Food is now the most cutthroat segment in O2O business

The Coffee House is a retail chain with 80 shops. The sale of coffee at its 80 physical shops is an offline business, while the sale of coffee via online channels of its own and partners is an online business.

All the intermediary units that support The Coffee House and the companies providing products and services to terminal users, such as GrabFood, Now, Lala.vn, AhaMove and Giao Hang Nhanh, are doing business under the O2O mode, an intermediary ecosystem that aims to attract online users to use offline products and services.

“The total number of online orders of The Coffee House could be up to thousands,” said Truong Nguyen, co-founder and CEO of AhaMove, a delivery firm belonging to Scommerce.

According to Khoi Nguyen, founder and CEO of Wefit, in the case of The Coffee House, with offline business, its shops serve as sale points, and with its online model, the shops are like a kitchen or storehouse, where its delivery partners such as Ahamove pick up products and forward them to users within 20-25 minutes.

The food delivery business is valued at $100 billion as estimated by McKinsey, or 1 percent of the total value of the food market. The biggest players in the world include UberEats which said it would get revenue of $3 billion, and Deliveroo, a food delivery app available in 200 cities valued at $2 billion.

In Vietnam, Now, belonging to Foody and GrabFood, with thousands of e-hailing drivers, is considered the most outstanding player in the food delivery sector. 

Lala.vn, a food ordering platform with delivery staff from AhaMove in SCommerce ecosystem, is also a well known name.

Each food delivery unit is attached to certain brands. The Coffee House, for example, only appears on Lala.vn’s app, not on Now and GrabFood. 

Meanwhile, Highlands Coffee appears on both Now and GrabFood, but not on Lala.

Beauty care is believed to be the second most competitive segment, according to Khoi Nguyen from Wefit.

“We are lucky as there is no rival in the fitness segment. But the beauty care sector is very competitive with a high number of service providers,” he said.

AhaMove’s CEO noted that O2O units tend to form ecosystems. 

In the retail segment, for example, the ecosystem that SEA Group is pouring money into includes Shopee (e-commerce), Foody (restaurant/café reviewing), Delivery Now (food delivery), Airpay (e-payment) and Ocha (restaurant management app).

Khoi Nguyen commented that except for e-commerce and food delivery, the other segments in O2O still lack players.

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