JD.com leverages 100,000 sales force to follow Meituan’s lead

In 2025, the high-profile launch of JD.com's food delivery business caused a huge shock in the local life service market. JD.com quickly attracted nearly 200,000 catering merchants to apply for entry through high subsidies and a "0 commission" policy, and at the same time set off a nationwide ground promotion boom. However, behind this seemingly massive ground promotion campaign, there are many problems hidden: from the "free combat" mode of ground promotion personnel, to the operational difficulties of merchants after entry, to the insufficient transportation capacity in the fulfillment link, JD.com's food delivery campaign is full of challenges.

"170 yuan per order, easy to earn thousands a day." "JD.com urgently recruits local sales, 180 yuan per order, no threshold to earn more than 10,000 yuan a day!" "The biggest outlet in 2025, it will be too late if you don't get on board now!"

At the beginning of 2025, JD.com launched its food delivery business with great fanfare. After the official announcement of the launch of "0 commission" to recruit merchants, the latest news is that one week after JD.com Food Delivery was launched in 39 cities, nearly 200,000 catering merchants applied to join, and the order volume in some cities increased by more than 100 times.

The application of these 200,000 merchants to settle in the market cannot be achieved without a nationwide promotion.

On Xiaohongshu, Douyin and WeChat official accounts, countless news about JD.com's local promotion became popular almost overnight. Online local promotion platforms such as Provincial Group, Street Promotion Alliance and Rentuibang have launched related projects one after another, and various local service providers have also begun to recruit. The high reward of 170 yuan per store has attracted countless players who want to catch up with the trend to join in. As of February 24, the number of people promoted by JD.com Takeout on the Rentuibang platform alone has exceeded 110,000.

This group of JD Takeout's field sales staff are different from the former Alibaba and Meituan field sales iron army. They are more "free to fight". They register through online platforms, use the sales talk summarized on social platforms, and carry their own printed JD work badges. From the 39 cities where JD Takeout was first deployed to small counties across the country, they started a "race to grab the wind".

But just one week later, the wind direction on social platforms changed. News like “JD’s ground promotion is a scam”, “Avoid, you won’t get any money from JD’s ground promotion” and “The unit price of 170 yuan is a scam” emerged one after another. Many service providers who had obtained the qualification for JD’s ground promotion of food delivery also began to discourage them. “Service providers don’t know when they can get the money, they have to pay for it themselves, let alone doing ground promotion for the platform”.

In the mental development stage, capital has become accustomed to launching blitzkrieg-style beachhead operations, and local promotion is the most effective tactic for local life.

14 years ago, Meituan relied on a 100,000-strong army of local salespeople to take over small stores and cities one by one. Today, when JD.com, an e-commerce platform with 530 million monthly active users, uses a "wild army" style of local sales methods to target the 1.2 trillion market size of takeout food delivery in China, the once quiet local life track has begun to boil again, and the service providers and local salespeople in each city are the vanguards in this war.

1. 170 yuan per order, JD.com has 100,000 salesmen

On February 18, at the door of a noodle restaurant in a second-tier city in Hunan, Hu Yang, wearing a JD work badge, introduced JD Takeaway's entry policy to merchants. His introduction was very impactful and tempting: "Merchants who join before May 1st will receive 0 commissions throughout the year. Many JD users are high-spending people. The platform will also intelligently recommend restaurants, and the conversion rate is twice as high as that of ordinary platforms!"

Similar scenes and the same rhetoric appeared almost simultaneously across the country. Hu Yang, born in the 2000s, is not an official employee of JD Takeout. He participated in the promotion of JD Takeout because he saw the news of "high-paying part-time jobs" on social platforms.

JD.com’s takeaway live streaming room on Douyin

On February 11, JD Takeaway officially launched the recruitment of "quality dine-in catering merchants" and promised that merchants who settled in before May 1, 2025 would be commission-free for the whole year. Overnight, countless part-time promotion information for JD Takeaway emerged on social platforms - 150-180 yuan per order, and many people said that they earned thousands of yuan in just two or three days.

