---
title: "Go, Meituan Instashopping!"
description: "Brands are betting on instant retail. During the 2022 Christmas and New Year period, RIO cocktails promoted new products via Meituan Instashopping, achieving over 40% year-on-year sales growth and attracting nearly 300,000 new customers in December, the year's peak. During Meituan Instashopping's 'New Year Shopping Festival', brands like P&G, Carlsberg, and Hsu Fu Chi saw transaction volume double, with Yihai Kerry leading in grain and oil, and Jinlongyu's sales doubling year-on-year, including one canola oil product with an 8-fold sales increase."
author: "十里"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2022-02-25"
language: "en"
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---

# Go, Meituan Instashopping!

> Brands are betting on instant retail. During the 2022 Christmas and New Year period, RIO cocktails promoted new products via Meituan Instashopping, achieving over 40% year-on-year sales growth and attracting nearly 300,000 new customers in December, the year's peak. During Meituan Instashopping's 'New Year Shopping Festival', brands like P&G, Carlsberg, and Hsu Fu Chi saw transaction volume double, with Yihai Kerry leading in grain and oil, and Jinlongyu's sales doubling year-on-year, including one canola oil product with an 8-fold sales increase.

Brands are betting on instant retail.

During the 2022 Christmas and New Year period, RIO cocktails promoted new products via Meituan Instashopping, achieving over 40% year-on-year sales growth and attracting nearly 300,000 new customers in December, the year's peak, with nearly double growth across all products.

During Meituan Instashopping's 'New Year Shopping Festival', brands like P&G, Carlsberg, and Hsu Fu Chi saw transaction volume double. In the grain and oil category, Yihai Kerry performed best, with Jinlongyu's sales reaching twice last year's figure, and one canola oil product achieving an 8-fold year-on-year sales increase.

These brands that have achieved new records through Meituan Instashopping seem to confirm that instant retail is bringing significant changes in channels and marketing.

As a key business Meituan has been focusing on recently, Meituan Instashopping has been online for over three years, and by 2021, its disclosed daily peak order volume had reached 6.5 million. Moreover, Meituan Instashopping is frequently mentioned in Meituan's earnings calls, highlighting its importance.

As an instant retail platform covering all channels, Meituan Instashopping not only meets consumers' demand for speed but also signifies the integration of online and offline channels, enabling traffic interaction and bringing new users and consumption scenarios to brands.

More importantly, Meituan Instashopping can bring young consumers to brands. By gaining insights into consumer needs, it can reverse-customize products and promotions, forming a closed loop and achieving more growth.

**Meituan Instashopping**

From January 6 to February 6 this year, Meituan Instashopping officially launched its 'New Year Shopping Festival'. Compared to the same period last year, the number of participating brands tripled, including not only international brands like P&G, Unilever, and Mars Wrigley that participated last year, but also many local brands.

This change indicates that local and emerging brands have also recognized the importance of instant retail channels and are beginning to make comprehensive arrangements.

Nowadays, the omni-channel model has become a new engine for retail growth. Many emerging consumer brands and categories not only need to enter offline channels but also need to promote their brands and products through online channels.

However, many brands face real pain points with new products: after online launch, there is a lack of continuous operational support, online and offline marketing are disconnected, offline store placement has high entry barriers, and supply chains need cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

But relying solely on a brand's own capabilities is difficult to solve all these pain points. However, joining Meituan Instashopping has changed the situation—brands that join not only push new products to consumers but also achieve sales growth.

During this year's Christmas period, Mars Wrigley deeply collaborated with Meituan Instashopping. Based on insights into holiday marketing trends, they conducted cross-ecosystem joint promotions with high-traffic categories on the Meituan platform, such as flowers and fruit cuts. By bundling popular products around the holiday, they provided consumers with innovative consumption experiences and built brand awareness.

Through cross-ecosystem collaboration, multiple new chocolate products under Mars Wrigley's Dove sub-brand were introduced to consumers.

It is reported that Dove sub-brand sales grew over 100% year-on-year and nearly 200% month-on-month, with the brand index reaching its peak during the campaign. The explosive trend of Mars Wrigley and Dove also drove overall growth in the snack category on Meituan Instashopping.

Beyond Mars Wrigley, on the winter solstice last year, Meituan Instashopping and Synear Foods leveraged the winter solstice marketing node, ultimately achieving nearly 300% month-on-month sales growth and nearly 70% year-on-year growth for Synear Foods.

From the various cases on Meituan Instashopping, it can be seen that the entire brand marketing process is aimed at influencing end consumers. This shows that understanding consumers and their needs, and formulating appropriate marketing strategies, is particularly important.

Through multiple experiments and data, Meituan Instashopping has developed a mature brand growth solution.

Taking the New Year Shopping Festival as an example, first, it uses Meituan's digital operation tools to guide brand product selection, choosing products with the highest user demand and best sales during the holiday.

Second, it collaborates with brands for on-site and off-site brand marketing. It conducts cross-ecosystem collaborations with other Meituan businesses, such as Meituan Hotels, to increase brand exposure. Additionally, there are various traffic exposure and subsidy supports.

With this full process, brands participating in Meituan Instashopping's New Year Shopping Festival grow much faster than those that do not, and they drive overall market growth.

**Value and Significance**

For brands, instant retail is a brand-new consumption scenario.

When growth in traditional offline channels and B2C channels stabilizes, brands need to find new growth points, and instant retail channels represent a new opportunity for them.

