Instant retail brings brick-and-mortar stores back into retail game

SHENZHEN -- Food for pet turtles, adaptor plugs for overseas travel, and handheld paint sprayers were usually hard to find at local grocery stores, but Peng Texiang who owns a store in South China's Guangdong province, said he now routinely restocks the shelves with these products as more customers turn to nearby stores to shop.

"To some extent, COVID-19 has changed people's shopping habits," Peng said, adding that his customers are mostly those who live within 10 kilometers of his store and their orders can be delivered within an hour.

Brick-and-mortar stores are making a comeback across Chinese cities under the impact of the epidemic, as they have innovated with new products, services and business models to embrace the trend of instant retail.

Relying on mobile applications such as Ele.me and Meituan, Peng's store started doing instant retail business in 2015 and since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2019, Peng has seen a spike in both offline shopping and online orders.

Nearly 1,000 orders are placed each day and the variety of commodities sold in the store has expanded by dozens, according to Peng.

Over the past decade, China's e-commerce has advanced tremendously, with a highly efficient delivery system that employs a large number of deliverymen.

By taking advantage of their physical location and use of the internet, offline stores are capable of offering customers delivery within one hour or even 30 minutes, catering to the changing consumer demand that prefers buying when they need rather than buying in bulk.

According to a report released by global management and consulting giant Accenture, over half of customers born after 1995 expect their online orders to arrive within the day, and 7 percent expect to receive the products within two hours after placing an order online.

Experts believe that instant retail thrives partly because people move less to prevent and control the epidemic.

Xing Linbo, dean of Evaluation Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said instant retail not only made buying easy and convenient for customers but also boosted small-and-medium-sized businesses, gradually becoming a new driving force in China's consumer market.

The volume of instant retail is expected to surpass 1 trillion yuan ($145.1 billion) by 2025, according to research center iResearch.

However, instant retail requires heavy investment in human resources, technical support and marketing. Only by developing profitable models can its overall market size grow steadily, said Lai Youwei, head of Meituan Research Institute.