In the past, the local marketing teams of Meituan, Ele.me or Douyin were mostly closely integrated with the company itself. Meituan once relied on the group buying local marketing team organized by Gan Jiawei to promote its food delivery business. Half of the 400-person entrepreneurial team of Ele.me were local marketing. Douyin converted 10,000 sales staff into local life staff in March 2021, mainly responsible for local marketing and other businesses.

In contrast, JD.com’s takeaway marketing, which has swept social platforms, did not adopt these strategies.

The head of a field promotion team from Northeast China said that JD Takeout’s current field promotion model is more inclined to the self-operated + service provider agency model.

Since last year, JD.com has started food delivery cooperation with many chain restaurant brands. This year, JD.com Food Delivery has assigned the promotion work in multiple cities to different service providers, and the service providers will complete the promotion work in a hierarchical manner. The JD.com Food Delivery promotion projects on various online promotion platforms are also related to different service providers. "Some of these service providers have worked for Meituan and Douyin Food Delivery."

Different models, combined with high subsidies, quickly transformed into market momentum.

In just a few days, JD Takeout had an army of 100,000 salespeople - on the Rentuibang platform alone, the number of JD Takeout promoters was 26,000 on February 19, and by February 24, this number exceeded 110,000.

The secret to the rapid development of local life cities comes from the ability to promote them on the ground and the coverage of merchants.

Along with the 100,000-strong sales force, there were also numerous JD Takeaway sales templates, with everything clearly arranged from attire to sales talk.

Hu Yang registered for an online platform to carry out door-to-door promotion tasks. The JD Takeout work badge he wore was actually made by the printing shop, and his sales pitch came from a document. As for other data such as "double the conversion rate", Hu Yang did not know whether it was true or not.

"Clothes make the man, and saddles make the horse. The ID card is the key to open the door to cooperation. Once you show your ID card in the store, the bosses' attitude will immediately change." Hu Yang said that in addition to making their own JD ID cards, some people also make their own JD T-shirts and vests.

Over the past week, many group chats related to JD.com's takeaway promotion have gathered hundreds of people, discussing how to better promote JD.com's takeaway and how to convince potential merchants to join. There are even many people who claim to be local life service employees of Meituan, Alibaba and Douyin, asking in the group about the employment prospects of JD.com's local life services.

It was not until the last two or three days that the craze for JD.com's offline food delivery service cooled down.

"Almost no one has successfully settled on the platform." Hu Yang worked for three or four days and visited more than 30 merchants. Several merchants passed the first and second trials of the platform, but no settlement has been made so far. "The platform shows T+3, but I haven't heard of anyone successfully settling. It is said that an order is considered completed only when the merchant starts operating." Under such circumstances, he can only choose to give up temporarily, worried that he has wasted his time.

Dayu, a service provider who broadcasts on Douyin, said that the platform did not settle accounts. First, JD.com's early review was slow, and second, the service providers needed to advance a large amount of funds. "JD.com's takeaway settlement cycle for service providers is very long. In the early stage, the service providers basically advanced the funds themselves. Only service providers with strength can play. If a platform has 110,000 ground promotions, even if only half of them make an order, there will be 55,000 orders. Each order costs 170 yuan, which is 9.35 million yuan. Unless you are strong, who can afford to advance the payment?"

As for the price of 170 yuan per order, Dayu also said that it is very unprofitable. It is better to find a local service provider and work for the service provider. "JD only gives the service provider 200 yuan per order. After deducting the tax of more than 187 yuan, let's count it as 188 yuan. The service provider gives you an order of 170 yuan just to make 18 yuan? Doesn't he have operating costs? The data you can see on those promotion platforms are what they want to show you. They will settle the first three or four orders for you, and then when the order volume increases in the later stage, they will swallow some of the orders and you won't know it."

2. JD.com Takeaway, a not-so-easy business

Down-to-earth field promotion seems to be a job that has nothing to do with the Internet and has no threshold, but it is a successful path that has already been tried by countless veteran local life players.

