The takeaway market has reignited, and Alibaba has entered the game with “Taobao Flash Sale” and competed fiercely with JD.com and Meituan. This is not only a competition for market share, but also a key step in the layout of instant retail.
The chaos set off by JD.com Meituan has intensified, and the latest situation is that the confrontation between the two armies has become a Three Kingdoms kill.
On April 30, the news of Alibaba’s joining the battle suddenly spread. Taobao Tmall’s instant retail business “Hourly Delivery” has been upgraded to “Taobao Flash Sale”, which not only wins the first-level traffic entrance on the homepage of the Taobao App, but also cooperates with Ele.me to jointly increase subsidies to give consumers free red envelopes, free milk tea and other consumer rights.
Students who like to order takeout can be happy. There are more opportunities to save money. From the perspective of Alibaba itself, it is inevitable to increase investment in takeaway and participate in the battle of JD.com Meituan. Not only because it is an old takeaway player, but also because this war will affect it after all.
Interestingly, whether it is a war of words or a subsidy war, Meituan and JD.com have been-for-tat before, but they have not mentioned Ele.me and Alibaba much. And now, Alibaba’s entry has officially started a more intense and comprehensive melee, and it is no longer a simple “takeaway” battle, and even to some extent, this melee will eventually make the separate concept of “takeaway” disappear.
Ele.me opened a new subsidy. Source: Hungry
01 In the battle between JD.com and Meituan, Alibaba’s failure to participate is the biggest loss
Someone said before that JD.com launched this takeaway war, and the most hurt was not Meituan, but Hungry. Intuitively, Ele.me’s voice is getting smaller and smaller. Some interesting signs illustrate the subtlety of Ele.me’s situation.
From April 11th to 15th, JD Meituan continued to fight.
First, JD.com took away 10 billion yuan of subsidies. Then Meituan Takeaway wants to invest 100 billion yuan in the catering industry. After that, Liu Qiangdong’s internal speech leaked out, accusing friends of making too much money and setting a rule that the net profit of takeaway should not exceed 5%. On the same day, Meituan released the “Meituan Flash Sale”, claiming to create a shopping experience of “30 minutes of good goods”.
And with these two families going back and forth, Ele.me was silently injured in the corner.
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According to Qimai data, almost at the same time as the two upgraded their fighting methods, Ele.me’s application ranking began to decline. In the App Store free app rankings for nearly a month, Ele.me’s previous best result was 17th, but it fell from the 13th to 56th. JD.com’s ranking has risen.
JD.com and Ele.me rankings in the App Store have changed. Source: Seven Microphone Data
According to a JD.com takeaway interview minutes, on April 15, JD.com’s takeaway order volume reached 5.6 million, and it is expected to exceed 10 million in May. However, it took only 6 days for this goal to be achieved. In other words, the rise of JD.com’s takeaway has greatly exceeded internal expectations, and this will inevitably have an impact on Meituan and Ele.me.
According to the data shown in the minutes and the changes observed during the actual visit, JD.com’s high performance is indeed encroaching on the orders and rider resources in the existing pattern, and JD.com will obviously not let this trend stop.
JD.com takeaway linkage pig man marketing. Source: Pig Man Xiaohongshu
For these situations, Ele.me and Alibaba cannot be unaware.
In fact, everyone knows that the current takeaway war is not only in catering, but also through high-frequency catering orders, to drive a broader instant retail business, and then ultimately change the pattern of e-commerce, the most important business in the mobile Internet era.
The more catering orders, the more user data accumulated, and the platform can better understand user needs, so as to more accurately recommend non-catering products through algorithms. At the same time, only by increasing the order volume through catering takeaway can the marginal cost of instant retail business be reduced through the reuse of the distribution network.
It has become a new growth point for e-commerce by impacting the existing boundaries of e-commerce.
As Wang Puzhong, CEO of Meituan’s core local business, said, instant retail has been in full swing in recent years, especially in categories such as fresh food, wine, 3C digital, and pharmaceuticals, and the progress has far exceeded expectations. At the same time, according to a report by the Ministry of Commerce, the scale of instant retail transactions in our country will reach one trillion yuan this year and more than 2 trillion yuan by 2030.
In fact, Meituan, JD.com, Alibaba, Byte, etc. have all carried out relevant layouts before. It’s just that from the perspective of importance, Meituan and JD.com are more concerned.
At present, with JD.com’s large-scale attack on takeaway, it further proves the potential of instant retail, and also rapidly increases the intensity of competition in this area. An era in which takeaway is commonly used to solve various shopping needs may have become a reality earlier.
