JD.com has a hard time dealing with Meituan: a defensive battle doomed to fail?

JD.com has officially entered the food delivery field, and this bold move has attracted widespread attention in the industry. This article will explore the prospects of JD.com's food delivery in detail, analyze whether it can break through the strong blockade of Meituan, and whether this seemingly ambitious defense war can achieve the expected results?

Two years after TikTok officially began to "disrupt" the food delivery business, JD.com launched an attack on Meituan in a high-profile and swift manner.

On February 11, 2025, JD.com's official WeChat account @JD.com Blackboard tweeted announcing the official launch of the recruitment of "quality dine-in catering merchants". Merchants who settle in before May 1, 2025 can enjoy a year-round commission-free policy, and only catering brands with offline dine-in stores can participate.

Nowadays, when you click on the instant delivery area on the homepage of JD.com APP, "Takeaway Recruitment" is placed in a prominent position at the top of the page, announcing JD.com's determination to do takeaway.

Image source: JD app

Looking back at the series of attacks launched by Douyin on Meituan in the past few years, judging from the results, with the triple superposition of traffic, content and low prices, Douyin's life service store business has squeezed Meituan's market share and caused a certain impact on it. In contrast, the food delivery business, which has undergone two structural adjustments in 2024, is still in the exploratory stage of seeking a development model suitable for itself. The progress has slowed down and has not caused a substantial impact on Meituan.

Douyin is still exploring, and JD.com has entered the market with great fanfare. So can JD.com do what Douyin has not done yet?

01 “The best defense is offense”

Why did JD.com start to focus on the food delivery business?

In the view of Li Hao, founder of Kas Consulting, the reason why JD.com is making a drastic move into the food delivery business at this time is largely a defensive counterattack against the rapid expansion of Meituan's instant retail business. This game logic is similar to the "Weibo attack and defense battle" in the social media war ten years ago.

In 2009, Sina Weibo rose rapidly with its "square-style social networking" and reached 50 million users within a year. The social graph formed by it directly threatened Tencent QQ's underlying communication status. At that time, Tencent, NetEase, and Sohu, the three major portals, collectively invested in the Weibo battlefield. Tencent Weibo invested a lot of resources to suppress the usage time of Sina Weibo through "celebrity strategy + QQ diversion". It was not until Tencent launched WeChat and built a lower-level social relationship chain with "address book social networking" that this "war" gradually calmed down.

The collective entry of Tencent, NetEase, and Sohu has typical defensive offensive characteristics. Rather than replacing or surpassing Sina Weibo, it is more important to slow down its speed of using its super strong user stickiness to form an absolute monopoly. The core logic of this strategy is actually to establish a strategic "buffer zone" - when competitors may form a disruptive advantage in a certain field and expose their core business to cross-border threats, they increase the expansion costs of their competitors through targeted layout, thereby gaining a time window for strategic transformation of their own core business.

There is no doubt that Meituan’s rapid expansion in the instant retail sector has posed a strategic threat to JD.com.

The "Instant Retail Industry Development Report (2024)" released by the Ministry of Commerce's International Trade and Economic Cooperation Research Institute shows that in 2023, my country's instant retail scale will reach 650 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.89%. With the collaborative innovation of platforms, supermarkets, brand owners, small stores, instant delivery and other entities, the instant retail market size is expected to exceed 2 trillion yuan in 2030.

The market size continues to expand, and Meituan’s instant retail business is also growing.

In July 2018, Meituan established Meituan Flash Purchase and officially entered the field of instant retail. From the initial catering takeaway business to fresh food and daily necessities, it has been exploring the category boundaries of instant retail to achieve "everything delivered to your home". Although it started late, with its efficient distribution network and mature distribution operation experience, rich merchant resources and a large user base, Meituan's instant retail business has grown rapidly and occupied an important share in the market in just a few years.

According to the Q3 2024 financial report released by Meituan, the number of Meituan's instant delivery transactions in the third quarter was 7.078 billion, a year-on-year increase of 14.5%. Another important layout of Meituan in instant snacks, the lightning warehouse, currently has more than 30,000 units, and by 2027, it will exceed 100,000 units, covering all categories and all regions.

When Meituan's flash sales swept the instant snack market on a large scale, JD.com's advantageous categories also began to face unprecedented erosion.

