On the eve of e-commerce 618, the “hot war” of instant retail continues, and we compare the non-meal instant retail business of Meituan flash sale, JD second delivery, and Taobao flash sale from the aspects of discounts, delivery timeliness, and price advantages.
1. JD.com Taobao has a large discount, and Meituan’s delivery experience is stable
After actual testing, the overall feeling of “Financial Story Club” is that Taobao and JD.com have greater discounts, and Meituan’s flash sale delivery experience is more stable.
Taking a community in Zhongyuan District, Zhengzhou City as an example on May 17, “Financial Story Club” found that in addition to the takeaway red envelopes of “15 minus 13” of Taobao flash sale, there are also store red envelopes of “5 minus 29 and 5 minus 5 for 59”; On the day of the Meituan flash sale, there are “25 minus 5” coupons, followed by JD.com’s second-round coupons of “99 minus 20” and “3 minus 2” 100 supplementary coupons.
(On the left is JD.com’s second delivery, in the middle is Taobao flash sale, and on the right is Meituan flash sale)
Taking the local comprehensive supermarket “Dennis” in Zhengzhou as an example, “Financial Story Club” found that in addition to different category coupons, JD.com has coupons of “10 minus over 79 and minus 12 for 99”, but Meituan Flash Sale only has delivery coupons for “2 minus 1”.
(The left is JD.com’s second delivery, and the right is Meituan flash sale)
Taking the local discount cattle supermarket in Zhengzhou as an example, on the same day, Taobao flash sale has a store-wide “15 minus 13” takeaway coupon and a brand alliance red envelope of “139 minus 40, 99 minus 30”, and Meituan flash sale only has “2 minus 1” coupons.
(The left is JD.com’s second delivery, and the right is Taobao flash sale)
However, this offer is not absolute. The final payment price of Meituan Flash Sale is 47.8 yuan, Taobao Flash Sale is 47 yuan, and the comprehensive cost of JD Second Delivery is 52.66 yuan, mainly because JD Second Delivery also needs to charge a delivery fee of 6 yuan.
(Meituan flash sale on the left, JD.com second delivery in the middle, Taobao flash sale on the right)
Another detail is that when “Financial Story Club” places an order for a beer in the same store in Zhengzhou, Meituan flash sale and Taobao flash sale can choose “iced” or “room temperature”, but JD.com can not choose for the time being.
On the whole, Taobao flash sale and JD.com second delivery, as latecomers, have greater discounts for consumers; As an “old player”, Meituan Flash Sale has a higher stability in the delivery experience.
On May 22, “Financial Stories” once again tested the Beijing market. Taking a best-selling Xiaomi headset as an example, JD.com and Meituan are almost the same in terms of price and delivery speed – the lowest price of this product Meituan is 1 yuan cheaper than JD.com, but the delivery speed is a few minutes slower than JD.com; In addition, in terms of merchant selection, JD.com is richer than Meituan, which may stem from JD.com’s deeper accumulation in the 3C category.
However, from the perspective of how fast and easy to save money, instant retail is only far ahead in terms of “fast”, whether it is the richness of products or the preferential price, it is currently inferior to traditional e-commerce. Therefore, we judge that in the future, instant retail and traditional e-commerce will still coexist and complement each other.
2. All-out campaign: subsidies, riders, supplies
Judging from the rhythm of the entry of the three platforms, instant retail is accumulating strong potential energy, JD.com, Taobao, and Meituan must “fight hand-to-hand”, which is also a comprehensive battle related to the definition of the new model of e-commerce in the future.
Whether it is 10 billion subsidies or 100 billion subsidies, the simplest and most direct way to play this instant retail war is to “throw coins” to grab users, promote users to “migrate”, and cultivate users to form consumption habits for the new platform.
On May 13, JD Takeaway suddenly launched a “single cup of 1.9 yuan” drinks for catering brands such as CoCo and Mixue Bingcheng in some cities without prior notice, resulting in many stores quickly exploding, such as a CoCo milk tea shop in Zhengzhou pouring in 100 orders within 1 minute.
It is worth noting that May 13 is the day when JD.com’s 618 promotion this year opens; Two days later, JD.com officially announced that the 18th of each month is the “Super Takeaway Day”, and big-name coffee and tea of 1.68 yuan will be randomly “distributed” on that day.
The battle for tea and coffee is extremely fierce, and Taobao Flash Sale provided red envelopes of “15 minus 9, 9 minus 8” on the day of the full launch on May 2, and even launched a “full 12 minus 12” coupon for a certain brand of milk tea.
It is not difficult to understand that JD.com and Taobao flash sales, as new players, must have stronger discounts than the more mature Meituan flash sales, especially through high-frequency catering consumption, driving a wider range of non-meal instant retail orders.
Taobao and JD.com do not regard flash sales as a “new battle”, and “coordinated operations” are the key words.
