Since Taobao Hourly Delivery was upgraded to Taobao Flash Sale on April 30, its daily order volume has exceeded the 10 million mark in just 6 days, even surpassing the 10 million performance that JD.com took 70 days to achieve. This article will provide an in-depth analysis of how Taobao Flash Sale and Ele.me have achieved this remarkable achievement through strategies such as ecological collaboration, traffic sharing, and performance capacity optimization, and explore its far-reaching impact on the competitive landscape and future development of the industry.
Since the official upgrade of “Taobao Hourly Delivery” to “Taobao Flash Sale” on April 30, Ele.me officially announced on May 5 that the daily orders from Taobao Flash Sale exceeded 10 million. This also means that Taobao Flash Sale took only 6 days to complete JD.com’s takeaway, which took 70 days (launched on February 12 to April 22) to achieve tens of millions of performance.
In the view of “Zhuang Shuai Retail E-commerce Channel”, Taobao flash sale exceeded 10 million orders in 6 days, just like AlphaGo defeated Li Shishi in 2016 and Master won 60 consecutive victories in the field of Go in 2017 to become a milestone event in artificial intelligence, it will also become a milestone event in the retail industry and promote the accelerated development of instant retail formats.
The “singularity moment” of e-commerce instant retail is accelerating.
Behind it fast and fierce
Zhuang Shuai, guest consultant of the China Chain Store Association and an expert in the retail e-commerce industry, believes that in the stock market stage, the competition between platforms is no longer you die and I live, but you compete for me, and the major platforms will enter the competition of the ecological synergy system, and the increase or decrease of the share depends on the strength of the synergy effect.
Meituan’s rider network and urban grid operation system built by catering takeaway have formed a mature model of “takeaway + instant retail + local life”, with strong user mentality, large-scale instant fulfillment capabilities, and offline supply and urbanization grid operation capabilities, which are its biggest advantages.
On the one hand, the existing instant retail connected physical stores will be limited by the lack of product SKUs and weak price competitiveness, on the other hand, the open platform front warehouse (Meituan Lightning Warehouse) has multi-platform operation, that is, the owners of these front warehouses can also operate on JD.com or Taobao flash sales at the same time. These two disadvantages still need to be compensated for through a mature centralized shelf e-commerce model.
B-end product manager’s ability model and learning improvement
The first challenge faced by B-end product managers is how to correctly analyze and diagnose business problems. This is also the most difficult part, product design knowledge is basically not helpful for this part of the work, if you want to do a good job in business analysis and diagnosis, you must have a solid …
View details >
Zhuang Shuai predicts that Meituan is likely to make up for the shortcomings of insufficient supply of physical goods through Meituan Preferred, and then form a synergistic effect with catering takeaway and local life, but Meituan’s e-commerce will have a much longer cycle than expected if it wants to reach the maturity of Taobao.
Although JD.com’s e-commerce business can make up for the gap in the supply of goods in instant retail and meet the diverse needs of consumers, whether it is the supply of catering takeaway merchants and local life merchants, or the scale of riders and the refined operation ability of the city, they are all in their infancy.
If you want to maintain sustained high growth, the platform needs to achieve a high balance between traffic (users), merchants and delivery (riders).
In contrast, relying on platform traffic and brand resources, the Taobao flash sale team has promoted the entry of a large number of categories and brands, with a rich supply of merchants and goods. Up to now, more than 3 million stores have settled in Taobao flash sale, covering many industries such as fresh food, FMCG, 3C digital, clothing, sports and outdoor, and fresh gardening.
Ele.me achieves silky smooth fulfillment through mature real-time fulfillment capabilities such as social warehouse distribution, supercomputing scheduling platform, and map technology.
With the strategy of “asset-light and synergy-weighted”, Taobao Flash Sale combines the accumulation of years of instant retail with Ele.me’s mature real-time fulfillment capabilities and urban grid operation capabilities to achieve efficient synergy, and reuses Taobao’s user scale and online operation advantages at low cost to activate the explosive growth of high-frequency consumer goods.
According to the data, since the Taobao flash sale was launched nationwide on May 2, coffee and milk tea shops in many places have ushered in a peak of orders, and within 24 hours of launch, Nai Xue’s tea takeaway orders soared by more than 200% year-on-year, and the sales of Cudi coffee quickly rose to the first place in the Ele.me coffee category, an increase of nearly 10 times compared with daily orders.
