On the highway of local life, Meituan is running all the way with takeaways, restaurants, wine and hotels, etc. When it comes to the turning point of "live broadcast", it runs into Douyin, which has changed its direction from short video and e-commerce.

In the ancient business of catering, a new revolution is taking place.

Wang Xing and Zhang Yiming are the initiators of this change. One of them advocates "long-term patience" and the other claims "vigor can produce miracles." Live broadcast +

  local life is their new battlefield.

As Wang Xing said many years ago, this  HE Tuber is an era of never-ending peace. Some investors once asserted, "We must fight the war at other people's homes. Even if we lose, we will not lose. What we will break are other people's bottles and cans."

The intersection between the two business tycoons is no stranger to the outside world. Although the current situation is not the first time this pair of old acquaintances have crossed paths, it is the most "sparky" one.

According to "LatePost" previous reports, in 2022, Douyin's catering transaction volume has been close to half of Meituan's; in early February 2023, Douyin's local life's transaction volume contributed by the catering business has been higher than that of the hotel, tourism and comprehensive business Sum.

The latest data from QuestMobile shows that the number of overlapping users of Meituan and Douyin exceeds 300 million, accounting for 81.0% of Meituan’s users. As an old rival of Meituan’s food delivery business, Ele.me’s overlapping users account for less than 20% of Meituan’s users.

Douyin's magic to quickly seize the market is "live broadcasting". Although the entry of opponents will help make the pie bigger, who is the winner under the 28-20 rule is crucial. Meituan finally took up arms. Its live broadcast business has grown from two years ago. Start testing the waters and accelerate after building a live broadcast center this year.

And savvy catering businesses are also voting with their feet. Take Wallace, which has nearly 20,000 stores, as an example. During this year’s 618 period, it gained highlights in both Meituan and Douyin. At Meituan’s “618 Group Coupon Festival”, its sales of value-for-money packages exceeded 150 million yuan; while Douyin’s “618 Group Coupon

What’s interesting is that Wallace walked into Meituan’s takeout live broadcast room, while the one on Douyin was an in-store live broadcast with online group coupons and offline verification. To a certain extent, the choice of chain merchants also reflects the differences between Meituan and Douyin in local life live broadcasting.

Meituan, standing at the center of the whirlpool, can it use the magic of Douyin to fight back against Douyin this time?

1. How much patience does Meituan have during live streaming?

Meituan Runtong’s first live broadcast product is home delivery (takeaway).

The "Shenshou" live broadcast room is the first official live broadcast room of Meituan to break out of the circle. It focuses on "magic low prices and instant grabs." In fact, its earliest live broadcast attempt was in September 2022, and it did not start daily broadcast until March this year. Meituan’s attempts at live broadcasting date back to earlier, and food delivery is not the vanguard.

In December 2020, Meituan launched the "Meituan Mlive" mini program on WeChat, which was limited to medical beauty and education merchants and has not yet covered the huge takeout merchants. In April 2022, Meituan launched the "Meituan Live Assistant" APP and launched the "Food Live" channel in an attempt to open new sales channels for catering merchants.

In the past two years or so, multiple businesses within Meituan have tried live broadcasting, but they have all stopped. According to "Blue Hole Business", it was not until the first half of this year that Meituan's live broadcast business established an independent team and set up a live broadcast center at the technical level. Each business unit can use this capability.

The popular live broadcast room of Meituan’s food delivery god

A person related to Meituan told "Blue Hole Business": "Shenshou" can be said to be an officially built "model room". In order to set an example for catering merchants, subsequent merchant self-broadcasts will be the main body of Meituan's live broadcast. At the same time, the most popular live broadcast rooms are currently the platform’s traffic and subsidies, and merchants subsidize the cost of goods, which does not involve

  charging traffic fees for the time being.

Obviously, in the past period of time, Douyin’s local life pressure on Meituan has fallen more on the store rather than the home.

