Is it easy to be an app promoter?

Across the country, a large number of riders wearing uniforms of different colors appeared on the streets of many cities.

Pink, yellow, blue, green, at a crossroads in Wangjing area of ??Beijing, from time to time you will see these "brightly colored" people whizzing past on electric bicycles. The companies behind them are Daily Youxian, Meituan, Hema, and Dingdong.

Uniforms are magical, just like military uniforms. Different colors represent different camps. If the colors are the same, they are comrades; if they are different, they are enemies. The last time there was a nationwide division of camps based on uniform colors was the food delivery war 10 years ago, and the bicycle sharing war 5 years ago. Meituan yellow, Ele.me blue, ofo yellow, Mobai red, colors They are symbols of different forces on the Internet.

This time, the focus of the war fell on the grocery shopping track, with the long-lost smell of gunpowder.

Internet giants and startups, large and small, are engaged in fierce competition around fresh food retail. The frontline promotion staff and community leaders have begun to fight hand-to-hand. Shen Ran saw in a community in Panjiayuan in Beijing that local promoters from Meituan and Dingdong were meeting each other and competing for new users face to face. Meituan’s grocery shopping launched its “Thousand Cities Plan”, and small and medium-sized players spontaneously formed alliances to “join forces to resist the United States.” Didi’s Orange Heart Selection directly lists the leaders of Meituan’s grocery shopping as recruitment targets.

Pinduoduo regards grocery shopping as a strategic new business this year, and founder Huang Zheng personally led a team to inspect it. At Pinduoduo’s fifth anniversary annual meeting on October 8, Huang Zheng said that grocery shopping is Pinduoduo’s long-term business and called on everyone to start a hard-core struggle mode. A Pinduoduo employee told Shenran that Duoduo’s grocery shopping should be the largest investment in its history. “Almost all entrepreneurial veterans and supervisors of all sizes are doing grocery shopping. Employees involved in grocery shopping are in a non-stop state. Half a year The salary increase was delayed for several months, which is very rare."

Internet grocery shopping may be the most brutal battle on China’s Internet after the shared bicycle war. Business BDs, takeaway riders, community leaders, local pushers, all kinds of people continue to change our world.

Red, yellow, blue and green, seizing the community

Lao Qiao put on a green Meituan grocery shopping uniform, packed on a few boxes of eggs and yogurt, and came to a community in Fangzhuang, Beijing, in the evening Make a push at the door. In order to prevent the items from being confiscated by the urban management, he specially labeled the outer packaging with "not for sale".

His task is to get new users to download and register the Meituan Food Buying App and complete their first order at the same time. After the new user places an order, he will be given a box of eggs as a gift.

Opposite the community is a shopping plaza. The Little Elephant Fresh Supermarket store under Meituan was closed just over a month ago. Meituan renamed the Little Elephant Division to the "Grocery Shopping Division" and invested resources in it. Go to Meituan, which has a front-end warehouse model, to buy groceries. Different from Meituan’s main color “Meituan Yellow”, Meituan uses green for grocery shopping and has launched an independent app.

The new App is not easy to promote. Firstly, the path for users to download the App and place orders is too long. Secondly, it is difficult to enter the Beijing community. On the second day after Lao Qiao was promoted in Fangzhuang Community, he was taken away by the local urban management and interviewed on the grounds that he was operating without a license.

The greater difficulty comes from competitors. Beijing is the base camp of Daily Fresh Food, and many communities have been "washed" by Daily Fresh Food. Dingdong Grocery, which started in Shanghai, also entered Beijing in April this year and is being promoted crazily in various communities. In terms of models, there is no essential difference between the three. What Lao Qiao has to do is to "wash away" the users of Daily Fresh, and at the same time attract users to Meituan to buy food before Dingdong does.

After being interviewed by the urban management, Lao Qiao moved to a community near Panjiayuan in Beijing. One afternoon at the end of September, he seized an intersection in the community in advance, which was a prime spot for local promotion. Bit. But soon, Dingdong’s grocery shopping troops surrounded him.

There are only two people on Lao Qiao’s side, and there are four people on Dingdong shopping. In terms of volume, Meituan was quickly overtaken by Dingdong. "Place Perfect Group under Ding Dong", "Meituan Ding Dong does not divide the family", "Place another Ding Dong, and get another box of eggs" Ding Dong staged a drama of turning against customers at Meituan's home court, and was quickly pulled away Several Meituan users.

In addition, some new users who passed by were also intercepted by Dingdong.

Meituan Maicai and Dingdong Maicai are promoted on the local market. Source/Photo by Shen Ran

Lao Qiao, who was originally taking things slowly and leisurely, suddenly became nervous. The shouting increased, the movement increased, the distance behind the pedestrians became longer, and the pushers worked harder. The smell of gunpowder is getting stronger.

