Ele.me and Fliggy will be merged into Alibaba's e-commerce and managed by Jiang Fan. Meituan will shut down most of its group buying business and fully focus on instant retail and community retail. Liu Qiangdong emphasized that JD.com will use supply chain thinking to redo local lifestyle products such as food delivery and tourism. If we look at these events that have occurred in less than a week, the answer can only be that Alibaba, Meituan, and JD.com are becoming more and more similar.
This kind of phenomenon is reflected in Meituan not only relying on local business and logistics to form a consumer mentality of bringing everything to home and enjoying food, drink, and entertainment, but also providing a service system of "half day home appliance delivery"; This is also reflected in the ability to order takeout, book hotels, and purchase group buying coupons on JD.com and Taobao apps.
The rapid development of commercial transportation capacity (from far-field express delivery to near-field hourly delivery) has led to the initial scale of e-commerce in most supply categories, laying the foundation for consumer mentality such as e-commerce and home delivery for everything. In theory, it has given all supply categories an opportunity to find suitable trading scenarios and circulation paths based on efficiency, experience, or price, and different categories will search for diversified consumption scenarios based on this.
For example, in the process of transferring alcoholic beverages online, most of them were taken over by instant retailers such as Waima Waimai; Because of the non-standard and high damage of fresh food, after experiencing the modes of fresh food e-commerce and community group buying, some of them have migrated to the pre warehouse mode such as Xiaoxiang Supermarket, the group mode such as Tiktok live broadcast/Pinduoduo, and the community retail mode integrating stores and warehouses such as Hema NB and Orozi.
However, categories such as flowers, medicines, water drinks, and beauty and daily chemical samples are naturally more suitable for instant retail composed of small store networks due to their dispersed or real-time requirements; As for the 3C digital and home appliance categories that both JD.com and Tmall are very concerned about, they have begun to shift from far-field to near-field due to the characteristics of standard products and the density of offline store networks of top brands.
The boundary between self operated and platform is also shifting with efficiency standards. For example, the replication of JD's self operated model in channels such as Jingzao, Meituan's expansion of self operated projects as a platform, such as Xiaoxiang Supermarket and the legendary N project that benchmarks Hema NB; Even offline retail is beginning to regain some of the market share previously taken by e-commerce, with the rise of regional retail giants such as Pangdonglai and Biyoute, as well as the emergence of efficient distribution networks, including snack discounts and other formats that have already taken shape.
This will inevitably lead to a re division of market share from retail to e-commerce, from online to offline, from entry to off-site, from self operated to platform, from NB (branded goods) to PB (proprietary brands), from home to store, and from physical goods to services.
The subsidy competition sparked by Alibaba, Meituan, and JD.com around food delivery, as well as the competition for instant retail at home, is a reflection of the dynamic evolution period of re competing for market share. It can be inferred that when the transportation network of instant retail is mature enough, it is the node where Pinduoduo and Tiktok officially end.