Similarly, when Zhou Fangyuan was in the United States, this time in the Pacific, in China, the war of several takeaway platforms quietly unfolded.

Because the smart phone of Yuanfang Group has advanced the era of wireless payment by several years, Zhou Fangyuan's high school classmates, under his guidance, founded a food delivery platform.

If you only rely on them, of course, it is difficult to make the platform bigger, so Yuanfang Group invested in the takeaway platform, relying on strong funds and channels, and managed to grasp the largest market share. However, other companies are not vegetarian either, not only in the field of smartphones, with Samsung and Apple competing, but also several food delivery platforms, relying on these two mobile phones to compete with the Yuanfang Group.

In fact, this situation has appeared more than once in previous lives.

The takeaway platform's support for brands and individual stores is indeed the takeaway platform to give greater support to brand stores. Because brand stores are much stronger than individual stores in terms of not only dishes but also services, but brand stores, for the most part, are much more expensive than individual stores, and the same price competition, even if the platform subsidizes, it is difficult for the order volume of brand stores to be higher than that of individual stores.

Brand stores do not rely entirely on takeout to make profits, and many brand stores only account for part of it. For example, KFC, McDonald's, and even Maidesike in Xi'an have a small number of takeaway orders, many of which are around 1,000 orders, but many of the same burger personal restaurants are in the volume of four or five thousand orders. If the platform does not support high-quality brand stores, these brands will have fewer orders, and they will slowly ridicule the platform. The platform needs high-quality brand stores to improve quality, but there are personal stores that need to be brave to kill.

A brand is like a general in a war, and a personal store is like a soldier rushing to kill. The difficult balance between platforms, merchants and customers is that the main high-volume platforms for food delivery are Meituan and Ele.me. After Meituan went public, it began to harvest. First of all, the platform has increased by about 5%. Then there is an increase in delivery fees, a decrease in subsidies or even none. In its previous life, Ele.me had been losing money even after being acquired by Brother Da Ma, so the activities of the Ele.me platform have always been very large, and the subsidies are more than those of Meituan. Meituan's move to start collecting money and collecting lines has led to the share of takeaway in many cities being forcibly occupied by Ele.me. Ele.me's subsidy is divided into three parts, one is for users, one is for riders, and one is for merchants.

The main thing for users is to send large coupons and Ele.me super members. These often kidnap merchants, Ele.me pays more than half, and merchants pay about 40%. Coupons are issued, super members are purchased by customers, and part of the money purchased is given to Ele.me, which can reduce part of the burden of Ele.me. Ele.me subsidizes riders, and Ele.me lists are less than Meituan, but the unit price is higher, plus overtime subsidies and distance subsidies, and the money deducted from the merchant is often subsidized to riders.

Riders often have six or seven or even a dozen dollars for a single order. Ele.me subsidizes merchants by two yuan, and the time may vary from one week to another. There are also traffic subsidies for merchants. Ele.me and Meituan forcibly occupy the market, but they will pull merchants into the chariot, and you have to bleed if I bleed, for example, Ele.me 9.9 yuan meal, the merchant may get it for six yuan, but the customer pays the delivery fee down to more than 15. Merchants don't make money either. The merchant will add a delivery fee of two yuan. The 9.9 yuan package is actually not 9.9 when it comes to customers. Meituan and Ele.me and the secret war between merchants and customersMeituan and Ele.me are all tug-of-war between various cities, a bit of a trade-off.

And the merchant is their ammunition and body, the platform is like the headquarters, and the customer is the receipt. Both want to use the least resources to obtain the maximum benefit, but the war is often not the final say! The platform gives more support to the merchants, the platform loses, and the merchants recover more profits at a smaller cost, and part of the rebates are given to customers, so as to achieve the profit of merchants and customers. But the platform will not let himself continue to lose money, and his losses in the early stage are to let himself get a bigger harvest in the later stage. It's just a matter of how long or long the harvest will be. When the platform starts harvesting, he will focus on harvesting merchants. It is often to increase commissions and reduce subsidies. This leads to a decrease in merchant profits, which in turn increases the unit price, which is passed on to customers. When customers see an increase in prices, they will order fewer takeaways, which will lead to lower profits for merchants and platforms. It's a cycle, and maybe a single move by the platform will cause a whole chain reaction. This is the secret war of takeaways.

There is an undercurrent between merchants, platforms and customers. The platform has an employment relationship with the rider and the merchant platform and the rider, and Meituan and Ele.me have their own special delivery and crowdsourcing. The scope of delivery is smaller than crowdsourcing, but each order will be delivered quickly, and the Meituan and Ele.me systems will deliver the food to the customer. What is crowdsourcing, crowdsourcing is not a special rider of Meituan Ele.me, some even run Dada or run after work for a while, but they just register crowdsourcing on the platform or cooperate directly with a local courier on the platform. Crowdsourcing is generally for riders to grab orders, and if there are no riders to grab this order, the platform and merchants can increase the price for riders.

For example, rainy days or rush hour. Therefore, the delivery fee of each order of crowdsourcing will be relatively high. But the corresponding single amount is unstable and far.

