Over the past three years, driven by internal and external factors, consumer scenarios have undergone significant changes. Instant retail has accelerated its entry into daily life, and 'instant gratification' has become a normalized shopping need for consumers. The business growth brought by the matching of consumer demand and supply has also drawn attention from all links in the consumption chain. Whether it is brand owners, retailers, or major e-commerce platforms, they are all accelerating their layout in this track. New Distribution mentioned in previous articles that the instant retail industry is gradually transitioning from the 'wild growth' 1.0 extensive stage to the 2.0 rational growth stage. In the coming years, the instant retail industry will enter a new round of transformative development. As a pioneer in the retail industry, JD.com has once again taken a new step first. On September 7, JD Daojia, representing JD.com's instant retail platform business, held a brand conference in Beijing with the theme 'Painting a Blueprint Together, Winning in the Omnichannel.' At the meeting, two key signals for the new stage of instant retail were released: 'Omnichannel 2.0' and 'LBS Gridization.' These two signals may be new growth points driving the development of the instant retail industry. Omnichannel 2.0: From Traffic-Driven to 'Digitalization + Supply Chain' Unleashing New Potential of Instant Retail Looking back at the development history of instant retail, it has gone through two stages. The first stage, the startup period, mainly involved platforms and retailers directly exploring, with brands indirectly participating and observing. Many retailers and brand owners did not have separate departments for operational coordination. The core source of growth was the uploading of products and users. As long as you did it, you grew. The second stage, the expansion period, focused on tripartite linkage among platforms, brand owners, and retailers. Brand owners and retailers began to set up departments and teams dedicated to instant retail operations. In this stage, growth was achieved through intensive promotional activities and marketing advertising. However, fundamentally, the operations in these two stages were relatively extensive, more of 'wild' growth, with the track's own dividends outweighing their efforts. Currently, instant retail is in a new critical stage—maturity. Brand owners and retailers have established foundations in terms of mindset, organizational building, business planning, and operational capabilities. The platform's instant retail infrastructure has also been gradually improved. Relying on track dividends alone is no longer sufficient for sustained growth. Therefore, for brands, the urgent issue to solve is: when instant retail enters maturity, how to seize new growth opportunities, unleash the new potential of instant retail channels, and find new growth points and value points. First, there must be a mindset shift: instant retail is not a supplementary channel but a mainstream sales channel. Many brands still treat instant retail as a supplement to offline business, without truly investing time, effort, and resources to value this model. This mindset remains in the past of instant retail and is no longer suitable for the current refined development stage. Recently released Dada Group's Q2 and interim results show that for the 12 months ending June 30, 2023, JD Daojia's total GMV reached RMB 70.8 billion, a year-on-year increase of 30%. The number of annual active stores exceeded 300,000, a year-on-year increase of over 70%. In this quarter's financial report, there are two core data points: annual transaction volume of RMB 70.8 billion and annual active stores exceeding 300,000, indicating that at the retail channel end, the importance attached to instant retail is evident, and the platform has achieved economies of scale. Taking this year's JD 618 as an example, brands from various categories also shone on JD Daojia: ASUS grew over 10 times year-on-year, Supor's sales increased 147% year-on-year, Junlebao's sales increased 180% year-on-year, and Clear's increased 155% year-on-year. Also, in September last year, JD Daojia, as the only instant retail channel with pre-sale qualification for Apple, saw cumulative sales exceed RMB 200 million by 14:00 on the official launch day of the iPhone 14 series. Therefore, for brands, instant retail is definitely an incremental business and a core sales channel. Brands that seize this channel will capture growth for the next decade. Second is a perspective shift: view instant retail from an omnichannel perspective, moving from traffic-driven to digitalization + supply chain collaborative drive. 'We need to view instant retail from an omnichannel perspective. Brands need omnichannel optimization, reallocate resources, return to the essence of retail, and find the optimal solution for cost, efficiency, and experience.' At the JD Daojia brand conference, He Huijian, Vice President of JD Group and President of Dada Group, stated. Although the value of omnichannel in instant retail has been mentioned before, in reality, it only involved uploading offline store products without truly unleashing the potential of omnichannel. When brands look at their overall business, they still divide it into online and offline parts. After JD Daojia fully integrated into JD.com and undertook JD.com's instant retail strategic development, it built a differentiated advantage of B2C+O2O, pushing the value of instant retail into the Omnichannel 2.0 era. Based on the deep integration of B2C and O2O, JD.com's main site and JD Daojia achieve user sharing, tool integration, resource consolidation, and supply chain collaboration. Online and offline users and products are unified, better meeting consumer supply needs and helping brands achieve multi-dimensional reconstruction of 'people, goods, and places,' making the cost, efficiency, and experience of product circulation better. Through this 'digitalization + supply chain' model, brand omnichannel integration can truly be realized in instant retail. LBS Gridization: Time, Space, People, Superposition of Three-Dimensional Field Potential The circulation of goods goes from production to consumer use. The starting point for all intermediate links is: meeting consumer