The expansion of JD.com’s takeaway triggered Taobao to upgrade “hourly delivery” to “flash sale”, and cooperated with Ele.me to increase user activity with social promotion and free order strategies. Alibaba integrates resources, breaks down business barriers, cooperates with Xiaohongshu to drain traffic, and makes every effort to compete for the instant retail market. In this competition, JD.com, Meituan and Alibaba show their strengths, and who can win in the future depends on resource integration and innovation capabilities.
JD.com and Meituan fought for a month, and Ele.me finally entered.
On April 30, Taobao announced that its instant retail business hours were officially upgraded to “Taobao Flash Sale”, and on the same day, Ele.me also announced the start of subsidies, “Hungry Supplement of More than 10 Billion” officially opened the first wave.
The outside world has made countless speculations about Ele.me’s entry posture, and the real situation has indeed not exceeded everyone’s expectations too much, Ele.me, as a takeaway platform backed by Alibaba, although its share in the takeaway market is declining,But as long as Alibaba is willing to access, Ele.me will become a mature and competitive weapon. Moreover, takeaway is not the only theme of this war, JD.com, Meituan, and Alibaba are grabbing the huge market potential of instant retail.
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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Taobao joins forces with Ele.me to fight, what are the differentiated ways to play with JD.com and Meituan?
The most obvious thing is that you will find strong social traces in Alibaba, who is good at opening traffic entrances.Taobao has issued free cards to some users, and users can share the free card to continue to invite others to receive coupons, but the shared coupons need to be collected on the same day and used within 3 hours after receiving them.
In addition, JD Takeaway and Ele.me both mention free orders, but in different ways. JD Takeaway is under limited conditions, and the order will be free only if there is an overtime, which shows that JD.com Takeaway has to do the basic line to ensure the normal performance of takeaway.Ele.me, on the other hand, uses free orders as a tool to promote activity, because Ele.me has already reached the basic line that JD.com wants in the takeaway market, and using free orders as a preferential activity is more suitable for Ele.me at this stage.
Obviously, grabbing free single coupons, inviting friends to free orders and using them for a limited time are all methods often used by Alibaba to promote activity, such as the annual Alipay blessing, the underlying logic is almost the same. Therefore, Ele.me did join the war, but in fact, Ele.me wanted a higher and more direct goal, rather than simply wandering around in the takeaway link.
JD.com Meituan has been fighting for several months and is also engaged in subsidies, but no one thought of the idea of using social to pull people’s heads.
In contrast, JD.com Meituan’s style of play is more inclined to the ancient Internet price war style, trying to increase the user’s mind with the most intuitive low price, and taking JD.com as an example, JD.com’s 10 billion subsidy does not mention the subsidy cycle and subsidy form, which makes the subsidy controllable, JD.com is more like throwing some money to test the water, and then increasing the weight when there is a wave, or turning the bow of the boat. Taobao and Ele.me are playing low price + social, and the goal is clearer: Ele.me’s orders will rise, and Taobao’s open rate will also rise.
People close to Taobao also told Zhiwei that the focus of Taobao and Ele.me is to pull Taobao’s “on-the-end time”, and takeaway is just a tool, and the real purpose is to let people open Taobao.
Recently, another action of Alibaba also confirmed the purpose of Taobao in the end time. On May 7, Taobao Tmall signed a strategic cooperation with Xiaohongshu to create the “Red Cat Plan”, announcing that the two sides will further open up and integrate, open up the whole link from grass planting to purchase, and jointly boost the business growth of merchants. The core of this cooperation is that users can plant grass on Xiaohongshu and then jump to Taobao to buy. Mu Shan, general manager of the marketing department of Taotian Group, revealed that in 2024, the transaction growth rate of Taotian brands exceeding 100 million will reach 18%, and the annual active consumers in important live broadcast venues will increase by 38% year-on-year, and the growth rate of live broadcast will contribute greatly to the growth rate of the market.