In addition to the tea and coffee category, more catering brands have also ushered in an explosion of orders, and the number of orders for Ele.me in Micun Bibimbap has increased by nearly 100% compared with April, and its online operation leader bluntly said that “far exceeding previous expectations”.
In Zhuang Shuai’s view, this seemingly takeaway race is actually an upgrade of the instant retail format, and the high frequency of takeaway drives not only instant retail, but also low-frequency clothing, 3C digital, home furnishing and other e-commerce categories, and the next competition is the synergy effect of the three major ecosystems in all formats, categories and scenarios.
Behind the blitzkrieg of Taobao’s flash sale exceeding 10 million orders in 6 days is the full implementation of Taobao’s ecological coordination strategy.
From the perspective of commodity supply, Taobao Tmall’s brand resources complement Ele.me’s local merchant supply, which not only covers the immediate demand for coffee, tea and catering, but also achieves full-scene coverage through all categories such as clothing, 3C digital, and household goods, and accelerates the expansion of the sinking market with brand physical stores.
In August 2024, the “Apple Authorized Franchise Store” will be fully connected to Taobao Hourly, with more than 3,000 stores across the country, providing consumers in more than 600 cities with the fastest hourly delivery service, and the search volume related to the iPhone 16’s new product pre-sale Taobao Hourly Delivery channel has skyrocketed by 200 times, and sales have increased by 40 times.
During the 38 promotions in 2025, the overall transaction volume of Taobao Hourly Reach increased by nearly 200% month-on-month. Among them, Decathlon’s hourly sales increased by 665% month-on-month, ONLY transactions increased by nearly 300%, JACK & JONES and VERO MODA also exceeded 200%, Watsons beauty and skin care orders exceeded 120%, and Schwarzkopf’s hair dye cream sold out.
From the perspective of fulfillment capabilities, Hummingbird’s million-level rider network and AI-driven supercomputing platform already have the ability and flexibility to undertake high-peak orders, which can not only be used for food delivery, but also to deliver fresh and perishable items such as medicines, flowers, fruits, etc., and can fully support instant retail full-category distribution.
From the perspective of ecological scalability, the entire Taobao ecosystem has the most complete supply system and service system at present, which can benefit consumers for a long time, and promote the coordinated growth of all business platforms such as Taobao, Tmall, Ele.me, and Hema through the full-format e-commerce retail model and synergy effect, especially the next VIP88 membership system will also become the core connection point of collaborative growth.
The beginning and end of tens of millions of orders a day
After all, for physical merchants, the online Taobao Tmall flagship store and offline physical store can be supported by the strong online operation capabilities of the Taobao flash sale team, and the catering and local life service merchants of high-frequency business are linked, and the orders of all types of merchants are jointly promoted to achieve comprehensive growth through cross-store full reduction, joint couponing and other forms.
According to the “Zhuang Shuai Retail E-commerce Channel”, the upgraded Taobao flash sale not only cooperates with Ele.me to increase subsidies around consumers, but also combines the advantages of Taobao and Tmall in brand e-commerce merchants, and cooperates with brand merchants’ city warehouses and offline stores to open up the pallets and prices of Tmall’s official flagship stores and instant retail, giving consumers the experience of “low prices of e-commerce and fast delivery of instant retail”.
Judging from the data of this May Day holiday, in addition to the tea and coffee category, brand merchants in many other categories have also doubled. This is the “beginning” of tens of millions of orders on Taobao flash sale day.
Next, as the synergy between Taobao flash sale and Ele.me continues to play, the future materialization strategy of catering merchants and local life will also be accelerated because of Taobao Tmall’s e-commerce business, such as Haidilao’s bagged base, bottled drinks from tea shops, etc., all of which can achieve secondary growth in Taobao Tmall’s e-commerce platform sales.
The collaborative innovation and development of online and offline, commodity retail + service retail is the “end” of 10 million orders on Taobao flash sale day.
Finally, Taobao’s online operation model of “short chain explosion + global traffic”, as well as the instant fulfillment guarantee and urbanization operation service guarantee provided by Ele.me, can ensure that no matter how large the order volume is, the user experience can be consistent, and Ele.me can also take advantage of the opportunity to quickly reduce the average cost of the order by expanding the scale of the order.