needs and enhancing consumer experience. From these two perspectives, what is the biggest pain point for brands doing instant retail channels? The data granularity from the supply end to the consumption end is not fine enough, making it impossible to achieve the best match of people-goods-places. In the past, channels were divided into two dimensions: offline and online. Offline data capabilities have always been weak. Brand owners simply hand over goods to distributors, but there is no accurate information feedback or profiling on which stores the goods end up in, which consumers they are sold to, which channels sell well, which users are potential opportunity users, and which channels need more supply and marketing support. In the first two stages of instant retail, merchants simply uploaded products, similar to traditional sales models, making it difficult to feed back precise operational and sales information to the ecosystem. Traditional e-commerce has strong data integration and information feedback capabilities, but the problem is that traditional e-commerce targets consumers across the entire network without an LBS-based geographic perspective. This means the data granularity is still not precise enough, with only 'time and people' profiles but lacking 'space' profiles based on geographic location, making the data not three-dimensional and lacking in refined operations. The challenge of full-chain data integration is a challenge for the entire instant retail industry. For platforms, they need to understand both instant retail and offline and traditional B2C e-commerce to deeply insight into the details of the problem and then solve it. This is precisely JD.com's advantage: in the instant retail field, it has JD Daojia; in traditional e-commerce, it has JD.com's main site; offline, it has JD convenience stores and other businesses. With such multiple retail genes, JD.com can provide the industry's first answer. At the brand conference, JD Daojia launched the Hongtu System, the industry's first LBS gridized operation tool for brand owners, integrating functions of business diagnosis, opportunity insight, strategy output, and solution implementation. Through JD.com + JD Daojia's full-domain data analysis, it achieves precise and efficient matching of supply and demand based on LBS gridization for people, goods, and places, helping brands improve omnichannel operational efficiency and create value increments. It can be understood that Hongtu is a battle map based on spatiotemporal scenario gridization. What time, what area, what people, in what scenario, with what consumption needs—multi-dimensional data fusion truly achieves thousand-person, thousand-store, thousand-face reach, thereby helping brands empower the omnichannel ecosystem. As introduced by Li Changming, General Manager of JD Daojia, 'Based on the unique B2C+O2O retail digitalization capabilities and deep integration of data accumulation of JD.com and JD Daojia, the Hongtu System can achieve LBS-based gridized insight, identification, analysis, and judgment of supply-demand matching within each grid, and output user, supply, and marketing strategies.' LBS gridized operation is the key to moving instant retail from extensive to refined operations. It is not just a tool for instant retail but also a guide for brand owners in formulating omnichannel marketing strategies, making the matching cost of people-goods-places lower and efficiency higher, efficiently identifying and capturing instant needs, and creating greater imagination space for incremental value. Instant Retail Has No Boundaries The development history of the retail industry is a history of the evolution of consumer needs. In the past, 'people' looked for 'goods'; today, 'goods' look for 'people.' How to make 'goods' find 'people' more efficiently? The core is to find the inner needs of consumers and sell 'appropriate products' to appropriate people in 'appropriate places.' As long as consumer needs have no boundaries, instant retail has no boundaries. Because instant retail continues to iterate and continuously meet changing consumer needs. The three plans mentioned by JD Daojia at the brand conference—'full category, hourly delivery, platformization'—also confirm this. On the supply side, in the past few years, FMCG products have accounted for a higher proportion of instant retail sales. But consumers' actual needs go beyond FMCG. According to JD Daojia's data, emerging categories such as 3C digital products have also achieved good results. This means that JD Daojia, with its 'full category' supply to meet diverse consumer needs, will have greater incremental space in the future. On the fulfillment side, consumers have increasingly higher requirements for delivery speed in online shopping. From 'three-day delivery' and 'next-day delivery' in traditional e-commerce to consumers now hoping to receive more products within 'one hour,' 'hourly delivery' as a strategy of JD Retail will also further strengthen its penetration on the main site. 'Everything delivered instantly to home' is gradually becoming a reality, and consumers' demands for timeliness are being met more efficiently. On the store side, JD Daojia, through platform strategy optimization and continuous iteration of product capabilities, fully unleashes the vitality of brands, KA chains, small independent stores, and more ecosystem partners, creating a platform ecosystem with multi-format prosperity. It plans to have over 1.5 million partner stores within three years, giving consumers more choices. From JD Daojia's strategic plan, we can not only see JD.com's confidence and determination to continue advancing in instant retail but also see that platforms, brand owners, retailers, and distributor service providers are rapidly transforming and strengthening collaboration, trying to seize the time window at the critical stage of instant retail transformation, and promoting the digitalization capability building and omnichannel supply chain integration changes. At the same time, this also sends a message to the entire industry: In the field of instant retail, everything is changing rapidly, and everything is just beginning. Instant retail has no boundaries; online and offline omnichannel have infinite possibilities. But opportunities always favor those who are prepared.