Oriental Selection went to work for JD.com, but can this solve its growth anxiety?

Delivery within hours is a territory that almost every company that dreams of e-commerce must embark on.

This time, the new face sitting at the table is no longer a platform player such as Douyin and Kuaishou, but Dongfang Zhenxuan, which was born out of New Oriental. Compared with the former, Dongfang Zhenxuan has a more small and beautiful brand temperament. It is interesting to see that it has bravely entered the small-hour delivery track.

On April 8, Dongfang Zhenxuan officially announced the launch of its 1-hour delivery service in Beijing. Users can place orders through the official Douyin account @东方甄選小时达, which will assign the nearest forward warehouse based on the user's address and complete delivery within about an hour. The live broadcast room of this account is also very active. Overall, Dongfang Zhenxuan's 1-hour delivery service is using Dongfang Zhenxuan's consistent style to do instant delivery in the same city.

Officials said that Oriental Selection has 17 warehouses within the Fifth Ring Road of Beijing, covering almost 80% of the area, and can basically deliver within two hours.

But in fact, the "big tree" behind Oriental Selection is JD.com. JD Logistics and Dada Group have successively announced that the products of Oriental Selection's "hourly delivery" will be stored in JD Logistics' forward warehouse in Beijing, and the final delivery will be fully undertaken by Dada Express.

So, has Oriental Selection become an “employee” of JD.com?

In the Douyin account of Oriental Selection's Hourly Delivery, Zhiwei found information about 10 forward warehouses (incomplete statistics). Judging from the distribution of forward warehouses, Oriental Selection's Hourly Delivery service almost covered the entire city of Beijing when it was launched. Among them, Zhiwei counted 5 stations in Chaoyang District, namely Dingfuzhuang Station, Shilihe Station, Tianshuiyuan Station, Wangjing Station, and Jiandemen Station, which basically cover Chaoyang District. In addition, there is also a station in Daxing District, Tongzhou District, and Changping District outside the Fifth Ring Road, and forward warehouses are also set up in the core areas of Haidian District and Dongcheng District. With such dense warehouses, can the concept of hourly delivery be perfectly realized? A rider at a station in Dongcheng District told Zhiwei that their farthest delivery distance is about 7 kilometers away. It takes about 30 minutes to ride an electric bike for 7 kilometers in Beijing. If you take into account the acceptance of orders, sorting, packaging, and a series of uncertain factors, in theory, Oriental Selection should be able to fulfill its promise of hourly delivery. In reality, how many hours is Oriental Selection's "hourly delivery"? Zhiwei placed an order less than 100 meters away from a certain station. The estimated delivery time shown on the page was a full hour later. It can be seen that Oriental Selection has at least set itself a goal of delivery within one hour. On the other hand, in the official account of Douyin, there is a line of words in a prominent position on the homepage of most stations: delivered in more than 90 minutes. The anchor of Oriental Selection's hourly delivery once said, "Basically delivered within two hours." At this stage, Oriental Selection's hourly delivery is not based on speed. This "hour" may be "two hours" instead of "one hour." Oriental Selection has a large user base, but at the beginning of its launch, the actual sales situation did not seem to be as hot as imagined. 15 days after the hourly delivery service was launched, Zhiwei came to a JD supermarket warehouse based on the store information of Oriental Selection's hourly delivery. Zhiwei noticed that Oriental Selection's orders were not "treated specially." The site staff received the order from Oriental Selection on the same computer, which was then packed by JD Supermarket sorters wearing red work clothes and placed on the shelf at the door waiting for the riders wearing red vests with the words "JD Supermarket" printed on the back to pick it up. The entire process was no different from packing orders from JD Supermarket at the same site. The site staff also seemed to have no special understanding of the products and orders from Oriental Selection and did not treat them specially. It seemed that the products from Oriental Selection were just like other things on JD.com and were naturally placed in the warehouse. The staff told Zhiwei that there were relatively few items from Oriental Selection in the warehouse, and there were also few orders, and the specific numbers "had not been counted separately." One of the staff members also asked, "Where do you place orders for the items from Oriental Selection?" "Are the items from Oriental Selection more expensive? They should be more expensive than ours (referring to JD Supermarket)?"

The riders of the site also told Zhiwei that not many people buy Dongfang Zhenxuan. "If I deliver 60 orders a day, only 2 of them are Dongfang Zhenxuan." On April 25, the official account of Dongfang Zhenxuan Hourly Delivery showed that the site had sold 286 (items) of goods. The threshold for free delivery of Dongfang Zhenxuan Hourly Delivery is 99 yuan. According to the unit price of its products, users must buy at least 1-2 items per order. Roughly calculated, the site may have only delivered about 140 orders in 17 days after going online, which is about 20 orders per day. According to Zhiwei's observation, the 286 items sold at the site are already a lot compared with other sites. The sales data of Dingfuzhuang site in the same period was only 180.

Oriental Selection delivers within 24 hours and still has a strong "Oriental Selection flavor".

Two days after going online, Xiaoshida's live broadcast room also planned a segment where the anchors would deliver the orders themselves. Siyu, Jingwen, Fengfeng, and Tianquan took turns as riders, randomly selecting a few orders to deliver, and would ask the users who placed the orders in advance whether they were willing to appear on camera and participate in the live broadcast.