Since cooperating with Apple authorized stores in 2022, Meituan has frequently attacked the 3C field that JD.com specializes in: on the one hand, it has reached cooperation with Apple, Huawei, vivo, OPPO and other leading mobile phone brands and digital accessories brand Pisen, and jointly carried out marketing activities; on the other hand, it has established a complete service system in addition to speeding up delivery time. A series of actions plus the mental migration of "high frequency to low frequency" have continuously increased the GMV of related categories.

Image source: Meituan

Meituan's continued efforts to leverage the instant retail market will undoubtedly shake the foundation of its e-commerce business, and JD.com, which has invested the most in timeliness and logistics speed, will inevitably be more affected. Just as the potential of Sina Weibo's social platform made Tencent realize that it could overturn its dominance in the instant messaging field, JD.com also sensed the approaching danger, forcing it to take measures to interrupt its opponent's strategic rhythm.

JD.com is playing the card of entering the food delivery market, exerting pressure through the flank battlefield, and slowing down Meituan's growth in the instant retail sector through a "besiege Wei to save Zhao" strategy.

In addition, according to 36Kr, Douyin's e-commerce GMV will reach 3.5 trillion yuan in 2024, and its market share will jump to third in the e-commerce industry, while JD.com will fall to fourth place after Alibaba, Pinduoduo, and Douyin. The decline in e-commerce business has undoubtedly forced JD.com to bring new growth to its e-commerce business through high-frequency catering takeaway traffic.

02 JD.com’s Takeaway Card

Although the food delivery business was only officially launched this year, JD.com had already gone through a long period of preparation and trial before that.

In 2015, JD.com began to expand its business boundaries and launched the "JD.com Home Delivery" service. JD.com Home Delivery integrates various offline merchant resources, covering supermarket fresh food, medical health, flowers and plants, digital home appliances and other categories, to provide consumers with "1-hour delivery" instant delivery services. Through this business, JD.com has built the underlying capabilities of local life services and has also accumulated certain operational experience and technical capabilities in the field of instant delivery.

In 2016, JD.com merged with Dada Group. Dada has a professional delivery team and operational experience in the field of instant delivery. After the merger, it can provide JD.com with more efficient and flexible delivery services, as well as a wider range of product choices, which has significantly improved JD.com's traffic and order volume.

In 2023, JD.com integrated and upgraded its instant retail business and renamed it "JD Hourly Delivery". In August of the same year, Dada Group fully connected to JD.com's hourly shopping system, realizing data connectivity between warehousing outlets and retail terminals, greatly improving the efficiency of product allocation and delivery.

Since then, JD.com has further integrated businesses such as "Hourly Delivery" and "JD.com Home Delivery", and upgraded them to "JD.com Seconds Delivery" in 2024. In September of the same year, it successively introduced coffee, milk tea, and fast food stores such as Luckin Coffee, Coodi, Juewei Duck Neck, and Burger King.

After a series of preparations in the early stage, JD.com finally officially joined the food delivery battlefield in February this year and launched a head-on confrontation with Meituan. At present, if you click on the delivery channel on the JD.com homepage, you can see the entrance of "Quality Food Delivery". Some merchants' delivery services are undertaken by "Dada Delivery", while some merchants are displayed as "Merchant Self-delivery". As of press time, JD.com's food delivery has been launched in 39 cities across the country, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Image source: JD.com

Just as the information released in the announcement indicated, in the battlefield of food delivery, JD.com's "differentiation card" is "quality dine-in" - it has established a strict screening mechanism, through reviewing business licenses, reviewing store photos, and offline visits by sales staff, etc., only allowing merchants with offline physical store qualifications and passed the review to settle in, thereby creating a "quality food delivery" positioning and eliminating current consumer concerns about "ghost kitchens" and food safety issues.

At the same time, JD.com has also launched a commission-free policy for merchants to attract more high-quality restaurants to quickly settle in. The subsequent commission rate is also lower than the industry level, reducing the operating costs of merchants on the platform. According to relevant news, since the recruitment information was made public, the JD.com food delivery team has received a large number of applications for settlement, which exceeded their expectations.