If you are a novice, you will suffer more in the early stage of crowdsourcing, because you are not familiar with the road and will grab a bad list. The platform sometimes reduces the delivery fee of the rider, or does not give subsidies in hot and cold weather, etc., causing the rider to go on strike or go to another platform. At that time, the situation was that many cities in Meituan had a large number of orders, but the unit price was low. Hungry on the contrary. It's a balance between the platform and the rider. Between the platform and the merchant, the food is delivered to the customer through the rider. Every veteran rider knows very well, and is very familiar with the speed of your meal, how it is packed, and what the location is.

Merchants who deliver meals slowly, riders will pick up meals slowly, resulting in long delivery times and bad customer reviews, and the feedback to merchants is that bad reviews will increase and the number of orders will decrease. The faster the meal, the faster the rider gets, the earlier the delivery time, the evaluation will add points, the merchant order volume increases, the more money is earned, the platform commission increases, the platform support increases, and the better the merchant. This is the better the better, the more the order, the worse the bad, the less the order. Riders, merchants, platforms, and customers all play a role in this, and they are indispensable and implicated in each other.

In fact, if you take a closer look, it is not difficult to see that from ride-hailing apps to food delivery platforms, to dry cleaning, housekeeping and nail art apps, these often reported O2O apps are making on-call instant services a reality. After the famous taxi app in the battle between Tencent and Ali, the most popular is the food delivery app. With BAT, Xiaomi, Meituan and Dianping joining the battle, the food delivery industry, which has been increased by resources, has a blowout trend, and everyone is trying to find ways to connect diners and catering businesses, and the signs of the "100 sales war" seem to be back on the eve of the "1000 group war".

At that time, "Eleme" received an investment of $80 million from Dianping, which drew people's attention to this seemingly inconspicuous industry. According to the data, the size of the takeaway market is expected to reach 70 billion in 2016, which is actually a huge market.

The Internet is trying to connect everything, and it is natural for takeaway to be targeted by the Internet as it can be combined with traditional e-commerce (service delivery to the door) and a typical O2O business (in-store consumption). In addition to "Eleme", there are also a large number of food delivery players. People used to say that the future of Huaxia Internet is a TABLE, but with the listing of JD.com and the dust of Xiaomi's $40 billion valuation settled, TABLE is becoming BATJM, and Zhou Hongwei is replaced by Liu Dongqiang's JD.com, and the most radical giants in the field of food delivery are these five.

Baidu's strategy at that time was to stop at a superficial level: in May, a low-key food delivery app was launched, deeply integrated with Baidu Map, and promoted on many offline occasions, but just like a taxi app, Baidu stopped at a shallow taste. Coupled with the fact that the LBS business and the map business are being integrated recently, it is unclear where the takeaway will go. But there is still a lot of room for imagination when glutinous rice, maps, wallets, takeaways and direct numbers are combined.

Ali is a defensive supplement: at that time, Ali launched Taodiandian, which intended to recreate O2O Taobao in addition to Taobao, starting from catering. The person in charge is Wang Yulei (Qiao Feng), the former vice president of Tmall. Ali likes to be a platform, Taodiandian only provides two apps for users and merchants, and the rest cooperates with a third-party agency team. In the past year, Ali Mobile has quietly taken shape, not O2O, these new models, but moved Taobao and Alipay to the mobile terminal, and Taodiandian has become Ali's defense supplementary business.

Tengxun's words are more interesting, it is the two legs of WeChat review: Tengxun did not directly enter the takeaway business at that time, and it took a year to hand over e-commerce to Jingdong through three major operations, search to Sogou, and O2O to Dianping. Therefore, Dianping's actions in takeaway can be regarded as Tengxun's head, Dianping invested $80 million in "Eleme" at the end of the year, and the fierce battle with Meituan Takeaway is in full swing, and the relevant indicators rank among the top three in the country. In addition, the WeChat public account is the choice of some small teams that do takeaway, such as "small farmer girls", and the public accounts of Haidilao and other businesses also provide takeaway functions, so WeChat is regarded as a natural takeaway platform - just like the role of the telephone in the era of takeaway 1.0, it is natural to obtain services based on communication.

Jingdong is more depressed, getting up early in the morning to catch up with the evening set: Jingdong's layout in takeaway is very early, and it led the "Home Food Meeting" in August of that year. JD is the best at logistics, but what it is good at is warehousing commodity logistics based on logistics centers, which is still separated from instant takeaway delivery based on a "one-kilometer radius", so JD chooses "Home Food Meeting" but is good at distribution. At the end of July, it had hundreds of thousands of household users, a catering distribution team of more than 500 people, covering the core areas of Beijing and Shanghai, and more than 1,800 catering companies had established cooperation with it. However, it has been left behind by Ele.me, Meituan Takeaway and Taodiandian.

Xiaomi is the most low-key, quietly investing in the layout: Xiaomi gives the outside world the impression that it is a smart hardware company, and it has little to do with O2O. This is not the case. Xiaomi has always considered itself an Internet hardware company, providing users with a steady stream of services outside of mobile phones, which are just information and identity terminals. The services provided can be value-added, e-commerce and content, or O2O.