This form of publicity is very Oriental Selection. The anchors of Oriental Selection have always been loved by the audience for their outstanding conversation, frequent golden sentences, and knowledge of astronomy and geography. This cultural route is a perfect fusion with the real delivery scene of Hourly Delivery. Anchor Siyu took the warm route. On the night she served as a rider, before leaving, she said to the camera: "For a city, deliverymen are like the blood of the city, shuttling between buildings. For us, working hard outside, the city is not just a place name, it may be more of a support for your dreams, a concrete embodiment of your distant places, and your expectation of whether life will get better."

With anchors experiencing the hardships of food delivery riders, the "Chicken Soup Comfort Zone" of Oriental Selection obviously has its own traffic code. A user said on a social platform that she was the first order delivered by anchor Feng Feng that day, and as soon as she placed the order, the customer service called to ask if she was willing to be on camera. The audience watching the live broadcast also said that the entire delivery process of the anchor was very real and down-to-earth. Feng Feng even ran to the wrong unit building, and the live broadcast team circled downstairs to find the way.

In its comfort zone, Oriental Selection is like a fish in water. Whether from the data or user feedback, everyone likes it. Oriental Selection's Douyin account currently has more than 120,000 followers. According to Chanmama data, the first live broadcast of Oriental Selection's live broadcast room on April 8 had a cumulative sales of 50,000-75,000 yuan.

With a comfortable circle, there is basically no need to worry about the purpose and brand reputation of Hourly Delivery. And the fact that Oriental Selection can find the big tree of JD.com is also a shortcut.

"The agricultural products category that Oriental Selection operates itself has a demand for immediate consumption. JD.com has just started to experiment with the forward warehouse model, coupled with Dada's instant delivery capabilities, so for Oriental Selection, this cooperation is low-cost and can improve user experience to drive growth, and it can also achieve differentiated development with Dong Yuhui's Yuhui Tongxing." Zhuang Shuai, founder of Bailian Consulting and retail e-commerce expert, told Zhiwei that Oriental Selection has almost no disadvantages in delivering within hours, not to mention the live streaming e-commerce capabilities, user base, and supply chain of its own agricultural products.

At present, it is almost certain to make money by delivering within one hour, and "working for JD" is the best choice to enter the instant delivery track. If you enter the market yourself, the construction of forward warehouses, transportation teams, fulfillment systems, etc. will infinitely increase the cost. "Dongfang Selection is not a platform yet, so there is no strong desire to establish the mentality of delivering within one hour. Besides, there is no need to build the scale of Dongfang Selection by ourselves." Zhuang Shuai said.

So why JD.com? Zhuang Shuai said, "It is mainly because JD.com itself has an open strategy. Dada delivery and forward warehouses and JD.com supermarkets are also two systems. Dada delivery has always been a third-party service for merchants and other corporate customers."

However, choosing JD.com may just be a coincidence. In addition to JD.com, Meituan would most likely do the same thing.

From another perspective, if JD.com wants to do local business, it also needs the entry of Oriental Selection.

JD Supermarket and JD Daojia are both JD's same-city delivery services. The difference is that the former is self-operated, similar to Xiaoxiang Supermarket and Dingdong Maicai, and adopts the forward warehouse model. The latter cooperates with surrounding fresh food stores, such as Ruo Duomei.

Even though JD.com has the strength to build its own forward warehouse, the Dada transportation team, and rich experience in platform-based e-commerce, it is not yet experienced in the hourly delivery business. In this field, there are Xiaoxiang Supermarket and Dingdong Maicai, which started out in the grocery business and have long accumulated user minds. Later, there are the instant delivery businesses of major supermarkets. They do online instant delivery, which is actually just to consolidate loyal users and increase consumption frequency. From both aspects, JD.com lacks both minds and traffic.

It may take time to accumulate minds, but traffic can be found. Dongfang Zhenxuan is a traffic giant that cannot be ignored. Industry insiders speculated to Zhiwei that this cooperation does not rule out more in-depth opportunities, such as Dong Yuhui going to JD.com for live broadcasting, or simply opening a store on JD.com and live broadcasting for a long time.

What’s interesting is that Dongfang Zhenxuan started out as a live broadcast on Douyin. Is it now intending to “switch sides” and join JD.com?

Judging from the current actions, Douyin is still an important content output and transaction platform for Oriental Selection. This does not conflict with the cooperation with JD.com to provide hourly delivery. After all, hourly delivery is just one part of its business.

Furthermore, Dongfang Zhenxuan announced earlier that it wanted to adopt the membership-based business model of Costco and Sam's Club in the live streaming track. Judging from Dongfang Zhenxuan's focus on self-operation and digging deep into the supply chain strength, Dongfang Zhenxuan's next step must be guided by its own brand, rather than just being the most common type of live streaming room on Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu.

From this perspective, Oriental Selection is seeking a bigger stage, and JD.com can help Oriental Selection take a step further on the path it wants to take.

At the beginning of entering the new track, Dongfang Zhenxuan was generally stable. In the future, Dongfang Zhenxuan's new task is how to increase the frequency of user consumption and improve the delivery time. For example, the real sales situation mentioned above is slightly different from the data on Douyin.

After all, although Oriental Selection chose a "shortcut" and only played the role of a distributor, leaving all the other physical work to JD.com, any problems in the fulfillment process will definitely be borne by the Oriental Selection brand.