Imagine an e-commerce platform like this: It holds a commanding market share in its domain. It has become a go-to platform for consumers, with usage driven more by search behavior. It offers a wide range of daily necessities and long-tail products. It has developed its own unique platform operations and product selection logic. Many of its merchants routinely source from 1688. Would you think, based on these attributes, that this platform closely resembles Taobao? But this is not Taobao—it's Meituan Instashopping. As an instant retail platform, it is already showing, or about to show, the characteristics of an e-commerce platform. After several years of rapid growth, instant retail continues to see impressive growth rates. Based on Meituan's Q3 financial report, Meituan Instashopping's daily order volume is estimated to reach 10.69 million orders, a year-over-year increase of 40.7%. With continued market and category expansion, Meituan believes that instant retail is evolving from an 'emergency channel' to a 'one-stop shopping channel'. In this context, as the instant retail platform with roughly 70% market share, Meituan Instashopping is building its platform effects and momentum. In 2021, Wang Puzhong predicted that over the next five years, the internet retail market would shift from 'Everything Store' to 'Everything Now', with the instant retail market potentially reaching 1 trillion yuan. Meituan's management also expressed strong confidence in instant retail during the earnings call: "The instant retail industry has formed an efficient flywheel and will play a pivotal role in the entire retail landscape. We believe that in the long term, instant retail's penetration of the overall e-commerce market can reach at least 10%." According to data disclosed by Meituan Instashopping, over the past year (September 2023 to August 2024), 124 million users placed orders at night (9 PM to 6 AM), over 100 million users used Instashopping while traveling across cities, and various daily items were sold, including 21.12 million boxes of face masks, 1.78 million women's skirts, 3.46 million electric fans, 160,000 game controllers, and 40,000 washing machines and dryers. And this is just the present. NielsenIQ data shows that China's average weekly working hours of 49 hours are the highest globally, leading consumers to prefer convenient, time-saving shopping channels. In 2024, penetration and visit rates among consumers under 35 in convenience stores have increased. If growth continues, instant retail might indeed support a new 'Taobao'. Who Will Share the Trillion-Yuan Market? According to Meituan's Q3 report, losses from new businesses (including Meituan Select, Xiaoxiang Supermarket, B2B catering services, bike-sharing, power banks, etc.) narrowed further to 1 billion yuan in the quarter; other new businesses excluding Meituan Select achieved profitability as a whole in Q3. Industry sources also suggest that Xiaoxiang Supermarket has achieved overall profitability. At this point, the major players in the front-warehouse model—Sam's Club front warehouses, Pupu Supermarket, Dingdong Maicai, and Xiaoxiang Supermarket—have all crossed or are close to crossing the break-even line, whether through model changes or strategic contraction. After a decade since the birth of fresh food front warehouses, the journey has been arduous. Even though fresh food is the biggest traffic driver, the industry consensus now is that the platform opportunity in instant retail belongs only to the original large traffic platforms (Meituan, JD.com, Alibaba, Douyin), and other participants are chasing the chance to become major merchants within these platforms. Thus, we see that besides Meituan, which has been focusing on instant retail, JD.com and Taobao also launched dedicated sections on their homepages this year—JD Seconds and Taobao Hourly Delivery—making instant retail a primary traffic entry point. We also see more brands beginning to value, rather than simply dabble in, instant retail. In October this year, Miniso and Meituan announced a deep strategic partnership, with over 800 '24H Super Stores' in the lightning warehouse format to be launched on Meituan within the year. According to disclosures, the two parties started in September 2023, spent three months in preparation and six months in trial runs, then decided to accelerate. It's not just Miniso; from earlier partners like Muji, Apple authorized stores, and Huawei experience stores, to this year's LEGO authorized stores, Decathlon, and Bestseller Group (parent of JACK&JONES and ONLY), more categories and more major brands are joining instant retail platforms. The reasons are twofold: on one hand, the formation of a bilateral flywheel effect requires a spiral of supply categories and consumer demand; on the other hand, although overall social retail is undoubtedly a zero-sum market and instant retail essentially carves out a share from e-commerce and offline, the reshuffling and unsettled landscape of this share makes it a 'must-fight' battleground for any participant forced into zero-sum games and low growth. After all, fresh food is only a small portion of the instant retail market; more consumer needs and category demands remain unmet. Moreover, after years of rapid growth, even if Meituan's lightning warehouses have spawned some chain flash-purchase supermarkets or niche warehouse brands, established brands still have a significant advantage in brand awareness and supply chain. Meituan has become the one dangling the carrot. If, as Meituan described at this year's instant retail industry conference, lightning warehouses currently exceed 30,000, are expected to exceed 100,000 by 2027, and Meituan aims for 200 billion yuan in GMV, with the industry market size exceeding 2 trillion yuan by 2030, it's hard for anyone to afford missing out. New Market, New Rules Instant retail has both online and offline attributes, making it a new market with new rules. So far, it has developed unique platform operations and product selection logic. Take the Miniso partnership as an example: according to both parties, Meituan will provide Miniso's lightning warehouses with customized warehouse network planning and precise site selection, tailored product assortment strategies, and specialized store operation systems and solutions. Both sides have set up dedicated teams for deep collaboration in site selection, product assortment, operations, and organization. For instance, Miniso's regular stores are typically located in offline shopping malls, while Miniso's lightning warehouses are mainly in residential areas and other densely populated zones, supplementing regular store coverage and operating 24 hours. Also, offline consumers tend to make impulse purchases, while instant retail consumption is primarily search-driven, with higher proportions of travel and