At present, JD.com’s self-operated section in JD.com’s second delivery channel has covered all categories such as fresh food, wine, beauty, health, clothing, 3C, and home appliances. First, the delivery speed is guaranteed, “arriving in 9 minutes at the earliest”, and the second is that under the self-operated model, the quality and after-sales of goods are also more guaranteed.
As of the end of April this year, more than 3 million stores have opened Taobao flash sale services.
However, the near-field flash sale and the far-field e-commerce are always different, so JD.com and Meituan are also head-to-head in the exclusive supply system of instant retail, such as the construction of a flash warehouse.
Meituan’s lightning warehouse launched in 2020 is a convenience store front-end warehouse model that serves pure online users, and third-party merchants are responsible for site selection, rental, procurement, daily operation and personnel management, while Meituan provides online traffic support, product selection suggestions, etc., relying on the takeaway network, and can deliver goods to consumers within half an hour to an hour. According to the plan, Meituan plans to expand the number of flash warehouses from the current 30,000 to 100,000 in 2027.
JD.com has also come to an end, officially launching the upgraded version of the warehouse store “Jingfenda”, its model is similar to Meituan Lightning Warehouse, specially delivered by JD.com’s full-time riders, and the new merchants have settled in and the regional protection policy of “exclusive operation within 1 kilometer”, which has been attracting investment in Zhengzhou and other places since March this year.
At present, Jingfenda’s warehouse stores have landed in Shenzhen, Xinyang, Henan and other cities, and have further penetrated into the county market, such as Wenxian, a county-level city under the jurisdiction of Jiaozuo, Henan.
After the actual measurement of the “Financial Story Club”, it was found that JD.com’s flash warehouse “Jingfenda” is no less than Meituan’s self-operated flash warehouse “Squirrel Convenience” (supply chain docking flash warehouse self-operated supply and marketing platform) in terms of comprehensive service experience.
Taking Shenzhen as an example, “Financial Story Club” is positioned as “Shenzhen Vientiane City”, and the “Jingfenda – Luohu Guihong Road Store” sent by JD.com shows the expected delivery time of 31 minutes, and there is also a store-wide coupon of “59 minus 5” on the same day; Meituan’s flash sale of “Squirrel Convenience Supermarket Guiyuan Store” shows that the estimated delivery time is 37 minutes (lightning delivery takes 25 minutes), and there is a “49 minus 10” coupon on the same day.
(Meituan flash sale on the left, JD.com second delivery on the right)
After purchasing the same products in “Financial Story Club”, it was found that the final transaction price of Squirrel Convenience was 30.2 yuan and Jingfenda was 27.54 yuan, compared to JD.com.
(Meituan flash sale on the left, JD.com second delivery on the right)
In terms of delivery services, although JD.com still mainly relies on crowdsourced riders to deliver its own orders, JD.com announced in April this year that it will recruit 100,000 full-time riders in the next three months to continue to expand capacity.
In the future, the entire instant retail war will inevitably move towards a comprehensive competition of efficiency, supply and scale effects, and the confrontation between Taobao, JD.com and Meituan will also be more intense.
From the current point of view, the phased results of JD.com and Taobao are quite considerable. In terms of order volume, Taobao flash sale announced on May 6 that the daily order volume exceeded 10 million six days after its launch; Xu Ran said that JD.com’s daily takeaway order volume will soon exceed 20 million orders. However, neither of the above companies has announced the order volume of non-meal categories in detail. For comparison, the daily order volume of Meituan’s instant retail sales in non-catering categories has exceeded 18 million.
The three-way players are fighting hot in the takeaway catering track, and they are also “fighting” for the larger battlefield of “instant retail to deliver everything” behind them.
3. Trillion flash sales and e-commerce are both synergistic and competitive
The instant retail that attracted three companies to enter the market is a “trillion war”. According to data from the Ministry of Commerce, China’s instant retail scale will reach 650 billion yuan in 2023 and is expected to triple by 2030 and will soon exceed 2 trillion yuan. Jiang Fan also has high expectations for instant retail, and he judges that the market size of China’s instant retail is now 5-600 million people, and it can grow to 1 billion people in the future. Trillion flash sales and traditional e-commerce not only bring new volume, but also divide the stock.
The small and high-frequency attributes of flash sales naturally come with high user stickiness, and the growth rate of order volume is considerable. According to data from Huaxi Securities, in the first quarter of 2025, Meituan Flash Sale not only occupied about one-third of the market share of instant retail, ranked first in market share, but also continued to grow at a year-on-year rate of 23%.
According to Tiger Sniff, in terms of instant retail market share, Meituan and JD.com currently occupy more than 85% of the share, and both have a share of more than 40%, but JD.com and Meituan have different opinions on who is the first in the market.
