In the context of fierce competition in the instant retail market, the launch of Taobao flash sales has brought new variables to the market. This article provides an in-depth analysis of how Taobao Flash Sale is looking for breakthroughs in the field of instant retail through collaboration with Ele.me, as well as its unique advantages in system capabilities, brand supply and consumption scenario reconstruction.
The instant retail market is in full swing, and Taobao suddenly announced an increase.
Since the beginning of this year, Meituan and JD.com have taken turns to make moves in the instant retail track, with tens of billions of subsidies, red envelopes and platform wars of words. Consumers insisted on “where to be cheaper”, while complaining that the takeaway was “delivered half an hour late”.
Since the announcement of its early launch on May 2, Taobao flash sales have been performing well.
Within 48 hours after the full launch of this “Hungry Treasure Combination” and the highest discount, the number of Ele.me’s single-day logistics orders in 13 cities has exceeded the highest in history. Cudi Coffee’s orders increased nearly 10 times in one day, and the average daily order volume of tea rookie brand Jasmine Milk White on Ele.me also increased by nearly 3 times.
So much so that there are voices in the market that Taobao may have “cut off” this instant retail secret war provoked by takeaway.
The problems encountered in the current takeaway subsidy war truly present the challenges faced by instant retail, the “next main battlefield of e-commerce”. As a format that also makes the ultimate requirements for “how fast and easy to save”, instant retail is the most test of logistics timeliness, goods management and price system. The platform must have core advantages in one or two dimensions of goods, warehouses, allocation, price, and mentality, and have no shortcomings in other dimensions.
Taobao gave its own unique problem-solving ideas.
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Just when JD.com and Meituan entered the anxious, on April 30, Taobao Tmall suddenly announced that its instant retail business “Hourly Delivery” was officially upgraded to “Taobao Flash Sale”, and displayed it on the Taobao APP homepage Tab with the first-level traffic entrance of “Flash Sale”, which was launched in 50 cities on the first day, and also joined forces with Ele.me to access all takeaway supply, with the goal of achieving “low price + takeaway speed of e-commerce”.
After sorting out Taotian’s business in recent years and the context of this action, Yilan Business believes that Taobao flash sale was not set up from the beginning, not to become famous in one battle, but to try to make up for the structural shortcomings of the “last mile” of e-commerce – it does not fight words or bet on explosive items, but starts from the three ends of the system, supply and fulfillment, trying to reconstruct a sustainable instant retail path.
01 Instant retail, another way to the main battlefield of e-commerce
Against the backdrop of the gradual fading of traffic dividends and slowing user growth, the e-commerce industry is facing an unprecedented structural inflection point.
In the past few years, far-field e-commerce has become deeper and deeper, from “low-price subsidies” to “refunds only”, from following the trend to copying money and stealing pictures, it has gradually moved towards the bottleneck of stock game and efficiency, and it is becoming more and more difficult to stimulate users’ freshness and impulse to buy.
In this impasse, “instant retail” has become one of the few new additions that are still growing.
“Buy today, arrive today” is no longer just an add-on to express delivery services, but has become a new underlying expectation for consumers. Behind this, there is not only the improvement of local life service infrastructure, but also the change of user mentality: buying quickly, receiving quickly, and using quickly have become key variables in leveraging decision-making. If the platform can better meet this demand, it will have the opportunity to break the homogeneous competition.
Takeaway happens to be the most mature instant scene. Its high-frequency and rigid demand characteristics are naturally suitable for aggregating flow. Catering orders not only establish users’ usage habits, but also become a traffic entrance to extend other categories (such as 3C, FMCG, clothing). Through “high-frequency bottoming and low-frequency monetization”, the platform has gradually established a “traffic funnel” with instant fulfillment as the core.
This is why major e-commerce companies have recently invested heavily in subsidies, using takeaway as a skirmish, trying to start from “food delivery” and cut into more instant retail scenarios.
