A complete guide to store operation on Meituan Dianping

As BAT becomes ATM, the importance of Meituan Dianping becomes increasingly prominent. Just recently, this one-stop e-commerce life service platform officially replaced Baidu and became the third in the ranking of Chinese Internet companies.

This means that Meituan Dianping is already a presence that cannot be ignored and has become a battleground for businesses in the dental and other industries. Businesses that are still hesitating now have to join the battlefield in advance to compete for traffic, although Meituan Dianping's backend does not yet have the appearance of an e-commerce platform...

This article aims to share Meituan Dianping’s operational methods from store opening to maturity, hoping to give some inspiration to students who are operating Meituan Dianping merchants.

The full text has 6586 words and takes about 15 minutes to read. It is recommended to bookmark it before reading.

1. Developmental period

Cycle: 1-6 months after opening a store

Work focus: store decoration, group order listing, evaluation, script preparation, promotion communication

When all qualifications are complete, payments are made on time, and the store is opened smoothly, the primary priority is to develop slowly rather than rushing into team battles.

There are different levels of entry into Meituan Dianping. The entry fee for the regular version of Merchant Tong (formerly known as Wangpu Bao) is low, but its functions are very limited. If you need to decorate your store, you need to upgrade to the advanced version of Merchant Tong.

Now the regular version of Merchant Pass should be cancelled by Meituan Dianping. If you want to sign it, you need to sign the advanced version of Merchant Pass directly.

Here I need to remind all merchants and operators that they cannot take it for granted that once I have opened an account with Meituan-Dianping, I can just sit back and wait for users to come without spending any other money.

Opening a store is just opening a door to enter the traffic pool. As for how much traffic you can get, it depends on your ability to harvest.

1. Shop decoration

The decoration of the store mainly involves the store display header, official photo album, service items, store address, contact number, group purchase, doctors, store highlights, etc.

It is recommended to use the company logo as the store header image. A stable header image will leave a deeper impression on users. When promoting through the promotion channel, you can adjust the header image for promotion. At this time, the choices for the header image are portrait > logo image > environment image.

The official photo album should be enriched with pictures of the hospital environment and different projects. The more the better, but the pictures must be of high quality and should be grand and elegant. Good videos can also be used as supplements.

Fill in the service items and store addresses normally. If allowed, write two contact numbers, one landline and one mobile phone.

The group orders under group buying should be improved, supplemented and put on the shelves. Because of the importance of group orders, it will be emphasized later.

Doctors are ranked according to their expertise, and store highlights are supplemented and improved.

It should be noted that the decoration of the entire store should be completed within 1-2 weeks as much as possible. Only after the store decoration is complete can other work be continued.

2. Group order is available

Meituan Dianping is an e-commerce platform for life services. The operations based on this platform are e-commerce operations, while group orders are product operations.

The reason why we emphasize e-commerce operations is to remind operators that the core essence of Meituan Dianping's operations is e-commerce operations. All operations should be based on the logic of e-commerce operations and cannot be imposed on Meituan Dianping by other methods.

The selection of group orders should be based on the principles of product operation, and the top-level design should be done in advance to plan the traffic/explosive products, profitable products, combination products and special products. Generally, only the first three are needed. If there are products that are different from other competing products, they can be designed as special products.

For a newly opened store, group orders do not need to cover everything. Instead, you should first focus on selecting the leading products for each project, put them on the shelves, and guide users to buy.

Meituan Dianping's product sorting rules are based on sales volume. The more sales, the higher the ranking. Usually, the higher ranked products are more affordable and low-priced products that attract traffic, with some exceptions.

The design of traffic-generating products can make less profit, but try not to lose money, otherwise it will affect the operation of the store.

When the store has been in operation for about two months, group orders under various categories can be completed one after another.

It should be noted that if you want to quickly increase sales in a short period of time, the store needs to concentrate its efforts on directing traffic from offline to online. As the store manager, you must have this awareness, balance the conflicts of interest among all parties, and gather all the strength in the store to make a breakthrough.

Although Meituan Dianping will charge a service fee when guiding offline users to make online purchases, this is worth it as the revenue it brings is far higher than the service fee. At this time, you should take a long-term view and not care about the small service fee.

3. Evaluation

Meituan Dianping attaches great importance to reviews. In the early stage, before there are natural reviews, we should try to guide users who consume in the store to make reviews on Meituan Dianping. The recommended review content is 6 pictures + 100 words. Only such high-quality reviews can attract more attention and increase the trust of other users.

When there are very few reviews, it is not recommended to activate the promotion channel, otherwise it will cause a waste of traffic. Generally, after 30 reviews have accumulated, it is recommended to start the promotion channel to launch traffic.

