The Internet is worth coffee.

In Ji Xiaoyang's view, this is only the initial form of the product, in order to facilitate customers' understanding of the product. His real goal is to run the specialty products of those offline independent bakeries.

This is also another original intention of Ji Xiaoyang to create downstairs 100. Before that, he had seen many small dim sum shops hidden in the corner of Shanghai, where the cakes were delicious, but few people paid attention to them. This is because independent bakery shops tend to pay more attention to their products, but they are unable to mass produce as chain brands do, so procurement and production costs are high, and the customer base can only cover the next three or five blocks. Once the off-season for cake and dessert consumption comes, these independent bakery shops are likely to close down because of a lack of cash flow. What Ji Xiaoyang is trying to do is to open up a market for these independent bakery stores through the Internet.

If the traditional western cake shop attracts the flow of people by selecting a location to drive logistics, then putting the cake on the network is to use logistics to drive the flow of people and complete the matching between the shop and customers.

On the other hand, for the downstairs 100 itself, making its own products is not as economical as offline purchasing. After all, for a start-up, the investment in building a central kitchen is too high, and promoting a single brand seems inadequate.

According to Ji Xiaoyang, companies can often get a discount of 30% to 60% for centralized purchases from offline independent bakery stores, while the cost of purchasing from chain brands is much higher. Usually, the price of the 100 afternoon tea set downstairs is 35-50 yuan, and the total price of each item in the package is higher than that of the set meal.

Compared with the product differentiation of 100 downstairs, Lian Coffee, which provides "standardized products", tries to put more emphasis on personalized service. In Wang Tao's view, although he sells "other people's coffee", few people will regard Lian Coffee's brother as an ordinary courier.

"the delivery brother delivered the coffee to the users, only finished 30% of the work, and the remaining 70% of the work was to make the users like your service. Only in this way will the users repeat the order and introduce it to the friends around them," Wang Tao said. In his eyes, even the little brother of coffee is very distinctive, and some will use paper to fold roses or the zodiac to give to users, these details are ways to enhance user stickiness.

On this basis, the distribution brother is burdened with certain promotion indicators, "specifically related to the number of new users per person per day, new orders, maintenance of old users, and so on." In Wang Tao's words, only by detailing the indicators to individuals can the overall goal of "40% growth per month" be achieved. And all these need to be realized by service.

On Lian Coffee's Weibo home page, you can often see different customers posting orders and posting photos with the coffee delivery guy. Wang Tao is also a master at using Weibo marketing, but he admits that the communication effect of Weibo platform is gradually decreasing.

"at first, many people will retweet our messages, but after a period of time, people will experience aesthetic fatigue and the chain of retweets will be broken," says Wang Tao. What he needs to do now is to try to capture the attention of users so that the content of even coffee appears frequently all the time.

In his view, a high-spread Weibo must have an attractive picture, because "text content users often pass at a glance", so he requires that every Weibo with coffee had better be accompanied by a picture. The second is the keywords, not only to choose highly sensitive keywords, but also to let keywords appear in the first two lines of Weibo. On this basis, Wang Tao asked even Coffee's Weibo home page to post new information every hour.

In addition to using social media for marketing, the characteristics of e-commerce also enable Lian Coffee to understand its customers through data analysis. For example, even coffee can know the user's active area, phone number, Weibo account and so on through the order, and you can also find out how often individual users buy coffee. Such detailed user information is difficult for an offline chain like Starbucks to do.

At the same time, "I know the taste, quantity and proportion of coffee users drink every day," Wang said. "if a user likes mocha, then I can infer that she likes chocolate. I can provide her with a chocolate gift box in the future; if the user likes the taste of matcha, then I can push the corresponding product for her later."

He believes that under the concept of "the last kilometer", the value of user data and distribution network can be further magnified. But I have to say that customers still choose even coffee because of familiar brands such as Starbucks and COSTA. Whether Lian Coffee can make better use of the value of the data depends on whether Lian Coffee can transform user loyalty from these well-known brands to the company itself. For Wang Tao, this is still unknown, but what he still needs to do now is to improve and expand his services. "at the next stage, we will consider becoming a promotion platform for other coffee brands."