Chapter 47: Misfortunes never come singly, agency turmoil
It’s just that one wave has not subsided, and another wave has arisen.
Blessings come in pairs, misfortunes never come alone!
A group of [Qiandu Takeout] agents came to the capital [Qiandu Building] outside and started a sit-in to defend their rights.
First of all, you must understand what a food delivery agent is!
As the name suggests, they are contractors who act as agents for the operation and development of a certain area of the food delivery company. They are responsible for developing the market, building a team, recruiting riders, signing merchants, and delivering food. They also take part of the commission from each order as their own compensation. Generally,
The ratio is 20%, depending on the regulations of each takeaway company.
The money-burning model has always been the core strategy of takeaway O2O.
In 2015, the takeout battlefield pattern in first- and second-tier cities was initially determined, and several takeout platforms successively extended the market to third- and fourth-tier cities.
However, the money-burning war in more than 40 first- and second-tier cities has already embarrassed several food delivery platforms. The number of third- and fourth-tier cities exceeds 500, and the population is several times that of first- and second-tier cities. For the money-burning model,
It can be described as a bottomless pit.
Under this situation, after November 2015, [Eatme], [Lituan Waimai], and [Qiandu Waimai] successively announced the recruitment of regional agents in some uncovered third-tier cities, a large number of fourth-tier cities and counties across the country
, among them, [Lituan Waimai] and [Eatme] both claim to cover more than 300 cities, and plan to open business in 1,000 cities to agents in 2016.
Although [Qiandu Takeout] is not as good as [Lituan Takeout] and [Eatme], the corporate reputation of the parent company [Qiandu] has also attracted some third- and fourth-tier [powerful people] to join.
Agent, expand territory for [Qiandu Waimai].
In the imagination of most agents - [The place I represent is a virgin land for food delivery], the expected costs are only the cost of building a delivery team, office space, advertising and promotion costs and a small amount of subsidies.
But making money is never that easy.
The reality far exceeds expectations!
There is more than one takeout platform on the market!
[Li Tuan Takeout] has not been here for 2 months, [Eat Me] has come, and [Qiandu Take Out] has also come, and what follows is a long-lasting subsidy tug-of-war, such as [Eat Me] 15 minus 3
, then the channel managers of other food delivery companies who are responsible for managing agents will also force their agents to make 15 minus 3 discounts, or even more intense.
Subsidies cannot be stopped.
Because once it stops, the customers and merchants who have worked so hard to develop it will run to other platforms with discounts.
These subsidies are basically provided by agents.
In more than a year, many agents have begun to think about quitting.
But you can’t give up, otherwise the merchants and users that the agents have worked hard to develop will be arranged by the food delivery platform to other agents who will take over the orders, and the original deposit will be gone.
When the food delivery market is booming, it is not so easy to join as a food delivery agent. You must pay a deposit and have sufficient liquidity.
For example, an agent pays a deposit of RMB 80,000 and has working capital of RMB 160,000. According to requirements, these RMB 160,000 working capital must be spent within 3 months for market development.
If the agreement is violated, the deposit will be lost.
Many agents are gritting their teeth and persisting, hoping to survive until other agents can no longer persist or other food delivery platforms close down.
The current situation is that [Qiandu Waimai], as a platform, cannot survive and must be killed first!
This is a bolt from the blue for the agents of [Qiandu Waimai].
If [Qiandu Waimai] goes bankrupt, then the costs they have invested over the years will be completely sunk.
Many agents have invested their entire wealth, and there are many agents who have lost one or two million.
This makes it difficult for many agents to accept it emotionally.
What makes these agents even more angry is that starting from the second half of 2016, due to the difficulties encountered by [Qiandu] itself, the various investments originally promised by [Qiandu] have gradually decreased, but the [Qiandu Waimai] management team still
Constantly describing the bright future, promising that [Qiandu] market investment will resume as soon as possible, and at the same time requiring agents to subsidize themselves, and asking agents to negotiate with merchants to allow merchants to subsidize themselves.
But until 2017, the subsidy plan promised by [Qiandu] was delayed again and again and fell through.
[Qiandu] is no longer investing and is negotiating to bring in new investors. Even in order to sell at a good price during negotiations, [Qiandu] requires agents in some cities to use various methods to rush orders and sales in a short period of time.
Scale.
Isn’t this using them as cannon fodder and treating them like monkeys?
Use the agent's huge losses to exchange for a good price from [Qiandu Takeaway].
When the money falls into the hands of [Qiandu], it will not give any cents to the agents, but the losses will be borne by the agents.
This is unacceptable to the agent and makes him extremely angry.
In another time and space, the agent of [Qiandu Takeout] didn’t know the result until the final price was negotiated between [Qiandu Takeout] and [EatMe].
But in this time and space, because of the existence of the black swan Wu Siyuan and [Chaoqun Group], [Qiandu] plans to sell [Qiandu Takeout]. With the heated discussion among netizens, it soon became known to everyone.
.
The agents of [Qiandu Waimai] naturally also know about it.
At this time, their inner feelings are like this:
"We are fighting on the front line, but you are ready to sign a surrender agreement. In order to get better treatment for defeat, you even encourage frontline soldiers to fight to the death!"
This made them furious. They stopped burning money and ignored the market. After communicating with the channel manager to no avail, the agents spontaneously united and angrily came to the [Qiandu Building] where the [Qiandu] company is located.
Before, ask for an explanation and compensation for losses.
In another time and space, these agents also did this.
It’s just that at that time, [Qiandu Food Delivery] had long been sold to [Eatme]. The parent company [Qiandu] had already signed the contract and received hundreds of millions of dollars. Naturally, it was too lazy to pay attention to these food delivery agents and just used
Some legal provisions drag them down.
However, this kind of thing is also an old tradition for [Qiandu].
[Qiandu] has a product called [Qiandu Library], which has been using the slogan [data sharing, user upload], infringing on the interests of many cultural creators.
Many well-known writers have united to demand that [Qiandu] remove infringing works, but the employees sent by [Qiandu] company behaved very arrogantly and refused to compromise.
That is to say, later a trendy writer wrote a "Letter to the President of Qiandu", which caused many netizens to repost it and triggered a wave of public denunciation, so [Qiandu] had to bow its head.