Lao Qiao said that in fact, the two groups of people knew each other, and at least they had met each other before, because Meituan and Dingdong were next to each other in the front warehouse nearby, and they often collided head-on when pushing in the community. superior. When grabbing users, everyone tacitly understood each other, held their breath, and shouted loudly to spell out words.

"The battle is about who is more shameless, so we won't get into a fight." A Dingdong grocery store promoter at the scene said to Shenran.

The local promotion staff said that the KPI of Meituan’s grocery shopping is to attract at least 6 new customers in a day, while that of Dingdong’s grocery shopping is 15. The task fulfillment standards for both sides are the same. Users download and register, and at the same time complete the order. Whoever scans the QR code will be counted in whose performance the QR code is valid for 24 hours.

Because Dingdong’s KPIs for grocery shopping are more important, its local promoters appear to be more wolfish. Their uniforms are all printed with the word "Iron Army", and their speech skills are full of tricks, "The smell of wine is not afraid of deep alleys, and the next APP is a hero who is not afraid of waiting", "Ding dong gives eggs, you don't have to buy them for a month "Eggs are gone"

Source of the uniforms of the "Iron Army" used by Dingdong to buy food/Photo by Shen Ran

Two groups of people cross each other, and pedestrians passing by have to experience two waves of ground. When it comes to pushing for brainwashing, Meituan usually comes first to push, and then Dingdong follows up after losing, or Dingdong wins a new user, and Meituan takes advantage of the trend and then tries to benefit Meituan.

The uniforms of Meituan Grocery and Dingdong Grocery Salesmen are all green, and they are mixed together and it is difficult to distinguish between friend and foe. Occasionally, riders from Daily Fresh in pink uniforms and Ele.me riders in blue uniforms would pass by in a hurry.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in the grocery shopping war.

In Beijing’s large and small communities, Meituan Grocery, Dingdong Grocery, and Daily Fresh are engaged in a fierce battle for fresh food in the front-end warehouse. Outside of Beijing, many cities have already blossomed. For example, in Wuxi, another startup called Xiaotu Maicai has joined the fray. What’s interesting is that it was founded by a former employee of Meituan Maicai.

Opening cities, robbing people, and selling goods

The competition for front-end warehouses is just a starting point. The larger-scale battle has actually spread to community group buying. This is the most concentrated and capital-intensive area in the grocery shopping market today.

Community group buying takes the community as the central hub and has strong regional characteristics. If you win a high-quality community, you will occupy the key points in advance. Now all the players entering the city are frantically opening up the city. They take out the map of China and divide the war zones according to administrative divisions. They either bring their own soldiers to fight in person or form local teams.

Local pushers and team leaders are the focus of the first round of competition on each platform. Starting from June this year, recruitment needs for various community group buying and local promotion personnel began to appear on major recruitment websites and Internet communities. In second-tier cities such as Wuhan, Nanchang, Jinan, and Chengdu, as well as the sinking markets that radiate from them, thousands of local promoters are frantically occupying communities.

Those sporadic, unorganized, but experienced community leaders in the local area are very popular on major platforms.

Meituan Select opened its first national stop in Jinan, Shandong Province on July 15. Its public debut in Jinan was a large-scale "Team Leader Interview and Training Meeting" with more than 300 groups. Long-term participation in signing contracts. A person close to Meituan Youxuan told Shenran that many of the group leaders present were experienced group leaders from local groups that had gone bankrupt.

Source/Meituan Preferred Official Account

Pinduoduo will be launched in Wuhan Kaicheng a month later, and Duoduo Maicai will be officially launched. A recruitment material for local promoters of Duoduo Maicai shows that the main job of local promoters is to communicate with community leaders to settle in Duoduo Maicai, and give priority to leaders of other platforms who have done community group buying.

Just like the takeout promotion war back then, Duoduo’s local promoters are running around the streets and alleys, looking for shop owners who are interested in joining the platform, including convenience stores, small supermarkets, express delivery sites, and beauty salons. Hospital etc.

These small shops can serve as collection points and are potential recruitment targets for group leaders.

Two days after Pinduoduo opened its doors in Wuhan, Meituan Select entered Wuhan. In the Wuhan market, Meituan did not copy Jinan’s zero-to-one Kaicheng model. Instead, it directly converted the front-end warehouse of Meituan Maicai in Wuhan into community group buying, and completely took over the traffic and traffic of Meituan Maicai in Wuhan. The scale of the supply chain instantly surpassed that of Pinduoduo.