The larger the order volume, the scale of riders and merchants of Ele.me and Taobao will also further grow, so that merchants, riders and consumers will benefit simultaneously, the better the user experience, the more repurchases, and the more orders from merchants, Taobao as a platform will have more investment, and finally form a virtuous positive circle of “Taobao earns traffic, Ele.me earns orders, merchants earn growth, and riders earn income”.
This takeaway blitzkrieg not only demonstrates the explosive power of the synergy between Taobao and Ele.me, but also means that Ele.me’s instant retail infrastructure has the strength to carry exponential growth.
For Meituan Flash Sale and JD.com’s second delivery, in the face of competitive pressure from Taobao and Ele.me, it is necessary to further increase investment, and in a certain sense, it will form more consumption to form the habit of instant consumption. Taobao Flash Sale has a full-format retail e-commerce model, which may become the biggest beneficiary of this round of retail e-commerce industry upgrades.
At the same time, driven by takeaway and instant retail business, e-commerce platforms will further accelerate their evolution, give full play to the centralized and cross-regional sales efficiency and scale advantages of e-commerce platforms, and promote the optimization of commodity structure, such as new product launches, inventory clearance (discounting), pre-sale customization, long-tail goods, etc., e-commerce formats and instant retail formats relying on physical stores and front-end warehouses will form a complementary supply relationship and coexist for a long time.
At present, it seems that the accumulation of Taobao flash sales has verified the positive cycle brought about by the synergy effect of multiple formats, and the platform subsidies benefit users, promote the growth of merchants, and ultimately allow merchants, riders and platforms to make long-term profits, so that participants in all links can share the upgrade dividends of the “singularity moment” of the industry, so that the competition in the stock market is no longer a simple ineffective involution, but to promote the accelerated upgrading of the industry and achieve qualitative changes in the industry.
Ele.me ushered in a new stage of development
From the perspective of the layout of the three major ecosystems for instant retail business, Meituan Flash Sale, JD Second Delivery, and Taobao Flash Sale are all channels in the comprehensive e-commerce platform, forming synergies with catering takeaway, physical e-commerce, instant retail and local life services.
It’s just that the development stages and maturity of the three major ecosystems are different.
Meituan needs to make up for the lack of supply of physical goods, and JD.com needs to strengthen the supply of catering takeaway and local life, and increase the rider capacity and urbanization operation capacity of instant delivery.
This Taobao flash sale + Ele.me attacked, at the moment of “just right”, one undertook the user’s instant consumption habits; As the first takeaway platform, Ele.me will also accelerate the development of Taobao flash sale instant consumption.
On the one hand, Ele.me has strong user minds and habits in takeaway and instant consumption, and has a large number of loyal users; On the other hand, Ele.me has the same supply of catering merchants and local life merchants as Meituan, with more than ten years of mature online and offline operation capabilities, as well as national and large-scale rider instant fulfillment capabilities.
Alibaba’s financial report data for the third quarter of fiscal year 2025 showed that the revenue of the local life group increased by 12% to 16.988 billion yuan, with the growth of orders from AutoNavi and Ele.me and the increase in marketing service revenue as the main drivers, and the loss narrowed significantly year-on-year.
This also means that Alibaba’s local life business synergy effect is remarkable, and Ele.me’s firm “1+2” strategy is also leading its overall business in the right direction, maintaining “stable and fast” growth: “1” represents Ele.me’s home catering platform that wants to grow healthily and understand consumers better, and “2” represents focusing on building two new tracks: “instant retail in line with Ele.me’s characteristics” and “instant logistics network for market value extension”.
For the latter, in the view of the “Zhuang Shuai Retail E-commerce Channel”, in addition to the instant retail of delivering everything, Ele.me can also open instant delivery services to all enterprises with instant delivery needs, and even the world. In this way, with the synergy brought about by the continuous growth of Taobao flash sales and the long-term strategy of “1+2”, Ele.me is about to usher in a new stage of profitable and healthy growth.
It is believed that in the future, with the continuous increase in instant consumption demand, the continuous expansion of instant consumption scenarios and categories, the mature “search-decision-fulfillment” shopping chain will be comprehensively upgraded, and Taobao + Ele.me’s full-format e-commerce retail model will also become the most likely platform to achieve “instant delivery of everything” in the future.
