In addition to low prices, what else does Meituan’s God Membership need to provide to users?

Recently, Meituan officially upgraded and revised its God Member product. This article will look at the membership stratification and rights settings from the perspective of Meituan’s upgrade of God Members.

Recently, Meituan officially upgraded and revised its "God Member" product.

Many users will receive a pop-up window for "Super Member" when they open Meituan. The general face value of the coupon is 5 yuan, and users can increase the face value through inflation to get a higher discount. According to Meituan, the maximum inflation can reach 100 yuan.

The God Membership app has a stable entry point on the "My" page. On the homepage's takeaway and group purchase pages, merchants marked with "God Coupons" are listed at the top. Compared with the past, the God Membership wallet covers more categories, including takeaway, group purchase, hotel and travel, leisure, etc.

Since May this year, Shen members have carried out small-scale pilot projects in 17 cities.

As we analyzed before, Meituan’s promotion of cross-business membership products first means that Meituan has begun to lower prices in a more systematic way.

Low prices are still the focus of competition in local life, and it is also an important means for Meituan to deal with competition. Currently, Meituan’s God Member program is mainly centered around providing users with low-price benefits, that is, various discount coupons.

Currently, the coupon packages for God members are divided into two categories: free God coupons and God member saving wallets.

The former is free, while the latter is a paid coupon package. For first-time users, Meituan's low prices are more obvious. For example, 20 5-yuan discount coupons are sold for 11.9 yuan, which is equivalent to a 19% discount. In addition, we also saw users share on Xiaohongshu how to buy 6 member coupons for 2 yuan.

The systematic nature of Shen members is first reflected in the expansion of product categories. Currently, the rights and interests of Shen members cover 13 food, drink, and entertainment businesses such as takeout, in-store, hotel and travel, and beauty, basically covering various consumption scenarios within the Meituan ecosystem.

Category expansion is based on Meituan's organizational restructuring and business integration since the beginning of this year. In February, Meituan merged the home delivery and store delivery business groups, with Wang Puchong as the core local business CEO, and made a number of product and business adjustments based on business integration - the launch of the God Member is also an example.

We mentioned in "88VIP is becoming more and more important to Alibaba e-commerce": "The fundamental reason why membership products can survive cycles is that they operate people, not goods. Especially in the inventory cycle, they provide the most valuable core users with a variety of services that exceed expectations, not just low prices. This is also Taobao's unique advantage over Douyin e-commerce and Pinduoduo, which has been verified by Taobao."

The same goes for Meituan’s God Members. When strengthening the systematic nature of organization and strategy through membership products, it is necessary to do a good job of stratifying members and defining rights and interests. Otherwise, the so-called members who are connected to the entire site are just playing the role of discount coupons and can only play a role in the low price dimension, but cannot improve user stickiness, sense of identity, and sense of surprise from more levels, and will not generate more consumer surplus.

At the same time, Meituan’s God members face another difficulty.

That is, it is not easy to expand from high-frequency, low-price consumer groups to low-frequency, high-price consumer groups. For example, in Meituan, the loyal consumers of takeout and hotel and travel may not be the same group of people, and have different consumption habits. So how can we make members attracted by low-price coupons cross over to cross-category medium- and high-end consumption such as beauty and health, and home services? And what are the membership benefits that both groups of people can pay for?

This is a problem that Meituan’s God Members must solve when expanding their population, increasing consumption frequency, and wanting to bring high frequency to low frequency.

Meituan’s God Member Program has taken a path that few people have traveled.

Tmall 88VIP and JD Plus members are both annual paid members, which is a screening threshold for members. 88VIP members still retain the 1,000 points of Taobao value, which is an indicator of influencing consumption value and activity in the site, which means that you don’t have to spend pure money to become a member.

