On April 30th, Alibaba announced that Taobao's &#34;Hourly Delivery&#34; service has officially upgraded to &#34;Taobao Flash Purchase,&#34; presented as a primary entry point on the Taobao APP homepage. It launched in 50 cities on the first day and will cover the entire country by May 6th. This move not only marks Alibaba's strategic bet on instant retail but also signifies a new phase of competition in China's instant retail market among Alibaba, Meituan, and JD.com.
The battlefield of instant retail is already filled with smoke; Meituan Flash Purchase has surpassed 18 million daily orders, and JD.com has launched its &#34;Self-operated Instant Delivery&#34; e-commerce service. At this moment, Alibaba is doubling down, attempting to redefine the rules of the game in the 30-minute delivery arena. The essence of this battle is the &#34;near-field retail&#34; penetration war between e-commerce and local life giants, as well as the ultimate competition in supply chain efficiency, consumer mindset, and ecological synergy capabilities.
<h3>Taobao and Tmall Strengthen Instant Retail</h3>
On the Taobao app homepage tab, &#34;Flash Purchase&#34; appears as a primary traffic entry point. The upgrade of &#34;Taobao Flash Purchase&#34; relies on mature brand merchant supply, aiming to cover 200 core chain brands. Currently, over 3 million stores have accessed the service, covering categories such as 3C digital products and fast-moving consumer goods, with delivery capacity guaranteed by Ele.me, achieving 30-minute delivery.
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&#34;Retail Business Review&#34; believes that the upgrade of Taobao Flash Purchase is not merely a simple rebranding but a systematic reconstruction of Alibaba's instant retail system.
First, on the consumer side. A joint initiative with Ele.me has launched over 10 billion yuan in subsidies, covering free order red envelopes, large discount coupons, etc., combined with cross-store discounts, forming a dual attraction of &#34;e-commerce low prices + instant delivery.&#34;
On the supply side, it integrates resources from Ele.me's food delivery, Hema Fresh, and Tmall brand flagship stores, initially covering 200 core chain brands (such as Apple, Lingerie Group, Decathlon), connecting online and offline inventory and pricing systems.
Ele.me's supply is fully open to Taobao Flash Purchase, and by leveraging Taobao and Tmall's advantages in brand e-commerce merchants, Taobao Flash Purchase will collaborate with brand merchants' city warehouses and offline stores, connecting Tmall's official flagship store inventory and pricing with hourly delivery, providing consumers with the experience of &#34;e-commerce low prices and instant retail fast delivery.&#34;
On the organizational side, the instant retail business of the Taobao system is unified under Taobao Flash Purchase, while Ele.me focuses on delivery support, ending the previous fragmented situation of Taoxian Da and Ele.me operating independently.
This adjustment directly addresses Alibaba's past pain points, where brand merchants had to connect separately to different systems like Taoxian Da and Ele.me. After the upgrade, merchants can seamlessly connect Tmall flagship store inventory, achieving a closed-loop experience of &#34;30-minute delivery&#34; for products. The core logic of this strategy lies in utilizing the untapped instant demand among Taobao's 1 billion users, transforming brand trust into a differentiated barrier for instant retail.
&#34;E-commerce platform growth is slowing, and Alibaba also sees instant retail as a growth point for its entire e-commerce business. Now is a relatively good timing. Both merchants and consumers have a higher acceptance of instant retail.&#34;
&#34;Industry analysts have told us.
<h3>JD.com, Meituan, and Alibaba's Big PK, Competition Upgrades</h3>
Of course, JD.com and Meituan have already occupied a significant advantage in the instant retail market.
On April 15, Meituan officially launched its instant retail brand &#34;Meituan Flash Purchase.&#34; This brand is positioned as &#34;a new generation shopping platform that accompanies consumers 24 hours a day,&#34; collaborating with nearly 3,000 retailers, brand owners, and local small and medium-sized businesses across the country to meet consumers' daily shopping needs, with an average delivery time of 30 minutes after placing an order.
&#34;Consumer spending stickiness and frequency on fresh food, beverages, daily necessities, and 3C home appliances continue to rise. The daily order volume for Meituan's non-food instant retail has exceeded 18 million orders,&#34; said Xiao Kun, Vice President of Meituan and head of the Flash Purchase division.
Meituan's fundamental advantage lies in the layout and network of its lightning warehouses.
The essence of lightning warehouses is distributed micro-warehouses that cover high-frequency demands such as daily necessities and fast-moving consumer goods at low costs. By the end of 2024, the number of lightning warehouses is expected to exceed 30,000, with plans to increase to 100,000 by 2027, thereby diluting warehousing and distribution costs through scale, covering all categories and regions, with an estimated market size of 200 billion yuan. Brands like Miniso and Watsons have already partnered with Meituan to open 500 and over 10 cities' lightning warehouses, respectively.
