阿里巴巴整合旗下即时零售业务，在淘宝App推出“闪购”入口，正式加入美团、京东的即时零售战局。闪购涵盖食品外卖、超市便利、医药、时尚百货、手机数码等品类。据报道，阿里原计划618期间推出该服务，但因近期京东与美团在即时零售领域的竞争，阿里选择提前入场。阿里和饿了么已准备超过100亿人民币补贴。此次竞争意味着中国即时零售市场全面开放，阿里、京东、美团均高度重视。未来，抖音、拼多多或也将加入战局。各品牌应更开放地利用门店进行即时零售，线下零售商也应欢迎更多销售渠道。

🚀 阿里整合旗下即时零售业务，推出淘宝App“闪购”入口，涵盖外卖、商超、医药等，正式加入即时零售战局。

💰 阿里和饿了么已准备超过100亿人民币补贴，旨在快速获取市场份额，推动用户采用“闪购”服务。

⚔️ 中国即时零售竞争格局全面展开，阿里、京东、美团均给予高度重视，并将即时零售作为重要的战略方向。

🛍️ 品牌应更开放地利用线下门店进行即时零售，这为线下零售商提供了新的销售渠道，有助于缓解客流量下降的困境。

On April 30, as China was heading into the 5-day May Day golden week holidays, Alibaba jumped into the Meituan, JD quick commerce flight. 

According to the announcement, all the quick commerce offerings of Alibaba are now consolidated into a single top menu item in the Taobao app called “闪购” (Instashopping). 

Instashopping, which takes the same name as the quick commerce offering of Meituan, includes categories such as food delivery (through Alibaba subsidiary ele.me), supermarkets / convenience stores, medicine, fashion and department store goods, mobile phone and digital devices:

 

According to media reports in China, Alibaba was initially intending to launch this offering during the mid year 6.18 promotions. However, the recent public attention on JD – Meituan competition (in food delivery and quick commerce) made Alibaba decide to launch earlier to catch the wave. 

It is also reported that Alibaba and ele.me have prepared more than RMB10 billion (US$1.38 billion) as subsidies for Instashopping adoption. 

A few thoughts: 

1. Finally the quick commerce competition in China are fully in the open, with Alibaba, JD, and Meituan giving the top level attention (and traffic) to consolidated quick commerce offerings;

2. Like other ecommerce platforms, Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese cousin) already has 1 hour on demand delivery offerings – it might consolidate these offerings further; we should not be surprised if Pinduoduo launches their own food delivery / quick commerce as well; 

3. It seems that both Meituan and Alibaba (two food delivery incumbents) have come to the conclusion that JD’s food delivery foray will not be sustainable due to its organisational capabilities;
    
4. However, Alibaba could be a bigger threat to Meituan. It has an existing large scale food delivery business (which targets to break even this year); it has good supplies (think about Freshippo and all the brands on Tmall); it is listing quick commerce on Taobao, a customer traffic juggernaut which has more than double the active users compared to JD;

5. The real question, as with any Alibaba new initiative, is organisation still. I.e. whether Alibaba’s leaders can have enough focused execution to effectively bring all these internal business units and offerings together. You can read more about Alibaba’s organisational challenges in our Transforming Alibaba report;

6. Most stakeholders we have spoken to still expect Meituan to emerge top. It has good execution capabilities – as its non-food daily order volume already surpassed 18 million. However, in the short term it would be a painful subsidy war before the market reaches equilibrium;

7. On the supply side, brands should be much more open to fulfillment from their stores in top tier cities via Instashopping (than running discounts from ecommerce fulfilment centres); offline retailers, which have been struggling with declining footfall, should welcome more avenues to sell without drastically changing their models; 

8. We also expect this quick commerce battle to spill over to other markets outside China. We already see attempts to build something similar in India, Middle East and Latin America, amongst other regions. Will DoorDash make the model work in the US? 

The post Alibaba jumps into China’s quick commerce war first appeared on The Low Down - Momentum Works.