Understand the logic, value and essence of Meituan's premium membership in one article
On July 4th, Meituan's "Super Member" underwent a major upgrade: Born from the food delivery business, this membership system now covers multiple categories for the first time, including food delivery, group dining, hotel accommodations, leisure entertainment, beauty & health, and family wellness—making it the largest revamp since the launch of "Super Member."
As a heavy user and nano-shareholder of Meituan, I and many friends around me are closely watching the development of the Super Member program. After over a month of full-scale operation, the upgrade seems to be performing quite well. Some micro-data we’ve learned includes:
For the "Must-Eat List" restaurant "Chongba Niufu," Super Member orders accounted for 25% within a week, with per capita order volume increasing by 8%. The wellness brand "Shen Yuan Tang" saw a 556% month-on-month increase in transaction volume on Meituan compared to June. For the gaming brand "Big Player," Super Coupon orders made up about 45% in July, with over 40% of new store customers coming from Super Coupon transactions. Cao Guanqiao, head of Suqi Hairstyle, revealed that "Super Member" drove a 27% month-on-month increase in online orders, with certain package orders growing by 58% compared to pre-campaign levels. "Some users may have come from categories like dining, with a higher proportion of new customers." As of July 4th, over 5 million merchants had signed up for "Super Member," covering 13 consumption scenarios like leisure entertainment and group dining.
Over a year since its launch, Super Member has evolved from a food delivery membership to a service bridging home and in-store experiences, now covering most of Meituan's business lines. What product logic does it follow? What value does it create for users, merchants, the platform, and the industry? What is its essence, and what does the future hold? Today, we aim to clarify all of this at once.
I. The Evolution and Product Logic of Super Member
As an internet product, "Super Member" was born on August 1, 2023. Before that, Meituan Food Delivery had two main marketing systems: membership red packets and "Daily Super Coupons." To simplify merchant marketing and focus traffic resources, the two were merged into "Super Member." Since then, merchants only need to sign up for the "Daily Super Coupons" campaign to access both Super Coupons and Super Member savings wallet benefits.
For users, the biggest change is that membership red packets became the Super Member savings wallet. Both require payment, granting access to N no-threshold coupons for 31 days. The platform’s free Daily Super Coupons remain unchanged, still requiring a spending threshold.
Since March 2024, Meituan formed a new S-tier project team to extend Super Member’s value beyond food delivery, integrating home and in-store membership systems. The new Super Member system began beta testing with select merchants and users in May, launching fully on July 4th.
For comparison, we summarized the changes in the Super Member savings wallet before and after July 4th:
1. Usage Scenarios
Before the upgrade, the Super Member savings wallet was limited to food delivery. After the upgrade, it became usable across multiple Meituan businesses—the biggest change in this upgrade. The new savings wallet includes no-threshold coupons not just for food delivery but also for dining, entertainment, and more, all expandable, as shown below:
2. Expansion Limits
Before the upgrade, the maximum expansion limit for the Super Member savings wallet was 20 yuan. After the upgrade, the limit for food delivery coupons remains 20 yuan, while other categories can set their own limits, up to 100 yuan.
3. User Experience
The Super Member savings wallet is a paid product that also plays a role in acquiring, activating, and retaining core users. All these actions ultimately aim to increase frequency, with the key levers being pricing and coupon distribution.
Judging by the current high-discount pricing, it’s a subsidy logic: The more coupons you use, the more the platform loses—in other words, the more you use, the more you save.
But the higher the usage frequency, the more the system’s per-order fulfillment efficiency improves. Theoretically, the more you use it, the more likely you are to try additional services, allowing the platform to recoup losses through improved efficiency and profits from other orders.
This pricing logic is the same for both old and new versions. However, as the Super Member savings wallet expands to in-store and travel businesses—where gross margins and average order values are much higher than food delivery, and merchant margins are also higher—there’s more room for flexibility, possibly leading to more dynamic pricing in the future.
