Giants such as Meituan, JD.com, and Alibaba have increased their membership systems, setting off a “membership rights war”. From takeaway discounts to life services, from e-commerce shopping to digital content, major platforms are trying to deeply bind users in the stock market by upgrading membership rights, breaking through ecological barriers, and even cooperating with other brands. Behind this competition that seems to revolve around “members” is actually the fierce competition between giants for user mentality, consumer loyalty and new growth points.
01 Membership rights and interests have expanded
China’s Internet platforms have not been as lively as 2025 for a long time.
When 0.1 yuan of milk tea, 8.8 yuan of chicken leg rice and 4 yuan of blueberry dominate the social network, the attention of China’s Internet was completely ignited by the takeaway war set off by JD.com, Meituan, and Taobao flash sales.
However, behind this visible smoke, a more secret arms race for the membership system also quietly unfolded on the eve of 618.
On May 29, Meituan announced that it had officially opened up its membership rights and interests with Marriott. Meituan black gold members benchmark Marriott silver cards, black diamond members benchmark gold cards, and newly registered Marriott members can also get free coupons of 58 yuan and 30 yuan.
Not only that, after deciding to officially join 618, Meituan launched a flash sale coupon for black gold members to get 500 minus for purchases over 3,000 and 100 minus for purchases over 300. On Xiaohongshu, there are also users who resell these discount coupons at a price of 25 yuan to 30 yuan, claiming that they can complete transactions by placing orders on behalf of others.
▲ Some black gold members sell exclusive divine coupons on social platforms
These changes are just an extension of the new upgrade of Meituan’s membership system on March 31. This year, Meituan has integrated multiple business ends, fully opening up the previous takeaway coupons into common rights and interests in life, hotels, travel, audio-visual and other fields, that is, “Meituan Grand Membership”. Among them, the highest level of black diamond members enjoy 16 rights and interests such as unlimited hotel free upgrades, free breakfast, and hotel welcome fruits, and the next level of black gold members can enjoy 12 rights including 2.99 yuan to purchase 25 yuan 5 yuan no threshold coupons per month and 2 hours of free power bank per month.
JD.com, which is fighting Meituan head-on on the takeaway battlefield, made an earlier move. In February this year, JD.com took the lead in announcing a comprehensive upgrade of PLUS members, adding a new life service package, 180-day replacement and no repair service on the basis of retaining the original free return and exchange, exclusive customer service and other rights, and covering unlimited free shipping to self-operated second delivery business.
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These mean that JD PLUS members can enjoy free delivery services even if they just buy a chives and a head of garlic at Qixian Supermarket, while the same type of Hema Xiansheng, Dingdong grocery shopping, Meituan Xiaoxiang, etc. also have a certain free delivery threshold for members. In terms of life services, PLUS members can also exchange 5 points for a 2-hour housekeeping card and 3 points for 2 JD.com’s self-operated laundry services.
Ali is also increasing its weight. After a large-scale upgrade of 88VIP membership rights last year, in this year’s Tmall 618 promotion, 88VIP members can also receive 6 consumption coupons with a total value of 820 yuan on the basis of the original discounts, compared with only 2 coupons in the past.
On the surface, these actions seem to be just updates and expansions within the rules, but in fact, they hide the ultimate competition between giants for users’ minds – the entrance to high-frequency consumption scenarios, which is shifting from traffic subsidies to deep binding of paid loyalty.
Interestingly, consumers are both beneficiaries and variables in this change.
some people enjoy the joy of “gathering wool” and move between the three major platforms; Some people also fall into “member anxiety” – “Should I open PLUS or 88VIP?” “Do you want to buy 88VIP to get a Ele.me membership or spend money to open a Meituan God membership?”
The deeper contradiction is that the platform tries to build a moat with a membership system, but users are eager to “want both low prices and freedom”.
From the perspective of the midfield node in 2025, although the end of the new round of competition for China’s Internet giants has not yet arrived, what is certain is that when the smoke of the price war dissipates, the membership system will become the second battlefield of the giants.
02 Why has membership become a battleground?
Of course, the crazy subsidies of the current e-commerce membership system will not be the whims of the giants.
This wave of e-commerce membership rights and interests upgrades that began in 2024 has at least three backgrounds: industry challenges, tightening local wars, and changes in consumer trends. In other words, stress is the biggest motivation for change.