Time waits for no one. A local promoter who sells food in Duoduo received an interview notice the day after he started applying for a job. When he arrived, he found that there was no interview. He finished the process in 5 minutes and registered a QR code to promote it. Then he was pulled to a car by a car. neighborhood, get off the car and start sweeping the streets.

There are no clear rules, no unified speaking skills, but only the shop owner who must be dealt with. Duoduo Maicai promoters in the Wuhan area will receive a commission of 30 yuan for each successful household. The single-day KPI is 5 households. If 8 households are completed, an additional 30 yuan will be awarded. Each local promoter is equipped with an independent backend, which can view the nearest target stores nearby, support one-click navigation, and can find the phone number.

Many local promoters interviewed by Shenran all belong to different labor outsourcing companies. They are dispatched to major community group buying platforms and follow the projects in different cities and communities. After promoting a community, Then advance to the next community and fight on the move.

Now, the path for each player entering the city to open the city is gradually becoming clearer. Meituan started from Jinan, Shandong, while penetrating into the next-level counties and cities, while expanding to second-tier cities at the same level; Pinduoduo first piloted in Wuhan and Nanchang, and then soon entered Xi'an and Hefei, and also entered Xianyang around Wuhan , Huanggang, Huangshi, Ezhou, Xianning, Xiaogan; Didi’s Orange Heart Selection has set its base in the southwest, winning major cities such as Chengdu, Chongqing, Kunming, Guiyang, and Nanning.

In Wuhan, latecomers such as Meituan and Pinduoduo are competing fiercely with old local players such as Xingsheng Youxuan, Shixianghui, and Shihuituan; in Guangzhou, Meituan’s grocery shopping and Youxuan Each business is advancing at the same time, competing with Dingdong Maicai, Pupu Supermarket, and Tongcheng Qianxianhui for the South China market; in Hefei, Pinduoduo competes head-on with Yipin Fresh, Fresh Legend, and Qian Aunt; in small cities like Wuxi , Little Rabbit buys vegetables and draws a map to serve as a prison, quietly attacking the local market.

The price war is also coming. Didi directly copied the money-burning strategy of the online ride-hailing industry back then. On the one hand, it gave the group leader a commission higher than the industry average, and at the same time, it reduced the price of goods to subsidize users. A local promoter who sells Duoduo groceries said, "Simple, crude and high commissions are the current status of the industry." Before entering, the entrepreneurial track of grocery shopping was almost abandoned by capital.

At the end of 2019, large and small community group buying projects died in batches, shrinking, laying off employees, going bankrupt, and merging. Squirrel Pinpin, Community Le, and Dailuobo, these former darlings of capital, have all fallen into trouble after more than a year of running blindly. They were either integrated by larger platforms or went bankrupt.

But no one expected that the epidemic was coming.

An industry insider who joined community group buying in 2018 and is now on a giant platform told Shenran that the epidemic has reactivated the fresh food entrepreneurship track. The most typical example is that during the most severe period of the epidemic, residents in Wuhan were locked down and unable to go out. The local government encouraged residents to use the Internet to buy groceries, completing market education overnight. Before the epidemic, the leading players in the Wuhan market were Xingsheng Youxuan, Shihuituan, Shixianghui, and Meijia. After the epidemic, Shixianghui suddenly emerged and quickly rushed to the front because it is a local company registered in Wuhan.

This has greatly stimulated those Internet giants that have not yet entered the game.

In August this year, Pinduoduo entered the game and opened its first stop in Wuhan. After Meituan opened the city in Jinan, it immediately turned around and also entered Wuhan. The balance of power in Wuhan was subsequently broken, which put local players such as Shixianghui under great pressure.

Zhao Yibo, an entrepreneur who has moved from live streaming to cross-border community group buying, told Shenran that the competition in the Wuhan market has become fierce. The giants have changed the previous rules, and only start-up companies such as Food Enjoyment Club have ushered in. A real challenge.

Source/Pexels

An insider in the community group buying industry lamented: In the winter two years ago, a group of community group buying entrepreneurs held a meeting with the theme of "Hold together for warmth and boycott Meituan." At that time Meituan is standing still and watching; this summer, the focus of community group buying discussions is still Meituan, because Meituan is really here.

In fact, in addition to Meituan, others joining the battle include Pinduoduo, Didi, Tencent, Alibaba, and JD.com. Meituan, Pinduoduo, Didi, and JD.com do business in person, while Tencent and Alibaba participate through investment and support agents. Tencent invested in Xingsheng Youxuan, Shixianghui, and Tongcheng, and Alibaba invested in Shihuituan , and Alibaba’s Hema business group is also in preparation. So far, all the top five Internet giants in China by market value have entered the community group buying market.

