Alibaba Group Holding’s online shopping app Taobao has added one-hour delivery as a shortcut to the platform’s homepage, 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 teams up with food delivery platform Ele.me, also owned by Alibaba, to expand the range of products offered 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-conscious consumers increasingly make purchases through budget-friendly apps like PDD Holdings’ Pinduoduo, China’s largest e-commerce companies are scrambling to find creative ways to keep customers on their platforms.
On-demand delivery for a range of different types 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 TikTok, also investing heavily in the space.
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 began a major design overhaul of its website in May — its “biggest update in seven years.” The platform hopes 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 reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP Facebook page and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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