(1) Industry challenge level: According to QuestMobile data, the number of Internet users in China has reached 1.259 billion, Taobao monthly active users have reached 945 million, Douyin has 852 million, Pinduoduo has 716 million, and JD.com has 550 million.
After traffic growth peaked, the growth of major platforms slowed down, and customer acquisition costs continued to rise. The highest customer acquisition cost for e-commerce pure new users has reached more than 3,000 yuan.
In the stock market, the repurchase of old customers has become the hope of the whole village. According to public data, the average annual consumption level of JD PLUS members remains at about 8.4 times that of non-PLUS users; Meituan Black Diamond members are expected to have an average annual consumption of 23 times that of ordinary users, and the repurchase rate is 58% higher; Alibaba’s 88VIP members have reached 50 million, and the average annual consumption of 88VIP is 6-8 times that of ordinary users.
▲ Source: Alibaba’s 2025Q1 financial report
Behind the excellent data performance is the loyalty of platform members. Taking Alibaba as an example, according to Tmall President Jialuo, in 2024, 88VIP members will visit Taobao 27 times every 30 days.
It can be seen that the increased membership system directly improves user retention and repurchase; At the same time, compared with the huge number of users, there is still a lot of room for growth in membership penetration and value development.
Taking Taobao and Tmall as an example, its annual active users are 900 million, and the penetration rate of 88VIP is currently less than 6%. In contrast, Amazon Prime membership penetration in the United States in 2024 will reach 67.4% of the U.S. adult population.
(2) Local wars: In 2024, e-commerce platforms will be extremely involuted, from refund-only to unlimited return freight insurance, and membership rights and interests have been upgraded as part of each company’s defense; In 2025, the instant retail war on the local life track is in full swing, and the membership rights and interests have been expanded into nuclear submarines in the arsenal. We will analyze the affiliate marketing logic of each company in detail later.
(3) Consumption trends: The current drastic changes in the global consumption environment have exposed the most vulnerable and critical link in the membership system – the problem of “how to retain price-sensitive users” in every financial report.
The ability to operate in layers has become a test for building a membership system. The decline in streaming Netflix revenue in 2022 prompted Netflix to launch a subscription plan with ads for just $6.99 per month, which is $3 cheaper than the basic subscription plan. By attracting price-sensitive users who are willing to accept some ads in exchange for low prices, Netflix has quickly increased the number of subscribers and revenue, and by the end of 2024, this group of users has reached 70 million monthly active users.
▲ Netflix’s $6.99 basic package only provides 720P definition of film sources
Domestic companies such as Meituan have also begun to explore the refinement of operations through membership stratification – ordinary members, black gold, and black diamond members. Alipay also has four levels: mass membership, gold membership, platinum membership, and diamond membership.
From the user side, when consumer psychology tends to be conservative, a single membership service is losing its attractiveness, and the traditional membership system with “coupons” as the core model is failing. Users expect the platform to provide tiered benefits based on consumption habits, scenario preferences, and even values (such as Alipay’s “Ant Forest”), evolving membership benefits from “money-saving tools” to “personalized lifestyle solutions”.
This forces the platform to reconstruct the value logic of the membership system.
Therefore, we will see that the membership system with a head and face is not only opening up within their respective ecosystems, but also accelerating the pace of external “member marriage”, such as Alipay, Starbucks, and Didi have successively announced the interoperability with Hilton member ecosystems, Meituan and Marriott members, and the scope of JD.com PLUS’s “life privileges” involves mainstream mass brands of clothing, food, housing and transportation.
03 Similarities and differences in Meituan’s JD.com Alibaba membership system
Due to different genes and strategic demands, the ideas of e-commerce platform membership operation are also different.
Let’s take a look at JD.com first. As a fan of Amazon, JD.com launched PLUS membership service in 2015, which is the earliest e-commerce platform in China to lay out a membership ecosystem.
JD.com’s follow-up to Amazon’s path is from beginning to end – JD.com operates self-operated to improve the quality of products; build a self-built logistics system to solve core pain points; Provide high-quality after-sales service to improve user experience. These actions quickly established JD.com’s “fast” and “high-quality” user mentality, and also built membership barriers that were difficult for competitors to replicate.
However, with the rise of Pinduoduo and Douyin, as well as Meituan’s cross-border squeeze from the instant retail field, JD.com’s advantage is no longer obvious.