Previously, Wang Puzhong, CEO of Meituan's core local business, stated at the 2024 Meituan Instant Retail Industry Conference, &#34;The Meituan lightning warehouse model represents the current evolutionary trend of instant retail and is key to promoting the prosperity of the instant retail supply ecosystem.&#34;
In terms of network, the distributed network consisting of one million couriers, 5,600 chain retailers, and 410,000 local merchants forms the largest moat for Meituan Flash Purchase's delivery fulfillment. High-frequency couriers constitute the core barrier to fulfillment capability.
From a performance perspective, Meituan's 2024 financial report shows that, aside from food delivery, instant retail is becoming an important growth point for Meituan. Last year, Meituan's delivery service revenue was 98.07 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 19.3%, mainly due to an increase in transaction volume.
Meituan's founder Wang Xing has previously stated that in the long run, instant retail may occupy more than 10% of the e-commerce market share, and currently, the development of Meituan Flash Purchase has exceeded previous expectations. Meituan sees huge growth opportunities for Flash Purchase in all cities, counties, and towns where it provides delivery services and will consider how to further improve the penetration rate of instant retail.
Now let's look at JD.com. Previously, JD.com listed instant retail as one of the &#34;three major winning battles.&#34;
With the launch of the &#34;Instant Delivery Zone&#34; and &#34;Instant Delivery Channel&#34; in the core position of the JD.com App homepage last year, and its coverage extending to a wider national area, it has effectively promoted the continuous growth of monthly transaction users for instant delivery within the JD.com App.
JD.com is reconstructing its competitive logic with &#34;supply chain + instant delivery.&#34; Relying on the Asia No. 1 smart warehouse and Dada Express, JD.com has compressed the delivery time for high-ticket items such as home appliances and digital products to 30 minutes
By integrating the &#34;Instant Delivery&#34; channel, Dada rider network, and main site traffic, JD hopes to drive the growth of low-frequency instant retail categories such as fresh produce, 3C digital products, and pharmaceuticals through high-frequency takeaway orders, forming a &#34;e-commerce + local life&#34; synergy.
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Previously, JD stated that the number of takeaway orders would exceed 5 million. In the second quarter, JD will recruit no less than 50,000 full-time delivery personnel. At the same time, JD has launched its &#34;self-operated instant delivery&#34; e-commerce business, with over 100,000 JD brand offline stores nationwide connected to instant delivery, with an average delivery time of less than 30 minutes. The instant delivery business has basically achieved full category coverage.
Recently, the &#34;JD Grocery&#34; entry in the self-operated instant delivery section of the JD APP homepage has been renamed &#34;JD Seven Fresh,&#34; further integrating resources, and JD's fresh produce business has also been upgraded. Its innovatively launched &#34;1+N&#34; model is being rapidly replicated. The goal is to have more than 100 stores + warehouses in Beijing by the end of this year, achieving full coverage of the Beijing area. By the end of June 2025, 20 &#34;warehouse stores&#34; will be established in Tianjin.
&#34;Comparatively, Meituan has a solid foundation in local life services, building a moat with fulfillment efficiency and high-frequency traffic, while Meituan's lightning warehouses accelerate coverage in county areas. JD, on the other hand, is breaking through with deep supply chain and quality service differentiation, and is also focusing on new warehouse store models. Alibaba's increased investment will also accelerate healthy competition in the industry,&#34; industry insiders said.
<h3>Brand Chain Stores Become Objects of Competition</h3>
Brand chain stores have also become objects of competition among major platforms.
The explosion of instant retail is forcing traditional retailers to accelerate their transformation; they are no longer content to be &#34;supporting roles&#34; in instant retail but are competing for discourse power through self-built warehousing and distribution, joint platforms, and innovative models, rapidly expanding by leveraging their scale, capital, and resource advantages.
Instant retail integrates local store resources with instant delivery networks, expanding the service radius of traditional stores from &#34;1 kilometer to the store&#34; to &#34;3-10 kilometers online,&#34; fundamentally changing the logic of traffic acquisition.
Sam's Club is currently the &#34;number one player&#34; in the front warehouse track. Orders for rapid delivery based on cloud warehouses account for about 70% of Sam's e-commerce order volume. Currently, Sam's has over 500 front warehouses in the Chinese market, with instant delivery accounting for over 40% of member orders. Its front warehouses are known for &#34;high average order value and high repurchase rate,&#34; with SKUs streamlined to 4,000, focusing on the essential needs of middle-class families, averaging over 1,000 orders per day per warehouse, with industry-leading profit margins.