Besides paid coupons, Super Member also offers free coupons randomly distributed by the platform. These coupons have thresholds but can be expanded for free, with limits of 20 yuan for food delivery and 100 yuan for other categories.
From what I’ve learned, after the new version launched, the frequency of coupon distribution increased significantly. Even non-paying members can claim and use these free coupons, though they come with spending thresholds, making user subsidies more controllable.
4. Merchant Experience
The Super Member savings wallet was originally designed for food delivery. Including its predecessor, the membership red packet launched in 2017, this product has been running for seven years, and most food delivery merchants are already familiar with Super Coupons.
For merchants, the biggest differences in the new campaign are cost variations and the exclusion of non-participating merchants.
Most food delivery merchants are already part of the Super Coupons campaign, and the rest will likely join soon to avoid losing organic traffic. For in-store and travel merchants, the incremental value of Super Member orders is clear, and new entrants will likely enjoy a wave of benefits.
Merchants signing up for basic or expanded Super Coupons not only gain access to more targeted high-quality traffic but also benefit from higher conversion rates, order frequency, and loyalty among paying users. Psychologically, paying users are motivated to use coupons to recoup costs or even profit, and expanded coupons—with higher values—further incentivize orders, boosting conversion rates.
5. Traffic Support
After the new Super Member system launched, Meituan added Super Coupon tags or filters in five traffic scenarios to direct users to participating merchants.
On the homepage’s "Guess You’ll Like" section, Super Coupon products are tagged and more likely to appear;
The Meituan app search bar dropdown shows Super Coupon tags;
Search results pages include a "Filter Super Coupon Merchants" option at the top, with participating products tagged;
Category pages like food delivery, group buying, hotels, leisure, and dining offer Super Coupon filters;
The "My" tab at the bottom of the homepage prominently features "Meituan Super Member," with dedicated pages for "Expanded Exclusive Merchants" and "Super Coupon Merchants."
On one hand, Meituan aggregates more high-quality traffic for Super Member; on the other, it shares this traffic with selected premium merchants. This boosts Super Member’s order share and per-store incremental revenue, attracting more merchants. The more merchants join, the more competition drives member benefits, attracting more users and creating a virtuous cycle.
II. The Value Created by Membership
The value of the upgraded Super Member for users is obvious.
Take me, for example: Though a heavy Meituan user with over 300 annual transactions, I’m not a high-frequency food delivery user. My spending on leisure, entertainment, and travel far exceeds food delivery. Before, Super Member had value for me, but not as much. I usually bought 12-coupon packs, most of which went unused—a waste, considering Meituan’s growth-via-subsidy model.
With 12 additional categories now covered, Super Member’s value to me has skyrocketed. For any user accustomed to multi-category spending on Meituan, this expansion is a massive value boost.
For merchants, joining Super Member means tapping into Meituan’s most capable, high-quality users. For non-food delivery categories, this incremental value is especially pronounced. While membership benefits come at a cost, food delivery’s growth history proves this path works. Meituan Food Delivery’s annual active buyers reached ~500 million, ~70% of the platform’s total. From 2017 to 2023, annual active buyers grew from 229 million to 490 million (14% CAGR), while order volume (excluding flash sales) grew at 30% CAGR, and GTV at 33% CAGR—thanks largely to membership-driven acquisition, activation, and frequency.
With home and in-store memberships now integrated, the value is even clearer. Platform-wide user stickiness will rise, increasing consumers’ overall Meituan wallet share, benefiting all businesses.
For Meituan, the new Super Member further unlocks the spending potential of high-engagement, high-value food delivery users, creating more value, reinforcing low-price perception and loyalty, and driving cross-category synergy. It also widens Meituan’s moat, adding strategic defensive value.
Recently, elevator ads in my neighborhood feature Hu Ge promoting Meituan’s group-buying Super Member. Such hyper-local marketing holds immense value for China’s consumer industry today.
