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

Online shopping app Taobao, owned by Alibaba Group Holding, has added an hourly delivery service to its homepage, a move the tech giant is making to gain a stronger foothold in the on-demand delivery market amid competition from JD.com and ByteDance-owned Douyin.

The four-year-old service now has its own tab available on the Taobao homepage starting Tuesday, as China’s largest e-commerce marketplace partners with food delivery platform Ele.me, also owned by Alibaba, to expand its product range through its “24/7 local living services,” Taobao Group and Tmall 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.

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Meituan and Ele.me delivery drivers wait at a traffic light among other cyclists riding electric bikes on the streets of Shanghai, August 9, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock alt=Meituan and Ele.me delivery drivers wait at a traffic light among other cyclists riding electric bikes 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’ Pinduoduo, China’s biggest e-commerce players are trying to find creative ways to keep customers on their platforms.

On-demand delivery for a wide range of product types has traditionally been the domain of China’s two largest food delivery platforms, Meituan and Ele.me. Now it’s the latest e-commerce battleground, with JD.com and Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, also investing heavily in the space.

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 also began a major overhaul of its website in May—“its biggest update in seven years.” The platform hopes a simplified layout and improved search will create a better experience for users.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative daily covering China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP articles, visit the SCMP app or the SCMP Facebook page and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.