Unlike traditional shelf e-commerce platforms (such as JD.com, Meituan, and Ele.me), content platforms are better at attracting users through traffic and poor information, especially in low-information areas. This article will provide an in-depth analysis of the strategic layout of Douyin and Kuaishou in the field of local life, explore the differentiation between content platforms and shelf platforms in store and home business, and the value transformation of supply chain and information gap at different market levels.
This 618, the local life field market is hot, from JD.com, Meituan, under the support of Ele.me, the instant retail market of the “home” business type has entered a new stage of development.The market where another sector of local life, “to the store”, is also surging again.
Taking Douyin and Kuaishou’s current way of doing local life as an example, the recent clearer signal is that Kuaishou released a new private message marketing plan on June 10, which is mainly applicable to local life formats; On June 19, Douyin Life Service also held a private message product launch conference, claiming: “Good business, just chat”.
These private domain types of products or solution iterations all point to businesses that require in-store service types.
Looking back at the local life battlefield set off by Douyin’s in-store and takeaway business in 2023, from the business goals revealed by the media, Douyin’s in-store and wine and tourism business target was 290 billion yuan that year, and the takeaway business target was 100 billion yuan.
The smoke of the 2023 local life battlefield has also continued to the present, but the position and opponents have been differentiated, from Douyin referring to Meituan’s attempt to synchronize efforts to coordinate the in-store business, to Douyin and Kuaishou referring to each other in the in-store business, and the red, yellow and blue have formed their own faction to set off a new instant retail battlefield from the home to the store, and the two factions have officially begun the strategic division.
Therefore, combined with the development of the instant retail market and related platform trends in 2025, and then re-sorting out the local life business boom set off by Douyin in 2023, it is not difficult to find –The content platform is better at doing the store, and the shelf platform is better at doing the home.
Behind this, the advantage of the shelf platform is the supply chain, and the supply chain will naturally focus on high-information areas first;The content platform is good at using traffic to provide poor information, which is an advantage in low-information areas, which also leads to the regional division between Dou Kuai and Red, Yellow and Blue to temporarily develop local life.
How can product managers do a good job in B-end digitalization?
All walks of life have taken advantage of the ride-hail of digital transformation and achieved the rapid development of the industry. Since B-end products are products that provide services for enterprises, how should enterprises ride the digital ride?
View details >
The biggest “confusion” of Douyin in local life in the past two years: the ownership swing of the takeaway business is the smoke that can connect the two battlefields of local life in 2023 and 2025.
01 The content is the store, and the shelves are the home
In the past two years, Douyin’s takeaway business has fluctuated between the local life sector and the e-commerce sector several times.
In 2023, Douyin will obviously put both takeaway and in-store business in the local life sector; At the end of 2023, there were rumors that Douyin would give up takeaway; In April 2024, Douyin takeaway will be adjusted from Douyin’s local life business line to Douyin e-commerce business line; However, in August 2024, it was reported that Douyin’s takeaway business has returned to Douyin’s local life business line.
At that time, the most widely circulated understanding of the Meituan model in the market was that “high-frequency home driving low-frequency arrivals, group buying to the store to cut into the wine and tourism with higher unit prices”, so Douyin would also try to synchronously develop takeaway to coordinate the in-store business at the beginning, although its short video conversion was an effective and asset-light path with lower cost directly to the store.
At the end of 2023, Douyin reported that it would give up its takeaway business, which is also in line with the market’s imagination that it does not have a local distribution system accumulation; In 2024, the takeaway business will be transferred to the e-commerce business line, combined with the supermarket business that Douyin e-commerce was accumulating at that time, takeaway and supermarket business can form instant retail, which is the ultimate form of e-commerce from the current perspective.
However, in the case of its own supply chain system is not strong, Douyin cannot rely on its own model to connect industry cognition. Within a few months, Douyin seems to want to go back to Meituan’s old path and transfer takeaway back to the local life section where the store is located.
From this point of view, the reason for the swing is that Douyin, as a content platform, has the core advantage of asset-light content traffic, and it should not refer to Meituan for local life, but there is no more suitable reference object than Meituan before 2025.
