Author: Hyun Li Qi, editor: Wen Jie
Shen Xingxing heard that “Da Soy Sauce” was an online Asian supermarket that night, so he couldn’t help placing an order.
Shen Xingxing, who is studying in Nantes, France, likes to go to the physical Asian Super League every week, so when looking at the products on the website, he was indifferent. However, when the rice noodles from her hometown appeared in front of her, she instantly believed that “this Asian Super League is her own” and quickly placed the order.
Since then, Shen Xingxing has also started to share common Asian supermarkets with his familiar classmates, and from time to time he goes shopping in “Soy Sauce”. She found that the Chinese food categories here are more abundant, and the delivery speed is also very fast. As a result, this shopping habit is slowly being fixed-urgently needed daily necessities or food are bought at offline supermarkets, and other snacks and Chinese spices are solved through the online Asian Super League.
It seems that the presence of the Asian Super League overseas has comforted countless overseas Chinese “Shen Xingxing” who have missed their hometown late at night, but in fact, it is also more and more China like “Shen Xingxing” The stomach has given birth to a large number of overseas online Asian Super Leagues like “Da Soy Sauce”. Especially during the epidemic, the online Asian Super League was given a wave of growth opportunities.
However, with the continuous growth of online Asian Super League users, problems such as product expiration, random labeling, and slow transportation have begun to be exposed…
From firewood, rice, oil and salt to snail powder, soothing “Chinese stomach”
Shen Xingxing, who went to study in France in 2019, already has an online list of Asian Super Leagues. From German Yogo, Asian Fun, Micron, to Soy Sauce, 37express and Super Cool, she is already familiar with every Asian Super League. The advantages and disadvantages are often compared to buy what you need.
Compared with the various designs of domestic shopping websites, Shen Xingxing feels that the design of the online Asian Super League can be described as “simple and rude”. When you open it, you will see a full screen of goods, as if you hit a shelf full of goods.
I still remember that when she first arrived in France, Shen Xingxing once felt “unacceptable”. When she was in China, she liked to cook, and she often spent most of the day studying recipes in the kitchen. After arriving in France, she was paid by the local supermarket. Expensive and categoryThe scarce condiments are discouraged. At that time, Shen Xingxing felt extremely lonely because of all kinds of unsuitability. “Eating unhappy every day makes me even more homesick.”
It was not until later that he gradually adjusted to the high prices in France that Shen Xingxing liked to go shopping in Asian supermarkets. “Many of the goods that are so common in China are placed in Asian supermarkets in other places, but they feel particularly cordial.” The online Asian Super League makes all this more convenient. Clicking on the website, looking at the familiar firewood, rice, oil, salt, and common convenience foods, Shen Xingxing often has the illusion of going home, “Even if there is no special need to buy something. , And often click to open it.”
When the city was shut down by the epidemic, Shen Xingxing even tasted the sweetness of the online Asian Super League stockpiling. The day before the lockdown, Shen Xingxing went to the local Super League and wanted to stock up on something, but because Nantes only had two Super Leagues, the people who queued up for shopping made her discourage her. “Fortunately, I bought a lot of convenience foods on the Asian Super League in advance. I have a lot of condiments, otherwise I’ll have to queue up for trouble, I’ll have to carry a big bag of things to catch the tram.”
In fact, during the epidemic, there are still many “Shen Xingxing” living on the online sub-supermarket.
The Chinese community app Licheng APP, developed by German students, has disclosed its online Asian Super League business data. Since the end of February, orders have been bursting frequently in the month since the end of February, accompanied by the surge in user procurement needs during the epidemic. , The business volume reached 5 times the usual. Even if Germany began to relax restrictions later, the order volume of the Asian Super League on Liaocheng line began to fall, but it basically remained at 2 to 3 times the usual.
Liu Ming, who is studying in Germany, has already spent thousands of dollars on the Asian Super League.
He loves to buy Korean turkey noodles, Sichuan hot pot base and sweet water noodles, as well as seasonings such as light soy sauce, sesame oil, and chili noodles on “Da Soy Sauce”, although the prices of these products are comparable to those of offline Achao It’s almost the same, but the category is richer, “from spicy noodles to crispy noodles, everything.”
In Liu Ming’s view, the most important thing is that these online Asian Super League payment methods are very convenient. You can use Alipay and WeChat to pay. “Mom no longer has to worry about my WeChat red envelopes.”
