Source | Paidai ID | paidaiwang Author | Yu Cheng Alibaba has once again opened a top-tier entry point for its local life services. Recently, the Alipay homepage launched a "Gaode Group Buying Deals" section, placed alongside Balance, Transfer, and Consumption Vouchers, tapping into Alipay's massive traffic. This may seem like a minor interface adjustment, but it is not a simple feature update. Just one month after the release of the "Gaode Street-Sweeping List," Alibaba has, for the first time, directly channeled the group's top-tier traffic entry point into its in-store business, undoubtedly signaling a comprehensive upgrade in the local life battlefield. On a deeper level, Alibaba is no longer satisfied with a fragmented "multi-entry" layout; it is attempting to consolidate its forces and build a multi-point resonance engine for local life. At the same time, the significance of this battle extends far beyond the local life market itself. At Alibaba's June earnings call, Jiang Fan first discussed the Taobao Flash Purchase strategy, predicting that within the next three years, as millions of branded stores join, Flash Purchase and instant retail will generate 1 trillion yuan in incremental transactions for the platform. Against this strategic backdrop, the opening of the Alipay entry point may indicate that the local life business is forging closer strategic synergy with instant retail and the core e-commerce business, marking a key move by Alibaba to consolidate its efforts and build a unified consumer platform. However, having a top-tier entry point only secures a ticket to compete; Alibaba still needs to make significant efforts in shifting user mindset, improving merchant operation tools, and addressing early-stage data opacity issues. Alibaba Finally Streamlines Its Mechanisms Looking back at Alibaba's layout in the "in-store" sector over the past few years, the significance of this round of adjustments becomes clearer. In the early days, Koubei was Alibaba's core local life brand, covering food, entertainment, and other consumption scenarios, but it gradually weakened in competition with platforms like Meituan. In March 2023, Alibaba officially merged Koubei's in-store business into Gaode, moving it from the front-end entry point to the backstage. Since then, Gaode, starting from maps, has leveraged its LBS capabilities and real user behavior data to explore the feasibility of "destination decision-making," gradually integrating local services such as dining and hotel travel, aiming to evolve from "use Gaode for navigation" to "use Gaode for life." Meanwhile, Taobao Flash Purchase, in collaboration with Ele.me, has entered from the "to-home" business, using instant retail and delivery networks to activate users' high-frequency consumption scenarios, testing the waters of the "in-store" market and creating a check on Meituan. The problem is that these three lines—Koubei, Gaode, and Taobao Flash Purchase—have long operated in parallel without interconnection. Resources are scattered, entry points operate independently, and user mindset is difficult to unify. "A lot of force, but not aligned in direction," this structural imbalance has run through Alibaba's exploration in the local services sector over the past few years. The turning point came in September this year when Gaode officially launched the "Street-Sweeping List" and initiated the "Smoke and Fire Good Store Support Plan," offering over 1 billion yuan in subsidies to encourage users to spend in-store. This seemingly lightweight list is essentially a low-cost tactical reconnaissance: through offline promotion and real user reviews, it rebuilds the "Koubei" mindset and observes market reactions to "real recommendations." Data shows that on the first day of the Gaode Street-Sweeping List, users exceeded 40 million, making it the largest food and lifestyle list in China. In the first week, traffic to listed small shops increased by 187%. The data validated the feasibility of "real scenarios + real word-of-mouth," which is the premise for "Gaode Group Buying Deals" to appear on the Alipay homepage. The opening of the Alipay entry point is undoubtedly opening a massive traffic funnel. "Alipay and Gaode are more like a strong combination. First, Alipay's daily active users far exceed Gaode's, so the product will get more exposure; second, Alipay naturally has connections with offline merchants, which fits this positioning; third, products screened by Gaode have a certain quality guarantee, so conversion rates should also be relatively high." On the other hand, from Gaode to Alipay, there is a profound shift in traffic logic: Gaode traffic is "passive": users open the map with a clear purpose, typical destination-oriented traffic—"I know where I want to go"; while Alipay's traffic is more "active": it has a larger DAU and higher frequency of opening, and users may be temporarily stimulated to consume during payment, account checking, or coupon collection, which is "service-oriented" traffic—"I might take a look." Zhuang Shuai, an expert at Paidai Think Tank's "Retail E-commerce" and founder of Bailian Consulting, mentioned: "As an open platform, Alipay has a rich variety of business formats, and for merchants, it is basically a marketing platform that does not require excessive investment or habit cultivation." Therefore, the opening of the Alipay entry point also moves Alibaba one step further in the "intent generation—intent conversion" chain for its in-store business. Alibaba vs. Meituan: Ecosystem vs. Vertical Competition Beyond the business itself, we need to see the upgrade in Alibaba's underlying competitive logic—that is, its deep intent to serve the grand consumer strategy. The opening of the Alipay entry point has built a "in-store business task force" with clear responsibilities and front-end/back-end integration, with operational efficiency far higher than the early loose alliance. Within the Alipay ecosystem, Alibaba has found the collaboration logic among various ports. For example, when a user is triggered by the thought "I want to eat hotpot" on Alipay, they might open Gaode Group Buying or Flash Purchase delivery, and both paths ultimately lead to "instant consumption." This means Alibaba is using an entry point adjustment to connect the strategic link between "in-store" and "to-home" businesses, providing a new traffic starting point for instant retail and the entire consumer ecosystem. From the perspective of the entire group's business ecosystem, Alipay aggregates "people," as Alibaba's largest DAU entry point, serving as the front-end entry and payment starting point, injecting top-tier traffic into the entire ecosystem; Gaode connects "scenes," as the core for scenario carrying, content conversion, and LBS, responsible for converting traffic into real in-store consumption; Koubei carries "goods," focusing on the back-end, specializing in merchant services, transaction verification, and after-sales support, becoming the cornerstone for stable business