Chen Qi: Jingdong invaded the hinterland of Meituan, and the platforms “decided the winner and death”

Wen| Financial author Chen Qi

On February 11, 2025, Jingdong officially launched Jingdong takeout, dropping a depth bomb on the local life track. On the same day, JD. com Takeout launched the recruitment of quality dine-food catering merchants, announcing that merchants who settled before May 1, 2025 would enjoy free commissions throughout the year. This news instantly attracted great attention from the market, and Meituan’s share price fell for two consecutive days.

In the take-out industry, where Meituan seems to be hungry and divided the world, Jingdong entered the market strongly with quality take-out and zero commission as selling points, trying to leverage the market, and its future direction has attracted much attention.

The layout of Jingdong’s external sales market has been quietly launched many years ago. In 2022, Jingdong Retail CEO Xin Lijun revealed plans to enter the take-out market. In 2024, Jingdong will fully upgrade its instant retail business to Jingdong Instant Delivery, and integrate Hour Delivery and Jingdong Home Delivery. Today, the official launch of Jingdong takeout not only marks the deep expansion of Jingdong’s instant retail field, but also heralds a new trend in the integration of e-commerce and local life services.

High commissions on the platform have always been a problem that plagues merchants. Meituan has announced that the commission rate is 6% 8%. In response to this problem, Jingdong Takeout launched a 0 commission strategy, which directly hit the industry’s pain point. It is very attractive to catering merchants with weak profit margins. It can quickly accumulate merchant resources and enhance the merchant richness of the platform.

Different from Meituan and Eniamo’s early strategy of pushing the Iron Army to sweep across small and medium-sized businesses, Jingdong’s takeout chose to focus on chain brands such as Haidilao, Zhouhei Ya, Mixue Ice City, etc. Such merchants have a high degree of standardization, do not require the platform to invest too much operational resources, and can quickly establish an image of quality takeout.

Jingdong takeout only recruits quality restaurant catering merchants, and ensures quality by reviewing business licenses, reviewing store photos, and offline visits by sales personnel to verify. From the beginning, it has eliminated ghost takeout merchants in the industry and satisfied consumers ‘concerns about food safety and quality takeout. The pursuit of quality takeout.

Jingdong’s takeout has its own strategic considerations. As e-commerce traffic gradually peaks, growth encounters bottlenecks, and the takeout market is huge and has huge growth potential. In 2024, the number of online takeout users will reach 545 million, with an average annual growth rate expected to exceed 20%. The potential of sinking market will continue to be released, providing JD with new business growth opportunities. As a high-frequency consumption scenario, take-out can effectively increase the repurchase rate of users and increase user stickiness. In the era of user stock, it helps Jingdong better retain users.

By integrating local living services, JD can improve its own ecosystem and provide users with more comprehensive services. In addition, Jingdong takeout can coordinate with Jingdong’s instant retail business to attract users through the takeout business, drive consumption in the instant retail and instant delivery sectors, and promote the growth of the instant retail business.

Jingdong has a strong logistics and distribution system. Jingdong Logistics has covered 99% of cities and towns across the country. Jingdong’s second-time delivery takes only 9 minutes at the fastest time. Relying on the Dada express delivery system, it can achieve minute-level delivery, providing a powerful delivery for the take-out business. Delivery guarantee. At the same time, Jingdong has accumulated technology in the fields of AI and big data, and can use these technologies to optimize the operation of takeout business, such as intelligent scheduling, accurate recommendations, etc., to improve user experience.

The entry of Jingdong takeout will undoubtedly intensify competition in the takeout market. Meituan and Enmei will have to face this powerful competitor and adjust their strategies to meet the challenge. At the same time, the emergence of Jingdong takeout will also promote the development of the takeout industry in a higher quality and more refined direction, promote the transparency of the commission system and the standardization of delivery services.

In the long run, Jingdong takeout is expected to become one of the core entrances to the instant retail ecosystem. Through high-frequency takeout services, sales growth in core commodity categories such as fresh food and 3C will be driven, breaking the bottleneck of slow revenue growth. In addition, Jingdong can also rely on its supply chain advantages in the sinking market to penetrate the county market and further expand its market share through a combination of catering + retail methods.

However, the challenges faced by Jingdong takeout cannot be ignored. First of all, Meituan and Enmaomo have accounted for more than 90% of the market share, and user habits are highly solidified. Jingdong needs to invest a lot of subsidies and marketing activities to cultivate user habits. Secondly, the take-out business involves complex links such as food safety, food insulation, and after-sales disputes. It requires Jingdong to deeply understand the pain points of the catering industry and establish an effective management mechanism. Finally, how to control costs and prices while ensuring quality is also a key issue that needs to be solved for Jingdong takeout.

At present, the richness of Jingdong takeout merchants still needs to be replenished. The number of brands settled in is limited, and consumers have little choice space. The user’s mind has not yet been established, making it difficult to form high-frequency repurchase. The sales data of many settled stores is not ideal, most store user reviews do not exceed three digits, and there are a large number of system default reviews, and even many stores fail to form store scores.

In terms of price, taking a product from a certain fast food chain as an example, the price for the same order after being taken out in Jingdong is almost the same as that of Meituan, but the delivery fee for Jingdong’s takeout is higher, with a difference of nearly 6 yuan, which makes the price competitive. In terms of distribution services, although Jingdong has its own distribution system, and the annual number of active riders in Dada Seconds is close to 1.3 million, there is still a gap compared with the 4.7 million rider capacity pool supported by Meituan’s quarterly order volume of 7 billion. There are basically two types of delivery services. More stores use Jingdong Dada Instant Delivery for home page push, and a small number are self-delivered by merchants. The stability and timeliness of delivery still need to be tested.

Meituan has attached great importance to real-time retail business in recent years. In 2023, Meituan invested 21.2 billion yuan in R & D, and in the first quarter of 2024, its R & D investment will also reach 5 billion yuan. The focus will be on strengthening AI scheduling systems and unmanned distribution technology. Its algorithm can predict business circles in real time. Order volume, dynamically adjust the distribution of riders. Hunmao is betting on near-market retail and launching the official flagship store of the near-market brand. It is supported by Alibaba Ecology, and its traffic entrances from Gaode Maps and Alipay are used to divert it. The 88VIP membership system also enhances user stickiness. JD. com takeout faces fierce competition and suppression from Meituan and Emeima.

In the mobile Internet world, e-commerce, search, social networking, video, takeout, and online ride-hailing are divided into five parts. As the incremental market for the main business of the head platform peaks, they need to continuously explore new growth points. Based on the consistent user base and complete infrastructure, it is easy to cut into each other’s trillion-level business volume. It also takes the opportunity to build a more solid ecological closed loop to firmly bind and meet the diversified needs of users, and it becomes necessary to break into the strategic hinterland of other Internet giants.

As a result, those Internet giants have shifted from competition for user time to attack and defend each other’s core businesses, which has been particularly prominent in recent years. For example, Douyin is doing e-commerce, Baidu is doing online ride-hailing, Jingdong is doing takeout, 360 is doing search, WeChat is doing videos, etc. This reflects that it will become the norm for major platforms to trigger conflicts and confrontations in the extension of the commercial landscape. While facing revenue growth challenges, they lack exploration of cutting-edge technologies in the future, resulting in a chaotic situation of competition.

It is foreseeable that whether they are taking the initiative or fighting back passively, Internet giants are trying to create a super application that integrates various traffic portals. In the future, users may be able to meet all daily consumer needs for food, clothing, housing and transportation in one application. Competition between platforms will be both decisive and life-and-death.