansion line, which further intensifies the competitive pressure of the traditional retailing industry, The road to the electric dealer is still full of more danger! Thankfully, after all, China's traditional retailing industry is on the road ...