From Meituan’s “Raccoon Canteen” to Taobao’s “flash sale subsidy”, to JD.com’s takeaway business, behind the fierce competition in the field of takeaway on major platforms is the competition for super APP traffic entrances. This article will delve into the strategic intentions of these giants, explore whether super apps can be the key to solving user growth problems, and the future direction of the instant retail battlefield.
On July 1, Meituan announced that it would build 1,200 “raccoon canteens” in three years to develop quality canteens.
Raccoon Canteen directly hits the pain points of the ghost kitchen, based on a centralized takeaway kitchen, the whole supply chain can be traced, and consumers can view the whole process of food production.
Taobao followed suit, announcing on July 2 that Taobao Flash Sale would directly subsidize consumers and merchants by a total of 50 billion yuan within 12 months.
The subsidy method is simple and direct, such as issuing large red envelopes, free single cards, and official subsidies for fixed-price goods. Taobao copywriting finally directly appealed to “Taobao flash sale, order takeaway is more preferential!” ”
This is the latest move by the two giants in the field of food delivery, and food delivery is a battleground for instant retail. The battle for instant retail has entered a fever pitch.
Previously, at the end of June, the major giants also made frequent moves. On June 23, Alibaba announced the merger of Ele.me and Fliggy into the e-commerce business group.
On the same day, Meituan announced that it would shrink its preferred business and comprehensively expand its instant retail business, and its Little Elephant Supermarket would cover all first- and second-tier cities.
After the takeaway industry, JD.com announced that it would enter the wine tourism, liquor, and home improvement industries.
These businesses seem unrelated, but in fact they all show the same strategic intentions behind the giants.That is to create a super APP that covers all aspects of dining, shopping, and wine and tourism.
The takeaway war, which has been going on for several months, is just a prelude to this strategy. Each company offers tens of billions of subsidies to fight for takeaway orders, but in fact, it is using takeaway to open the traffic entrance and snatch user habits.
When Meituan, JD.com, and Taobao look more and more similar, where will their competition be next?
1. Open the traffic entrance with takeaway
The takeaway Three Kingdoms killing, which lasted for several months, was actually a competition between the leading platforms for the APP traffic entrance.
On April 11, JD.com launched a subsidy of 10 billion yuan, entering the takeaway market in a high-profile manner. On April 15, Meituan upgraded Meituan’s flash sale to an independent brand, aiming to go head-to-head with JD.com’s second delivery business. On April 30, Ele.me also joined the melee, announcing the addition of 10 billion subsidies. In just 6 days, the daily order volume successfully exceeded 10 million.
The biggest beneficiaries of the 10 billion subsidy are consumers, many of whom ate 2 yuan of takeaway and drank 0.1 yuan of milk tea.
However, this irrational excessive subsidy not only makes the prices of goods and services seriously deviate from the cost, but also easily makes consumers dependent on low prices, which is not conducive to the sustainable development of the industry.
This melee ranged from riders with five insurances and one golden fund, a war of words to a war of public opinion, and finally burned to the spokesperson’s homophonic meme competition.
When the subsidy war was in full swing, the Market Supervision Bureau intervened. On May 13, the State Administration for Market Regulation, together with the Central Ministry of Social Work, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, and the Ministry of Commerce, interviewed platform companies such as JD.com, Meituan, and Ele.me, pointing out outstanding problems in the current competition and requiring enterprises to operate legally and compete fairly and orderly.
Two months have passed, and there seems to be no loser in the takeaway war. On June 1, JD.com announced that takeaway orders exceeded 25 million, and on June 23, Taobao flash sale and Ele.me announced that the number of daily orders had exceeded 60 million. Among them, Taobao flash sales have nearly 40 million orders, and Ele.me has more than 20 million orders.
But there are no winners either. The order data seems gratifying, but according to some industry research reports and the company’s public financial information, the profit of the food delivery industry is very low. In 2021, Meituan’s profit margin was about 6.4%, in stark contrast to the 43.3% of the wine and tourism business.
The food delivery industry is a heavy-investment, long-term but low-profit business.Ele.me is even losing money so far. Why has such a business attracted generous subsidies from JD.com and Alibaba to seize the market and users’ minds?