Meituan disclosed in its earnings call that it is currently piloting a new marketing model for its takeout and in-store hotel and travel businesses. For example, live broadcasts, short videos and limited-time sales have been launched to guide user traffic to the products that merchants want to promote and help merchants create popular products. This kind of exploration is defined as shelf + hot style.

Judging from the data in the official live broadcast room of Meituan Waimai, it has given the outside world a signal: Meituan may be able to do live broadcasts.

During Meituan’s two Coupon Festival live broadcasts in April and May, Wallace store sales increased by 4% to 10% month-on-month, and the commodity coupons directly

  brought more than 100,000 new customers to it.

From the perspective of Meituan’s external caliber, high sales and high conversion are their main promotion of live streaming. According to previously disclosed data, the write-off rate of some single products in Meituan’s takeaway live broadcast room can reach 75%. At the same time, the write-off of one commodity coupon will drive a 1.5-fold increase in order transaction volume. Data from Jiuqian Zhongtai estimates that the write-off rate of Douyin’s takeaway group purchases is only 61%.

From a merchant's perspective, the key factor in choosing to cooperate with Meituan Waimai for live streaming is not only high conversion, but also the ability to fulfill contracts.

As Wang Xing said at the financial report meeting in March this year: "Meituan is very confident in the quality of its riders, operating network and merchants. Some other platforms currently mainly provide scheduled delivery for the next day. This model The impact on us is limited, and consumers’ expectations are also different.”

Douyin, which launched Xindong takeout as early as 2021, has not expanded beyond the three cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu until the first half of this year. It currently sells group meals with weak timeliness and high unit price per customer. The unit price per customer is 110 yuan - 130 yuan. The reason is that Douyin does not build its own logistics, but relies on third-party instant delivery platforms such as SF Express and Dada.

There is also no self-built logistics. Why is Douyin e-commerce successful but local life is so difficult?

On the one hand, takeout delivery requires higher timeliness, multiple concurrency, and greater randomness; on the other hand, third-party logistics costs are higher, and it is difficult to improve efficiency through system deployment, and delivery personnel will give priority to orders from their own platforms. CITIC Securities predicts that the average delivery cost of Meituan’s food delivery orders in 2022 will be 7.1 yuan, which is lower than SF Express’s 10.2 yuan in the same city.

According to "Blue Hole Business", starting in July, Douyin Life Service has introduced "group purchase and distribution agents" in five cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and Changsha to help willing merchants in the service area open group purchase and distribution services, and 33 selected agents have been announced. Just last month, according to a report by "LatePost", Douyin Waimai had given up its GMV

  target of 100 billion yuan this year.

It is not difficult to see that Douyin still intends to develop the food delivery business, but it has no intention to build its own fulfillment system in the short term.

In addition to the ability to fulfill contracts, another reason that has hindered the development of Douyin's takeout is that compared to in-store dining, takeout does not rely on traffic and is more biased towards search. This is the logic of "people looking for goods", while Douyin still prefers " The flow logic of "finding people for goods". Many merchants started group buying on Douyin and also opened takeout services. But when

  they found that it was not cost-effective, they closed them down.

"For catering merchants, both home delivery and in-store delivery are necessary products. In the short term, both platforms will be considered. In the future, the focus will still be on one platform for refined operations. If Douyin takeout cannot be implemented, merchants will It will flow back to Meituan." An industry insider said.

Zhang Yiming must fight in the takeout battle, but it is difficult to win by bypassing contract fulfillment. Wang Xing once said in 2019: "The failure of most companies is not that they fail to master difficult movements, but that there is a problem with the basic skills." "If we practice the basic skills solidly, we can win 99% of things."

2. When you go to the store, will Douyin do a miracle?

Completely opposite to Meituan. Douyin's first success in local life is to go to the store.

36Kr reports that Douyin’s local life services will complete approximately 77 billion yuan in GMV in 2022, equivalent to 48% of Meituan’s. According to a recent report by LatePost, the transaction volume of Douyin’s in-store and hotel and travel business before write-off remained at about 40% of Meituan’s. Six months ago, this number was close to 45%.