gifting scenarios. Therefore, Miniso's lightning warehouse product assortment needs to be developed and supplemented, with an expected 70% difference from regular stores. Additionally, the 'routinization' of instant retail consumption is a trend. One Miniso store manager observed that in instant retail channels, users no longer buy only emergency items as before; "in a typical delivery cart, daily necessities are gradually becoming the mainstream, with emergency items just an add-on." Furthermore, online product updates naturally occur faster than offline, requiring adaptation to the pace of new product launches and adjustments. This indicates that Meituan is exporting a mature set of operational systems and tactics to brands. In fact, the mere fact that Miniso chose to set up pure front warehouses rather than the more common store-warehouse integration model for large stores offers some insight. Instant retail expert Zhang Chenyong once noted in an article that the difference with the pure front-warehouse model is that instant retail is search-centric, focusing on keywords and weights; how to set up 0.1 yuan traffic-driving items and guide consumers to add to cart is a marketing science. In terms of display, the display density of pure front warehouses can be three times that of physical stores. In organizational management, metrics like inventory accuracy, invalid order rate, and on-time fulfillment rate should also be key performance indicators alongside sales and gross profit. As a new business model, instant retail has developed its own professional expertise as its market share grows and participants increase. For example, in various lightning warehouse operation exchange groups, a '8-day new warehouse' methodology circulates, detailing what to do from day one to day eight, how to use orders from friends and family to boost order volume and five-star reviews, control average order value, and manage store conversion rates and order growth. The goal is to feed corrected data into the model to obtain the platform labels and traffic support the merchant desires. These hard-earned lessons from tens of thousands of small lightning warehouse owners are indeed unfamiliar territory for major brands. Therefore, whether it's the store-warehouse integration model for large stores or Meituan's external methodology export, these may be transitional forms of instant retail market operations, and the model is still evolving. New Market, Old Players In the current instant retail market, Meituan is undoubtedly the most mature platform with the strongest consumer mindshare, holding about 70% market share. Even in terms of share, it's almost a seamless transfer from its food delivery business. According to the latest earnings call, lightning warehouses will continue to expand, focusing on lower-tier markets and long-tail categories. After the major expansion of Meituan Select and the street battles with Douyin Local Services, and given that the 'Retail + Technology' strategy's technology has yet to yield tangible benefits in the short term, instant retail has grown into one of Meituan's new pillars. Combined with overall financial results showing growth in both revenue and profit, Meituan is undoubtedly the most favored new Chinese stock in the past six months. Looking at Meituan's competitors in the instant retail market, it's clear that at least for a while, Meituan's advantage remains significant. In July this year, Taobao Hourly Delivery was given a primary traffic entry point, signaling Alibaba's renewed emphasis on instant retail. However, based on information Taobao Hourly Delivery released to media in October, its positioning seems more like offering a different delivery method for existing Taobao merchants, enriching the original 'all-purpose Taobao' mindshare in the new era. A typical scenario is that an individual Taobao merchant acts as a warehouse; even if the delivery distance is short, they could only ship via express before, but now they can offer instant delivery. This is a way of empowering the near field from the far field, and vice versa. From this perspective, Meituan's approach can be seen as empowering the near field from the on-site (i.e., stores) and then empowering the on-site from the near field. Even in Meituan's typical partnership cases—Miniso, Decathlon, and Bestseller—these brands, regardless of their online sales share, have deep roots in offline chain stores. Although Taobao also has a typical case with Uniqlo, for the large base of small and medium merchants, using a 10km business scope to empower the original 3000km scope, compared to Meituan's 10km empowering 3km, should be less motivating from an operational enthusiasm standpoint. Ele.me, which is both a major merchant on Taobao Hourly Delivery and an independent instant retail platform, stated at its own conference in October that it aims to do 'instant retail with Ele.me characteristics', launching a strategic project called 'Near-field Brand Official Flagship Stores', with plans to open 100,000 stores in three years. Ele.me has chosen brands as partners, believing that a brand may cover thousands of business districts nationwide, and managing them individually is too costly. The main function of the near-field official flagship is to help brands connect these thousands of districts for unified management. It sounds simple, but the challenge lies in the practical difficulties of how brands enter offline, manage terminals, and the extent of their terminal management capabilities. On the other hand, in May this year, JD Seconds was launched on the JD.com app homepage. Although frequently mentioned, since the major changes at JD.com in late 2022, the priority of JD's instant retail business has actually decreased significantly. This year, its priority has increased, but it carries a heavy historical burden. According to a report by Jingxuan Pro, after a series of adjustments, former Meituan executives have basically taken over Dada Group's core business lines. Although internally benchmarking Meituan Instashopping comprehensively, JD Seconds currently has no specific performance targets because Dada Group is still recovering from its previous performance fraud scandal, and the immediate priority is to set things right. In August this year, Dada Group announced that Guo Qing, a JD.com advisor, would become chairman of the board. Guo Qing is co-founder and CEO of Xianglu Technology, vice president of the China Hotel Association, and a former member of Meituan's S-team and executive chairman of its sales committee. For Meituan, having found its strategic direction while competitors are still stumbling in exploration, entering in the second half of the internet era but winning the first half of instant retail, it's hard not to call this a long-awaited and much-needed small victory in a stagnant market.