This is because food delivery is a high-frequency and low-profit business. Three meals a day, plus afternoon tea and late-night snacks, people open takeaway software twice a day second only to chat software such as WeChat.As long as users successfully open the software and form a habit, JD Taobao’s goal will be achieved.
JD.com does takeaway, does not launch a separate APP, but sets the entrance inside the original JD.com APP.This reveals JD.com’s intention to do takeaway – to drain traffic to the JD.com APP.
Liu Qiangdong also said at the sharing meeting that 40% of consumers who come to JD.com to order takeaway will buy e-commerce products from JD.com, “The money we lose by doing takeaway is more cost-effective than going to Douyin and Tencent to buy traffic.” At the moment when JD.com’s user traffic is peaking, Liu Qiangdong is “looking for increments in the stock”.
Liu Qiangdong also proposed that whether it is takeaway, catering or wine tourism, JD.com’s purpose is the supply chain behind it. Selling meals at the front end of takeaway is not profitable, but it can make money through the supply chain.
In fact, it can be said that takeaway is a special kind of instant retail, but the goods are replaced with “food”.
The entire set of operation mechanisms and personnel of takeaway can be almost completely copied to the instant retail business, and JD.com’s investment in takeaway can be fed back to the instant retail business in the future.
Therefore, some industry insiders believe that JD.com’s takeaway is actually offensive and defensive, intending to instant retail, and to consolidate its moat in the field of e-commerce.
Taobao is also following suit, setting up a “flash sale” first-level window in the APP and jumping to the Ele.me interface.
On June 23, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming announced the merger of Ele.me and Fliggy into Alibaba’s China e-commerce business group, but there are no rumors to do anything about the Ele.me APP.
Takeaway is just a drainage business, not profitable, big manufacturers just want to use takeaway to open the traffic entrance, behind this is their competition for the instant retail ecosystem.
2. I want to make a super APP
Alibaba put Fliggy and Ele.me into the Taobao APP, Meituan cut off the loss-making preferred business to focus on flash sales, and JD.com suddenly entered the takeaway market. These seemingly scattered actions are actually doing the same thing: creating a super app and locking users in their own apps.
On June 18, JD.com launched a 0 commission plan for hotel stays, which means that the business travel population and the hotel business group highly overlap, and the wine and tourism business has also been installed into the JD.com APP. And there are rumors that JD.com poaches people from platforms such as Fliggy, Tongcheng, and Ctrip with 3 times the salary.
This strategy not only threatens Meituan and Ctrip, but also touches the sensitive nerves of Alibaba’s local life. So Alibaba quickly announced the reintegration of Ele.me and Fliggy into the e-commerce battlefield.
Alibaba internally called this adjustment a “return to Taobao territory”, indicating that this is not a simple functional superposition of Ele.me Fliggy and Taobao, but an ecological restructuring.
The power of this strategy can be seen from the numbers, for example, after Ele.me and Taobao joined forces, the daily order volume of Taobao flash sales exceeded 60 million, which directly threatened the basic market of Meituan’s daily orders of 90 million.
Previously, within Alibaba, Fliggy and Ele.me both encountered development bottlenecks, and as businesses that could not make profits on their own, they did not have the ability to be completely independent. So Alibaba merged these two into Taobao, strengthened Taobao’s position, and created a super APP to cope with external traffic competition.
After the integration, Ele.me’s instant delivery capabilities are deeply integrated with Taobao flash sales to achieve full-scene coverage of far-field e-commerce and near-field retail. Fliggy can also expand its sales channels through Taotian’s huge traffic.
Previously, the Taotian platform could not well meet the diverse needs of consumers in local life and instant retail, and needed to switch between different APPs to meet them, but now it can meet the needs in one APP after integration.
Alibaba’s opening up of catering takeaway and instant retail can better leverage Taotian’s online operation advantages and bring incremental growth to other businesses.
And Meituan is also constantly exploring the boundaries of business, from local life, takeaway, wine travel to flash sales, Meituan has gradually become a super APP.
3. Can you solve the problem of user growth?
Super APPs are no longer a new thing, and national applications such as WeChat and Alipay can be regarded as super APPs.
Since the traffic dividend period of mobile Internet has passed, the Chinese market has fallen into a period of competition for existing users. People are installing fewer and fewer apps on their phones, not more.
