Convenience Store New Force - Convenience Bee “Technical Models”
No matter what you agree with or not, Convenience Bee, an new force in the traditional convenience store industry, is growing at a remarkable speed. In February 2017, Convenience Bee just opened its first offline convenience store in Beijing. In 2020, there were 1585 Convenience Bee stores (according to the 2020 Top 100 Convenience Stores Report of China Chain Store & Franchise Association). The goal of Convenience Bee 2021 is to reach 4000 stores nationwide. By comparison, the Family Mart, a traditional convenience store giant, has grown from the its first store to 2,500 in China, and it took 16 years.
The COVID-19 outbreak is a blow to unprepared enterprises, and it may be a great opportunity once in a blue moon for Convenience Bee. At the ongoing Convinence Asia Summit of NACS, Mr.Vaughan Ryan, Managing Director of Nielsen Asia-Pacific Ecommerce, predicted that in the post-epidemic era, nearly all growth in retail will come from online sales in the next 3 years. This is undoubtedly a great benefit for the Convenience Bee that have been online root since his birth.
How Convenience Bee - an new force in convenience stores, depend on the "high-tech system", subverting the traditional convenience store industry and bringing new "technological innovation" to the convenience store industry. I will share my views with you in several issues.
In the eyes of ordinary people, convenience stores are small businesses such as selling cigarettes, mineral water and bread. What high-tech is there? In fact, convenience stores are the "small" businesses that need "high" technology most. For example, convenience stores do not need technology for site network planning and selection, category management and products assortment, display and mechandising, pricing, ordering and replenishment, and human resouce management everywhere. For example, in terms of ordering, what goods are ordered every day, and how much is ordered, that is, they will not be out of stock and lose the opportunity to make profits, nor will they lose money due to slow sales. General convenience store orders depend on excellent shop assistants or store managers, and their experience and sense of responsibility and business. Therefore, traditional convenience stores rely on "people" management to produce benefits.
According to Wang Zi, senior vice president, CEO of Opertion Convenience Bee, Convenience Bee can expand rapidly and maintain its service level, mainly relying on high-tech support systems. High-tech support means replacing human brain with big data, replacing human experience with computer processes, and making decisions with data and algorithms wherever people need to judge. Change the management of convenience stores from relying on people to relying on systems, reduce employment, and concentrate on customer service with limited manpower. With high technology, it is guaranteed that Convenience Bee has realized the profit at the store level in Beijing market.
Convenience Bee stores have adopted unmanned self-service cash register system, unmanned electronic shelf system, automatic store management system (high-definition monitoring and identification, passenger flow analysis, supervision service), automatic inventory management and pricing system, automatic vending system, and customer relationship system etc.
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1. Unmanned self-service cash register system
Self-service cash register of Convenience Bee, born out of the cash register technology of unmanned convenience stores, continues the accumulation of cash register technology of unmanned shelves invested by Convenience Bee in the early stage. In the online and offline operation, Convenience Bee are mainly unmanned self-checkout and supplemented by personnel-assisted cashier. Except for high-value products such as cigarettes or cash checkout, all other cashiers are customers self-scanning goods and self-checkout cashier. Users can realize self-service shopping and settlement by downloading the APP by themselves. At the same time, it provides online ordering, self-lifting by stores and delivery within 300 meters.
Convenience Bee canceled the cashier on duty, as shown above, but kept the self-checkout terminal and a cash register drawer. This setting is similar to the cash register mode of Hema Supermarket, a new retail template invested by Alibaba.
Traditional convenience stores are not only equipped with special cashiers, but also designed cashier counters with cashiers. With the rise of self-service cashiers, traditional convenience stores will set up self-checkout terminals to solve the problem of customers queuing during peak hours. The unmanned checkout cashier system of Convenience Bee is linked with its CRM (customer relationship system), APP and Convinence Bee Wallet. When checking out, there are some preferential activities such as attracting new member, such as depositing money in the wallet and jumping out of the free promotion, as well as product bar-coding design. The cashier system of Convenience Bee is quite different from traditional convenience stores. The big difference likes that traditional fuel driven vehicles are equipped with driving adaptive systems, while new energy vehicles have their own driverless systems since their birth.
The Convenience Bee customer relationship system and wallet are very powerful. The system will automatically push promotional information and wallet balance information to customers according to your consumption habits through algorithms to invte customers to visit Convenience Bee store. Convenience Bee Wallet also locks the customer's consumption in advance through the money deposited by the customer shall provides valuable liquidity for the development of the enterprise.