However, the “war of words” has been fought to this day and has entered a period of consumption: the distribution resources are tight, the performance experience is uneven, on the surface, it seems that the platform has started the volume, but in fact, the user’s mind has not really precipitated.
The results of the takeaway subsidy war are difficult to continue, and the problem still lies in the platform’s understanding of the five dimensions of goods, warehouses, allocation, price, and mentality.
Platforms that started as takeaway often have advantages in warehouses and distribution, with more points and stronger distribution capabilities; The advantages of shelf e-commerce platforms in the instant retail field are goods and prices, rich supply of branded goods, and stronger bargaining power of the platform. However, it is often difficult for these two types of platforms to obtain each other’s advantages and quickly make up for their shortcomings.
Therefore, the takeaway subsidy war quickly evolved into a “little brother treatment war” and “platform compliance war” in the previous stage, and the mental transformation from takeaway subsidies to instant retail was far from being realized.
In the view of Yilan Commerce, the predecessor of Taobao Flash Sale, Taobao Hourly Delivery, has a significantly different path choice. It is not in a hurry to compete for the first entrance to catering orders, but uses the native advantages of e-commerce – brand pallets, supply chain depth, and system capabilities – to cut into near-field retail, and use instant fulfillment capabilities to reconstruct the brand’s reach method.
02 The complementary advantages of Ele.me and Taobao
If Taobao flash sale is a “system-level reconstruction” of near-field retail, then Ele.me is the “muscles and nerves” that support the efficient operation of this system.
The advantage of Taobao Hourly Delivery is still the goods and price. Backed by the brand supply of the entire Taobao and Tmall, Hourda chose to leverage the enterprises behind the brand, first break through the barriers between e-commerce and offline multi-level dealers from within the organization, and then exchange the volume for price, and exchange the near-field market increment for the brand “no delivery fee”.
An example can visualize this line of thinking.
In the spring and summer season of April 2025, Taobao Hourly launched a preferential commission policy, attracting more than 50 leading brand merchants to settle in before 618, many of which are clothing brands, including the well-known domestic women’s clothing brand MOCO, the largest brand of domestic underwear, Hongdou, as well as Seven Wolves, Cotton Times, Xingmian, Yalu, Zhenweisi, etc.
Once the price of takeaway clothes is consistent with the price of the same model in the flagship store, even without a large amount of marketing subsidies, many consumers are now willing to take the initiative to choose the form of faster delivery.
In the first week of launch, Taobao hourly orders with brands drove the brand to increase by 10% in the entire Taobao order. In the second week of launch, the number of orders reached by the brand soared 30 times month-on-month.
Goods and prices are the real advantages of Taobao in instant retail. At the same time, warehouses, allocation, and minds are the advantages of Ele.me.
In this year’s “takeaway war”, Ele.me once seemed low-key. However, the hummingbird rider system now covers major cities across the country, and it is a rare “high-standard normalization” platform in the industry in terms of capacity scheduling, geographical algorithms, and instant fulfillment response speed. This capability is difficult for competitors to replicate or replace in the short term.
The vast majority of the performance tasks of Taobao flash sale are undertaken by Ele.me. Compared with other platforms that still need to build their own fulfillment teams or rely on franchise rider systems, Taobao has gained significant advantages in cost, efficiency and scheduling accuracy by integrating the Ele.me network.
But the value of Ele.me is far more than a delivery system. It is also a springboard for the mental layer.
As a local life platform that has been used frequently for many years, Ele.me has long occupied the consumer cognition of users to “place orders at any time and deliver quickly”. This psychological expectation of “fast like takeaway” extends beyond catering to daily necessities, and then further extends to various brand products such as clothing FMCG, which is the scene that Taobao flash sale wants to activate the most.
Taobao flash sale is with the help of this mature mind to gradually guide users from “ordering” to “shopping”. For example, after ordering milk tea, the user may buy the football that the child needs for class next week; Place an order for a piece of clothing and find that it can be delivered within half an hour. This kind of mental migration can be “smoothly transferred” through Ele.me’s years of high-frequency accumulation.