Some merchants may choose to find someone to brush the reviews on their behalf. Although this industry has existed for a long time, it is still not recommended to do so. Meituan Dianping has a very strict review mechanism for reviews. If it is discovered, corresponding penalties will be imposed, which is not worth the loss.

It is generally recommended to do free meals, that is, local activities. This is the best way for officially recommended merchants to guide reviews. Of course, the user level of free meals is usually very high, and you need to consider whether the store service and technology can keep up. Otherwise, if you attract traffic and give bad reviews, it will kill your teammates.

The users who provide good free meals have a high level of service and are familiar with the evaluation system, which plays a big role in improving the quality and positive reviews. The price of a free meal varies from city to city, but it's worth doing it upfront.

4. Preparation of speech

You need to prepare corresponding words in advance for online consultation and answering calls. Some departments may not have the knowledge reserves in this area, so they can consult other mature consulting teams to see how to respond to related questions.

Through constant communication with users, we summarized and summarized a set of words suitable for the platform.

General scripts can satisfy 80 to 90 percent of users, but there may be some users who need more professional scripts to deal with them, which requires customer service staff to continuously improve their professional knowledge.

The purpose of speech is to respond to users efficiently, while at the same time not being absolute and leaving some space for yourself. This way, many issues can be easily communicated and resolved. Everything that is certain is not necessarily certain, so avoid very affirmative statements in speech.

5. Promotion

When there are more than 30 reviews, start the promotion. At the beginning of the promotion, the time period can be set to working hours. Plan to build only one, rank 3-5, control the budget, conduct testing, and test the traffic while checking online consultations and telephone scripts, and make continuous corrections.

You can use a week to observe the data, from exposure to browsing to purchase, as well as the intensity of competition in different time periods.

Analyze data, observe the strengths and weaknesses of stores, learn from good brands, and make improvements. Then conduct a test launch and grow through continuous trial and error.

The development period is the stage of nurturing the account, cultivating the team, and adjusting and sorting out the processes. Many problems may arise during this period, but this is normal. We should use these mistakes to continuously improve the entire process of Meituan Dianping from the front end to the back end.

Hone the collaboration capabilities of various departments to prepare for the subsequent influx of large traffic. However, it should be noted that in the early stage when traffic is low, all problems that need to be solved should be solved. We cannot wait until large traffic flows in to solve previous problems. Such problems should not occur.

This will test the team's problem-solving and execution capabilities. Allocating the right human resources and doing the right things are also what should be done at this stage.

2. Growth Stage

Cycle: 6-12 months after opening a store

Work focus: group sales, number of visitors, reviews, team

If the development period is from 0 to 1, then the growth period is from 1-10. With proper operation, the traffic in the growth period will increase several times. As the person in charge of operations, you should focus on the key issues and let the team members carry out the specific implementation. During this period, the impact of key issues on the store is almost 80% of other issues.

It is necessary to clarify the focus of work, do a good job of recording and analyzing key data, and think deeply.

1. Group order sales

After constant adjustments and trial and error during the development period, it is necessary to create a stable traffic-generating product. The price should not change too much within half a year. At the same time, it is necessary to consider the prices and factors of major e-commerce festivals such as 618 and Double 11, and strive to achieve explosive growth in sales during the growth period.

The quality of sales is directly reflected in the store's online consultation volume and telephone appointment volume. When these volumes increase significantly, it will greatly boost the team's confidence, keep them busy, and better exercise their work ability.

It is also necessary to pay attention to the conversion of profitable products or performance products. Traffic-generating products only attract users, but cannot lose those users with needs. It is necessary to retain users through in-store technology and services to achieve a win-win situation.

It is an unhealthy operation model to only attract small projects without converting into big projects. It needs to be adjusted in time to see if the familiarity of the hero is wrong or the jungle rhythm is deviated.

2. Number of Visitors (UV)

One of the signs of a restaurant's booming business is that there are many people eating there, and for an online store, one of the criteria for doing well is the number of visitors. In most cases, the more people who visit, the better the store will perform.

Some people may worry that most people come in to attract products. It is undeniable that the base number of people for basic projects is much larger than others. More importantly, it is necessary to do a good job in store operation and perfect the settings of various modules so as to attract more users and give them more choices.

For example, when the basic project is very good, other projects can also have appropriate discounts, or special group purchases and flash sales, or in-store activities to attract people who are interested in the big project to sign up, thereby guiding conversions.

The number of visitors is related to the success or failure of a store. As an operator, you must pay attention to changes in the number of visitors. During the growth period, the number of visitors will increase much more than during the development period, but after the increase, try not to let it decrease. Either continue to grow or stabilize.