At the delivery level, in addition to relying on Dada Group's delivery network and rider resources, on February 19, JD.com issued an announcement on @JD.com Blackboard, stating that starting from March 1, 2025, it will gradually pay five insurances and one fund for JD.com's full-time takeaway riders, and provide accident insurance and health insurance for part-time riders. This means that after paying five insurances and one fund for couriers, JD.com has become the first platform to pay five insurances and one fund for takeaway riders. This approach has not only improved the risk resistance and stability of riders, attracted more riders to join, but also won a good reputation among consumers and riders.

Image source: WeChat official account @Jingdong Blackboard News

03 JD.com has a hard time overcoming Meituan

Can JD.com succeed in food delivery? Or in other words, will JD.com's food delivery business have an impact on Meituan?

Just as he had predicted that Douyin, which had many advantages, would not be able to defeat Meituan in the home delivery business, Li Hao also gave a negative answer this time: It would be difficult for JD.com to succeed in food delivery, and it would be even more impossible to shake Meituan's position.

The core reason is that Meituan has solid barriers that are difficult to break.

Takeout, like group buying, requires not only certainty in price, service, and quality, but also extremely high certainty in timeliness. Meituan's takeout delivery consists of a delivery team of millions of delivery men, and an order-taking and distribution system that has been optimized at great expense and relying on massive data, allowing it to complete fulfillment and delivery within the time limit. This highly deterministic experience is undoubtedly Meituan's moat and the foundation for developing other businesses and building user trust. It will be difficult to catch up in the short term.

The second is the high degree of adaptation between Meituan’s platform ecology and user habits, and the misalignment between JD’s platform ecology and user habits.

There is no doubt that food delivery is a typical high-frequency demand, and Meituan's years of operation have already formed an inherent mindset and user habits for users. On the contrary, JD.com's user mindset is mainly based on e-commerce shopping. It is conceivable how difficult it is to guide users from low-frequency e-commerce scenarios to high-frequency food delivery scenarios and cultivate a new mindset of "ordering food from JD.com".

In addition to the difficulty in cultivating habits, JD Takeout also has several obvious "disadvantages" from the perspective of user experience:

For example, the takeaway entrance is hidden in the secondary page of the "Second Delivery" section of the JD APP, which takes a longer time to open, increasing the user's time cost and making it less convenient.

In terms of food delivery time, compared with Meituan’s mature cellular-level dispatching system, JD Takeout cannot guarantee a stable delivery time; according to a comparison by Kas, for the same food delivery store, the delivery time shown by JD Takeout is much longer than that of Meituan Takeout.

Delivery time of the same store on Meituan and JD.com

In terms of product variety, JD Takeaway currently has far fewer merchants than Meituan, so users have a very limited range of choices. In addition, due to the narrow coverage of cities and high entry barriers for merchants, the number of people that JD Takeaway can radiate and attract has also been further reduced;

From the price point of view, considering factors such as the discount level and delivery fees, the actual payment on the user side is not much different, which makes it difficult to attract those price-sensitive users.

In addition to the user experience, Li Hao also saw the "unsustainability" of its business logic and business model. After all, the cost currently invested by JD Takeout is difficult to replicate in the long run, and there is a high probability that the cost will be passed on to merchants or users. This logic itself does not hold water.

"No one can defeat Meituan in the food delivery business." In Li Hao's view, Meituan is a company with super strategic determination. It has been constantly increasing its competitiveness in the local life track, making its moat deeper and deeper, and its barriers higher and higher, which is difficult to be easily shaken. If Douyin food delivery cannot shake Meituan's foundation due to its insufficient fulfillment ability and immature user mentality, then JD.com does not have the thickness to bear strategic losses in the long term to attack Meituan. The current rapid progress is likely to die down or gradually weaken in one or two years.

When Meituan infiltrates into the core area where JD.com relies on for survival by using high-frequency food delivery, this business game of offense instead of defense becomes inevitable. Although JD.com's "strict selection model" and quality story can build a differentiated barrier, it is difficult to shake the moat that Meituan has built over a decade in the short term.

It is worth noting that after JD.com announced that it would pay social security for its riders, Meituan also announced that it would gradually pay social security for full-time and stable part-time riders. To some extent, JD.com's defensive attack can indeed slow down Meituan's development process, but just like throwing stones to build a dam in a turbulent river, although the water flow can be temporarily slowed down, can the direction of the riverbed be easily changed?