食品电商仍在苦苦探索成功秘方

    鉴于利润率出了名的低，任何以食品为主业的企业都将面临着一个固有的挑战，那就是拿出健康的资产负债表。这就是Gilt Groupe在2012年9月份宣布削减Gilt Taste所提供的产品数量时所给出的原因。Gilt没有回应笔者为撰写本文而提出的置评请求。

    然而，将手工食品推介给普通民众所面临的诸多特殊挑战并没有让技术型人才和投资者望而却步。亚马逊（Amazon）今年6月份将自己于2007年在西雅图试点的食品杂货服务AmazonFresh扩大到洛杉矶，加上在线食品零售商FreshDirect已证实获得的成功，这些都明确证明了上面这一点。FreshDirect表示，该公司2012年营收超过4亿美元，而且在过去几年里就已经实现了盈利。

    亚马逊之前收购了Webvan，目的在于从这家初创公司的失败中吸取经验和教训，而FreshDirect首席营销官约翰•利曼则将该公司的业绩增长归功于服务便利和食品质量。他声称，虽然在线购物“从根本上说就是一项便利业务”，但FreshDirect争取回头客的杀手锏是自身“在食品质量方面的超强竞争力”。利曼说：“在采购中力求食品质量以及信任，正是我们经营模式扎根的基础所在。”

关键在于配送

    试图销售食品的公司还面临一个特殊的问题：配送。据市场研究公司Food+Tech Connect创始人达尼埃尔•古尔德认为，这是创建一个可行的商业模式最困难的部分。“很多人就是栽在了这上面。”

    除了通常的配送要求——仓库、货车、劳动力之外，食品还容易腐烂。 她说：“它增加了公司配送的复杂程度以及约束因素，尤其是当它们扩大经营规模的时候。随着业务开始增长，需求增长，你便成为一家配送公司，一家订单履行公司”，所以如果无法跟上需求增长的步伐，就无法生存下去。

    总部位于旧金山的在线农贸市场Good Eggs也得出了同样的结论。执掌该公司的是科技界老将罗布•斯皮罗【社交问答网站Aardvark的联合创始人，Aardvark在2010年以5,000万美元出售给谷歌（Google）】和阿龙•萨万特（软件设计公司Carbon Five的联合创始人）。他们最开始尝试过不少办法，以便攻克配送的“最后一公里”，向客户提供地方食品，最后才建立了自己的物流基础设施体系，得以把食品杂货配送到旧金山湾区客户的家门口。然而，与批量购买食品然后销售给客户的FreshDirec不同，Good Eggs建立了一个物流平台，让食品手工制造者和农场主通过这个平台把他们的食品直接出售给客户。通过与生产商合作设计他们自己的在线销售平台，Good Eggs团队能够迎合不同食品生产者的需求。而这点，Gilt Taste根本没有做到。

    斯皮罗说：“我们的网站吸引人的地方在于，它感觉像是一个在线食品杂货店。顾客订购自己想要的东西，然后就会有人送货上门。但它实际上在结构安排上完全不同。”这个方法还从配送体系中消除了易腐和浪费因素。“进入我们仓库的所有东西都是顾客已经付过钱的，为顾客制作的。因此，每天结束营业后，我们的仓库都是空荡荡的。”

    With notoriously low profit margins, any food-based business is going to face the built-in challenge of showing a healthy bottom line. That was the reason Gilt Groupe gave in September 2012 when it announced it would be cutting back Taste's offerings. Gilt did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

    The special challenges of bringing artisanal food to the masses, however, have not discouraged techies and investors. As the June launch of Amazon's grocery service, AmazonFresh (AMZN), in L.A. -- expanding a service it had piloted in Seattle in 2007 -- makes clear, as well as the proven success of FreshDirect, which says it had 2012 revenues over $400 million and that the business has been turning a profit for the past few years.

    Amazon brought in Webvan alum to learn from the startup's failures, while FreshDirect CMO John Leeman attributes the company's growth to convenience and quality. While online shopping is "fundamentally a convenience business," it's the company's "overkill in the quality area" that keeps its customers returning, he claims. "The high quality and trust in the sourcing," Leeman says, "is what our business model is anchored on."

All about distribution

    There's another special problem for a business trying to sell food: distribution. According to Danielle Gould, founder of research firm Food+Tech Connect, it's the most difficult part of creating a viable business model. "That's where so many people have failed."

    Besides the typical distribution requirements -- warehouses, trucks, labor -- food has a perishability component. "That adds levels of complexity and constraints on delivery for companies, particularly as they scale," she says. "As you start to grow and as demand grows, you're a distribution company, a fulfillment company," so if you can't keep up, you won't survive.

    Good Eggs, a San Francisco-based online farmers market led by tech veterans Rob Spiro (a co-founder of Aardvark, which sold itself to Google (GOOG) for $50 million in 2010) and Alon Savant (co-founder of software design company, Carbon Five), came to the same conclusion. After tinkering with a number of ways to deliver local food "the last mile" to their customers, they eventually built their own infrastructure to bring groceries right to their Bay Area clientele's doorsteps. However, unlike FreshDirect, which buys food in bulk and then sells it to customers, Good Eggs built a logistics platform for artisans and farmers to sell their food directly to customers. By working with producers to design their own online sales platforms, the Good Eggs team is able to cater to different food producers' needs in a way that Gilt Taste simply wasn't set up to handle.

    "What's cool about it is that it feels like an online grocery, in that you order exactly what you want and you get a home delivery. But it's actually structured extremely differently," Spiro says. The approach also removes the perishability and waste components from the system. "Everything that is brought to our warehouse has already been bought and made for a customer. So at the end of every day our warehouse is empty."