This seems to have the meaning of "the mantis stalks the cicada, but the oriole is behind": first let the startup companies explore the business model, burn capital money to run the model, and at the same time complete the market education, the giants Re-entering the game, relying on capital and scale advantages, quickly conquering cities and territories, and then using price wars to eliminate opponents.

Only these wealthy and powerful super giants have the energy to replicate quickly and spread across the country. Meituan said it plans to expand into 20 provinces in the next three months and achieve coverage in "thousands of cities" within the year.

From the personnel layout, we can see how much the giants attach importance to this battle.

The person in charge of Meituan Selection is Chen Liang, the senior vice president of Meituan and a member of the core management S-team, who reports directly to Wang Xing; the person in charge of Duoduo Grocery is Abu, who is Pinduoduo Co-founder, he was the CEO of Pinduoduo before the merger of Pinhaohao and Pinduoduo; the person in charge of Didi Chengxin Selection is Chen Ting, Didi’s senior vice president, reporting directly to Cheng Wei.

An internal Pinduoduo employee told Shenran that with the entry of other giants, Pinduoduo’s internal emphasis on community group buying is increasing day by day. It is now a strategic level project and people are being transferred from various departments to Duoduo Buying Food. The department implements super-sized weeks, which is the most tiring of all departments.

At the fifth anniversary annual meeting, Huang Zheng specifically mentioned and emphasized the business of buying more vegetables. In order to win this battle, he called on Pinduoduo employees to start a hard-core struggle mode.

From toVC to to giant

The entry of giants has completely changed the industry ecology of Internet grocery shopping.

In the past, entrepreneurs chose to take VC money. In the 2018 fresh food entrepreneurship boom, Sequoia Capital, Capital Today, GSR Ventures, Qiming Venture Partners, Zhen Fund, and GGV Capital The top VCs have spent billions of dollars in real money. But this year, few VCs have entered the game, and those who have invested large sums of money in the industry have become Internet giants.

Most of those projects that could not defeat the giants or survive losses have declined after the storm. Squirrel Pinpin is a star entrepreneurial project in 2018. Its founder Yang Jun once co-founded Fanfou.com, Hainei.com, and Meituan.com with Wang Xing. After leaving Meituan, he founded Squirrel Pinpin and quickly obtained a large investment. financing. But Squirrel Pinpin ran into trouble in 2019, and the project was subsequently suspended.

Source/Pexels

After Meituan entered the community group buying game, it took over some of Squirrel Pinpin’s employees and launched a nationwide layout with great fanfare. Meituan, the super giant, took over what Yang Jun left unfinished.

This situation has led many fresh food entrepreneurial projects to embark on the path of mergers. In the community group buying field, last year, Shihui Group merged with You, Me, You, and this year, Tongcheng Life merged with Linlinyi. After the merger was completed, Shihuituan received two consecutive rounds of financing, Alibaba continued to increase its investment, and Tongcheng Life also completed Series C and Series C financing. These two companies sided with Alibaba and Tencent respectively.

Capital chooses to stick together for warmth, concentrate resources while embracing the giants, and no longer give opportunities to new entrepreneurs. In this situation, either choosing to take sides or selling the project is a hurdle that entrepreneurs cannot avoid.

An industry insider close to Dingdong Maicai analyzed that the chance that Dingdong Maicai will be independently listed is currently small, because it almost loses money on every order, from large positions to front-end positions. The loss alone is about 4-5 yuan, not counting the operating costs and marketing costs of the headquarters. "Taken together, it may be acquired or merged with another company in the future."

Being acquired or merged does not necessarily mean failure, and is sometimes a strategic choice. In fact, Liang Changlin, the founder of Dingdong Maicai, is a serial entrepreneur. All the companies he founded in the past were sold. Currently, there are no giants taking sides in Dingdong Grocery.

Zhao Yibo told Shen Ran that he had been in the industry for almost a year and found that the business was too heavy and the profits were too thin, so he had completely given up on independent development. His current strategic intention is very simple, which is to find a giant to raise a sum of money, use the giant's resources, seize the time window to quickly expand the project, and then sell it to the giant to cash out. He is approaching Tencent through various relationships.

Now is indeed a good time window. Lao Qiao told Shenran that Internet grocery shopping is regarded by the government as a livelihood project, and there will be special subsidies and annual tax rebates for companies. This is also one of the reasons that attracts all kinds of companies to join the game.

The groceries war continues and is getting more intense. The outcome of this battle will affect China’s Internet landscape to a certain extent.

As the top local pusher, Lao Qiao doesn’t care about these grand patterns. He is thinking about how to attract more users tomorrow. "This battle will not be over for a while." Lao Qiao said.