In 2011, Meituan won the “Thousands of Groups War” by relying on a large army of field sales.

At that time, Gan Jiawei, who came from the China Supply Chain Iron Army (Alibaba's first-line sales team), was parachuted into Meituan as COO. He refined and standardized Meituan's ground-based sales team by adjusting the organizational structure and formulating management systems.

Meituan’s early push marketing. Image source: Meituan WeChat official account

At the Meituan annual meeting in 2012, Gan Jiawei shouted the slogan "Visit as much as you can, place orders as much as you can" to encourage field employees to canvass the streets, and proposed the "Full Warehouse" incentive activity before the 2012 Spring Festival. This was the first time that Meituan implemented incentive measures: as long as the field employees' sales performance reached a certain standard, their round-trip air tickets home would be reimbursed.

Relying on his rich experience in field promotion and operations, Gan Jiawei led Meituan to carve out a path in the "Thousands of Groups War". At the end of 2012, Meituan won the first place in market share. In the second year, Meituan achieved a small profit for the whole year.

But what cannot be ignored is that aggressive ground promotion did allow Meituan to quickly win over many local life businesses, and Meituan group buying has also become a major boost to Meituan's food delivery business. However, in order to make the food delivery business run, it also requires supporting distribution systems, operation systems, after-sales and other supporting facilities.

Meituan’s widest and most stable moat, in addition to its offline marketing, is its huge rider system.

Data from the Meituan Research Institute shows that in 2023, Meituan will have 7.45 million "riders with order income", of which 11% of the total number, or about 820,000 people, will receive orders for more than 260 days throughout the year; JD.com's food delivery is delivered by Dada Seconds. A PPT shown to us by a field sales staff showed that as of December 31, 2023, JD.com's second-by-second delivery business covered 2,200 counties, districts and cities, with more than 1.2 million active riders.

However, according to LastPost, although JD.com stated that Dada Express has 1.3 million active Dada riders annually, except for a very small number of in-store riders serving large customers such as Sam's Club who are in fact full-time, the vast majority of Dada Express riders are crowdsourced part-time workers with no fixed working hours.

This also leads to a problem for JD.com’s offline food delivery business: insufficient transportation capacity.

JD.com's PPT promoting instant delivery

Many ground-based players and service providers have stated frankly that although JD Takeout’s ground-based promotion is very vigorous, except for the first 39 cities where JD Takeout started, most other cities are short of transportation capacity. If merchants want to operate online, they can basically only choose “self-delivery”. “Some merchants will give up because they don’t have the resources for self-delivery.”

At the same time, after the uploaded information is reviewed, merchants still face operational issues such as uploading dishes. In many JD Takeaway live broadcast rooms on Douyin, many sales staff asked how to help merchants launch new products and how to explain business problems to merchants. "Uploading 5 dishes is effective. Should I directly download pictures from Baidu and upload them or take them myself?" "What should I say when a merchant asks me how to place an order?" "What should I do if the merchant doesn't have a takeaway receipt machine?"

Of course, in the eyes of some field sales staff, these problems are not big problems. Even if merchants cannot log in to the JD Takeaway platform for the time being, or merchants do not know how to operate the JD Takeaway platform for the time being, they also want to occupy this "slot" first.

"Regardless of whether you can go online now, you should first communicate with the merchant on WeChat. If the review is passed, the promotion money will be all yours. If the review is not passed, you can get the money when JD.com lowers or changes the standards in the future."

Hongyuan, who is doing promotion in a small county in Guangxi, said that the earliest 39 cities for JD Takeout have already been overcrowded, and a merchant can welcome three or four waves of JD Takeout promoters a day. It is better to bet early and expand into small counties. He can also provide takeout services to merchants in small counties that do not understand takeout operations. "Lack of transportation capacity is not a problem. It is not a problem if the merchant cannot deliver by themselves and has no riders. I can help you contact the rider and earn another agency fee from the merchant."

3. A deeper “retention” issue

JD.com’s high-profile promotion of its food delivery business now seems more like an open conspiracy by JD.com.