By 2025, JD.com, which has sufficient accumulation in e-commerce business and local distribution systems, will further confirm the paradigm of shelf platforms for instant retail, and the paradigm will become a trend, and the trend will become an enclosure.
Taobao follows the model and connects Ele.me flash sale to the app; Meituan and Ele.me have followed the price war, and at the same time, red, yellow and blue have also started a new round of public opinion construction. The market cognition of the shelf platform to do instant retail has been completely connected, and it is inseparable from the joint efforts of red, yellow and blue.
Since then, JD.com has announced its entry into the wine tourism industry in a high-profile manner, which has recognized the rationality of the path from the shelf to the home to the store and finally to the wine tourism, and the core of the shelf platform to transform other businesses is the supply chain advantages of its own platform.Liu Qiangdong said that JD.com’s logic for takeaway and wine tourism is: “Beijing only revolves around the supply chain.” ”
The updated information is that on June 23, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming issued an email to all employees, announcing that from now on, Ele.me and Fliggy will be merged into Alibaba’s China e-commerce business group. On the Alibaba side, e-commerce, instant retail, and wine and tourism businesses are also being opened.
In addition, according to the exclusive information on June 20, Duoduo is experimenting with 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.
Pinduoduo, which does not have its own logistics and distribution system, is similar to Douyin doing takeaway, but due to the different underlying business genes of the two, Pinduoduo’s shelf e-commerce platforms have entered the local life field, and now have enough model models, some advantages of the supply chain and market cognition maturity.
At this time, Meituan’s model can also be redefined along with the trend: home is the best way for shelf platforms to give full play to their supply chain advantages, but it is not suitable for content platforms to do local life with light assets. In the past six months, content platforms such as Douyin Kuaishou may have recognized that the instant retail home business, including takeaway, is really an excessive asset, and there is no need to be involved in the competition of red, yellow and blue.
So far, JD.com, Meituan, Taobao, and Pinduoduo, the largest shelf platforms in the past, have all started instant retail of local life.
Therefore, from the perspective of the overall conversion path, compared with Douyin Kuaishou, red, yellow and blue plus Pinduoduo can be uniformly classified as high-frequency shelves to low-frequency stores, and the core advantage of shelf traffic is the supply chain; The core advantage of the Doukai model is that content traffic is asset-light operation, which can reach the store more efficiently.And the final conversion end of both the shelf platform and the content platform can be a low-frequency customer and a higher unit price of wine tourism.
At this time, it no longer matters whether Douyin takeaway belongs to the e-commerce business or the local life business, after all, other content platforms do not even have the business of instant retail:
Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce exploration process is slow, but the local life transformation attribute is strong; Although WeChat e-commerce and the local life system are both large and highly dependent on third-party ecology, WeChat’s in-store system is still stronger than WeChat’s e-commerce system, according to the sharing of the top three third-party mini program suppliers in terms of market share, the market maturity of in-store mini programs in the WeChat system is much higher than that of e-commerce mini programs.
So it is not difficult for us to conclude that the current version of the local living market is:The content platform is good at doing the store, and the shelf platform is good at doing the home。
And the home business is not a must-have option for the source of conversion, but it is the advantage of the shelf platform and the disadvantage of the content platform.
02 The supply chain rises, and the information gap sinks
In fact, Kuaishou has also tried the takeaway business, but due to the timing of entry, it is more shallow than Douyin takeaway.
Kuaishou officially started its takeaway business in May 2024, and coincidentally, in the same month, JD.com is also initially trying the takeaway business, with coffee chain brands such as Luckin and Cudi to enter.
Previously, the article “Meituan is busy going overseas, JD.com starts delivering food” mentioned that in May 2024, JD.com will rename its “hourly delivery” business to “second delivery”, and JD.com Distribution and Dada Distribution will support its distribution system.
Kuaishou, on the other hand, follows Douyin’s asset-light operation model, platform subsidies, traffic subsidies, brand million GMV support, etc., but after that, Kuaishou Takeaway has no news of more substantive progress, and Douyin Takeaway is still swinging.
However, Kuaishou’s momentum in the entire local life sector is no less than that of Douyin, especially in the sinking market.
