Food e-commerce: The bottleneck of supply chain needs to break through

With COFCO's “My Buying Network” on the high profile in 2009, e-commerce has set off a wave of development in the food industry. Since its development, food e-commerce has been flourishing, and the domestic market as a whole is still in a period of budding growth. According to statistics, the online food transaction volume in 2010 reached 12 billion in the first quarter, and the market is very large. There are PKs in various food sites and it is difficult to compete. Therefore, no leading website has appeared so far.

Not long ago, Jingdong Super Business “JD East Food Supermarket” was officially launched, involving leisure food, beverages, condiments, drinks, nutrition and health care, and was committed to creating a “one-stop shopping platform”. Despite the experience of losing Tmall supermarkets in logistics, JD.com made full preparations for warehousing and logistics, and fully used proprietary distribution. However, this also poses a huge challenge to Jingdong's supply chain management. No matter whether it is No. 1 store, COFCO Mess.com or SF Express, in recent years, it has performed in terms of both sales volume and order volume. The reason is that poor storage supply chain management has become a major factor hindering its development.

In this regard, industry experts generally believe that the key to the success of food e-commerce is a good supply chain warehousing management. Most of food products are low-priced, single-item distribution is difficult and costly, and some foods have high storage requirements and require specialized information system management for distribution. These factors are not conducive to the large-scale development of food e-commerce. Therefore, the establishment of a sound supply chain management system is crucial for food companies.

On this issue, the reporter interviewed the person in charge of the Beijing Xingchangxinda WMS System (Warehouse Management System). He said that although the major e-commerce companies are now rushing to select food products, they have been struggling because of their industry specificity. Because of the special requirements of consumers on food hygiene, source traceability and other special requirements, the threshold for entry of enterprises has been raised. This has always been a problem that has plagued the development of food e-commerce. How to break through this bottleneck depends on the investment made by companies in the WMS system. .

Through the visit, the reporter also learned that Xingchangxinda was one of the technology-oriented enterprises that focused on e-commerce services in China earlier and started in the 3C digital industry. After years of development, it has expanded into industries such as food, toys, and automobiles. In the recent Tmall appraisal of the second half of 2013, Xingchang Cinda achieved good results in the food industry. Its self-developed WMS system helped many companies break through the bottleneck of supply chain management.

Compared with other WMS systems of the same type, the WMS system of Xingchang Cinda has unique advantages. In response, the person in charge further explained that "the general WMS system can efficiently manage the storage of goods, delivery, warehouse transfer, inventory transfer and virtual warehouse management, but it is temporarily unable to meet the upstream supply and downstream of the food industry. The traceability of mining and marketing. In recent years, we have invested nearly ten million in R&D and continuously upgraded the system, which can already meet this special demand of corporate customers and end customers.”

In the current competition for apparel, household appliances, makeup, and other categories, the food e-commerce business will become the next blue ocean. Not long ago, SF Express CEO Li Dongqi told the media: In the past, food e-commerce companies did not do well. On the one hand, because food products are edible products, consumers lack confidence in buying food products online; on the other hand, they are due to the entire logistics and distribution. Missing support. Li Dongqi said that the development of e-commerce has made the time for the development of e-commerce in food products mature.