Because in essence, when 88VIP and JD Plus membership were first launched, they relied not only on attractive discounts to users, but more on high standards and convenience in service. For example, JD Logistics and after-sales were still very scarce in 2015 when JD Plus was launched. 88VIP can also enjoy better customer service, and many people pay for the various ecological rights and interests included in 88VIP, such as simultaneous enjoyment of Ele.me membership, NetEase Cloud Music membership, Youku membership, etc.

However, Meituan’s God Membership is based on the largest takeout membership, which largely determines that it will be difficult to expand from the takeout population, while at the same time, it has not established other ecological rights and interests other than discount coupons that can make users feel deeply.

We can also get a feel for it from the feedback from current users and merchants.

After the launch of the God Membership, some users who were attracted by the low prices began to strictly supervise Meituan regarding its low prices.

Some users pointed out that only the first-time God Member can enjoy a 12% discount. After purchasing the God Membership for the second time, the same 20 5-yuan coupons will cost 60 yuan after the "surprise discount minus 40 yuan". Compared with the purchase records in May, the actual cost of 6 member coupons has also increased from 12.9 yuan before to 18 yuan after the "surprise discount".

Some users compared it with other food delivery platforms and found that the price after using the Shen Membership Wallet Savings did not have a significant advantage. Take the Baodan Chicken Pot (Beijing Jianwai Store) as an example. Under the same delivery address, the same meal on Meituan with the Savings Wallet is only 1 yuan cheaper than on other platforms. For paid Meituan users, such a price is not cost-effective.

Meituan, which has opened a wallet-saving service, is only one yuan cheaper than Ele.me. The left picture shows the Meituan page, and the right picture shows the Ele.me page.

So we saw on social media that some users chose to refund or communicate with customer service to negotiate compensation after purchasing the Shen Membership Wallet.

Meituan merchants have different attitudes towards participating in the God Member program.

The activity rules mention that merchants who sign up for God Membership can obtain additional traffic support, official subsidies and other policies. And as you can imagine, after joining God Membership, merchants can more or less enjoy the joint advantages after the business is connected, such as using their own takeaways to attract traffic to their stores, etc.

In terms of traffic support, the platform provides five display positions for God member merchants, namely the homepage "Guess you like", search suggestion bar, search results page, God coupon label in the channel, and the newly added God member entrance display position. All God member merchants have their own God coupon logo to distinguish them from non-God member merchants.

As of July 4, the number of merchants participating in Meituan’s God Member program has reached 5 million.

But not all merchants have a positive attitude, and they still have to do some calculations.

The God Membership includes two types of merchants: the basic pool and the expansion pool. According to Photon Planet, merchants in the basic pool have to bear a fee of 3 yuan, and merchants in the expansion pool are divided into four ranges according to different prices from 100 yuan to more than 300 yuan after the merchant's instant discount, and the merchant cost ranges from 5 yuan to 25 yuan.

This means that as long as merchants participate in the God Membership activity, their basic costs will increase. If merchants want to maintain their original profit standards, they can either not participate in the God Membership or increase the price of their packages.

A merchant from Inner Mongolia said on Kuaishou that because he did not sign up for the Shen Membership, the store he runs "immediately lost 40% of orders, and even the delivery range was reduced."

Therefore, Meituan should now focus more on the product of "God Members", stratify members, establish member rights and interests, and establish merchant participation rules.

Meituan’s core advantage is the combined advantage of merchant advantages, user advantages, consumer data advantages and comprehensive business formats. Shen Membership is a product that can embody these advantages at the same time.

Based on the two basic facts that "the core base of God members are takeaway users" and "low price is the core means of competition in local life", it is not that God members cannot offer low prices, and they can completely focus on low prices.

However, the low prices for God members cannot just be a way for the official to work with merchants to issue discount coupons. The low-price competition has reached this stage, and the low-price capabilities required by the platform must be based on scale, systematization, and win-win cooperation with ecological partners.

The rights and interests that the platform should provide to its members cannot just be low prices, but must include more dimensional services including low prices, so that it can truly achieve systematicity.