According to the data, the 30 apps with the most users in the Chinese market account for 99% of users’ usage time. The remaining hundreds of thousands of apps can only be distributed to the remaining 1%. And these apps that occupy the most usage time and have the most comprehensive functions are super APPs.
In the past, there were many independent APPs, and the subdivisions of each APP were different, and the customer acquisition cost of promoting APPs was high and repetitive. Attracting new users to buy clothes is a investment, and attracting new users to order takeaway is another investment. After having a super APP, you only need to spend a sum of money to acquire new users, and the subsequent new business content can be launched directly in the APP.
At the same time, a super APP can meet all the consumption needs of users. Users repeatedly consume in different scenarios in the APP, the value of a single user is increased, and the user portrait is more accurate, which is conducive to personalized customization of products.
The underlying logic reconstruction of the super APP is to install more functions, shorter user operation paths, and massive consumption scenarios into an APP to improve customer stickiness as high as possible. Increase user stickiness formula: Open frequency x scene coverage x service closed-loop rate.
JD.com, Meituan, and Taobao are all keen on making takeaways, just for the ultra-high opening frequency of three meals a day; while food + electronic products + fresh food + clothing + N are different consumption scenarios that major giants strive to fully cover; The closed-loop rate of service is the full closed-loop from demand-distribution-service.
For example, when a user opens JD.com’s takeaway, he sees a new mobile phone and generates shopping demand, so he can place an order in the JD.com APP.
Or if you suddenly want to buy clothes when you open Taobao flash sale point takeaway, you can also complete the business jump in the same APP. These three indicators are improved together to increase user stickiness, enhance the value of individual users, and achieve the purpose of super APP.
So, can major giants upgrade their application software to super APP, can they solve the problem of platform dividends fading and growth is difficult to find?
According to the data, JD.com has attracted nearly 17 million new users through the takeaway business, and woken up more than 41 million sleeping users who have not logged in or consumed for more than 180 days, totaling 60 million. For new users who register through takeaway for the first time, the effective conversion rate to e-commerce users is about 32%.
Taobao and Meituan did not disclose specific growth data, only the number of orders. Taobao flash sales have exceeded 60 million daily orders in the past 2 months, indicating that the user base and activity have increased significantly. Meituan’s daily flash sale orders rose from an average of 18 million orders per day in 2024 to 18 million orders in 2025Q1, which can also reflect its growth.
In this way, when the platform dividend fades and growth is hard to find, super APP is a solution that may bring increment.
However, it is still necessary to be vigilant that it may be a short-term false prosperity accumulated by tens of billions of subsidies.
When the subsidy ends, how much user retention will there be left in the major APPs? As well as subsidies to burn money for activities, the business is still at a loss. If profit margins cannot be improved within 1-2 years, the current boom will be nothing more than fleeting fireworks.
4. Fight in the instant retail battlefield
From takeaway to “30-minute delivery”, the focus of competition for super apps is now instant retail.
In the past 20 years, the retail track has undergone three major changes. The first change was to break the limitations of physical space and move goods from offline to online, and JD Taobao appeared.
The second change is to change the way user attention is distributed from shelf e-commerce to content e-commerce.
The third change is instant retail, and consumers’ ultimate pursuit of immediacy has given birth to instant retail.
According to the “Instant Retail Industry Development Report (2024)” released by the Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation of the Ministry of Commerce, the size of our country’s instant retail market will reach 650 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 28.89%. It is expected that our country’s instant retail market will exceed 2 trillion yuan in 2030, and the number of orders will continue to grow.
Every change is a major reshuffle of the industry pattern. Therefore, instant retail is one of the most important traffic entrances in this era, and it is a battleground for major e-commerce platforms.
The players are not yet here, and new players continue to step onto the table.
According to the “Late” report, Duoduo is testing self-built commodity warehouses in first-tier cities such as Shanghai, and will launch instant delivery services as soon as August, delivering goods to your door at a speed similar to JD.com’s second delivery and Taobao flash sales.
Unlike the large-scale investment of JD.com and Taobao, Duoduo’s attempt to buy groceries is still in its early stages, and it will not be involved in catering takeaway.
In addition, Douyin also has an hourly layout of instant retail. No one wants to be absent from this e-commerce revolution.
If you don’t get off the table, who will be left in the end? Let’s wait and see.
