Nowadays, the business of online ride-hailing platforms is getting more and more exciting. Not long ago, while taking a taxi, I discovered thatAmap quietly launched a one-second delivery service.The entrance is on the taxi-hailing page. Click in and enter the address to help you deliver or pick up your items. There are two options: two-wheeler shared delivery and four-wheeler direct delivery. In fact, to put it bluntly, it’s just running errands. I tried it, the distance from the company to Hangzhou West Railway Station is about 3 kilometers, the combined delivery is at least 11 yuan, and the direct delivery is almost 18 yuan.
What’s interesting is that AutoNavi is not the first online ride-hailing platform to do this.
In June this year, Didi also launched similar Didi Express.
Is it now popular for online ride-hailing platforms to have side jobs?
In fact, errand running is not an emerging market that has only appeared in the past two years.
Earlier, around 2014, Dada and Shanshuo were established. Then, SF City and UU Errand were launched one after another. Meituan and Ele.me also launched their errand services, Meituan Errand and Hummingbird.
In recent years, the development of local life business of major manufacturers, coupled with the catalysis of the epidemic, has added fuel to the errand market. In addition to first- and second-tier cities, there are also local errand service providers in many small 18th-tier counties.
These errand runners can be roughly divided into two categories.
One category is comprehensive platforms with their own traffic, such as Meituan and Ele.me, and the other category is independent third-party errand-running platforms such as Shanshuo and UU Errands.
After so many years of development, the errand running market has actually formed a relatively stable industry structure.
iiMedia data shows that,Meituan Errand (60.1%) is the most commonly used errand brand among consumers, followed by Ele.me Errand (29.8%) and Flash Delivery (27.8%).
In addition to these players, SF Express, Dada Express, UU Errands, etc. are also following closely behind, each guarding their own one-third of an acre of land.
It can be said that the current errand running market is no longer a blue ocean, and is even very complicated.
But online ride-hailing platforms like Didi and AutoNavi are squeezing in one after another. What are they trying to do?
The errand running market is booming naturally because there is demand.
I believe everyone has had this situation at one time or another: after going out, I found that important things were left at home, and the things I wanted to buy were not available on the takeaway platform...
According to data from iiMedia Consulting,38.4% of consumers use errand boys to pick up and deliver items because they forgot to bring them; 37.3% of consumers use errand boys to buy things; in addition, their needs for help with queuing (26.7%) and delivering documents (19.2%) are also gradually increasing.
Demands such as errands that are multi-scenario, non-standardized and dispersed are not as frequent as food delivery, but they are still a market that cannot be underestimated.
According to statistics, the market size of my country's errand running industry has increased from 1.3 billion yuan in 2018 to 13.1 billion yuan in 2021, and the market size has increased tenfold.
From the supply side, the entry of online ride-hailing platforms into the business also provides the possibility of a win-win situation for all parties.
Everyone should also know that when taking taxis on Amap, third-party travel service providers have always provided transportation capacity. What Amap does is just to match users with these service providers.
When it comes to running errands, AutoNavi also follows the same routine as online ride-hailing: aggregation.
Amap's instant delivery is connected to Ele.me's Hummingbird errand, SF Express intra-city and UU delivery, and the four-wheel direct delivery is probably also an online ride-hailing service on the platform. Equivalently, AutoNavi quickly integrated industry resources to enter the errand market without having to go out to build transportation capacity personally.
Similarly, Didi Kuaishou also adopted an aggregation model. It was connected to Dada and Shanshuang as soon as it went online, and then cooperated with SF Express intra-city and Shanshuang. It even aggregated the aggregation platform Malttian, which aggregates multiple errand service providers. It can be called the errand-running version of a Russian matryoshka doll.
This asset-light model saves a lot of operating costs. You must know that self-built transportation capacity has always been a "flaw" for errand service providers.
Take SF Express for example. The financial report shows that from 2019 to 2022, the labor outsourcing costs of SF Express were 2.111 billion yuan, 4.860 billion yuan, 7.918 billion yuan, and 9.634 billion yuan respectively. This cost alone accounts for more than 90% of operating costs.
High labor costs have caused SF Express to suffer losses year after year, and it just turned around in the first half of this year.
At the same time, the aggregation model also cleverly avoids head-on conflicts with third-party errand service providers.
Although Amap and Didi Kuaishou seem to be doing errands, they are not directly competitive with these errand running platforms.
The online ride-hailing platform has its own traffic, and errand service providers such as UU Errand and Flash Delivery can use the online ride-hailing platform as a new traffic entrance to gain more users.
In addition, for online ride-hailing drivers, this is also a way to make money.
In April this year, the online car-hailing regulatory information exchange system received a total of 706 million online car-hailing orders, a month-on-month decrease of 1.4%. However, the number of drivers who have obtained online ride-hailing driver qualification certificates has increased to 177,000.
The result of more wolves and less meat is obvious.
Generally speaking, online ride-hailing platforms such as AutoNavi and Didi have entered the errand market. On the one hand, they are considering the growth of demand. On the other hand, they are also looking for new growth by leveraging the advantages of aggregation platforms.
Finally, as we mentioned earlier, although the errand running market is large, each order is scattered and random, and these orders are divided among different errand running service platforms.
So it seems that aggregation may be the way out for errands. There is nothing wrong with AutoNavi's current errand aggregation.
However, when online ride-hailing companies enter the errand-running market, it is inevitable to incur costly subsidies. However, compared with other companies’ discounts, AutoNavi’s discount this time is not particularly strong.
In addition, the instant delivery is not promoted on the homepage. It is very likely that AutoNavi is still trying the water this time. It would be more appropriate to regard it as a small puzzle piece of AutoNavi's expansion of the travel ecology.
What can be confirmed is that the entry of online ride-hailing platforms has once again pushed the entire errand running industry in the direction of convergence.
But there may be a question mark as to whether this business model, which has been proven successful in online ride-hailing, can be perfectly replicated in the errand market.