Xiaomi's active layout of mobile phone payment, especially NFC payment, has been preparing for O2O, and also low-key lead the investment in the takeaway company "I have takeaway" round A, with a scale of 100 million yuan, Xiaomi only lacks a key link to enter O2O: map - what Baidu is good at, Ali only made up after the acquisition of AutoNavi, and Tengxun has always been a weakness and has to invest in NavInfo to make up for it. "I have takeaway" attracts Xiaomi precisely because of its special model: to provide merchants with "takeaway machines", which combine software and hardware to take away, and the smell of Xiaomi is similar.

A few years before Zhou Fangyuan's rebirth, Meituan was already a well-deserved first platform for group buying, according to a report by Tuan800.com, Meituan occupied nearly 6% of the market share in the group buying market, followed by Dianping and glutinous rice. On the other hand, Meituan can also be regarded as one of the three major O2O platforms with Dianping and Baidu. Wang Xing has upgraded his goal to use the Internet to transform the tertiary industry and change the way people eat, drink and have fun, not just group buying. The three most important businesses are movies, hotels, and food delivery.

After Meituan Takeaway was launched, it quickly seized the market by virtue of its merchant resource base, Meituan's ability to promote its local team, and its high degree of consistency with catering group buying users, and it took only one year to become one of the top three takeaway platforms in the country, the other two being Ele.me and Taodiandian. Just like the movie ticket business, Meituan has made another dark horse. The brutal growth of Meituan Takeaway has put it in tension with its "predecessors" Ele.me, and in some cities, there have even broken out vicious incidents of takeaway fights, which is exactly the same as the frequent fights between the group buying and local pushers in those years, which shows the fierce competition between the two companies.

On the one hand, there is a hot and fierce competition in takeaway apps, and on the other hand, negative news about takeaway apps has begun to appear, such as vicious competition between takeaway platforms, and problems with the hygiene quality of takeaway businesses. However, this still cannot stop the rapid development of the food delivery industry, which is undergoing drastic changes in products, models, marketing and services.

The first generation of takeaway is based on telephone, and merchants distribute takeaway menus, users make phone calls to order, and merchants take out takeaways. Large chains such as Zhen Kung Fu and Pizza Hut have call centers, and the shortcomings of phone-based are obvious, such as untimely menu updates, high update costs, high ordering time costs, and poor user experience.

In the second generation, most of the food delivery platforms are modeled, users place orders to the order center based on the Internet, App and phone, and the order center distributes to the merchant, which is essentially no different from Pizza Hut home delivery. Although Ele.me and Taodiandian have made it possible for merchants to directly accept orders, they still need the order center to carry out related processing such as order reminders.

The third generation of takeaway is decentralized, users directly place orders to merchants through the App, and merchants handle the orders themselves, which is conducive to communication between users and merchants, check progress, order reminders and service reviews. The biggest feature is that there is no "order center", and the App directly connects merchants and users. Taxi apps and Uber have become popular through technical means to eliminate the "order center" to improve efficiency and reduce costs, and takeaway has finally entered this stage, such as GrubHub and JustEat, which have IPO ordering websites abroad, Delivery Hero that has entered Huaxia, and "I have takeaway" in China are the third generation of takeaway.

In terms of how merchants take orders, there is a relatively large differentiation between different takeaway players.

One is based on the merchant's CRM system or a new computer system. Ele.me initially required merchants to install a system called "Napos", which also requires a fee in mature markets, and Yitao Food also started with a catering management system, but this is more suitable for large merchants, because merchants in a one-kilometer living circle may not have the conditions to install high-end networks and computers. For all merchants, installing a computer that can browse the Internet casually is not conducive to the management of in-store staff, but the advantage is that it can be combined with the order management, purchase, sale and inventory management of large merchants, and customer queuing management, which is very suitable for large merchants with mature supporting facilities such as Haidilao.

The second group abandons computers and allows merchants to use mobile apps to take orders directly. The barrier to entry is very low, and almost all store managers and clerks can use smartphones. But this is more suitable for small businesses and even "stall aunts" such as service providers, to deal with a certain scale of orders will be powerless, a little heavy, larger processing, mobile phone screen and input methods will become a disadvantage.

The third faction is the most extreme, providing dedicated terminals directly. The aforementioned "I have takeaway" provides merchants with a built-in system "delivery machine" through which merchants can take orders, communicate with users, update menus and inventory, and update the progress of food delivery. This has two advantages, first, it is convenient for merchants to process orders and improve merchant stickiness, and second, it uses hardware to select merchants to ensure service quality.

The fierce competition has repeatedly hit the real fire, which shows how important the food delivery field was in the previous life.

And this importance, this life has also quietly emerged, and now Meituan Takeaway, which already belongs to the Yuanfang Group, is fighting with other food delivery platforms in hundreds of cities across the country, and a large amount of money has been burned into it, and a war in the food delivery industry has permeated all corners of the land of China.