It is also necessary to mention that we need to pay attention to the visit-purchase conversion rate. When the traffic-generating products are not adjusted, pay attention to the price. If the number of visitors is increasing, but the visit-purchase rate shows a downward trend, this means that the purchase of the traffic-generating products may have reached saturation. At this time, if you increase the promotion budget and increase the number of visitors, the effect will actually not be very significant.

Additional thinking and preparation are needed, and how to increase large projects is the next focus.

3. Evaluation

High-quality reviews are extremely helpful in increasing user trust and the success rate of Amway promotion. Based on high-quality services, guiding users to give good reviews is of great help in the promotion of the store.

It is no exaggeration to say that the number of visitors, group sales, and reviews of a store directly determine the success or failure of a store.

The number of reviews should remain steady and increase, with at least one high-quality positive review (6 pictures + more than 100 words) every day. It takes some effort to guide users to write high-quality positive reviews.

You cannot find someone to write a review for you just for the sake of good reviews, and you cannot write good reviews just for the sake of good reviews while ignoring the real problems in the store. Good reviews must be based on the store's high-quality services or technology. If the technical service cannot keep up, then the good reviews are just bubbles. If many users are attracted to the store by good reviews, but then find that the real experience is not as good as the good reviews online say, and thus doubt it, and if it prompts more users to give bad reviews, then the credibility built up before will collapse instantly.

At this stage, the number of positive reviews needs to increase. At the same time, if there are negative reviews, timely communication should be made with various departments within the store to see which link has problems and make timely optimization and adjustments. Just as failure is the mother of success, failure without learning lessons and making improvements is not the mother of success. If the link reflected by the negative review is not improved, it can only be a negative review.

In addition, during the growth stage, offering free meals is also a good choice. On the basis of attracting traffic, you can increase reviews. However, during this period, you need to reasonably set the content of the free meal package, and try to communicate with the store as much as possible to ensure maximum utilization of store resources.

4. Team

An excellent team is half of success, and talent is always the most important part. During the growth stage, facing the growing number of users, a professional, responsible, and resilient team is needed. At the same time, the ability to solve problems is becoming increasingly important.

A person's ability to solve problems represents the value of his or her ability to solve problems.

A team's ability to solve problems represents the value of the team.

The growth stage is often the most prone to problems. The external issue is the growing number of users, and the internal issue is the store's ability to absorb and carry on.

As the number of users increases, the needs of different users are also different. How to ensure that the information received in the store is consistent with the users is a test of the team members' seriousness, responsibility, and carefulness. If team members make mistakes in their work, it will cause trouble to users.

In this case, the first thing to do is to coordinate the resources within the store and try to solve the problem if it can be solved. If it cannot be solved, apologize to the user and give a certain gift as compensation to avoid causing negative reviews from the user.

In most cases, users will express their understanding, but some users do not agree. For users who disagree, it is understandable. If the user explains it clearly to you, if you fail to do your job responsibly, you cannot blame the user. In this case, bad reviews are inevitable, and you can only bear it.

However, a reward and punishment system needs to be established. Those who make mistakes need to be punished, and those who do well need to be rewarded. Only by clearly distinguishing rewards and punishments can the psychological balance among team members be ensured.

Even though a team may not have many people, they will form their own small groups. As the team leader, you have to balance the interests of each member and each small group, with each member in the open and the small groups in the dark. This tests the team leader's ability to explore. If he explores well, he can take the initiative. If he does not explore well, he will fall into a passive position.

As a team leader, you should read more necessary psychology and management books, and learn about other people's management methodologies to gain lessons.

However, the most fundamental thing is what the members can get, growth or treatment. One of the two can retain most of the talents. If both exist, the team will be much more stable.

An excellent and stable team is a company's valuable asset. It takes much more time and energy to recruit a new person and train him/her to maturity than it does to build a stable team.

The same is true for acquiring new users. The cost of acquiring a new user is often many times that of maintaining old customers. Therefore, more and more companies are paying more and more attention to the maintenance of old or active users, such as Alibaba's 88VIP membership and Alipay's membership day on the 20th of each month.

The team leader also needs to make good use of the strengths of the people and avoid using their weaknesses. At the same time, he needs to have the ability to ignore some small things and spend more time on important things and think more.

3. Maturity

Cycle: 1-2 years after opening a store

Work focus: stability, platform large-scale activities, member training, new development

When the store enters the mature stage and various data tend to stabilize, the store’s primary task is to stabilize the data and perform more refined operations in order to achieve growth.

1. Stability

The mature stage requires stable monthly visitor numbers, stable group sales, stable monthly online consumption amount, and stable evaluation growth. Only when these data are stable can we ensure that the revenue from the Meituan Dianping platform will not decrease.

Because various data in the mature stage have tended to be stable, including the advertising budget, so when other conditions have not changed, the first thing to do is to ensure that various data of the store are also stable. They can be stable, but they should not be reduced, although they will inevitably decrease sometimes.