For Alibaba, it is imperative to increase investment from the perspective of defending its core position in e-commerce and seizing the emerging growth point of instant retail. If you do not actively respond to the battle, not only the takeaway market share, but more importantly, the new e-commerce volume and narrative rights in the future may be taken away by competitors.
02 External pressure brings opportunities for Alibaba’s internal resource integration
This is also why it is not Ele.me itself that “participated” in the war, but Taobao Tmall’s instant retail business leads.
In the previous catering takeaway melee, Ele.me finally stabilized in the second place in the industry. The objective market share is like this, and subjectively, Alibaba’s attitude towards the takeaway market seems to have been like this for a long time. But when it comes to the new battlefield of instant retail, Alibaba obviously has to tell a different story.
Taobao flash sale chose to suddenly appear at this node at the moment, and linked with Ele.me to increase subsidies, some Taobao flash sale project personnel said, “This has always been Alibaba’s style of doing business, seizing the best opportunity, concentrating superior forces to work together to press it.” ”
He mentioned that Taobao has promoted a large number of categories and brands to invest in instant retail, and at the same time, Ele.me’s social warehousing and distribution, instant fulfillment, supercomputing platform, map and other capabilities have matured. In addition, as mentioned earlier, takeaway and instant retail have become unprecedented because of the recent battle between JD.com and Meituan.
If you follow the trend, you can spend less money and do more. Now is indeed a good time for Ali to regain its strength and become bigger and stronger. However, on the new battlefield, Ali will not face an easy situation.
First, catering takeaway is directly affected by JD.com’s entry, and secondly, in terms of instant retail, opponents have in-depth layouts.
Meituan shares instant retail. Source: Meituan official website
Since 2018, Meituan has expanded its instant delivery business from emergency categories to daily necessities. By October 2024, the number of Meituan flash warehouses will exceed 30,000, and it plans to increase to 100,000 by 2027. This allows it to further dilute the cost of warehousing. At the same time, Meituan’s huge team of riders is a moat in itself.
JD.com is also speeding up. Last year, JD Retail set instant retail as one of the three must-win battles, and then integrated JD Hourly Delivery and JD Daojia into “JD Second Delivery”. When it entered takeaway this year, JD.com was recruiting full-time riders in a high-profile manner, while also preparing to privatize Dada. This will allow for better coordination of distribution resources and consolidation of competitiveness in instant retail.
In contrast, Alibaba’s previous investment in instant retail was insufficient. For example, if you urgently need a digital or home appliance product, JD.com is still the priority option. In terms of non-digital products, Meituan’s slogan of “30 minutes to get everything home” is changing the consumption habits of more and more people.
Back to Alibaba, this is somewhat regrettable. After all, as Taobao flash sales staff said, it already has many superior conditions. Just before the launch of Taobao flash sale, Alibaba released and open-sourced the Tongyi Qianwen Qwen3 series model, which attracted widespread attention at home and abroad. Although exploring large models is not directly related to instant retail, the leadership of various technologies may help specific businesses achieve better iteration. In addition, the experience, resources and influence accumulated in the field of e-commerce are also its confidence to do a good job in instant retail.
But for a long time, these “advantages” have also been a challenge for Alibaba – theoretically the resources are sufficient, but in fact they are scattered everywhere. Whether it is JD.com or Meituan, catering or non-catering takeaway can be completed through an app, and on Alibaba’s side, services and resources are still relatively scattered. For example, if you search for a certain mobile phone on Ele.me and Taobao at the same time, you can’t find it on Ele.me, but Taobao Hourly Delivery can. This will undoubtedly affect the user experience. In other words, Alibaba’s internal collaboration is key. Users need to conveniently complete all their instant shopping needs on one platform, and how to truly integrate Taobao’s “goods” and Ele.me’s “fulfillment” to provide a seamless “e-commerce platform + instant delivery” experience is an internal challenge that Alibaba must overcome.
From the perspective of Alibaba’s entry into the game this time, sometimes huge external pressure can be transformed into a catalyst for internal change. This fierce competition, jointly upgraded by JD.com and Meituan, mixes online traffic, offline local supply, and real-time fulfillment capabilities into a competition.
Whoever can better integrate resources and provide faster, more complete and more cost-effective “everything to home” services will occupy a dominant position in the next stage of e-commerce evolution. And this is unprecedentedly exposing the urgency of Alibaba’s internal coordination, and when the competition itself is already smoothing the boundaries between takeaway and e-commerce, Alibaba itself must move. In the entire internal collaboration, whether Ele.me’s positioning is an independent “takeaway business” or an important resource provider in the new “e-commerce + local service”, different judgments will ultimately determine the different directions of this competition.
