「The next day, at the crack of dawn.」
Luzhou, Luyang District, Rongfeng Garden District.
A young man in his early twenties sat at his computer, yawning nonstop. It was a rare day off, so naturally, he had to pull an all-nighter gaming to his heart’s content.
"Dragon Scale Horse! Damn, this body of mine is shot. Back when I was seventeen or eighteen, I could pull three all-nighters in a row without even getting sleepy. I’m starving. I’ll order some delivery."
Wang Junjie muttered to himself, rubbing his empty stomach.
Ever since Kuai Pao Delivery became popular in Luzhou, many homebodies had started living a life where they never had to leave the house, with three meals a day delivered right to their door. Although Wang Junjie wasn’t a total shut-in, he was still a loyal Kuai Pao user.
In his opinion, Kuai Pao was a local Luzhou internet company, so of course he had to support it.
He pulled out his Orange C2 smartphone and opened the Kuai Pao app. But he wasn’t paying attention for a moment, and his finger slipped, tapping one too many times and taking him to the Group Buy channel.
He was about to go back, but out of the corner of his eye, he suddenly spotted a new ’Group Buy to Home’ button in the menu bar.
’Group Buy to Home?’
’What’s this new feature?’
Curious, Wang Junjie immediately began to investigate. It didn’t take long for him to figure out what "Group Buy to Home" meant.
For example, with Group Buy deals from places like Caidie Xuan, Madam Luzhou, or Dai Mei Hot Pot, you used to have to go to the restaurant to redeem them after placing an order. Now, you just had to pay an extra delivery fee, and a Kuai Pao Rider would bring the food right to your door.
Ordering Group Buy products like it was regular delivery!
It combined ’Group Buy discounts’ with ’instant delivery’!
For users, it meant they could enjoy the low prices of Group Buy deals while also getting the convenience of instant delivery, with their order arriving within 29 minutes.
For merchants, the delivery model meant a higher frequency of purchases and the ability to reach a wider user base, easily causing order volumes to skyrocket by three to five times.
Moreover, by preparing standardized set meals, they could significantly increase food prep speed, lower marginal costs, and in turn, boost their profit margins.
Pei Yi had deliberately chosen the second day of the National Day holiday to launch the new feature, preparing to catch Wang Xin completely off guard.
As it turned out, his plan was a huge success. Before 11 a.m., popular restaurants in every district of Luzhou were slammed with orders.
An economy restaurant chain like Madam Luzhou hadn’t just partnered with Meituan and Kuai Pao; it was also on Dianping, Lashou Network, and WoWo Group.
But in a single morning, their system had received 86 orders for two-person Group Buy meals, 32 for four-person meals, and 17 for eight-person meals. Each meal set contained a minimum of eight dishes and a maximum of sixteen.
When the kitchen staff saw the thick stack of order tickets, they nearly fainted.
’When the hell are we going to finish all this?’
The lobby manager hurriedly contacted Kuai Pao’s staff. After reaching an agreement, they first disabled the "Group Buy to Home" feature, deciding to wait until the restaurant had fulfilled all the existing orders.
Pei Yi hadn’t expected so many users to be staying home during the National Day holiday.
And the merchants hadn’t anticipated that so many customers would emerge the moment "Group Buy to Home" went live.
As a result, one Madam Luzhou location in Yaohai District had to push through until three in the afternoon just to finish all the orders for both dine-in customers and the Group Buy deliveries.
After learning about the situation, Kuai Pao’s Market Department immediately reported it up the chain of command.
Kang Guodong grabbed the product and development teams and urgently pushed a new feature live: a redemption limit for "Group Buy to Home." The default value was set to 20 orders, and merchants could set their own maximum capacity based on their actual operational capabilities.
Once that set number was reached, users would no longer be able to use the "Group Buy to Home" service at that particular store.
This would balance the user experience for both Group Buy customers and regular delivery customers!
After this adjustment, the issue of being swamped with orders was alleviated. Despite this small hiccup, Kuai Pao’s "Group Buy to Home" feature still achieved its expected results.
On the day of its launch, it added an extra 200 million in transaction volume to the platform!
A figure that previously would have taken an entire week to achieve!
By the time Wang Xin reacted, it was already the afternoon of the third day. He canceled his vacation, had Wang Huiwen at the Yanjing headquarters pull together a team of R&D engineers to form a task force, and urged city operations managers across the country to launch a counterattack against Kuai Pao’s move.
In the past struggles between Group Buy websites, the most effective weapon was always a price war!
To protect its market share, Meituan simply initiated a subsidy model of ten to fifteen percent.
For the same Group Buy product that Kuai Pao sold for 99 yuan, Meituan’s price was as low as 84.9 yuan—a direct drop of 14.1 yuan!
They weren’t evaluating ROI (Return on Investment) or looking at the long-tail effect; all that mattered was order volume and transaction value. The priority was to hold the line for Meituan!
Lashou Network followed close behind. Under Li Yanhong’s coordination, Gong Zhenbing quickly organized a team to work overtime and rush the development of their own "Group Buy to Home" feature.
For a time, the programmers at Meituan and Lashou Network were grumbling incessantly.
Their wonderful National Day holiday was completely ruined. R&D engineers who had been spending time with their families or girlfriends had no choice but to rush back to company headquarters after getting a call from their superiors.
Lashou Network had it better. Backed by Qian Du, Li Yanhong was also generous enough to give double pay to everyone he called back to work overtime.
Wang Xin, as stingy as ever, only offered time off in lieu of overtime pay. Want overtime cash?
Not a chance!
As a result, after receiving the product requirements document, the project manager wanted to call a meeting with the product manager and the leads of the front-end, back-end, and testing teams to go over everything. But he called out for a long time, and no one paid him any mind.
"What is wrong with you people? Don’t you want to work here anymore?!" Tang Ling demanded, suppressing her anger, her face a mask of displeasure.
Two months ago, the scandal surrounding Zhu Xianbao’s resignation had caused her to lose a great deal of face. However, the company hadn’t punished her; on the contrary, they had given her a position of greater importance.