Alibaba Group Holding‘s online shopping app Taobao has put its one-hour delivery service on the platform’s homepage as a shortcut, as the tech giant tries to gain a bigger foothold in the on-demand delivery market amid competition from JD.com And ByteDance‘s Douyin.
The 4-year-old service now has its own tab accessible from the Taobao homepage starting Tuesday, as China’s largest e-commerce marketplace is partnering with food delivery platform Ele.me, also owned by Alibaba, to expand its product range through its “24-hour local life services,” the Taobao and Tmall Group said in a statement. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
The service covers a wide range of daily necessities, including fresh produce and other groceries, medicines, alcohol and flowers. Most of these are already covered by Ele.me. The platforms guarantee delivery within an hour of placing an order.
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Delivery workers from Meituan and Ele.me wait at a traffic light among other electric cyclists on a street in Shanghai on August 9, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock alt=Delivery workers from Meituan and Ele.me wait at a traffic light among other electric cyclists on a street in Shanghai on August 9, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock>
According to Taobao, Alibaba’s supermarket chain Freshippo and Taiwan-based RT-Mart are also participating in the one-hour delivery service.
The online marketplace has recruited more brands and merchants on its platform to become suppliers of its one-hour delivery service, “as long as they have local warehouses that can meet users’ needs for instant delivery,” the company said in a statement.
As price-sensitive consumers have shifted more and more of their business to budget-friendly apps like those from PDD Holdings, PinduoduoChina’s largest e-commerce companies are busy finding creative ways to keep customers on their platforms.
On-demand delivery for a wide range of products has traditionally been the domain of China’s two largest food delivery platforms, Meituan and Ele.me. Now it’s the latest battleground in the e-commerce market, with JD.com and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTokand has also invested heavily in this area.
Douyin launched a one-hour delivery service in 2022, covering more than a dozen cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou. JD.com upgraded its own one-hour delivery service in May with a new brand called Miaosongor “one-second delivery.” The company boasted to Chinese media that in some cases, delivery could take up to nine minutes.
With much of China’s growth driven by exports, e-commerce platforms are also looking for ways to boost sales abroad. One of Taobao’s loftier experiments in this area involves a partnership with domestic rocket developer Space Epoch to explore ways to deliver packages anywhere in the world within an hour, the startup announced in April.
Taobao also started a major design change of its website in May – its “biggest update in seven years”. The platform hopes that a simplified layout and improved search functionality will create a better experience for users.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP)the most authoritative voice covering China and Asia for over a century. For more SCMP stories, explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook And Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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