In this scenario, first, consumers' purchase decision chain is shorter than in B2C e-commerce, often being purposeful purchases. They place orders immediately when they have needs, without going out shopping or waiting for delivery—buy now, deliver now—while also creating more consumption demand.

Second, many brands' traditional sales channels are mostly offline, especially supermarkets, which not only require entry fees but also competition with similar products. However, consumers shopping through instant retail channels are not entirely the target customers of offline supermarkets. For brands, this part of consumption is entirely new.

**Data shows that the current mainstream users of instant retail are under 35 years old, mostly post-90s and post-00s, who have strong personalized consumption needs. On the supply side of offline channels, most products have been on shelves for over 5 years, and nearly half for over 3 years.**

This means that consumers on O2O platforms are young, while the products in offline supermarkets are relatively 'old'. Young consumers cannot find the products they want offline, so they can only shop on online platforms.

This is a typical supply-demand mismatch, but for brands, it is a good opportunity to 'pick up bargains' and an opportunity to optimize omni-channel supply. This is also key to the future development of China's retail industry.

Brands have a desire for younger, newer, and more consumers. These users are the ones brands 'favor' and want to capture. Meituan's overall massive user base is a pool that Instashopping can convert in the future, largely overlapping with the consumers brands are targeting.

Leveraging this advantage, Meituan Instashopping has recently achieved user conversion for many brands.

Taking RIO cocktails as an example, they launched a winter-limited hot mulled wine in the winter of 2020. This winter, the trend of 'hot mulled wine' has risen again, and this new drinking method has been embraced by young people.

During the Christmas and New Year period, Meituan Instashopping seized this new consumption trend and collaborated with RIO to promote the winter-limited 'tipsy hot mulled wine' product.

By gaining insights into young women's consumption preferences and targeting the target group, they broke through growth in the highly competitive low-alcohol beverage track. By pairing with Meituan Instashopping's fruit cut channel's traditional Christmas bestseller 'peace apples', they turned RIO products into trendy drinks and drove sales growth across RIO's entire product range.

Not only focusing on brand product growth, Meituan Instashopping also enhances brands' overall instant retail online operation capabilities to promote high-quality growth.

With a large user base, data, and practical experience, Meituan Instashopping can reverse-customize products and marketing plans for brands, conduct new product promotions on the platform, test effects, and obtain more accurate feedback.

It is reported that Meituan Instashopping plans to make brand operations more personalized in the future. For example, for each campaign, it can provide different product selection guidance based on regional characteristics. For instance, for a certain potato chip, in Beijing it might recommend the brand promote one flavor, but in Nanjing it would recommend another.

For brand owners, instant retail is a rapidly growing incremental channel, bringing new users and new consumption scenarios. At the same time, instant retail platforms can also build digital pathways for brands, helping them better understand users and conduct node marketing.

It is worth noting that **on Meituan Instashopping, in addition to large chain KAs, there are also numerous small and micro merchants. These merchants are difficult for brands to cover and influence in the past. After cooperating with Meituan Instashopping, the platform can help brands reach these small and micro merchants, improve marketing efficiency, and create more revenue.**

**The Trend of Instant Retail**

In September last year, Meituan Instashopping made its first high-profile announcement since its establishment, stating that the instant retail market is expected to reach one trillion yuan in five years, with Meituan aiming to capture 400 billion yuan of that market share. This goal has also been interpreted externally as a prelude to Meituan Instashopping increasing its investment scale and intensity.

Of course, behind the rapid business data growth are changes in consumer demand due to generational shifts and a corresponding rapidly growing market.

According to Accenture's report 'Focusing on China's Post-95s Consumer Group', post-95s value delivery speed more than millennials. Over 50% of post-95s consumers hope to receive goods the same day or even within half a day, and 7% hope to receive goods within two hours.

Another set of data from iResearch shows that China's instant retail market size is expected to reach nearly 900 billion yuan by 2024.

Changes in consumer demand correspond to the rapid growth of instant retail. Instant retail meets new consumption demand scenarios and satisfies users' demands for better and faster services. It is no surprise that it has become a rapidly growing blue ocean.

But fully achieving the word 'instant' is not easy.

First, instant retail faces dispersed and segmented demand. Upstream, it connects brand owners and retailers; midstream, it requires mature and stable digital systems; downstream, it tests fulfillment capabilities. The complex chain, despite being an 'instant' business, requires higher costs than standard express delivery.

In addition, instant retail places higher demands on warehousing, distribution, and supply chain capabilities, meaning higher costs are needed to find a revenue balance point. The richness of categories that instant retail can cover and the quality of delivery are core competitiveness in this battle.

It is reported that Meituan Instashopping, relying on Meituan's 24-hour delivery capability and its foundation covering 2,800 urban and rural areas, can already achieve '30-minute delivery to home' for various products, including fresh produce, daily necessities, hardware, digital products, books, pet supplies, mother and baby products, flowers, beauty products, and more.

Its cooperation formats cover brand owners like Yili and Mars Wrigley, chain supermarkets and convenience stores like Yonghui, Carrefour, 7-Eleven, and Lawson, beauty brands like Sephora and Florasis, as well as authorized dealers of Apple and Huawei.

The market is always changing, and the trend of instant retail has risen. The post-e-commerce era also needs new stories. A new war for instant demand is about to begin. What is certain is that 2022 will be the explosive year for instant retail.

Source: Lingshou (ID: lingshouke)

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