Today I encountered something absurd, worth sharing with everyone.

The cause is simple: I purchased a cleaning service through a group deal on Douyin. The merchant agreed on a time for the service, but when I wanted to cancel last minute, they refused. What happened next was truly eye-opening—the merchant, without my knowledge, changed the appointment time in the backend and then directly clicked "Service Completed" on my behalf. From start to finish, I received no confirmation and had no control. The money was deducted, the order was "completed," and I, the consumer, had no chance to even say no.

It sounds like a joke, but it actually happened. And precisely because it happened to me, I started seriously thinking about the underlying issues.

On the surface, this is about a merchant being unreasonable. But the real question is: why did the platform design a process that allows a merchant to complete all operations on behalf of the user in the backend?

On mature transaction platforms like Taobao and Meituan, order flow follows a strict state machine—merchant acceptance, scheduling, in-service, completion, review. Each step requires user confirmation or system verification. A merchant unilaterally ending an order? Impossible. This isn't a technical issue; it's a product philosophy issue.

Douyin's group purchase business still carries strong "traffic platform" DNA. Its core logic is content-driven transactions—you place an order while scrolling through videos, with extremely high conversion efficiency. However, the post-transaction safeguards—fulfillment guarantees, dispute resolution, user experience closure—these "dirty, hard jobs" haven't kept up with the speed of traffic growth. On the path chasing GMV at full sprint, many basic product safety mechanisms have been intentionally or unintentionally overlooked.

This incident gave me a crucial investment perspective: Douyin's local services business may seem unstoppable, but its weaknesses are equally glaring.

Long-term, what determines a platform's success isn't just traffic efficiency, but the infrastructure of trust. Taobao has Alipay's escrow transactions and years of credit systems; Meituan has merchant ratings and accumulated fulfillment data—these are friends of time. Douyin can quickly replicate the transaction process, but it cannot replicate these trust assets that require years of accumulation.

Back to the question everyone cares about: In the AI era, will the landscape of China concept internet stocks be reshaped?

ByteDance is indeed aggressive in its AI layout, and Doubao's user base is growing rapidly. But the internet isn't a 100-meter dash; it's a marathon. Alibaba has the depth of self-developed chips and cloud infrastructure; Tencent has the social relationship moat and gaming fortress; Meituan has the instant delivery network and offline fulfillment capabilities—these are not barriers that can be overcome by algorithms alone. AI will indeed reshape many industries, but what determines who runs the last mile may not just be model capability, but also an understanding of business fundamentals and reverence for user experience.

I bought a cleaning service on Douyin and ended up understanding the competitive landscape of China concept internet stocks. That in itself is quite absurd.

$Alibaba(BABA.US)$TENCENT(00700.HK)$MEITUAN(03690.HK)