The battle for instant retail supremacy intensified as Taobao Flash Sales and Ele.me jointly announced daily orders surpassing 80 million on July 14, 2025. Significantly, this figure explicitly excluded zero-yuan promotions and self-pickup transactions—a strategic clarification seemingly addressing Meituan's recent growth surge. Earlier that week, Meituan had proclaimed its instant retail orders smashed the 150 million daily threshold, a remarkable leap from its 90 million daily average in mid-June. Meanwhile, JD.com's food delivery service plateaued around 25 million orders after initial expansion.
This rivalry evokes memories of the decade-old food delivery wars, yet today's conflict spans broader horizons. Instant retail now transcends traditional meal deliveries, embracing diverse categories like electronics, apparel, and daily necessities within thirty-minute delivery windows. This evolution reshapes consumer psychology: spontaneous, low-barrier purchasing replaces planned shopping behaviors. The seismic shift challenges fundamental retail structures, from fulfillment networks to traffic algorithms, heralding potential industry realignment.
When dissecting Meituan's 150 million orders, approximately 35 million originated from group-buying service "Pinhaofan," while 50 million stemmed from flash-sale platform "Shenqianshou." Crucially, 20 million involved zero-yuan vouchers—half requiring self-collection, half being supplementary orders for minimum delivery thresholds. Excluding such non-typical transactions, Taobao Flash Sales now trails Meituan by mere millions in core operational volume.
Divergent strategies underscore this competition: - JD.com prioritizes premium dining experiences through partnerships with brands like Dada and SF Express, offering targeted subsidies. - Taobao Flash Sales adopted systemic aggression, embedding services across Alipay and Taobao while deploying massive coupons. - Meituan countered with blanket zero-yuan vouchers, instantly inflating volumes but straining its logistics.
Financial commitments loom large: Taobao pledged $5 billion annually, JD.com approximately $1.4 billion, and Meituan $14 billion over three years. Yet fulfillment capabilities diverge sharply. Meituan struggles with peak delivery capacity despite its 7.45 million registered riders, while JD.com maintains segregated service channels. Taobao leverages Ele.me's 4-million-rider network, where couriers earn premium wages averaging $1,700 monthly by handling higher-value non-food parcels.
Category dynamics reveal critical advantages. Non-food orders—electronics, snacks, groceries—exploded over 300% year-on-year for Taobao, constituting 13 million of its 80 million transactions. This contrasts with Meituan's subsidy-dependent model requiring user behavior conversion from food to goods. Merchants face new realities: non-food brands flourish through urban micro-warehouses enabling 30-minute deliveries, while restaurants grapple with thinning margins from zero-yuan promotions.
Rider ecosystems now determine competitive floors. Meituan's standardized 28-minute delivery benchmark faces pressure from Taobao's restructured logistics, which compels non-food delivery windows from one hour to thirty minutes. Couriers increasingly prefer standardized non-food deliveries for their predictable routes and superior earnings.
As traffic algorithms evolve toward balancing sales volume with fulfillment quality, instant retail's ultimate victor may hinge on synchronizing four elements: flow allocation, delivery resilience, consumer habit formation, and merchant ecosystem alignment. Meituan's scale provides initial leverage, but Taobao's integrated model—blending e-commerce DNA with localized fulfillment—threatens to redefine the battlefield.