HAN groups - Home Delivery Business (Non-store business)

Home Delivery Business (Non-store business)

Development of non-store business

Co-op's home delivery business is a group buying system using the HAN groups. HAN is a Japanese word literally means group. Only members who have registered as HAN members can utilize this facility. Roughly 46% of co-op sales come from a co-op group buying system.

How it works:

A group of five to seven households from a neighborhood, which is called "a HAN group", orders products together to be delivered directly to the group. The system is especially popular with mothers of young children and households who live near the local co-op stores. The group buying system saves co-op members time and money by enabling them to shop at home. Further, household budgeting becomes easier and impulsive shopping is kept to a minimum since members must plan their purchases ahead of time. Best of all, HAN groups can enjoy the convenience of weekly home deliveries of fresh food and groceries.

This type of business was established in the 1970s and member's used Han to voice out their opinions to Co-op, which in turn improved operations and boosted business. There are several factors that enabled co-ops to create this model that are historical, socio-economic, institutional and organizational in nature.

Home delivery classified into three:

Group buying

We deliver ordered products to a group of more than three members

Mechanism of Co-op group buying

Individual buying

Individual Delivery Services now surpasses Joint Home Delivery Services in terms of the number of members utilizing these services

NAKAYOSHI (Friends) delivery service

We deliver two members' ordered products to one place

For further more explanation:

In the group buying system, each member of a HAN group individually selects goods from the distributed catalog. In the typical co-ops, a HAN group is formed from a neighborhood and they write the codes of goods on a OCR sheet for ordering. The leader of a HAN collects the OCR sheets of members in his/her group and sends them to co-ops.

One week later, the ordered products are delivered to the HAN. Although co-ops accepted cash in the past, the most recent preferred payment method for group buying is through automatic bank transfers.