ENJOY, an application of group purchase, wants to make a general membership card for fine coffee in the city.

The number and density of cafes may have become one of the criteria for measuring the quality of urban life.

Many of them are chain coffee shops, and some are called boutique coffee shops, which tend to be small, using beans from different parts of the world to make coffee, and some even bake their own coffee beans.

Although many regular customers can get familiar with each other in the store, it is difficult for these boutique cafes to launch membership cards like chain cafes, because the distribution is too small.

Recently, niche gourmet group-buying app ENJOY launched Coffee Pass in Beijing and Shanghai, partnering with boutique cafes in the city to offer uniform member discounts.

Coffee Pass, similar to Starbucks' stored value cards, requires users to recharge in advance. The first opening of Coffee Pass requires a recharge of 99 yuan, and subsequent consumption is also deducted from the stored value. If you use Coffee Pass to pay at partner merchants, you will automatically get a 20% discount.

In addition, Coffee Pass members can also buy coffee beans, coffee earbags, handcups and other coffee products on the ENJOY platform at a member discount.

The first batch of cafes to join Coffee Pass are not many, with 22 in Beijing and 30 in Shanghai. By default, the Coffee Pass page shows the partner merchants with the nearest geographical location, in addition to the address and distance of each cafe, there is also a comment introducing the special features of the cafe.

The page of each cafe will display photos of shops, coffee and baristas taken by the platform, as well as more professional information such as raw bean origin, coffee machine brand, barista certification and so on.

We tried it in a cafe in Shanghai.

On the second day of internal testing of Coffee Pass, we found a nearby cafe in Shanghai to experience the process of Coffee Pass consumption.

The QR codes of WeChat Pay and Alipay are placed side by side on the cashier of this cafe.

In consumption, merchants need to scan the consumption QR code of Coffe Pass members with a dedicated client. After entering the consumption amount, the system will automatically deduct the points after the discount.

Owner Nana told us that since moving to the new location in the alley in March, the main customers have come from well-known regular customers and other boutique cafes who have come to visit.

Enjoy's coffee shop in Shanghai

Liu Jiayi, senior business cooperation manager in charge of Coffee Pass, told Curiosity Daily that some of these "open stores" are stores that have already sold group-buying packages on the ENJOY platform, while others are going to newly developed stores specifically for Coffee Pass.

Her team spent two months preparing for Coffee Pass to launch, while another colleague was working on a similar business, Wine Pass.

The platform hopes to use recharge consumption to improve the consumption stickiness of users, on the other hand, it also uses this way to bring traffic to boutique coffee shops.

But boutique coffee shopkeepers also have some concerns.

"I don't know about the bigger cafes. For us, the price is very low, there is no room for discounts, and there are cafes with thinner profits in these cooperative merchants, and we don't know how to make money if we offer discounts. " Nana tells us that some of the boutique cafes she is familiar with are not on the list, perhaps because of similar concerns.

There are already a number of overseas services trying to combine boutique cafes to sell membership cards. There are independent coffee passports (Indie Coffee Passport) in Toronto, Washington, Chicago and other cities, and users who buy an ICP membership card are equivalent to having a membership card in an alliance cafe.

CUPS, which launched in New York in 2014, is a monthly coffee service that allows members to drink coffee in more than 200 independent cafes across the city for a monthly membership fee of $45.