Lu Yunhao never thought that Li Mu would play a game of life and death with him.
Forcing Hungry Man's merchants not to connect to Bull Takeout, wasn't that robbery?!
Lu Yunhao was angry and afraid. He was angry that Li Mu's move was too ruthless, but he was afraid that Li Mu's move would directly strangle Bull Takeout.
Li Mu's thinking was very simple. Lu Yunhao took the Merikan capitalists' money and started Bull Takeout. It seemed like a normal competition, but behind the scenes, he wanted to use the Wall Street capitalists' hatred for him to take advantage of him.
Since his motive was not pure, and he repeatedly jumped around in Shanghai, then he might as well give him a dose of strong medicine and let him feel what was called a dimensionality reduction.
Now, the business model of the internet industry was still in the exploration stage, so there were no clear rules to restrict the platform from forcing merchants to make a choice. It was better to imitate the 3Q war of the past and directly stop you at the source.
Of course, Li Mu would not be as crazy as Teng Xun, directly forcing hundreds of millions of netizens to make a choice.
He did not want to blow things up. It had nothing to do with him whether the users wanted to use Hungry Man or Bull Takeout, and he would not interfere. However, he wanted the merchants to make a choice and let them weigh the pros and cons themselves. If they wanted to follow Hungry Man to earn money, they would give up on Bull Takeout. If they wanted to follow Bull Takeout to earn money, they would give up on Hungry Man.
Moreover, all the notifications were not in the form of documents, but were directly notified by the merchant managers through phone calls. Therefore, the consumers did not know that Li Mu was forcing the merchants to make a choice.
In fact, many platforms used this kind of move in the future.
When Pimixi rose rapidly, it had a huge impact on Ah Li. Because Pimixi mainly focused on the sinking market and had a large number of users at the bottom, many brands took the initiative to expand their sales on Pimixi's platform.
In order to restrict the development of these brands on Pimixi, Ah Li imposed restrictions on the official flagship stores of many brands that joined Pimixi. Perhaps a certain brand could earn tens of millions on Ah Li's Tmall platform last month, but after the restrictions, it could not even earn a million, and it was even possible that it would lose money.
However, by then, it would be very difficult to shake Pimixi's foundation. That was because Pimixi's real foundation wasn't those real well-known brands, but those counterfeit brands.
For example, there were at least dozens of brands of Pampers diapers in Pinduoxi, and they were the main sales force in Pinduoxi. Even if Ali restricted the official Pampers from entering Pinduoxi, it would not be able to prevent those counterfeit brands from entering and selling well.
It could be said that pirated brands were the real battleground of Pentiu's resistance. Pentiu dared to sell the pirated "Bangbao" brand to a million orders a month, but Taobao did not dare to let "Bangbao" brand enter the market. This way, Pentiu would have a place to hide from the attacks.
However, Li Mu had the upper hand and initiative now. Bull Takeout was being crushed by him in all aspects, and there was no way for him to find a strong backing.
So far, thousands of restaurants in Shanghai had joined Bull Takeout, but tens of thousands of restaurants had joined Hungry Mike. Moreover, all the merchants who joined both platforms at the same time realized that Bull Takeout's orders were far less than Hungry Mike's.
Moreover, there had been problems with the delivery time of Bull Takeout previously, which resulted in frequent complaints from users. Therefore, the merchants did not have a good impression of Bull Takeout.
Now that Hungry Mike had given them a choice, although they were unwilling, they instinctively chose to continue working with Hungry Mike. After all, their goal was to earn money.
This time, Bull Takeout's original shortcoming of insufficient delivery capacity immediately became its biggest obstacle. This was because the merchants who worked with them had all chosen to close down their online stores on Bull Takeout.
On the first day that Hungry Mike sent out the notice, the number of restaurants that joined Bull Takeout dropped from more than 3,000 to less than 100 in one go.
A large number of motorcycle and bicycle riders hired with high salaries simply waited at the entrance of these shops for orders to be delivered. As a result, there were at least ten riders watching at the entrance of each shop.
Due to the sharp drop in the number of shops, there were some areas where users could find more than 10 restaurants within a five-kilometer radius, but now, they could not even find a single one.
After all, the distribution of these less than 100 restaurants was not that even.
After listening to Zheng Chao's report, Lu Yunhao was about to go crazy.
'Isn't this asking for my life?
Previously, no matter how much Li Mu suppressed me, I could at least struggle at death's door.
However, once I used this ultimate move, I immediately fell into a state of paralysis.
The essence of Takeout O2O was Taobao, which specialized in selling food and beverages. If all the merchants on Taobao withdrew, what else could Taobao do?
Lu Yunhao's first thought was to use money to subsidize the merchants and make them give up on Hungry Mike for the sake of money. However, after thinking about it, he felt that this method might not work.
First of all, the merchants' income from Hungry Mike was obviously much higher than that of Bull Takeout. If he wanted them to give up on Hungry Mike, he would have to at least make up the difference and give them some benefits. However, if he did that, the daily subsidy for a single shop might exceed 1,000 yuan. The subsidy for thousands of shops would be an astronomical figure.