The high commission incentive made the name of JD Takeout known across the country. Even many service providers and field sales employees who used to work for Meituan and Douyin’s local life services said that this time JD Takeout’s field sales was more “terrifying” than Douyin Takeout’s field sales in previous years.

The homepage of JD Takeout has a channel for merchants to enter

"It's crazy. In the past, service providers competed with each other, but now service providers and other players are fighting each other. Even ordinary merchants know about JD.com's takeaway promotion. As soon as the pushers come in, they ask if your order is 150 yuan or 170 yuan. JD.com has also directly launched a merchant entry section on the takeaway homepage. Everyone knows that JD.com's takeaway is commission-free, pays a lot, and is generous."

Business competition is always a battle for traffic. Behind this nationwide push is JD.com’s revaluation of the instant retail market.

On the one hand, Douyin e-commerce is eyeing it covetously.

According to a report by 36Kr, in 2024, the total merchandise transaction volume (GMV) of Douyin's e-commerce will be approximately 3.5 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 30%. At the 2025 All-hands meeting held by ByteDance on February 13 this year, Kang Zeyu, head of the e-commerce business, revealed at the meeting that Douyin's e-commerce market share has become the third in the industry.

Douyin, which came from behind, defeated "Dongdong", one of the three giants of "Cat, Dog and Pin", and put some pressure on JD.com.

On the other hand, the growth of JD.com's traditional business is gradually slowing down.

JD.com's Q3 2024 financial report shows that under the influence of the "national subsidy", JD.com's self-operated business revenue was 204.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.8%, while in Q2 2024, JD.com's self-operated business revenue had zero year-on-year growth. At the same time, at the beginning of 2024, JD.com set three major directions, namely the "three must-win battles", in addition to content ecology and open ecology, instant retail is also among them.

Launching food delivery business in the instant retail sector means that JD.com is trying to leverage user habits with high-frequency catering consumption, thereby increasing the frequency and possibility of users clicking into the JD.com platform. This is also the reason why every e-commerce platform wants to become a super APP covering more scenarios.

However, JD.com’s food delivery business is a huge gamble, with millions or even tens of millions of dollars of subsidies invested, but it may only result in a small splash.

The once aggressive Douyin Takeout has died down, and in August 2024 it was incorporated into the instant retail business "Hourly Delivery" under Douyin e-commerce. From an important business that once had a first-level entrance and challenged Meituan, it has become a small section area.

Even if JD.com competes with Meituan with signs such as "quality dine-in restaurant" and uses "clean, safe and hygienic" as its banner, it cannot prevent local players attracted by high salaries from using various "means" to get JD.com's local takeaway promotion incentives.

JD Takeout’s rigid requirements for merchants are aligned with those of other platforms, which is equivalent to filtering out a wave of takeout merchants through the review mechanisms of other platforms. For example, merchants are required to have a Dianping score of 3.8 points. If the merchant does not have a Dianping score, then they need to have an AutoNavi score or a Douyin score of 4.0 points.

Some local players said that if merchants want to join JD Takeout but their ratings are not high enough, they can also provide "score and review brushing" services. "Many Kangaroo Group (Meituan) merchants also do this. High-scoring stores are ranked high and are easily chosen. This is a common thing in the industry."

From the ground promotion boom, to the JD.com takeaway fulfillment link that has not yet been completely resolved, to the industry's gray industry that is hard to guard against...

“How many merchants and users do you think will stay in the end? That’s none of our business. We’re here to make money in the early stages.” In the Douyin live broadcast room, several players who were discussing JD.com’s takeaway promotion said bluntly.

Wang Xing of Meituan said in 2018 that "too many people focus on the boundaries, not the core", and JD.com also followed this saying when it came to food delivery. Starting with a 100,000-strong army of salesmen, the battle of JD.com's food delivery may not end in a "winner takes all" outcome, but a catfish in the food delivery industry is accumulating strength to shake its tail and muddy the calm waters.

Text｜Wang Zhan Editor｜Wang Yaqi