The difficult road of the home industry towards O2O

 

The collapse of "Niuwo.com" has pushed the topic of "how the home furnishing industry goes online" to the forefront.

 

 

The rumored investment of more than 100 million yuan, the claim that more than 700 merchants have settled in, and the online e-commerce platform that has only been online for three months has recently been proven inaccessible and the project has been suspended. Its attempt to integrate online and offline business models has also been widely questioned.

 

On the other hand, the O2O model aimed at achieving "offline experience online sales" (referring to consumers in the era of mobile Internet, where online / online virtual world and offline / offline interaction) began to sprout in traditional home furnishing companies .

 

Yu Lei, vice president of Xilinmen Co., Ltd., which mainly deals in mattress and soft bed related businesses, recently explained to the "First Financial Daily", "Last year, when we were doing product management, we found that consumers’ purchasing behavior has been closed and single from the past. Today's changes are open, so the company has begun to plan a new business model of O2O. Its essence is to form a closed loop of online and offline sales, so that consumers can achieve offline experience and online purchases. "

 

In addition, the old furniture brand Yihua Wood also announced in the middle of last month that it will cooperate with Guangdong Tengnan Network Information Technology Co., Ltd. to promote the construction of the Yihua home WeChat application platform.

 

In contrast, IKEA, an international home furnishing giant with good store experience and concentrated passenger flow, does not seem to be in a hurry to develop e-commerce and O2O businesses. More domestic home furnishing manufacturers are still on the sidelines.

 

From "Commercial" to "Commercial"

 

"Consumers' habits have undergone subversive changes." This is the consensus of most home furnishing companies today. The days of waiting for customers to come to the door will be gone.

 

Liu Weihong, deputy general manager and secretary of the board of directors of Yihua, feels very deeply about this. He emphasized that the mode of passively waiting for offline business has not adapted to the development and changes of the entire market, "need to optimize the business model."

 

There are three types of online home furnishing models: one is Melaleuca, Qijia.com and other vertical e-commerce, the second is Qumei Online Mall and Red Star Macalline ’s Xingyijia represented by third-party furniture or channel brand e-commerce, and the third is Tmall [Weibo], Jingdong and other professional platform providers.

 

Mo Daiqing, an analyst at the China E-Commerce Research Center, said that unlike retail goods such as apparel, home appliances, and food, furniture is a personalized durable consumer product that emphasizes experientiality. Consumers often need to touch, see, and even compare The purchase will only occur after the price, so selling furniture online is inherently difficult.

 

In the case of Yihua, its furniture group purchase business launched in cooperation with platform vendors has allowed it to taste the sweetness brought by e-commerce. But at the same time, the lack of experience, high platform usage fees and high traffic fees, and the inability to accurately push product information to potential customers also caused Yihua's brains.

 

O2O experiment

 

In Liu Weihong's view, group buying is, in a sense, O2O at the initial stage, but Yihua is now not only limited to the group buying business, but also to obtain customer data through social platforms such as WeChat for precision and peer-to-peer Push and service, combined with offline store experience and online sales.

 

A "Trial Sleep Passport" combines Xilinmen's online and offline. Xilinmen introduces customers from online to offline for experience and consumption, and at the same time obtains a large amount of consumer data. In the future, this company will "realize all retail data networking, and future sales will be completely achieved through mobile Internet APP."

 

Aiming at the problem of online and offline "hand-to-hand combat", Xilinmen simply included more than 800 stores, mainly franchisees, all over the country, into the O2O project, which ensured the convenience of the customer-to-store experience and also achieved logistics and After sale provides the basis.

 

Compared with Xilinmen, Yihua is currently taking the route of direct store experience + self-built channels. According to Liu Weihong, at present, Yihua has only included ten direct stores into this O2O layout. These stores are large independent stores, covering the company's full range of products, which are more suitable for customer-to-store experience. In terms of logistics, self-built regional transit warehouses in the city where the experience hall is located may become Yihua's primary choice.

 

The future is uncertain

 

More companies still prefer to wait and see. A furniture brand from Beijing made it clear that he would not consider getting involved in e-commerce business for the time being, let alone the idea of ​​O2O layout, because "logistics problems cannot be solved temporarily."

 

In fact, IKEA provides consumers with relevant product prices, local mall discounts, store addresses and other information on its official website and Weibo, which are actually an important part of O2O. But it has not been linked online and offline for a long time, perhaps because of the logistics cost.

 

Pintu.com ’s CEO Liu Wanlan used to work for IKEA. She pointed out to reporters that although panel furniture seems to be more suitable for transportation than solid wood and other furniture because of its easy disassembly, in fact IKEA ’s shipments are often loaded in a large cargo box. For small items, if you subcontract and distribute items to people who place orders online, the cost will increase significantly.

 

"Board furniture is only slightly cheaper distribution costs, but gross profit is very low, coupled with the traffic has been in prices, marketing costs are high, both sides of a squeeze profits gone, a direct result of this type can not be sustained." She Said.

 

In addition, the problems of imperfect mobile payment methods, the uniformity of online and offline products in the background of the operation, and how to complete after-sales services such as product distribution and installation are also bottlenecks that need to be broken through in the O2O model.

 

On October 21, Kumanju, an e-commerce platform for children's animation furniture with O2O and asset-light models as the main selling points, was invested by Tiantu Capital with 100 million yuan. Vibrate. (Editor: Peter)

 

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