At Kuaishou’s Local Life 2025 Cohesion Conference in April this year, Xiao Gu, senior vice president and head of the local life business unit of Kuaishou, revealed that in 2024, Kuaishou’s local life GMV will increase by 200% year-on-year, of which the GMV of new-tier cities (third-tier cities and below) will increase by more than 220% year-on-year, showing strong sinking market penetration.
In 2024, the average number of daily payment users will increase by 100% year-on-year, and users in new-tier cities will account for more than 62%, which is the core driving force for the continuous growth of Kuaishou’s local life.
Compared with the shelf platform, the sinking transformation of heavy assets is more difficult than the “upward floating”.
For example, JD.com’s takeaway business and the previous layout of e-commerce business in low-tier cities, JD.com takeaway first tried first- and second-tier cities, and was launched in just three months for 90 days, with daily orders exceeding 25 million orders and full-time riders exceeding 100,000. On the other hand, JD.com’s “Jingxi” business full custody service, which previously aimed at the low-price e-commerce market, began to attract investment in lower-tier cities last year, but JD.com’s e-commerce business is an old business.
The reason behind this is naturally that the degree of informatization in new-tier cities and the popularity of users’ awareness of instant retail are not as good as those in first- and second-tier cities, and the asset-heavy supply chain has unique requirements for the informatization level of the entire city and its surroundings and user consumption habits.
At the same time, on the other hand, in new-tier cities, the low degree of informatization means that the value of poor information is higher, and content traffic platforms such as Douyin Kuaishou have the core advantage of doing local life is to bring poor information to users.
In addition, Douyin is now the best reference object for local life is also Kuaishou, and the strategic division between the two and red, yellow and blue has jointly created a situation of heavy assets rising and light assets sinking.
As mentioned at the beginning, Kuaishou released a new private message marketing plan on June 10, which is mainly applicable to local life formats; On June 19, Douyin Life Service also held a private message conference, claiming: “Good business, just chat about it”.
As a short video content platform, Kuaishou’s information poor advantage + sinking mind + private domain nature is very self-consistent with the local life model required by new-tier cities, so in addition to the strong supply chain advantages of shelf platforms such as red, yellow and blue, it is also very reasonable for Douyin’s local life to start touching Kuaishou to cross the river.
Not to mention that there was a market view that “the county may be a competitive depression for Douyin’s local life”: this points to the fact that the short video platform has basically completed the popularization of bottom-line areas, but the supply chain is not as light (or even addictive) as an entertainment app, and can quickly sink to the capillaries of every bottom-line area.
Moreover, due to the high degree of informatization in first- and second-tier cities, not only the value brought by poor information is low, but even first- and second-tier cities are also taking the initiative to create regional cocoons, and a commercial real estate form called TOD is a typical example of this trend.
TOD (transit-oriented development) is a public transportation-oriented development model, in which public transportation mainly refers to railway stations, airports, subways, light rail and other rail transit and bus trunk lines, and then the central square or city center is established with public transportation stations as the center and a radius of 400~800 meters (5~10 minutes walk), including residential areas, commercial areas, office buildings and other buildings.
It is characterized by a “mixed use” that integrates work, business, culture, education, and residence, so that residents and employees can easily choose a variety of travel modes such as buses, bicycles, and walking without rejecting cars.
In this case, the current version of local life is the supply chain rising and the information gap sinking, both of which can get greater value transformation.
03 Write at the end
The current popularity of the instant retail market comes from JD.com’s takeaway at the beginning of 2025, and has attracted Meituan and Ele.me to form a red, yellow and blue combination to fight a price war together. But as Meituan said, JD.com is not the first opponent to hit Meituan, and it may not be the last.
It’s just that Meituan is the largest local life platform in recent years, and the store-to-home business has a large market share, so it seems that in 2023 and 2025, Douyin and JD.com will “attack Meituan’s hinterland” one after another.
But more essentially, in 2023, Douyin Kuaishou will focus on the in-store market itself, and in 2025, JD.com Taobao will also focus on the home market itself.
Whether it is up or down, the local life market is large enough, and Dou Kuai, Red, Yellow and Blue and even Pinduoduo have a bright future.