Different from Shen Xingxing and Liu Ming, Lily, who worked in the UK after graduation, rarely cooks her own food. An important reason is that the condiments are too expensive. “Even in the local Chinese supermarket, the cheapest cooking wine is almost the same. It costs 5 pounds(about 45 yuan), and most basic seasonings such as oyster sauce, soy sauce and vinegar cost 3 pounds(about 27 yuan), cooking is a lot less fun in an instant, basically just make do with eating. “
So, in comparison, she prefers to buy all kinds of convenience foods on the Asian Supermarket. “I used to let my family buy them in China and send them to me, but the cost is too high and it takes a long time to receive Goods. Buying online, it will be available in about a week, and it has saved the Chinese stomach of lazy people like me.”
Especially when snail noodles are very popular in China, Lily, who grew up in Liuzhou, Guangxi, often stared at the pictures of snail noodles sent by friends in China and became sulking. However, the online Asian Super League obviously understood Lily’s heart and quickly put on the snail fans. When Lily saw the snail noodles appearing on “Da Soy Sauce”, she quickly placed an order, “No longer have to look at the pictures of snail noodles in the circle of friends, and drop sad tears and bitter saliva.”
If there is no price advantage, do enough marketing. Where there are Chinese, there will be advertising
“Being far away from home is no longer the bitterness of food, and there are soy sauces at home.”
It was the first time Liu Ming had an impression of “Da Soy Sauce”. In fact, he frequently saw this advertisement on an overseas Chinese movie-watching website. Since this movie viewing website provides a large number of domestically produced TV series and movies, most overseas Chinese have heard of this. Liu Ming often watches domestic movies on this website.
One night, Liu Ming, who watched “Thirty Only”, was too greedy to fall asleep by the frequent self-heating hot pot in the show. An advertisement for “Da Soy Sauce” popped up at the top of the screen. Liu Ming immediately entered “Soy Sauce” website, ordered a few boxes of self-heating hot pot and a variety of snacks. Although it has been a week after receiving the goods, Liu Ming remembered the online Asian Super League, “after all, he is too good at advertising, as if there are advertisements for Chinese people.”
Actually, this is just one aspect of the marketing road of “soy saucers”. Unlike the early Asian Super Leagues such as Yogoo, which was born around 2008, the newly-born Asian Super Leagues in recent years have obviously worked harder in “advertisement”.
Take the performance of Da Soy Sauce during the epidemic as an example. Its official Weibo quickly posted online promotions on the top of the homepage. Repost Weibo to participate in the prize draw. Prizes include Weilong’s spicy strips and Haohuanluo’s snails. Powder etc. At the same time, it also released a “gift event for posting orders”, allowing customers to post orders in exchange for gold coupons, and the information released by customers can quickly attract another wave of customers.
In the post-epidemic era, soy sauce also continued to make frequent efforts in marketing.At the beginning of 021, the “Chief Experience Officer” event was released. According to the rules of the event, users can post pictures or short videos on Weibo and Xiaohongshu to receive their customized gift boxes. Zinc Scale searched Xiaohongshu and found that there were more than 40,000 notes related to the “Da Soy Sauce” Asian Super League, among which nearly 10,000 were posted.
But the more important marketing activities are discount activities launched during various Chinese holidays.
“During the epidemic, the WeChat groups of overseas Chinese frequently appeared pushes from various online Asian super brands, and various stores launched special promotions to benefit the people.” Shen Xingxing told Zinc Scale, in fact, the discount rate is not It’s too big, but it’s quite a bargain compared to the high prices in Europe.
Zinc Scale found that most of the online Asian Super Leagues have special discounts on the official website, and in various shopping festivals in China, these online Asian Super Leagues will almost follow the rhythm and launch corresponding activities.
For example, Da Soy Sauce launched a 50% discount event during the Spring Festival, and corresponding activities were also launched during Double Eleven, Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day; and the online Chinese Super League UKCNshop also launched discount activities such as the Chinese New Year Lucky Pack during the Spring Festival. ; Zhimai Global, which mainly promotes “the most distinctive domestic products in China”, also launched several spike activities during the Double 12 period…
“In fact, the marketing and promotion methods chosen by the Asian Super League are the paths of domestic e-commerce platforms. One is discounts and the other is traffic. From the perspective of discount activities, the time and preferential methods they choose are the same as those of domestic platforms. Similarly, from the traffic perspective, choosing social platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo that are highly used by Chinese people, including Chinese WeChat groups, Chinese video sites, etc., have directly and accurately covered their target users.” An e-commerce company Industry insiders from the platform marketing department told Zinc Scale, “For the needs of overseas Chinese, the most important thing is the product category and transportation time. Since most of the online Asian Supermarkets are shipped from Europe, the transportation time of each platform is not much different. So at present, many Asian Super Leagues are beginning to push the snail noodles, the vitality forest bubble water, and the explosive milk tea.”
