Are the unmanned shelves in your office still there?

Yes, with the new retail trend, the field of unmanned shelves ushered in the fire of cooking oil and flowers in 2017. On the one hand, unmanned shelves of various brands have sprung up, and companies such as Guoxiaomei, Xiaoewei Store, Daily Youxian Convenience Store and Gorilla Convenience have quickly entered the public's field of vision. Dancing on the wind, such as Alibaba's small counters, JD.com's JD Daojia GO, Suning's Suning shop Biu and other unmanned shelf businesses. On the other hand, unmanned shelves are highly sought after by capital.

However, since 2018, unmanned shelves seem to have started to cool. No more goods are added to the unmanned shelves in the office, and the unmanned shelves are frequently removed. The once unprecedented unmanned shelves are now ruined. Why is the speed of unmanned shelves disappearing so fast?

1. Low threshold, homogenization of commodities

Compared with other new retail projects, unmanned shelves can be said to have almost no threshold. It costs hundreds of dollars to purchase a shelf and put it on the goods. And what about commodities? The same fast-moving consumer goods, and the limited shelf space, the selectivity of the placed food, plus the scattered spots, delays in replenishment are commonplace.

2. High cargo loss rate, lagging service, positioning low quality and quantity

The burglary rate, which is far higher than expected, is also a fatal pain point for unmanned shelves. The shelf is "unmanned", which determines that the commodity trading depends on the user's consciousness, which is a great test for human nature. Shelf merchants generally estimate the loss and theft rate to be 5-10%, but the actual rate is 30-50%, and one-third of the goods are taken away without payment.

3. Immature operation and profit model

The vast majority of unmanned shelves still cannot achieve revenue balance. The emergence of negative news reveals that some companies have expanded too early and it is difficult to consolidate their existing market share, which shows that companies have not yet explored mature operation and profit models.

After unmanned shelves, where is the future direction of new retail?

The market for unmanned shelves is narrowing

Direction 1: Opportunities to improve the efficiency of the industry. Although the unmanned shelf improves the efficiency of docking between users and commodities by sinking the channel, due to the limitations of the unmanned shelf itself, it can finally only improve the operating efficiency of the industry unilaterally. Through the application of new technologies and new models to the original industry, the practice of restructuring the industry to improve the efficiency of the industry seems to be more in line with the essence of new retail.

Direction 2: Opportunities to optimize user experience. Another outlet in the new retail era is optimizing user experience. In the new retail era, we can innovate and develop brand-new experience methods to seize new development opportunities in the new retail era. Nowadays, new technologies represented by VR and AR continue to emerge and evolve, and begin to integrate with different industries. This is actually an external manifestation of new retail. In addition to the product experience, there are many opportunities for payment experience, purchase experience, etc. For example, we can use unmanned self-service cash registers or smart retail shelves to optimize user payment experience through new payment methods such as face payment and fingerprint payment, while improving safety and greatly reducing the rate of cargo damage.

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Direction 3: Create opportunities for a new supply chain. In the new retail era, by creating a diversified supply chain system, industry efficiency can be improved and industry development opportunities can be found. By expanding and enriching the merchant's supply chain, coupled with the application of new technologies, we can achieve the goal of multiple supply ports to connect with multiple users, thereby achieving further improvement of industry efficiency.

The failure of unmanned shelves provides us with a new perspective to examine new retail. New retail is a rich concept. With the gradual landing of new retail concepts in the future, we may be able to find more new development opportunities and directions to open A new situation in the post-Internet era!

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