Also see that there is a hole in the tuyere of fresh e-commerce.

It is said that fresh e-commerce is an industry standing on the tuyere, but now many entrants have fallen into it. in fact, it may also be a big pit to manage and control fresh areas with high costs, such as highly professional and logistics warehousing. Recently, it has been reported that all the App products on Shanghai fresh e-commerce platform have been removed from the shelves, and the headquarters has also been empty.

There are a lot of outs.

After delicious Qiqi, fruit gang and other fresh e-commerce players have been out, it has recently been reported that a table network has been exposed to remove all goods, the phone has not been answered and the company headquarters has been empty. Beijing Business Daily reporter logged on to the App and found that the home tweet was still in August, and the shopping function under the recommendation article was no longer available. Yijia.com App customer service staff said that the platform is currently undergoing business adjustment, fresh food has indeed been removed from the shelves, users' coupons are temporarily unavailable. But he also said that the company has not closed down, the platform is expected to return to the relevant fresh food purchase business in two months' time, and users' coupons will be able to be used normally.

According to public data, Yitai.com was established in June 2015 and belongs to Shanghai pick-up Trading Co., Ltd., with fruits, vegetables, meat and eggs as its main business categories, previously mainly for consumers in Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Through the establishment of buyer team and self-built logistics, we can provide users with fresh food push, sales and distribution services. According to public data, Yitai.com was hatched by private equity firm Siming Investment, but the amount of initial investment was not disclosed.

Although it has not been confirmed whether Yijia.com is really going to go bankrupt, the hot development of fresh e-commerce has been a cold wave recently. In April this year, delicious Qiqi was revealed to have closed down, making it the first major fresh food e-commerce business in China to close down. In July, Orchard announced the concentrated closure of offline stores. In August, the fruit gang officially closed its business through the official Wechat account.

Tuyere or pit?

From the entrepreneurial boom to the current cold spell, fresh e-commerce has repeatedly hit a brick wall and capital concerns have something to do with it. Some media quoted Yidai.com 's former employees as saying that the platform closed down because of financial problems, but this claim has not been confirmed by Yijia.com.

Looking at other fresh e-commerce players before, delicious 77 said in an internal announcement before its closure that there were no funds to pay employees due to serious operational difficulties. It was once revealed that the semi-finished net vegetable e-commerce youth Caijun who was "ready for bankruptcy liquidation" also fell into the capital chain fracture crisis because of the investors'"ticket skipping" situation.

Li Chengdong, an e-commerce analyst, said that most fresh e-commerce companies are still in a state of loss, and when their own hematopoietic capacity is insufficient, there will be problems without foreign capital subsidies in the cold winter. At the same time, the fresh e-commerce platform needs a large amount of upfront investment in the supply chain and other aspects, if there is not enough volume to attract capital attention, the platform is difficult to support.

In fact, behind it is the lack of core competitiveness of fresh e-commerce enterprises. As far as the domestic fresh e-commerce industry is concerned, there are still many vertical fresh e-commerce businesses that are difficult to get rid of the limitations of only doing "errand business". To seize the "last kilometer" as the starting point, through the "push popular style" and other ways to facilitate, cheap and other selling points to attract consumers. However, with the gradual maturity of the fresh e-commerce industry, large e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, JD.com, SUNING and other large e-commerce platforms have increased their rural e-commerce business one after another, opening up the market of rural fresh products by means of direct mining of origin, rural characteristic pavilions, crowdfunding and so on. it has a great impact on the price advantage of vertical fresh e-commerce platform. At the same time, with the continuous optimization of offline physical retail markets such as community vegetable stores, supermarkets and fruit stores, the smaller fresh e-commerce platform is difficult to maintain its unique advantages in terms of commodity categories, convenience and so on.

"the fresh e-commerce industry has long passed the initial entry period and has now entered the final stage of competition." According to Lu Zhenwang, an e-commerce observer and CEO of Shanghai Wanshi Business Consulting Co., Ltd., the fundamental reason for the frequent outages of fresh e-commerce is that the industry as a whole is still in a state of loss. Capital will focus more attention on the large platform, the independent small platform does not have the advantages of supply chain and flow, so it is difficult to find a way out.

According to the China Agricultural fresh ecommerce Development Forum, only 1 per cent of the country's more than 4000 fresh ecommerce companies are profitable, 4 per cent flat, 88 per cent at a loss and the remaining 7 per cent at a huge loss.

It is still far from making a profit

Although fresh e-commerce companies are exiting one after another, it does not mean that the industry is in decline.

Lu Zhenwang said that from the overall industry situation, fresh e-commerce is still on the rise. Li Chengdong said that the operational difficulties of fresh e-commerce mainly lie in the standardization of goods in the upper reaches of the supply chain, the lack of cold chain logistics and user education. The purchase frequency of fresh products is very high, and the market prospect is still very large.

According to the 2016 research report on China's fresh e-commerce industry released by iResearch Consulting, the transaction volume of China's fresh e-commerce market reached 49.71 billion yuan last year, accounting for 3.4% of the total retail sales of agricultural products. Some statistical institutions predict that by 2018, the scale of China's fresh e-commerce market will exceed 100 billion yuan, reaching 128.3 billion yuan. Industry insiders said that compared with the mature foreign fresh e-commerce model, China is still in the initial stage of the development of fresh e-commerce, and there are some pain points such as imperfect supply chain, single service mode and difficult technical barriers to break through. the development system to adapt to the market has not yet been formed, but fresh e-commerce enterprises still have a broad market space and profit space. It is expected that in the next three years, fresh e-commerce will open up the situation and gradually enter a profitable era. The key is to improve the safety quality of products, pay attention to the construction of cold chain logistics, strengthen the guidance of consumer services, and change the focus of layout from extracting upstream profits to creating value by relying on products and services.