Alibaba Group Holding’s online shopping app Taobao has made its one-hour delivery service hotkey on the platform’s homepage, as the tech giant tries to stake out a larger position in the on-demand delivery market amid competition with JD.com and ByteDance’s Douyin.
The 4-year-old service now has its own tab accessible from the Taobao homepage as of Tuesday, as China’s largest e-commerce marketplace works with food delivery platform Ele.me, also owned by Alibaba, to expand the range of products 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, medicine, alcohol, and flowers. Most of these are already covered by Ele.me.
While the service is referred to as one-hour delivery in Chinese, actual delivery times can range from minutes to a few hours, according to its Taobao page.
Meituan and Ele.me delivery workers seen waiting at a traffic light among other electric bike riders on the streets in Shanghai on August 9, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock
Alibaba’s supermarket chain Freshippo and Taiwan-based RT-Mart are also part of the one-hour delivery service, according to Taobao.
The online marketplace has been recruiting more of the brands and merchants on the platform to become suppliers of its one-hour delivery service, “as long as they have local warehouses that can meet users’ instant delivery needs”, the company said in its statement.
As price-sensitive consumers have shifted an increasing amount of their business to budget-friendly apps like PDD Holdings’ Pinduoduo, China’s biggest e-commerce players have been scrambling to find creative ways of keeping shoppers on their platforms.
On-demand delivery for a slew of different types of products has traditionally been the domain of China’s two biggest food delivery platforms, Meituan and Ele.me. Now it is the latest battleground in the e-commerce market, with JD.com and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, having 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 Miaosong, or “delivery in a second”. The company boasted to Chinese media that in some instances, delivery could be as fast as nine minutes.
With much of China’s growth driven by exports, e-commerce platforms are also looking for ways to boost overseas sales. One of Taobao’s loftier experiments in this area includes a partnership with domestic rocket developer Space Epoch to research ways of delivering parcels anywhere in the world within an hour, the start-up announced in April.
Taobao also started a major design overhaul of its website in May – its “biggest update in seven years”. The platform hopes a simplified layout and better search will create a better experience for users.