Moreover, who could guarantee that Li Mu wouldn't subsidize them?
Looking at Li Mu's current strategy, he had even brought YY coins into the game. It was obvious that he was going to invest all his resources to help Hungry Mike win. This kind of almost cost-free business would definitely increase the number of users and orders of Hungry Mike. In this way, the income of Hungry Mike's merchants would be even higher. If Li Mu still wanted them to not change sides, the maintenance costs would also increase.
Under such circumstances, his money would not be enough. After all, his costs had already reached an astronomical figure from the user subsidies and rider subsidies. If he included the merchants' subsidies, it would mean that Bull Takeout had to subsidize the entire takeout O2O industry chain. This cost was simply terrifying. Not to mention tens of millions of USD, even hundreds of millions of USD would not be able to support this.
However, if he couldn't think of a way to make the merchants stay, then Bull Takeout could really close down. He was a food delivery O2O. He couldn't possibly invest in restaurants just because there were no third-party merchants, right?
Lu Yunhao realized that this was very likely to be a disaster, so he immediately asked IDG Capital for help.
IDG did not expect Li Mu to use such a shameless method to curb the development of Bull Takeout. The only thought that came to their mind was to report and file a complaint to the relevant departments. They wanted to complain about Li Mu and Hungry Mike's malicious competition, and complain about Hungry Mike's monopoly of the market.
At the same time, IDG specially provided a team of lawyers to immediately head to Bull Takeout to provide legal aid to Lu Yunhao.
However, they were also not sure if such a report and complaint would be effective. They could only try it as a last resort.
The relevant departments quickly gave a reply:
First, there was no direct evidence to prove that Hungry Mike had forced the merchants to make a choice. Even if there wasn't even a recording, all the evidence that Bull Takeout's legal team could provide was the verbal statements provided by the merchants who did not want to be named. In other words, even a recording could not be directly used as evidence, let alone this kind of thing.
Second, even if Hungry Mike did force the merchants to make a choice, it did not constitute malicious competition. This was because, according to the law, Hungry Mike did not counterfeit Bull Takeout's trademark, did not damage Bull Takeout's reputation, did not publish false advertisements, did not violate the intentions of consumers, and did not sell at low prices. This did not include the verbal requests that Hungry Mike made to the merchants.
Third, the anti-monopoly law had not been implemented yet.
In other words, they could not use the law and policies to fight back against Hungry Mike.
On the second day, there were more than seventy Bull Takeout shops left.
On the third day, there were still more than fifty Cow Take-Out shops left. These fifty or so shops were at the bottom of the food chain that could not earn money from Hungry Me, Cow Take-Out, and even their physical shops could not earn money.
What was interesting was that these fifty last-place merchants were reborn through Bull Takeout.
As Bull Takeout's subsidies were very large, some users had not used up their coupons, so they could only choose one of the fifty shops to place an order with. As a result, the business of these fifty merchants finally improved, and they immediately treated Bull Takeout as their benefactor.
Lu Yunhao endured for three days, waiting for IDG's legal team to make a breakthrough. However, there was no progress from this legal team.
Therefore, Lu Yunhao used the same old trick to draw trouble to Li Mu.
He spent millions of yuan to lure a few shops that had given up on Bull Takeout to resume their cooperation with them.
Then, after their shops were closed, he immediately instructed these people to post a protest on Weibo, saying that they still used Bull Takeout, but Hungry Mike had closed its own shop, hoping to create pressure on Li Mu.
Li Mu did not give any response, but asked his people to change the game.
Then, Hungry Mike announced that the shop was closed due to technical problems and would be back online as soon as possible.
When the netizens saw that it was a technical problem, they stopped paying attention to this topic.
Lu Yunhao thought that he had grasped Li Mu's weakness and that he would be able to turn the situation around soon.
However, he did not expect the results to be that although these shops were back online, the number of orders they received was reduced to less than 5% of what it was before!
What's more, there were some players who used to receive hundreds of orders a day from Hungry Man, but after they went back online, they only received one order a day from Hungry Man.
The reason was that Li Mu had asked the technical staff to strictly restrict the flow of these shops.
The restriction was written in the internal code through technology. On the surface, one could only see the results, but no actual evidence could be found.
In layman's terms, they were smiling on the surface, but cursing in their hearts.
These merchants did not expect to lose so much. They immediately called to consult and protest, but it was useless.
Hungry Mike directly told these merchants that they were only responsible for normal visits to the shops, and not for high or low flow of the shops.
Lu Yunhao even personally called the boss of one of the merchants to protest, and even cursed over the phone. "I know you deliberately adjusted the algorithm! You think we used Bull Takeout, so you want to mess with us? Let me tell you, if you don't restore the algorithm, I will report it to the relevant departments! "
The customer service told him directly, "I'm sorry, sir, the algorithm is the responsibility of the technical team, and it is not within the scope of our customer service department. Moreover, the algorithm is the company's technical secret, and we cannot disclose it to you. Please forgive us."
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