At this time, JD.com faces two challenges: how to consolidate the 3C digital basic disk and how to open up new growth points with the help of the instant retail wave. Judging from the results, JD.com chose to cut into Meituan’s base camp – the takeaway business.
As part of the strategic synergy, JD PLUS members have ushered in a comprehensive upgrade, on the one hand, to increase the rights and interests of members and further enhance the stock value; on the other hand, it cooperates with the group’s strategy to assist in key businesses such as takeaway.
JD PLUS membership has always been the core operating tool of JD.com’s high-net-worth users, and the newly upgraded membership rights and interests are breaking through the single attribute of “e-commerce membership” and expanding to the life service ecosystem. Among them, the life service package, including housekeeping, laundry and other services, as well as the unlimited free shipping service of self-operated second delivery, all point to local life, instant retail, 180 days of only replacement and no repair, with the intention of consolidating the 3C digital basic disk.
Look at Ali again. After Alibaba’s financial report for the first quarter of 2025, it made it clear that Taotian will continue to focus on improving the retention rate of 88VIP members. The person in charge of the 88VIP business previously revealed that in the past year, Taobao 88VIP has continued to maintain double-digit growth, becoming the largest e-commerce paid membership system in China.
Through 88VIP, Alibaba integrates the membership rights and interests of scattered business lines such as Taobao, Tmall, Youku, Ele.me, Quark, NetEase Cloud Music, etc. into an “all-in-one card”, building a super member ecosystem covering “eating, playing, listening, watching and buying”. In October 2023, 88VIP was subdivided into three packages: life card, shopping card, and all-round card.
▲ 88VIP is subdivided into three packages
For users, 88VIP improves the coherence of user experience; For Alibaba, global resources can be integrated, and this ecological collaboration doubles the cost of member migration – if users switch to other platforms, they will lose the superimposed value of cross-domain rights.
This “all-in-one card” takes “naughty value” as the screening threshold, the naughty value is > 1,000, and the annual fee of 88 yuan can purchase the officially declared rights package with a total value of more than 2,000 yuan, and its essence is the “subsidy lock” for high-value users. According to public data, 88VIP members contribute more than half of the revenue of Tmall’s head brands.
Compared with the membership system of other Internet giants, 88VIP has achieved “ecology” since its birth. This is related to Alibaba’s organizational structure at that time, which successively established a data center and a business middle platform, providing prerequisites for the creation of a “member ecosystem”.
However, in the past two years, 88VIP has caused some user controversy several times due to suspected shrinkage of rights and interests and frequent changes in rights and interests. For example, the unlimited return free shipping policy, which appeared in the most vicious stage of the e-commerce price war in 2024, was later adjusted to no more than 50 yuan per month from February 18, 2025, and old users will not be affected until they expire.
We infer that behind the policy change are both cost considerations, governance of wool party considerations, and macro regulation of the competitive situation in the industry – the involution of e-commerce platforms peaked in 618 last year, but gradually cooled down since Double 11 last year.
Meituan’s membership system is the most special. Due to the different paces of business development in local life and the difficulty of standardizing each business, Meituan’s membership system construction started late.
Meituan previously mainly used takeaway members in the form of “discount coupons”. This “takeaway war” in 2025 will force Meituan to completely attach strategic importance to the construction of the membership system and tilt resources.
According to previous reports by 36Kr, Meituan internally defined the membership business as an “S-level” project, transferred Zhou Mo of the takeaway division to the Meituan platform, opened up the two major businesses of home and store, and emphasized that it was temporarily not affected by short-term business assessments, highlighting Meituan’s determination to build a member ecosystem.
Different from the charging system of JD PLUS and Alibaba 88VIP, as a latecomer, Meituan members adopt a points system, and users can automatically become members after completing one valid payment, lowering the membership threshold and rapidly expanding the membership volume.
The new version of Meituan covers all life scenarios such as eating, living, traveling, traveling, entertainment, shopping, and medical treatment. Through subsidies and resource tilt, Meituan intends to divert high-frequency demand for takeaway to flash sales, wine tourism and other scenarios to deepen business collaboration and increase core user stickiness.