This is also reflected in the sales of the major Asian Super Leagues: Haohuanluo’s snail noodles, Baijia’s red oil noodles, Weilong spicy noodles, and coconut palm juice are also popular in China. It ranks at the top of the food favorites list of “Da Soy Sauce”; and the popular selections on Yougou.com include self-heating hot pot/maocai, milk tea and snail noodles…
The user experience is more intuitive. “This Asian Super League allows me to realize the freedom of snail noodles” and “I can drink domestic Internet celebrity drinks abroad” have become high-frequency sharing of online Asian Super League related notes. language.
“It’s not hard to understand, after all, what everyone wants to eat overseas is familiarThe taste of hometown is the new Internet celebrity product that has become popular on various social platforms. “Liu Ming felt, “During the time when everyone seemed to be eating snail noodles, the online Asian Super League got snail noodles and won the world.” “
Frequent problems, lagging services, cold capital, “soy saucers” do not do much
Although the emergence of more and more “soy sauce” has made overseas Chinese less homesick, since its inception, the online Asian Super League has emerged with a “small and beautiful” tone, and its users have rapidly increased At the time, the chain fell without accident.
During the epidemic, Liu Ming found that “the delivery speed of soy sauce is so slow that it is suspicious in life that you basically have to wait a month.” Even in the post-epidemic era, delivery speed still becomes a major pain point.
This is not what Liu Ming feels alone. Zinc Scale found that on Xiaohongshu, Weibo and other platforms, discussions about “soy sauce delivery is getting slower and slower” are increasing.
An important reason is that the target audience of the online Asian Super League is mostly students and full-time wives. However, the outbreak of the epidemic has brought a great impact to everyone’s lives and traditional business formats. According to the introduction of Liaocheng APP Online Asia Super League, during the epidemic, the number of users and orders from big cities increased significantly, and male users also increased.
However, it is obvious that in the face of rapidly increasing user volume and order volume, the online Asian Super League has not yet adequately responded.
In addition to the transportation problem, what worries users more is the labeling of the production date and shelf life of Asia Super’s products. As a matter of fact, as early as the beginning of 2020, some users exposed that the production date of a large number of products of the Oriental GoAisa chain of Asian supermarkets was inconsistent with the production date in English and the production date in Chinese, and even the production date crossed into the future.
Liu Ming told the Zinc Scale that, taking Germany as an example, products sold in Germany generally do not have a production date but only have an expiration date. Therefore, ordinary imported goods only need to indicate the expiration time of the product, while products imported from China Basically, I will not re-package. When selling in Germany, I only need to affix German or English labels to sell. “People usually don’t want to tear off the English label to see the shelf life in Chinese, but some people have found that the Chinese and English labels are inconsistent before. Situation.”
“Although this is a situation that has occurred in the offline Asian Super League, it is difficult to say whether the online Asian Super League can avoid these problems when orders are liquidated.” Liu Ming said frankly.
An industry insider explained to Zinc Scale, “Because the goods in overseas Asian supermarkets are basically shipped from the original factory to food imports.The company, then the supplier sends it to the major supermarkets. If the supplier provides products with inconsistent labels to the supermarket, it is really difficult for the supermarket tally staff to find the problematic goods. After all, they need to arrange too many goods every day . It is necessary to strengthen control when the order volume is large, but this is more difficult for the online Asian Super League. “
So, in the eyes of the above-mentioned industry insiders, online Asian supermarkets for small-scale groups may only be “small” in order to maintain “beauty.”
Behind all the problems is actually a dilemma in the development of the online Asian Super League. Although its birth period is similar to that of domestic e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com, more than ten years have passed. The “high light moment” has not ushered in.
This is not unrelated to its development environment. First of all, this type of online Asian Super League is limited by national policies, and the users covered often change. Take soy sauce as an example. During the Brexit period, the delivery of parcels has increased a lot of uncertainty. It can only issue relevant notices in January 2021; and on January 25, 2021, despite the opening of soy sauce Swiss line, but Swiss orders and parcels are taxed, and the taxes and fees need to be borne by themselves, and the current express delivery to Switzerland can only choose DPD.
On the other hand, unlike domestic e-commerce platforms, which are surging in the capital market, capital does not pay much attention to overseas online Asian super markets. The track lacking capital support is obviously difficult to tell new stories and enter the next stage of development.
(Shen Xingxing and Liu Ming in the text are pseudonyms)