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Alibaba’s Taobao Launches One-Hour Faster Delivery in Race Against ByteDance, JD.com

Posted on by darion

Alibaba Holding GroupOnline shopping app Taobao has made its one-hour delivery service a shortcut on the platform’s homepage, as the tech giant seeks to establish a stronger foothold in the on-demand delivery market in the face of competition from JD.com AND ByteDanceis Douyin.
The four-year-old service has had its own tab on the Taobao homepage since Tuesday, as it is the largest service in China e-commerce marketplace is partnering with food delivery platform Ele.me, also owned by Alibaba, to expand its product range through its “24/7 local living 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 needs, including fresh produce and other food items, medicines, alcohol and flowers. Most of them are already covered by Ele.me delivery. The platforms guarantee delivery within an hour of placing the order.

Employees of delivery companies Meituan and Ele.me wait at a traffic light among other electric bike riders on the streets of Shanghai, August 9, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock

According to Taobao, Freshippo, a supermarket chain owned by Alibaba, and Taiwanese RT-Mart also offer one-hour delivery services.

The company said in a statement that the online marketplace is recruiting more brands and retailers to become next-hour delivery providers, “provided they have local warehouses that can meet users’ immediate delivery needs.”

As price-conscious consumers shift more of their business to budget-friendly apps like PDD Holdings PinduoduoChina’s biggest e-commerce players are looking for creative ways to retain customers on their platforms.
On-demand delivery of a wide variety 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 e-commerce, with JD.com and Douyin, the Chinese version TIK Tokalso investing significant resources in this area.

Douyin launched its one-hour delivery service in 2022, covering more than a dozen cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou. JD.com improved its own one-hour delivery service in May, introducing a new brand called Miaosongor “delivery in a second.” The company boasted to Chinese media that in some cases, delivery could take as little as nine minutes.

With much of China’s growth driven by exports, e-commerce platforms are also looking for ways to boost sales overseas. One of Taobao’s more ambitious experiments in this area is a partnership with domestic rocket maker Space Epoch to explore ways to deliver packages anywhere in the world within an hour, the startup announced in April.

Taobao has also started major renovation of the project its site in May — its “biggest update in seven years.” The platform hopes a simplified layout and improved search will create a better experience for users.