▲ Meituan opened up the original takeaway coupon into a universal coupon for all scenarios
We have noticed that in the case of the increasingly tense instant retail war, Meituan’s membership rights and interests have increased subsidies for Meituan’s flash sale business. The 3,000 minus 500 that appeared during the 618 period should be just a small test, and it is expected that there will be more membership rights upgrades in the future to strengthen the user mentality of strategic businesses such as flash sales.
On the whole, the core advantage of Meituan’s membership ecosystem lies in its ability to integrate in local life scenarios, which is a starting point for Meituan’s membership to transform from a functional membership system (discount-oriented) to an ecological system.
04 The Future of Membership: Become the Next Amazon Prime
Not long ago, the State Administration for Market Regulation and other five departments interviewed platform companies such as JD.com, Meituan, and Ele.me on the issue of takeaway competition, which is equivalent to sending a clear signal: the “barbaric growth” model is a thing of the past, and the platform economy should move towards “standardized development”.
Therefore, whether it is market competition or policy guidance, the war in the stock market can no longer be fought indiscriminately, then the membership economy will become a battleground for the platform.
Through the dynamic changes in the construction of the membership ecosystem of Internet giants, we can see the following commonalities: clarify core users and value propositions; hierarchical operation, equity segmentation; ecological collaboration to avoid “rights and interests islands”; Technology drives personalized operations.
It is worth noting that the construction of each member ecosystem is gradually evolving from a “discount coupon tool” welfare orientation to an ecological model, becoming the core battlefield for giants to compete for user time and loyalty, as well as a new growth engine.
The construction of the membership system is no longer a single point battle, but a part of the strategic synergy of the enterprise, and a business starting point.
When talking about the membership ecosystem, one company that must not be ignored is Amazon.
Nowadays, domestic giants are making frequent moves, but there is always the shadow of Amazon Prime behind every move.
This “free shipping plan”, which began in 2005, has now evolved into a full-scenario life service ecosystem with an annual fee of $139 and covering 300 million users around the world. Its success lies not only in the size of members, but also in reconstructing the underlying logic of the retail industry – sticking users with high-frequency rights and interests, driving infinite scenarios with data, and finally transforming consumers into “ecological citizens”.
In the early days, Amazon solved the core pain points of local users in the United States for logistics efficiency through “two-day delivery”, but with the expansion of the ecosystem, it gradually upgraded its rights and interests to “life infrastructure” – Prime Video, Prime Music, Kindle e-books and other digital content are used for more than 2 hours a day, and even derive innovative services such as drone delivery and smart home control, and these actions also create an irreplaceable lifestyle for the member ecosystem.
▲ Prime Video service has landed in more than 200 countries and regions around the world
This equity matrix of “rigid need + high frequency + emotional connection” has kept the renewal rate of Prime members above 90% for a long time, and the payment rate in the United States accounts for 75% of American adults.
Bezos’ famous flywheel theory has brought Amazon a business closed loop catalyzing user growth and business model, and the Prime membership system has an average annual consumption of $1,400 (2.3 times that of non-members), and the greater value of the Prime membership system is that it drives the three major flywheels of retail, content, and AWS –
As the originator of e-commerce membership, Amazon is well versed in the psychology of “loss aversion” and adds 2-3 new rights every year to create the “sunk cost illusion”. From free e-book lending in 2011 to Rufus, an AI shopping assistant in 2024, the membership equity-to-value ratio has reached 8:1 (that is, the user’s perceived value is 8 times the annual fee). Previously, there were industry estimates that the market price of some of the rights and interests of Prime members was close to $1,000.
For example→→, the Prime Day shopping festival has evolved from a promotional event to a cultural symbol, with total sales exceeding $14 billion during the 2024 event.
▲ Prime Day 2024 promotional poster
The success of Amazon’s membership system has long been verified by a series of data: up to 75% of Prime members will choose to subscribe to the membership service for the first year after a 30-day free trial, while 91% of users will renew the membership service for the second year after the first year. At the same time, Prime members account for more than 50% of transactions, showing their extremely high activity.
When retail competition entered the “user time war”, Bezos spent 19 years proving that the real membership ecosystem allows users to pay for “inseparable”, not to stay for “discounts”.
This is not uninspiring for domestic Internet companies. When services such as red envelopes, discounts, delivery timeliness, and free shipping have basically become standard, how to continuously create new member value so that users cannot do without the platform?
After all, in the era of consumers voting with their feet, who can give full play to “user value” rather than “GMV myth” can truly win the future.