One thing that can be reduced is the response time for online consultations. The shorter the response time, the better.

2. Platform big rhythm activities

When running an e-commerce platform, you must learn to take advantage of the general trend and large traffic. If you only rely on your own store to hold activities, the number of users you can reach is limited, so you must take advantage of the large-scale activities promoted by the platform, such as the regular 618, Double 11, and the different activities promoted by each platform for different industries.

According to your own industry, you need to take the initiative to see what activities on the platform are suitable for you to participate in. You don't necessarily need to participate in all the activities. The most important thing is to choose the ones that suit you.

Participating in activities places high demands on store operations and in-store staff. Attending activities all the time will be a burden for them. If the effect is good, it will be a disadvantage but not good, which will dampen their enthusiasm. As soon as the question of participating in activities is mentioned, they will ask why we are participating in activities again. Therefore, it is necessary to consider whether it is suitable for your store, balance the emotions and interests of each department, and bring the best benefits to everyone.

It is a must to participate in the platform's big-beat events. Under the condition of not damaging the interests of the store, try to apply for the maximum discount. The sales growth or traffic growth brought by big-beat events is incomparable to any other period. At the same time, due to the long-tail benefits of big-beat events, the positive impact on the store continues after the event ends.

3. Cultivate members

When the store becomes stable and has no obvious growth points, the team leader should train team members so that they can independently operate and maintain the Meituan Dianping platform, while the team leader should be freed up to look for other platforms to expand the store's revenue.

The training of members should be based on the essence of e-commerce platform operation. Let them master the most critical points first, and then slowly extend from branches to leaves. When both buff and tyrant can be taken at the same time, take the tyrant first and then the buff.

I have heard a saying before that in a startup company, the second-in-command should be left to guard the base camp, while the boss needs to fight outside to seize resources and territory.

But the selection of the second-in-command is extremely important. He must be someone who can allow you to fight outside without worries. In the team, you need to find people with such qualities and train them. In this way, you can focus on doing other expansion without worrying about the Meituan Dianping platform.

4. Innovation

The ceiling of a company is the boss, and the ceiling of a team is the team leader. Therefore, as a team leader, you need to constantly learn, grow, get in touch with new things, and learn new methods so that the team can remain vibrant, and deep thinking is a must.

When it comes to handling things, we should be like Comrade Xiaoping in "The Deng Xiaoping Era", only grasping the general direction and key issues, and leaving the specific execution to team members.

If a team leader spends a lot of time dealing with trivial matters, it is unhealthy or unproductive for the team leader himself or herself or even for the team.

How a company can establish excellent systems and allow more middle and senior management to do truly effective thinking is the key to the growth of an enterprise.

Of course, Wang Xing also said: People are willing to do anything to avoid real thinking.

As for the expansion of new platforms, you can refer to the 5W2H analysis method for thinking. You can go to Baidu to check out the detailed 5W2H method. The following is written based on my personal thoughts.

WHAT?

What type of platform is it? What is the model? How to attract us? What is the charging model? How does the platform itself operate? What are the key tasks and key issues?

HOW?

How to do it well? What is the method? What resources need to be mobilized? What should we pay attention to? How to maintain the interests of both parties?

WHY?

Why do it? Can we not do it? Is there an alternative? Is there any similar platform?

WHEN?

When to do it? When is the best time?

WHERE?

Where to do it? Should we do it online or offline?

WHO?

Who is most convenient to do it? Who is the user? Who is the decision maker? Who will benefit?

HOW MUCH?

To what extent? What are the expected results? What is the quantity? What is the quality level? How much does it cost? How much output? How much time and money will it take to achieve the goal?

After we started to expand based on these considerations, the subsequent work was similar to the operations of Meituan Dianping. For operations, it was about constantly looking for platforms that could grow, making the snowball bigger, and then continuing to look for new platforms to continue snowballing.

IV. Conclusion

Finally, what I want to say is that you should not disperse too much energy in the early stage. You want to do this and that, which will result in none of them being done well. You should concentrate on building one platform well, and then continue to work on other platforms.

Operations involve day-to-day repetition and accumulation. Although it may seem boring at times, immersing yourself in it is endless fun. The best way to work is to let yourself learn and grow at the same time.

Most operational work is based on attracting new customers, retention, conversion, and activation, and growth may now be added, especially at a time when the concept of growth hacking is prevalent.

As an operator, you must be patient, pay attention to key data, and continue to learn and try. Maybe everything I said above is applicable to our store, but if you copy it, you may find that you don’t achieve such good results. Execution is the biggest test.

Operators must learn from others' operating methods and conduct tests before summarizing a set of operating methods that suit them, so that their own methods will be long-lasting.

Author: Frost Spring

Source: Frost Spring (bsquan624)