Service elasticity is vast: A movie outing can extend to transportation, dining, charging, karaoke, and hotels. Local consumption boosts local employment and supply chains. For fragile offline retail and services, this online-to-offline model is a lifeline, delivering not just order growth but new marketing and business possibilities. Innovative categories can reach target users more efficiently via platforms like Meituan. The stronger Meituan’s infrastructure, membership system, and cross-category synergy, the more it empowers offline services and retail.
III. Why Now?
Meituan’s new Super Member was long overdue. Before this, we discussed it with industry investors and insiders, who agreed a cross-business membership system was urgent.
But reviewing local services’ history and Meituan’s context, this timing seems inevitable.
The main reason is that digitizing life services is a marathon, requiring not just IT upgrades but offline transformation—including reshaping some consumer and merchant mindsets.
Local services vary wildly. Standardizing them is a huge task, and many industries can’t share backend systems. Movies, massage, food delivery, hotels, group dining, retail, and wholesale each need custom systems.
Different businesses also mature at different paces, with varying goals, KPIs, and profit models, making a cross-business membership system even harder.
Since 2023, Meituan has accelerated integration between home and in-store businesses, sharing data across categories.
In 2024, Meituan merged its platform, in-store, home, and R&D units into "Core Local Commerce," led by CEO Wang Puzhong, completing organizational integration and speeding up Super Member’s upgrade.
Of course, intensified competition in local services since 2023 also hastened the process.
IV. The Essence of Super Member
Looking back, Meituan and Dianping share a trait: Early on, they were store-centric.
Mostly, Meituan’s basic unit was a store—a food delivery shop, restaurant, nail salon, or hotel. Users browsed categories to find stores, then products.
This met consumer needs but organized products around stores.
Like Dianping, whose goal was helping users find satisfactory stores, its product was store-centric.
Fundamentally, this reflects local services’ developmental stage. Moving supply from offline to online takes time, especially given industry uniqueness.
Today, as more stores go online and supply grows crowded—though not as much as e-commerce, given local services’ 5-km radius—consumer autonomy has exploded. Behavior and trust chains have shifted, with rising demand for quality and affordability.
Meituan’s recent changes respond to this shift, from Dianping’s content revamp and "Must-Eat List" to live-streaming and Super Member’s upgrade.
In short, Super Member reorganizes supply chains around people.
In an era of oversupply, consumers want trusted, quality, affordable options. Curating supply for members deepens trust, creates value, and upgrades supply chains.
Amazon, Costco, and Walmart’s Sam’s Club did this in retail. Meituan is pioneering it in services—a first globally and a groundbreaking experiment for China’s service retail.
V. Future Outlook
Today, Super Member spans food delivery, group dining, leisure, travel, and health.
First, we can expect future integration with Meituan Grocery and Youxuan’s membership cards. Further out, could Meituan Bike’s monthly pass join too?
Personally, Meituan Bike is my most frequent need—I auto-renew the 16.8-yuan monthly pass, riding ~30 times/month.
Incorporating most categories is surely the goal, though challenging. The more categories included, the greater the user value and cross-category synergy, benefiting merchants and Meituan alike.
But another direction is worth imagining.
As of 2023, online penetration for group dining was under 10%. There’s huge untapped potential.
But high-discount group buying has limits—constrained scenarios and SKUs. If Super Member could extend offline, offering discounts like credit cards (not limited to in-store SKUs), with low merchant fees (like Visa/Mastercard), it could revolutionize.
Such shallow discounts wouldn’t cannibalize group dining but could leverage Meituan’s two advantages: 1) Many users discover stores via Meituan/Dianping; 2) Super Members have higher review value.
Maybe Meituan could waive fees, with merchants offering points redeemable for Super Member coupons.
If achieved, Super Member could become China’s Visa—a $450-500 billion market opportunity. $MEITUAN(03690.HK)
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