In short, whether it is access to Ele.me, Hourly Delivery is changed to flash sales and upgrades, or open to the outside world, cooperate with content platforms, or in recent years, netizens have always joked that “no matter what software you open, you have to jump to Taobao”, most of Taotian’s actions are serving the open rate and user activity.
Spare no effort to let users increase the frequency of opening Taobao, on the one hand, because of the anxiety caused by the fierce competition between e-commerce platforms in the stock competition stage, and at the same time, content e-commerce such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu has gradually broadened the scene of bringing goods, and Taotian urgently needs more traffic delivery, which can come from outside or from its own other businesses, such as Ele.me.
On the other hand, takeaway, as a high-frequency consumption entrance, can use high frequencies to drive low frequencies, driving 3C digital, daily necessities and even clothing bags and other instant retail categories in addition to catering, even short-term immediate demand, may also generate the next purchase in e-commerce, for example, users may use flash sales because they urgently need a parasol, and then buy more sunscreen products of the brand on Taobao because of the good feeling of use.
Lai Yang, member of the Expert Committee of the China Chamber of Commerce and executive vice president of the Beijing Business Economics Association, also pointed out to Zhiwei that another point worth paying attention to this upgrade is that the upgrade is accompanied by the in-depth adjustment of Alibaba’s internal system, “In the past, the business related to instant retail within the Tao system was scattered in different departments, but now it has achieved unified management and resource integration through flash sales, and Ele.me is also fully coordinated.” This institutional restructuring breaks down the original business barriers and improves strategic coordination and market response efficiency. ”
It is equivalent to saying that JD.com has made efforts in takeaway, and Taobao has directly awakened.
The effect is already appearing. On May 5, Taobao announced that in just 5 days, Taobao’s single-day takeaway orders for Taobao flash sales have exceeded 10 million, while JD.com’s takeaway has exceeded 10 million orders, taking about 40 days.
So, how big can this fire burn?
The three platforms have their own focuses in the field of instant retail. Relying on e-commerce traffic and brand resources, Alibaba collaborates with Ele.me to create an integrated online and offline consumption scene; Meituan takes local life services as the core, emphasizing high-frequency rigid demand and distribution network density; JD.com focuses on quality assurance of its own logistics and supply chain. The key to future competition is who can better integrate resources and improve real-time performance and scenario innovation capabilities. Lai Yang concluded.
Meituan has more advantages in urban grid operation, that is, Meituan is better at including takeaway, instant retail, and local life fulfillment, but when it comes to commodity prices, SKU richness, etc., Meituan still has shortcomings compared to platforms from e-commerce.
Zhuang Shuai, a guest consultant of the China Chain Store Association and an expert in the retail e-commerce industry, told Zhiwei that Meituan’s open platform front warehouse (Meituan Lightning Warehouse) has a multi-platform operation, and these front warehouse owners can also operate on JD.com or Taobao flash sales at the same time, which may need to be supplemented through a mature centralized shelf e-commerce model. What JD.com lacks is exactly what Meituan is good at urban operations, and what Meituan is good at is exactly what Meituan lacks: rich SKUs and lower prices. If you look at it from these two perspectives, Taobao may be a little easier, because the city operation is done by Ele.me, and there are a large number of Taotian merchants in the supply of goods.
However, whether Taotian can really maximize the synergy will take time to verify. At least for now, introducing Ele.me, a mature app, into Taobao can indeed bring some order growth, but low-price stimulus may not necessarily allow consumers to get used to it for a long time and accept the counterintuitive logic of “simplifying into complex”.
In the stock market stage, the competition between platforms is no longer about you living and living, but about you fighting for each other, and the major platforms will enter the competition of the ecological synergy system, and the increase or decrease of share depends on the strength of the synergy effect. Zhuang Shuai said.
Takeaway has become the hottest “entrepreneurial project” on e-commerce platforms in 2025, but what everyone is really focusing on is the fat of instant retail.
And the sudden awakening of Taobao may give JD.com, the initiator of the war, even more headaches.