Specific to the 3C electronics category, according to Leifeng.com, Meituan’s flash sale orders for 3C home appliances in 2024 are close to 40% of JD.com’s entire site, and the order volume of mobile phone communication products will reach 40% of JD.com’s entire site; Meituan’s non-meal instant retail in Beijing (Meituan flash sale, Little Elephant Supermarket) has an average daily order volume of more than 1 million.
Since the beginning of this year, Meituan has accelerated its actions, planning to build a vertical lightning warehouse in the 3C category of home appliances, to match the four-wheeled intra-city capacity that has been piloted for a long time, as well as more complete offline services.
On May 9, Meituan Flash Sale officially announced the launch of the service guarantee plan “Peace of Mind Flash Sale”, which includes the launch of a half-day air conditioner delivery service in conjunction with Gree, Midea, Oaks, and TCL; At the same time, official certified stores of brands such as Nike and Adidas were launched, directly attacking Taobao’s core categories.
From the perspective of changes in overall demand and consumption scenarios, Meituan Flash Sale is trying to expand from meeting the urgent needs and limited categories of “buying water on hot days and umbrellas on rainy days” to a wider range of daily scenarios and full categories of products.
However, we judge that clothing, beauty, home appliances, mobile phones, etc. are still based on planned shopping after all, supplemented by emergency shopping, so in terms of structural proportion, traditional e-commerce may still dominate in the future.
Moreover, flash sales are currently concentrated in categories with low customer unit prices, and third-party data shows that the average overall customer order price of Meituan flash sales in all categories is about 80 yuan. Among them, the lightning warehouse, which mainly undertakes online orders, has a unit price of only 30 yuan.
Therefore, instant retail and far-field e-commerce have a certain competitive substitution relationship, but they are more complementary attributes. It is also the consensus of Alibaba and JD.com to highly synergize instant retail and the main format of e-commerce.
At the JD.com earnings conference, Xu Ran, CEO of JD.com, said, “We believe that JD.com’s takeaway business is deeply rooted in our overall business ecology, not just an independent business.” We believe that instant retail, including takeaway, will have great synergies with our existing business in terms of users, supply chain, and fulfillment. ”
Xu Ran asserted, “In the future, there will be huge synergy value for our instant retail, core e-commerce retail and even logistics business, which can bring incremental contributions in terms of user traffic, shopping frequency, cross-category shopping, etc., and can also bring efficiency improvement and cost reduction in distribution capacity, technical data, etc.” ”
At Alibaba’s Q4 fiscal year 2025 and full-year earnings report performance meeting, Jiang Fan said that the focus is still on “how to quickly convert more users into ‘instant retail’ users”, and at the same time establish a stronger instant retail user mentality on Taobao.
In fact, the business development of instant retail is also closely related to the e-commerce supply chain to a certain extent. For example, the purchase channels of Meituan Lightning Warehouse franchisees are quite complex, Pinduoduo, 1688, Douyin, etc. are the main purchase channels chosen by merchants; A Meituan lightning warehouse merchant in Wenzhou said that nearly a quarter of the goods in his store come from Pinduoduo.
The above-mentioned merchant said that although the current purchase channels are messy, as the volume of his own lightning warehouse orders gradually stabilizes to 4,000-5,000 orders per month, after having five to six flash warehouses in a region, he can negotiate with upstream suppliers to achieve greater profit margins.
In order to control the purchase channels, Meituan quietly launched a flash warehouse procurement platform in May 2022, and early merchants mainly came from mature B2B procurement platforms such as Alibaba Retail Connect and JD Shopkeeper Treasure.
With the further expansion of the scale of the flash warehouse, many suppliers are also willing to provide customized and exclusive goods for the flash warehouse procurement platform; For example, a brand in Shenzhen that produces mobile phone accessories, “Saisino”, is currently cooperating with Meituan to launch a special version of the Type-C 6A data cable for Lightning Warehouse, priced at only 2.5 yuan, which is lower than the price of some brands on Pinduoduo and Douyin e-commerce.
In addition to the reasons for the growth of Meituan’s own scale, the strong potential energy of the instant retail market also drives suppliers to choose “multi-point flowering”, after all, there is one more platform and one more source of income, and suppliers must “vote with their feet”.
Compared with the new retail era, more retailers have let go of the obsession with digitalization to be “completely self-operated”, and in order to “regain” customer flow and order volume in the case of weak offline consumption, physical merchants are also more willing to actively embrace instant retail platforms.
The shift in supply and demand has formed a collective force, driving the entire instant retail market to a trillion-dollar scale, and naturally driving more instant retail players to join the battle.
Before launching the takeaway business, Liu Qiangdong invited Meituan CEO Wang Xing and Didi CEO Cheng Wei to dinner, “I am very simple and direct: I have never said a bad word about retail for so many years, because retail is not mine, not JD.com, anyone can do it.” I have no right to complain, and the same goes for takeaway. ”
“Anyone” can do it, which also means that instant retail will grow into a supermarket, and this full-scale battle has only just begun.
