After Meituan, JD.com, and Taobao entered the game one after another, the “flash sale” business became the focus. It meets the needs of users “low frequency but urgent”, and all major manufacturers have also ended up with their own advantages. Let’s explore together.
Before Taobao announced that it would upgrade hourly delivery to a flash sale and launch a flash sale entrance on Taobao’s homepage, Meituan had been working hard for 7 years in the name of flash sales. Even, the word “flash sale” is defined as “instant retail business other than catering”, which is closely related to Meituan.
A little archaeology of Internet industry reports shows that for a long time, the term “flash sale” has been explained as attracting users to place orders quickly through discount sales of branded goods. The first so-called “flash sale e-commerce” was the American website Gilt Groupe, which was born in 2007, and the main channel for publishing discounts and gaining users was email. In the narrative context of the early years, the domestic Internet products called “flash sales” were Vipshop and Jumei.
But in the business world, the right to define a term is not more than who has a longer history, but who has a greater influence on the current world.
After Meituan, JD.com, and Taobao have come to an end, the more important question than the name is: what is the difference between flash sales and past takeaway and e-commerce businesses? Why do big factories have to do instant retail in a high-profile manner? Is everyone only fighting for the instant retail market?
1. Find a “small warehouse life”
My impression of flash sales stems from countless times buying headphones in the middle of the night, bottled water for turtles, and No. 7 batteries for scales…… After buying the (strange) goods I wanted in the middle of the night for the Nth time, I began to be confused: what is the origin of this 24-hour store that is open and you can buy anything, but I have never seen it in the mall or on the street?
In the recent “flash sale” war of Meituan, JD.com, and Taobao, ultra-long “standby” online supermarkets such as Xiaocang Life and Dolphin Purchase have become the backbone of the supply side of goods. Consumers’ understanding of it is that it is an online supermarket that is always open and can buy anything; And the industry gave it a name, called “Lightning Warehouse”.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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Successfully finding the entrance to the hidden “Lightning Warehouse” is a sign that a rider has successfully broken through the “novice village”. Following the direction guided by the navigation, I walked around a building near my home, and after passing by an SF station and a labor dispatch company, I finally found a window to life in Kokura.
But obviously, I shouldn’t have broken through the window, so in order to find the door, I walked around the building for a second time and ran into a novice rider who was also lost. It was reassuring to find a companion, and we locked in an experienced-looking rider as he had five bags of takeout hanging from his electric car, one of which was from Kokura Life.
“Isn’t Kokura life there, there are so many big characters on the window, go in through the door on the side, and then turn right.” Good guy, it turns out that the entrance is hidden at the end of the corridor. After passing through three takeaway electric vehicles, two express tricycles, and a public toilet, the novice rider and I finally stood at the door of the warehouse where we lived.
Life in the small warehouse looks a little crowded, and the goods are placed on dense shelves, which are extremely narrow at first, and then pass people, and then walk dozens of steps, but they are still extremely narrow. The two clerks kept pulling out bags with red letters on a white background, walking through the gaps between the shelves, picking goods according to the list, tying a knot, and then throwing them on the pickup shelf at the door. The shelves are divided into three layers, from top to bottom, are Ele.me, Meituan Takeaway and JD Daojia. Now those who come to the store to pick up the goods are all delivery workers sent by JD.com, and the business world is changing too fast, and the shelves have not had time to change their names.
There should be an opera lover among the clerks, and a minor tune was played in the small warehouse as the background sound for them to walk through, and every few minutes, a delivery man appeared at the door and shouted, “Is XX out?” The clerk only talked to them when they were close to the door and told them: “It’s too busy, look down on the shelf yourself.” ”
The hidden location of the “small warehouse” explains all the operating logic of the lightning warehouse – exchanging as many SKUs as possible with the ultimate space efficiency, and achieving the lowest possible labor cost with the ultimate personnel utilization. To this end, the lightning warehouse needs to abandon offline consumption scenarios, avoid shopping malls/street façade houses with high rents, and avoid wasting manpower for entertaining C-end consumers.
Jin Yan, the founder of Ogura Life, once revealed in a sharing that “the number of SKUs in each front-end warehouse of Ogura Life exceeds 4,000, and the overlap between core products and other channels is only about 40%.” Cheap enough venues, dense enough shelves, stuffed with enough goods, here, you can even buy a stainless steel student mug.
Flash warehouse is a special merchant form spawned by flash sale business, mainly to undertake the demand of online daily department stores, and the overall unit price of customers is low, but the flash sale business is not only flash warehouse.