operations. Zhuang Shuai commented: "Currently, Alibaba's various platforms are relatively independently operated and settled. Alibaba's advantages in payment and maps are relatively obvious compared to other competitors, which can help users use other apps more frequently within the entire ecosystem. As service providers, each platform ultimately promotes the development of Taobao's grand consumer platform." "This year, Alibaba's strategy is cross-platform collaboration, mutual traffic guidance, and joint efforts towards a grand consumer platform. This logic has already been used once with Flash Purchase." In response to Alibaba's approach of leveraging entry points and ecosystems to pry open the market, Meituan's choice is to go deeper and more vertical. Its biggest asset is high concentration and user inertia. The path for users to open Meituan is clear: food, entertainment, hotels, travel, medicine, groceries—all life scenarios are closed within one app, with no "entry point diversion" issue, which gives Meituan a natural synergy between content, conversion, and fulfillment. Over the past year, Meituan has continuously strengthened three things: first, restarting "quality delivery" and merchant grading mechanisms, raising merchant entry barriers, building barriers in fulfillment and service quality, and countering Alibaba's scale subsidy approach; second, intensifying content construction, strengthening the exposure logic of notes, short videos, and lists, using the "content seeding + transaction conversion" model to counter the penetration of Douyin and Alibaba in "search + interest" scenarios; third, promoting local retail integration, using the fusion strategy of in-store and to-home to defend core business district traffic, especially strengthening the fulfillment network in third- and fourth-tier cities to extend the competitive defense line. Returning to the competition itself, Lao Zhang pointed out: "The in-store group buying market is a typical Matthew effect market, where only two or three players will ultimately survive," and Alibaba's challenges are not small. First, there is the shift in user mindset: the perception of "Gaode = navigation" and "Alipay = payment" is extremely strong. To make users think of "group buying" when opening Alipay requires long-term content and subsidy education. Lao Zhang also believes: "The biggest obstacle to cultivating users' in-store consumption habits is getting consumers to actively search, which requires that your group buying products are sufficiently abundant and prices are attractive enough. This is not achieved overnight. Can your traffic and subsidies sustain until that point? That is the core challenge." Second, the improvement of merchant operation tools: Gaode Group Buying is still in its early stages, and some merchants have reported to Paidai that data transparency, verification efficiency, and customer service response still need improvement. Third, the execution efficiency of ecosystem collaboration: once the jump links between Alipay, Gaode, Flash Purchase, etc., break, the user experience becomes fragmented. For Alibaba, the real test is how to efficiently circulate traffic and data between different platforms without falling into the old problem of "inter-system friction." Liu Bin mentioned: "It seems that Alibaba wants to do too many things now. Although it intends to support the in-store business, its resources are not that abundant, and user stickiness is not as high as Meituan's. At the same time, Alibaba cannot achieve a super app; it must rely on jumps, which inevitably incurs losses." From a competitive standpoint, Alibaba's advantage lies in the breadth of collaboration and strategic depth, while Meituan's moat lies in system stability and execution depth. This battle will continue. How Merchants Can Seize the Local Life Dividend With Alibaba's full-scale entry into the local life market, a more active and complex competitive landscape is unfolding before merchants. Competition has escalated from a single-dimensional "group buying war" to a three-dimensional, systematic confrontation of "traffic entry point x scenario service x credit system x fulfillment capability." Entry points determine exposure, scenarios determine conversion, credit determines retention, and fulfillment determines repurchase. For merchants, this has become a critical moment to rethink their business strategies. On one hand, the initial period of the Alipay homepage entry point may come with some traffic support, and early entrants will inevitably enjoy the dividend. But Liu Bin also reminded: "Gaode's in-store business will take time to mature. If merchants treat this channel as a key focus based on ROI and expend a lot of energy betting on its success, I think it's not necessary. Just treat it as an incremental channel." On the other hand, merchants should also consider differentiated operational strategies. The core of multi-platform operation is not "spreading wide" but "hitting accurately." In the Gaode and Alipay scenarios, merchants can fully leverage the "real" mindset based on navigation data, focusing on building "trust" labels, such as highlighting "repeat customers account for over 40%" or "a decade-old store" in promotions, converting platform data into brand credibility. On Meituan, merchants rely on its stable traffic and mature transaction environment, using refined operations like package optimization and time-slot diversion to achieve scale growth while maintaining profits. On other platforms like Douyin, merchants can focus on creating hit products, leveraging the communication advantages of short videos and live streaming to achieve voice breakthroughs at specific nodes. In multi-platform operation, Lao Zhang also provided a new perspective: "In fact, merchants have a subtle psychology when choosing group buying platforms. They sometimes prefer to list packages on relatively niche platforms because if there are too many group buying users on mainstream platforms, in-store customers generally get used to checking group buying before consuming, which erodes merchants' normal profit margins." This also means that for merchants, it's not just about acquiring traffic but also about mastering traffic dominance, enjoying the traffic dividend of large platforms while maintaining flexibility in profit margins. Looking at this profound transformation in the local life market, the "entry point war" is far from a zero-sum game; it is a protracted battle over user mindset reconstruction and future consumption ecological positioning. Alibaba's ambition is not just to grab Meituan's market share but to realize Jiang Fan's grand vision of "one trillion yuan in new instant retail over the next three years"—a super consumption ecosystem that connects "in-store, to-home, and e-commerce." In this new round of competition, traffic, content, transactions, and trust are being reshuffled, and a more diverse, more complex, but also opportunity-filled new cycle in the local life market is slowly unfolding.