Walmart China, after reaching a strategic cooperation with Meituan, saw a 120% year-on-year increase in orders through the Walmart mini-program and is capturing consumption scenarios after 8 PM through its &#34;night delivery&#34; service. Its financial report shows that the instant retail business contributed 25% of the annual revenue increase
MINISO reached a strategic cooperation agreement with Meituan in mid-October last year, planning to launch over 800 &#34;24H Super Stores&#34; in the form of lightning warehouses within the year, providing instant retail services around the clock. The product differentiation rate between &#34;24H Super Stores&#34; and regular offline stores is expected to reach 70%.
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Ye Guofu, the founder of MINISO, stated during the announcement of the deep strategic cooperation with Meituan that MINISO continues to be optimistic about the development prospects of instant retail and lightning warehouse formats. He hopes this cooperation will become a new starting point, making the instant retail lightning warehouse format the second growth curve for MINISO in the domestic market. The newly launched Taobao Flash Purchase has also integrated MINISO's &#34;24H Super Store.&#34;
&#34;Retail Business Review&#34; believes that offline stores engaging in instant retail also increases &#34;physical value,&#34; and stores need to become &#34;instant fulfillment centers.&#34; Instant retail promotes stores to upgrade from &#34;passive sales terminals&#34; to &#34;dynamic fulfillment nodes.&#34;
<h3>Final Battle: Three Major Competitive Focuses of Instant Retail</h3>
From the overall market perspective, the market size of instant retail is growing at an annual rate of 50%. The latest &#34;Instant Retail Industry Development Report (2024)&#34; released by the International Trade and Economic Cooperation Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce indicates that the scale of China's instant retail market is expected to exceed 2 trillion yuan by 2030.
For platforms, instant retail has entered a new competitive stage, focusing more on three major competitive points.
First is supply differentiation. For example, Alibaba relies on its Taobao brand resources to focus on high-margin categories such as clothing and 3C digital products, collaborating with 200 brands including Apple and Lenzing Group to establish &#34;instant retail flagship stores,&#34; achieving real-time synchronization of flagship store inventory and online orders. Taobao Flash Purchase will cooperate with brand merchants' city warehouses and offline stores to connect Tmall official flagship stores with hourly delivery inventory and pricing. This is also its e-commerce advantage.
Meituan's lightning warehouse previously focused on white-label products, increasing the average daily orders per warehouse by diluting costs through scale. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the richness and quality of supply. Brand supply has significantly increased, with continuous cooperation from brands such as Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Midea, Walmart, Decathlon, and MUJI, driving rapid growth in core categories such as 3C home appliances and daily necessities.
Second is fulfillment efficiency, entering a &#34;minute-level competition.&#34; Unmanned delivery and AI scheduling are key to cost reduction. JD plans to cover 50 cities with unmanned vehicle delivery by 2027; Meituan's drone delivery has opened 53 routes by the end of 2024, with over 450,000 orders delivered, and automated delivery vehicles covering hundreds of communities, significantly improving delivery efficiency. For example, drone delivery at the Great Wall scenic area can achieve delivery in 6 minutes and 37 seconds. Meituan's &#34;Smart Assistant&#34; has increased the average daily orders for riders by 15%. If technology costs drop to a critical point, the fulfillment cost rate is expected to decrease from the current 15% to below 10%, releasing a profit space of hundreds of billions
Furthermore, regarding the sinking market, the &#34;capillary penetration&#34; of immediate demand in county areas. The saturation of first- and second-tier cities forces platforms to penetrate downward. The Electronic Commerce Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce released the &#34;2024 Development Report on the Instant Retail Industry,&#34; which shows that in 2023, the scale of instant retail in county areas reached 150 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 23.42%. Meituan's Lightning Warehouse is also focusing on the county market.
&#34;Retail Business Review&#34; believes that the ultimate goal of instant retail is not simply the division of market share, but the reconstruction of retail infrastructure. The key to future success lies in who can first achieve the flywheel effect of &#34;cost - experience - scale,&#34; evolving instant retail from a &#34;traffic business&#34; into an &#34;efficiency engine.&#34;
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Taobao's "Hourly Delivery" has been upgraded to "Taobao Flash Purchase," officially entering the instant retail market and competing with Meituan and JD.com. This move marks Alibaba's strategic intensification in instant retail, aiming to cover 200 core chain brands, relying on mature brand merchants' supply to provide a 30-minute delivery service. Alibaba, in collaboration with Ele.me, has launched over 10 billion yuan in subsidies, creating a dual attraction of "e-commerce low prices + instant delivery," integrating online and offline resources to enhance supply chain efficiency

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Taobao's "Hourly Delivery" becomes "Flash Purchase," is instant retail "on fire" again?