Their smart shopping carts mainly focus on the following two points in overseas markets:
In the process of putting the whole product on the market, the biggest misunderstanding for them is that the shopping cart is just a mobile cash register, but what they do is actually a mobile data collection car. The customer's route, which shelf to stay longer, the goods in the basket, etc. , collect them one by one and optimize the user experience through further analysis.
After listening to this, I thought, is this project funded domestically?
1 years ago, Amazon Go, an unmanned convenience store in Amazon, was officially opened to the public in Seattle, USA. Despite the slogan of "no queuing, no checkout", Amazon Go made its debut and there was still a long queue outside the store.
"I believe this is the future of the retail industry."
In China, Ma Yun's unmanned supermarket "Amoy Coffee" appeared at the Taobao Creation Festival in Hangzhou, announcing the opening of 65,438+10,000 unmanned supermarkets nationwide in the next few years, but after only four days of operation, there is no following.
Neighbors said that their model could be copied to Europe, but in China, when automatic checkout was not widely used, it was 15-20 years later than in North America, and the business model had to be reconsidered.
I thought it was very interesting. Is it only a matter of time before the model adapts well abroad and is difficult to localize in China? Unmanned supermarkets have been repeatedly proposed in recent years. Judging from the domestic situation, they are actually ahead of the current environment. Is this future of retail industry the future of retail industry in China?
After the outlet of 20 17 unmanned convenience store was bombed, the trillion-dollar retail market attracted many players to run in: GOGO rooted in Chongqing and unmanned supermarket in JD.COM. ...
However, there are only two things that are really hot: the domestic bingo box and the foreign Amazon Go.
20 16, Amazon Go was originally used only by Amazon's staff in Seattle, and was not open to the public. Their scheme is summed up as a customer tracking system, which determines the location of customers and then identifies their behaviors. Automatic online deduction after going out, no extra action is needed in the whole process. That is to say, "go and leave", take it and leave.
On the other hand, Guo Bin Box in China scans the QR code every time it enters the store, and brings it to the checkout area after purchasing the goods. After the test is completed, the receipt code will appear on the next screen, and you can leave after paying with WeChat or Alipay. The whole detection is realized by RFID technology (radio frequency identification), and all goods are tagged with RFID in advance, so it is impossible to take it and leave it like Amazon Go.
Although both are unmanned convenience store models, compared with Amazon's plan to open 3,000 stores in the next three years, Bingo Box's continuous layoffs are somewhat stretched.
Amazon Go has two outstanding advantages. First of all, the "take and go" experience is great. Looking at China, almost no technology can match it. Although Amoy Coffee can achieve a similar experience, it only adds face recognition technology on the basis of RFID. Moreover, Taobao Coffee, a pop-up store company, seems to have no plans to promote it at present.
"20 17 Research Report on User Behavior of Unmanned Retailers in China" shows that nearly 40% of users clearly expect unmanned convenience stores to really take them and leave.
Second, in addition to daily necessities, Amazon unmanned convenience stores also sell fast food, while American lunches are relatively simple, usually hamburger sandwich salads. The advantage of Amazon Go is that it can get rid of the long queues during the peak meal period, and the price is transparent and fair.
Then the question is, why can't unmanned convenience stores develop in China?
I often say that when doing company and industry research, we can study some market capacity issues, such as:
There is a routine in this. We need to disassemble a seemingly complicated problem into its small components and finally synthesize a formula.
For example, Jun Yu divided the value of products:
Product value = (new experience-old experience)-conversion cost
For another example, the founder of Dollar Shave Club summed up the formula of successful consumer goods in his A-round plan:
If these two formulas are used to redefine the unmanned convenience stores in China, we will find that the current products are of low value and do not meet the definition of successful products.
According to Jun Yu's product value formula, the two core factors that affect product value are experience and cost.
From the cost point of view: unmanned convenience stores can be popularized, and the core driving force for enterprises to buy self-checkout machines and smart shopping carts is to reduce the cost of enterprises. But as far as unmanned retail is concerned, reducing costs is still a false proposition.
On the one hand, it cannot reduce the cost of a single store. For example, Amazon Go uses many cutting-edge technologies to realize "Just walk go", including machine vision, deep learning algorithm and sensor fusion technology, and the cost of a single store is millions of dollars.
Previously, CITIC Securities made an in-depth report on unmanned retail. They found that if Bingo Box wants to break even, it needs 1 year to generate a turnover of 24,000 yuan per square meter, that is, the floor efficiency should reach 24,000 yuan/square meter/year.
This value is twice that of ordinary supermarkets.
The efficiency of Hongqi supermarket chain at the break-even point is 1.2 million yuan/square meter/year, while Yonghui supermarket is only 1. 1.0 million yuan/square meter/year.
On the other hand, compared with the United States, China's labor cost is lower, and the motivation to replace labor with machines is insufficient.
According to 20 18 China Q2 convenience store prosperity index report, the main business cost and labor cost index of convenience stores tend to decline.
Overall, the labor cost in the United States is about 4-6 times that in China. The minimum monthly salary in new york is about $2,000-3,000, which is 5-6 times that in China.
Another aspect is experience. At present, the technology can not accurately identify items and accurately price them. For example, the products of Guo Bin Box still need the assistance of RFID technology, which means manual labeling. Although this kind of identification will be more accurate, it will increase the cost, and it is difficult to ensure that there will be no misunderstanding, and it will be solved manually, which will directly and seriously affect the customer experience.
The idea of the neighbor's smart shopping cart is that there is a sensor inside, and the customer puts the goods on it. The shopping cart first identifies what it is, then weighs it, and finally calculates the price. The technical difficulty here is the accurate identification of objects. Although the accuracy of face recognition has exceeded 99%, object recognition is still a difficult point to be further broken through.
At present, both Amazon Go, which is slowly promoted, and Amoy Coffee, which is a flash in the pan, are in the form of convenience stores, and the scale is relatively small. The key reason here is that the relevant identification technology is not yet mature, and it is difficult to identify all kinds of goods. If you are a large supermarket, it means that you need to process more data and faster processing speed, which is also the current technical bottleneck.
From this perspective, in fact, we have always misunderstood the core of unmanned convenience stores. The core of unmanned convenience stores is convenience, not nobody.
At present, if an unmanned convenience store only divests services and simply buys and sells goods, vending machines can also handle it, and it will be very tasteless. Especially today, when online shopping and express delivery in the same city are developed, why should we go to unmanned convenience stores?
The core of the future supermarket is the interaction between people and things. How to do better through the Internet, whether it is artificial intelligence, biometrics or big data (analysis and optimization after data accumulation), even the best technology is inseparable from the essence of retail. Constantly improve and optimize commodity display and turnover, dynamic analysis, intelligent marketing and shopping experience, and finally improve efficiency.
For traditional retail, sales volume = passenger flow x store entry rate x conversion rate x customer unit price x joint rate x repurchase rate, which is the core process of retail value improvement; In the future, it is an inevitable trend for us to optimize efficiency and cost through the reconstruction of technology and data in all links.
"New Retail" spread through Ma Yun's speech at the Yun Qi Conference. This business model has begun to break the boundaries between pure e-commerce and traditional retail. Passenger flow feeds back offline through online diversion, and offline consumption portrait data connects us in series, continuously improving efficiency, and the cost structure is undergoing earth-shaking changes.
Unmanned convenience stores have experienced a wave of fire and death in the past. I hope that in the future, projects that follow human nature can go further. After all, perhaps few industries are bigger than the retail industry, and few industries are more competitive and fierce than the retail industry.