A study on the O2O Commerce Business Process with Business Model Canvas

Purpose: The growth of online commerce is now becoming a major threat and a new opportunity for retailers. Existing offline retailers struggle to cope with new online retailers' threats by utilizing offline infrastructure. Besides, online retailers expand their online strengths to offline sales by opening their offline stores. Many retailers are paying close attention to the O2O business and the resulting changes. Thus, this research focuses on the O2O business model and process that retailers can adopt. Research design, data and methodology: Considering the features of products that retailers sell, this paper divides O2O business process with the following criteria: delivery lead-time and delivery area. And This research uses the business model canvas to define the features of O2O commerce business process. This paper also uses nine key elements in the business model canvas for analyzing the structure of O2O commerce business. Results: This paper suggests the delivery model of retailers respond to offline customer orders and summarizes the following results. (1) Considering characteristics such as logistics process, delivery area, and product type, we define the features of O2O business models: wide-area (warehouse) based O2O business model, regional area (store) based O2O business model and time-separated O2O business model. (2) This study checks the availability of the business model through the business cases of O2O business models. (3) This study also analyzes the O2O business model of domestic retail companies by the factors defined in the business model canvas. Conclusions: Retailers can adopt the O2O business process to fit their business requirements and strategy. The online retailers who deal with normal consumer products mainly have the wide-area based O2O business model. The wide-area based O2O business model can be suitable for retailers who manage inventory centrally. The time-separated O2O business model can be a good solution for fresh food retailers to operate the logistics process efficiently. And to shorten the delivery lead-time of fresh foods, the regional area based O2O business model can be fit to the retailer that utilizes its offline logistics or sales infrastructure. It may be much more important for retailers to share the inventory information with other branches and to change the role of offline stores.