Another important type of flash sale comes from the access of local offline stores, including larger supermarket chains, chain brand stores, as well as smaller single stores, and even small grocery stores in the community. This type of merchant, which is both online and offline business, access to flash sales is equivalent to one more sales channel, for example, users can now get a Uniqlo shirt, a Huawei sports bracelet, or a pair of Decathlon swimming goggles within 1 hour.
When the second type of supply is increasing in the flash sale business, it has become almost an inevitable choice for e-commerce companies to increase investment in flash sale business.
2. Why do big factories do flash sales?
In transaction behavior, the frequency of consumption mainly depends on the category of goods, such as high-frequency demand for catering takeaways and low-frequency demand for home appliances. The requirements for delivery timeliness depend on the urgency of meeting the demand, urgent needs need to be met by immediate delivery, and if the demand is not urgent, it can accept several days of waiting.
If consumers’ online shopping behavior is classified by consumption frequency x urgency, the business form of “flash sales” mainly meets the needs of users who are “low-frequency but urgent”. For example, when I was traveling, I found that I didn’t bring cleansing oil, so I ordered a takeout from the hotel and got it in half an hour. In daily life, buying cleansing oil is a “low-frequency non-emergency demand”, and normally I will replenish it on JD.com or Taobao in advance; However, in the special scenario of “forgetting to bring it while traveling”, buying cleansing oil has turned into a “low-frequency emergency need”, hoping to get it as soon as possible.
From the perspective of volume, the “high-frequency urgent need” represented by catering takeaway and the “low-frequency non-urgent need” represented by e-commerce are undoubtedly the largest. The former is because of the high frequency of consumption, and the latter is because the “non-urgent need” feature can accept a longer logistics radius, which can cover the supply side to almost all commodity categories, and push back the super-large-scale C-end demand with ultra-large-scale B-end supply.
Therefore, large-volume products are also born in these two quadrants. Consumers’ “high-frequency urgent needs” support the two major takeaway giants Meituan and Ele.me, as well as several fresh food e-commerce companies that deliver instantly; The “low-frequency non-urgent need” quadrant gave birth to e-commerce giants such as Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, as well as emerging e-commerce forms such as Douyin e-commerce and Kuaishou e-commerce.
After the larger market is almost “rolled” to the top, the smaller demand volume of “low-frequency urgent need” and “high-frequency non-urgent need” enter the field of vision of large manufacturers and become an innovative business carrying growth hope.
A few years ago, several large factories went to the market at the same time to do community group buying, trying to build an “online vegetable market” to meet the high-frequency daily consumption of users. Most community group purchases are undertaken in the form of “next-day site pick-up”, which is lower than that of fresh e-commerce in terms of delivery timeliness, and the price also has obvious advantages, which can be regarded as an expansion of the “high-frequency non-urgent need” business. But in the end, under the dual influence of high expansion costs and low-viscosity C-end users, the community group buying business of major manufacturers has always been difficult to truly make a profit. Some community group buying projects were shut down or abolished, and the outlet quickly dissipated.
The “low-frequency urgent need” business represented by flash sales shows the opposite trend of community group buying. In 2018, Meituan launched a “flash sale” internally, with the original intention of meeting consumers’ emergency needs for drugs, flowers, electronic products and other categories; Earlier, JD Daojia was established in 2015; Alibaba established a intra-city retail business group in 2020 and established the “Hourly Delivery” channel. However, at first, the investment of major platforms in the “flash sale” business was not as concentrated as the community group buying business, reflecting on the supply side, and almost all the initial actions of the “flash sale” were only to introduce offline stores online.
Until the scale of the instant retail market continues to expand, and by 2024, it will approach the trillion mark, and the importance of the “flash sale” business within major factories will continue to increase. Meituan’s recently announced daily order volume has exceeded 18 million; In May 2024, JD.com will integrate Hourly Delivery and JD Daojia to launch “JD Second Delivery”, and in 2025, it will enter the catering takeaway industry with a high-profile entry into the catering takeaway industry with Second Delivery as a unified brand; Taobao announced on April 30, 2025 that it would upgrade the previous hourly delivery to a flash sale, and two days later, the “flash sale” entrance was fully launched on the Taobao homepage, leaving the team with little time for testing and experimenting.
The trend of “every second counts” is enough to prove that the competition has entered a white-hot stage.
Several large manufacturers that have made it clear that they are doing flash sales have natural convenience because of their own business structure, one is riders, and the other is merchants.