As the king of the takeaway drainage category, tea coffee has stood in the C position of Taobao flash sale this time, and the order volume of in-depth cooperative brands such as Nai Xue’s tea, jasmine milk white, and Cudi coffee has skyrocketed, but this is far from the end of the story. In the future, well-known brand stores in clothing, beauty and skin care, and 3C digital may also usher in this scene.
With Ele.me’s warehouse distribution capability, Taobao Flash Sale has been able to deliver goods faster and provide more detailed services, but what really supports this battle for a long time is the deep chassis and supply capacity on the brand side, as well as the consumer mentality established through “same price” and affordability.
03 Taobao’s “big retail” evolution
Instant retail is not a traffic war, but a competition of system capabilities. Compared with the platform that started with subsidies, Taobao flash sale has an essential difference – it does not start from scratch, but stands on the system of “instant retail exploration” for more than ten years, and it comes naturally.
From the concept of “new retail” in 2016 to Hema Xiansheng’s first “store + warehousing + instant delivery” model; From Taoxianda to open up supermarkets online and offline, to Tmall Supermarket to launch a multi-layer fulfillment model of “1-hour delivery”, “half-day delivery” and “next-day delivery”; Then, in 2020, Taobao launched the “Hourly Delivery” channel, and in 2024, it was upgraded to a first-level entrance on the homepage, and the Alibaba ecosystem gradually built a supply network that spanned online and offline through years of transformation and accumulation in supermarkets, local warehouses, and digital stores.
And brand supply is the biggest confidence of Taobao flash sales.
As of the time of the upgrade, Taobao Hourly has covered more than 3 million stores and accessed more than 200 core brands, covering Apple authorized franchise stores, Nongfu Spring, Lexus, JACK&JONES, Decathlon, ONLY, Watsons and other leading players in the industry. The diversification of brand supply and the goal of achieving the same price in the near and far fields are the key to Taobao’s difference from other platforms of “single category and explosive driven”.
For example, brands like JACK&JONES and Apple, which have their own offline store networks, have significantly improved inventory scheduling efficiency after accessing Taobao flash sales. FMCG brands such as Watsons and Nongfu Spring have completed the dual-scene resonance of “brand flagship store + offline store” through city warehouses and store direct delivery. What Taobao is good at is not a single point outbreak, but a mobilization system and coordinated operations.
On the front-end user side, Taobao flash sale reconstruction also has consumption scenarios.
Instead of the platform going to the store and sending riders after the user places an order, the system automatically recommends “1-hour delivery” products according to the user’s location and inventory proximity, realizing link compression from search to fulfillment. For example, if a user takes a fancy to a lipstick in the live broadcast room, he can directly choose “hourly delivery” to place an order and receive the goods on the same day; Users who order milk tea on takeaway platforms can also buy a razor and Bluetooth headphones by the way. This is a mental leap from “waiting for express delivery” to “available right now”.
At the bottom, Taobao is promoting the model of “one plate of goods, one plate of price, and one link”.
Brands no longer need to build separate systems for online, offline, and local delivery, but manage goods, inventory and prices in the common architecture of Taobao flash sales. This digital capability allows brands to no longer be separated by channels, and can be light operational, fast converted, and efficient. For users, they perceive unified product presentation, faster delivery efficiency and clearer service experience.
In the end, these seemingly systematic improvements fall on the business side, which is to make brand business easier, make consumers buy more certainly, and make the platform’s growth path healthier.
Behind the linkage between Taobao Flash Sale and Ele.me is a more sustainable growth model: with the brand as the core, the system as the skeleton, and the near-field as the channel, reconstructing the integration capability of “e-commerce + local”.
When “fast” becomes the default expectation of retail, it is not the fastest platform that can win this battle, but the one that can stabilize efficiency, open up supply, and extend brand value.
