In the early morning of March 2024, Zhang Fengyuan, a flash rider, received an order at Langfang, Hebei. After a third of the journey, the customer asked for the medicine to be sent to Chaoyang Hospital. Zhang Fengyuan recognized the customer’s eagerness. Without hesitation, he changed the route and sent the medicine to the designated location at the first time. In May, the flash rider Mu Honglei received an order to send the project bidding documents. At that time, the customer holding the bidding document was blocked on the road, so he placed an emergency order to send the documents through the rider riding the electric car, and the final documents were delivered in time.
In the past many years, such urgent orders have appeared in the flash dispatch system every day. Not only that, but also daughters surprise their mothers with flowers, passports, clothes and keys … After one case after another, the one-to-one delivery model gradually builds their own business "moat". Founded in 2014, Flash not only turned losses into profits, but also successfully went public and embarked on a new stage of the company’s development.
Flash delivery was established in 2014, and e-commerce is still in the early stage of development, and the mode of distribution in the same city has just started. Nowadays, after 10 years of epidemic experience and development, the same city distribution represented by flash delivery has entered a new stage of development, the market demand has been further expanded, and the distribution quality has been further improved.
In the past 10 years, the instant delivery industry has experienced rapid development. When some peer companies choose the single-order mode, Flash always adheres to the one-to-one service scenario mode and is committed to solving the urgent needs of users.
According to the survey conducted by iResearch, the top three factors that users value when they actively use ready-to-use services are: platform delivery timeliness (55.5%), delivery service experience (41.8%) and platform delivery price (35.8%). In the one-to-one delivery mode, the rider only delivers one ticket at a time, without spelling or detouring, which makes the delivery faster and the time more accurate. According to the current transportation capacity deployment, the flash riders arrive at home in an average of 7 minutes and deliver to the whole city in 27 minutes. Similar cases have happened countless times on the flash platform. For example, when the user arrives at the airport and finds that he forgot to bring his passport, it is not allowed to return to collect his passport. At this time, the one-to-one mode of flash can give full play to the role, and the rider is like a "savior" of consumers.
In addition, in the one-on-one delivery, the service quality of the rider is also more guaranteed, and giving gifts to important people has become the "best thing" of flash delivery. Especially on Valentine’s Day, Qixi Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Spring Festival and other holidays, the demand for gifts has greatly increased, and one-on-one delivery orders have also reached a peak. In addition, important items such as bidding documents, contracts and valuables are also the categories that have been delivered more in the past years.
These seemingly simple delivery tasks, in the process of actual delivery, will face many challenges, such as traffic jams, poor communication when picking up goods, and so on, which will greatly consume the time limit. Chen Guolin, a flash rider, has received such an order. The goods to be delivered are U shields, and the financial personnel at the other end are waiting to use them. However, it rained cats and dogs that day, and the rider couldn’t stop the dripping rain in his raincoat. He was soaked all over and the road was slippery, so it was difficult to increase the driving speed. However, Chen Guolin kept in mind the user’s instructions of "deliver as soon as possible, don’t lose it", and finally delivered the goods on time, intact.
In the current situation that the pace of life and work is getting faster and faster, urgent delivery needs occur from time to time, and timeliness and communication ability are the most important factors for users. These situations are difficult to be completed by the mode of spelling orders, and one-on-one flash delivery has gradually formed its own commercial barriers. According to the survey data of instant delivery service users conducted by iResearch in October 2023, the user satisfaction and recommendation of flash delivery are higher than the industry average. According to the data of iResearch, according to the revenue in 2023, Flash will account for about 33.9% of the independent one-to-one express delivery service market in China.
In recent years, with the rapid development of e-commerce platform, catering take-out, fresh fruits and vegetables and other industries, the demand for instant delivery in the same city has increased dramatically. Consumers put forward higher requirements for fast, accurate and safe delivery services, thus promoting the continuous innovation of delivery technology and the continuous optimization of service model. In 2023, the scale of instant delivery industry in China has reached 338.5 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 19.8% from 2019 to 2023.
However, we also need to see that there is still a lot of room to be tapped in the instant delivery market in the same city, and more incremental markets will be expanded in the future. According to the forecast of iResearch, the average annual growth rate of instant delivery industry in China is expected to be as high as 19.1% from 2023 to 2028, and the overall scale of the industry is predicted to increase to 809.64 billion yuan in 2028.
Taking Flash Delivery as an example, on the basis of one-to-one express delivery service, Flash Delivery has reached cooperation with different companies such as Tik Tok, Meituan and China Railway Express, and its express delivery service capability has become the fulcrum of extended cooperation.
In 2022, Flash reached a "group purchase and distribution" cooperation with Tik Tok Life Service, and Flash provided a "one-hour average journey" service for the Tik Tok platform. In 2023, Flash Delivery cooperated with Meituan Takeaway to provide transportation support. Facts have also proved that in certain categories and scenes, such as flowers, medicines, mobile phones and other categories, and in the scene of long-distance delivery, many merchants and users will choose to use flash delivery.
After that, under the catalysis of the epidemic situation, the demand for "one-hour delivery" service of life platforms such as Tik Tok expanded rapidly, and new retail platforms such as Meituan, Dongfang Selection and Box Horse also launched a new round of competition in delivery timeliness and quality, and independent instant delivery platforms such as flash delivery also had stronger market value.
The involution also appears in the railway industry, which also provides a new business scenario for the same city distribution. Last year, China Railway Express launched the "high-speed rail express delivery" service, providing cross-city and inter-provincial "door-to-door" day-to-day service. This new format also needs to be delivered in the same city, and it has higher requirements on timeliness and quality. Flash delivery has become the "high-speed rail express delivery" partner of China Railway Express, providing one-to-one express delivery service in the pick-up and delivery links in the same city. According to the data released by Flash Delivery, in the first four months of the launch of the business, "High-speed Railway Express Delivery" handled more than 7,000 orders.
In addition, in addition to the traditional distribution format, flash delivery also extends to help buy, queue and handle affairs, further enriching the format.
With the accelerated integration of the same-city distribution, especially high-quality distribution services, into consumers’ lives, the demand for the same-city distribution has been further stimulated. According to the survey data of iResearch consumers, nearly 25% of consumers use the ready-to-use service more than 10 times a month, and over 90% of consumers use the ready-to-use service at least once a month.
At the same time, the demand of B-end users for instant delivery service in the same city is also growing. According to the survey data of iResearch, 37.1% of users think that the distribution demand derived from work exceeds 20% of the total demand. This has prompted B-side merchants to gradually recognize and use the instant delivery brand, and improve the penetration rate of instant delivery among B-side users. At the same time, with the increase of B-end users’ usage rate, the trust of instant delivery brands is accumulating, which will also be positively fed back to C-end users’ market, thus promoting the user scale of instant delivery enterprises to increase by an order of magnitude.
What needs to be further seen is that instant delivery in the same city should also transform from low-end to high-end. With the continuous expansion of the market, users’ needs are more and more diverse, and some users have put forward higher requirements for the quality of distribution. Instant distribution enterprises in the same city should always grasp the changes in consumers’ needs and gain market recognition.
Whether the instant delivery in the same city is moving from traditional to high-end or the B-end merchants are increasingly using one-to-one delivery, it shows the development potential and activity of this market. The instant delivery enterprises in the same city, represented by flash delivery, should also seize the opportunity of industry changes and further tap the market potential while meeting the diverse needs of consumers.