Not to mention that Meituan’s core home business is just a matter of adding new products and merchant categories, and the growth of orders also proves that flash sales have now become Meituan’s new growth engine; JD.com and Alibaba both have their own rider teams, and they also have a large number of brands, and their stores under the brand may be transformed into flash sale merchants.
From the perspective of resources, when the market size of the flash sale business is attractive enough, Meituan, JD.com, and Alibaba will inevitably be the first to compete.
3. The battlefield is not just about instant retail
In this instant retail war, there are two product details worth discussing:
Why doesn’t JD Takeaway make an independent APP? Why does Alibaba, which owns Ele.me, choose to mainly use Taobao to undertake flash sales (at least in terms of product promotion strategy)?
Cost must be one of JD.com’s considerations. After all, if you start an independent app from 0, you need to re-do user growth and cannot use ready-made user assets. But putting aside the cost issue, in the view of Hedgehog Commune, these two questions have the same answer: for JD.com and Alibaba, this is not just competition in the field of instant retail.
As the scale of the flash sale market continues to expand, consumers’ “low-frequency non-urgent needs” may migrate to “low-frequency urgent needs”, putting the basic disk of e-commerce platforms at risk of loss. In layman’s terms, in the past, I had to wait one day for express delivery when I bought a Huawei bracelet on JD.com, and two days for express delivery to buy swimming goggles at Taobao Decathlon flagship store, but now I can receive the goods in an hour when I order takeout. In order to prevent the loss of these orders, JD.com and Taobao need to allow consumers to buy bracelets and swimming goggles on their own platforms in an hour.
This competition did not start this year.
In the past few years and as long as 27 years of business practice, the core businesses of different platforms have created what is called “platform mind”, which has become the first choice of consumers in certain scenarios and categories. But the problem is that practice will not be as defined as drawing PPT, and any platform eager to make money will not only guard one and a third of an acre of land in its original quadrant, especially when the original business is close to the ceiling.
So we see one after another:
JD.com, which was originally mainly engaged in shelf e-commerce, first vigorously developed fresh e-commerce represented by Qixian and instant retail represented by JD Daojia, and then broke into the takeaway market with great momentum, intending to show its strength in the quadrants of “high frequency” and “urgent need”.
Alibaba, which has been fighting with JD.com in the field of shelf e-commerce for many years, acquired the second takeaway Ele.me as early as 2018, used Hema to undertake the market exploration of fresh e-commerce, and urgently put the two big words “flash sale” on the Taobao homepage in May 2025.
Douyin Kuaishou, which uses the live broadcast room as its main sales venue, has also accelerated the layout of local life in the past two years, trying to extend its tentacles to more high-frequency and urgent needs.
Fresh e-commerce platforms, which are relatively small in size, are also expanding non-fresh SKUs in the front warehouse. You can buy nail clippers at Hema, or dental floss sticks and mosquito repellent water at Dingdong Grocery Shopping. Even, Dingdong grocery shopping is an important merchant that provides flash sale products under the Taobao and JD.com systems; Meituan grocery shopping was renamed Little Elephant Supermarket, which in a sense became a subset of the flash sale business.
Platforms in which quadrant they fall are constantly expanding to other quadrants. Originally, it was mainly for low-frequency demand, but it was necessary to do high-frequency demand; Originally, it was mainly for non-urgent needs, but also to enter instant retail and squeeze into the user’s one-hour consumption circle. Vice versa.
After the business boundaries are gradually blurred, the most direct perception of the market is, how did your online consumption platform become a pot of porridge? In fact, the era of cutting into the market with subdivided categories/scenarios has passed, and in the era of increasingly difficult growth, platforms want to do full-chain transactions, so that users are willing to “buy everything” in themselves in any scenario.
The choice between JD.com and Taobao has become easy to understand. Using the same APP to undertake all the needs of users from high frequency to low frequency, from urgent to non-urgent needs, will have positive value to its main shelf e-commerce business. Users who originally opened JD.com once a week, because they wanted to use JD.com to order takeout, may open JD.com 5 times a week, and high-frequency demand creates more reasons to open it, and has a probability of converting it into more e-commerce GMV.
From this perspective, the goal of JD.com and Taobao in takeaway/flash sales is not to be the leader of the industry, or even to achieve profitability in independent businesses, but to bring positive benefits to the platform as a whole.
In the final analysis, no matter what scene you buy, for consumers, it is to trade goods with money, and for merchants, it is to trade money with goods.
It is normal for there to be competition in the industry, and the completion of business exploration by different platforms under their respective advantages will also promote the overall Chinese retail market to move forward.
