Fresh moves transform hybrid shopping
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E-mail China Daily, August 2, 2017
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A shopper visits a newly opened Hema Xiansheng store in Shanghai. [Photo/China Daily] |
In one 10,000 square-meter outlet located in a shopping mall in Shanghai's downtown Changning district, every item had a bar code.
When scanned, this showed the price, product information and origin of purchase.
Before leaving the store, customers scan the code and complete their electronic purchase through Alipay, Alibaba's homegrown payment system, at a checkout register.
Nearly all of Hema's products come in single-meal portions. This is to address the demand for high-quality food with unnecessary waste.
"Unlike in the past, city dwellers seldom cook for at least half of the week," said Zhang Guohong, general manager at Hema. "They tend to dine out or order food in."
The O2O supermarket's fresh seafood section, such as king crabs and lobsters, has proved to be extremely popular.
Shoppers can purchase what they want to eat from large tanks, have it cooked and then tuck into their food in the dining area.
Alternatively, they can have it delivered to a location within a radius of three kilometers from the store.
Fuelled by the voracious appetite for fresh food in China, Alibaba has expanded its seafood and fruit sectors.
Fresh produce, in fact, now accounts for more than half of all Hema's stocks. In some stores, it is as high as 70 percent.
"If we can handle fresh fruit and seafood, then learning to handle all the other kinds of imports becomes relatively easy," said Ma when Alibaba's business-to-customer site Tmall first introduced Canadian lobsters.
Naturally, online retail is expected to grow from 15 percent of overall sales in 2015 to 47 percent through to 2022, according to KPMG, the professional service company and one of the big four auditors.
"That is evident from the rise of the likes of Hema," said Jessie Qian, head of Consumer Markets for KPMG in China.
"Hema achieves a 50 percent split between offline and online sales through a business model integrating showrooms and online delivery of fresh products," she added.
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