For the instant retail industry, 2023 was an extremely turbulent year: the industry was booming, many players continued to increase their investment, the market became increasingly competitive, and competition grew more intense. The new trends reflect both changes in the market environment and new directions in consumer demand. According to the latest data released by the Ministry of Commerce at the end of September, in 2022, instant retail orders exceeded 40 billion, with a market size of 504.286 billion yuan, and it is expected that the latter will triple by 2025. The prosperity of the domestic instant retail industry can be attributed to the combined effects of technological progress, policy support, and consumer demand. In recent years, as digital technology continues to empower innovation in China's retail formats, retail transactions have continuously broken through time and space constraints. As one of the new retail formats, instant retail has improved local retail supply capacity by connecting online and offline sales channels and shortening delivery times, becoming an important force in expanding and upgrading the consumer market and smoothing the domestic economic cycle. At the policy level, at the beginning of 2023, the Central Document No. 1 explicitly proposed for the first time to "vigorously develop new models such as joint distribution and instant retail." Changes in consumer demand are even more evident. Management consulting firm McKinsey pointed out in a research report that Chinese consumers have increasingly high requirements for delivery timeliness, with 60% of post-90s and 85% of post-80s hoping for same-day delivery of online purchases. This new trend provides a foundation for instant retail to partially substitute for e-commerce retail demand. With multiple favorable factors combined, the explosive growth of instant retail in 2023 is inevitable. An Industry Constantly Being Reshaped, Ushering in an Explosion Retail, as a business model, has always been "reshaped"—from small shops, supermarkets, chain supermarkets, shopping malls, e-commerce, to live-streaming commerce... So, what is instant retail? This term may sound high-end, but from the consumer perception perspective, it has actually existed for a long time. For example, O2O was popular more than a decade ago, and later developed into the branch of food delivery. After the emergence of the new retail concept, supermarket-to-home services also appeared. These models essentially fall within the scope of instant retail. However, among the many models, only food delivery has grown into a large market, while other categories have remained lukewarm. The turning point came in 2023, and many brands and platforms have already tasted the benefits of instant retail. For instance, in October this year, when Apple released its new products, JD Daojia, Meituan, and Ele.me—three super players in the instant retail industry—all showed off their "muscles." The photos of the red, yellow, and blue camps at Apple phone stores are still widely discussed by the public. By the time of Double 11, the layout and gains of major platforms in the instant retail market became even more apparent. On Double 11 day, over 90% of Ele.me's cooperative brands saw their transaction volume hit historical peaks, and nearly 100 brands doubled their transaction volume compared to last year; both transaction volume and user scale reached new historical highs, the number of merchants participating in Double 11 increased by 50% year-on-year, and consumers in third- and fourth-tier cities placing orders increased by 60% year-on-year. JD.com unified its instant retail service under the name "Hourly Delivery." According to the battle report data released by JD Daojia: over 400,000 physical stores joined JD Daojia to participate in JD's 11.11, with over 45 million products available on the platform, providing consumers in more than 2,200 counties, cities, and districts with all-category hourly delivery and fastest delivery in minutes. Meituan Flash Purchase continued to grow rapidly. During this year's Double 11, the product categories available to consumers increased by 56% compared to last year. According to Meituan, consumers who see products recommended in live streams and place orders can receive them in as fast as 30 minutes. Clearly, since the beginning of this year, the increased investment by various players in the instant retail field has finally yielded results. This model is also attracting more offline entities to join, with more and more supermarkets, brand owners, and convenience stores expanding their service radius through instant retail. The market's vitality is related to the continuous expansion of the market size. According to the "2023 Instant Retail Development Trends White Paper" jointly released by the China International Electronic Commerce Center and JD.com's Consumer and Development Research Institute, it is estimated that by 2030, China's instant retail market size will increase to approximately 3.6 trillion yuan, equivalent to 6% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in the same period. At the same time, both the investment market and the giants have already reached a consensus on the market size expectations for instant retail—for this new track that can develop into a trillion-level market after live-streaming commerce, it is worth investing in the future, and the prospects are worth looking forward to. New Stories on the Track For such a huge potential market, the players already on the field will naturally not let the opportunity slip away. But how to specifically lay out their strategies, each has its own focus, thus giving rise to different new stories on the track. Looking back, JD.com was the "first to eat the crab" in the instant retail field. As early as 2012, it began to lay out instant retail, initially testing the waters with fresh produce, becoming the earliest company in the industry to engage in instant retail. At that time, the hottest company in the industry, Miss Fresh, had not yet been established. However, at that time, consumers did not have a widespread urgent need for "ordering online and receiving within 1 hour." By 2020, the concept of "everything can be delivered" became popular, online traffic growth slowed down, e-commerce giants needed new growth, and consumers needed instant retail. Moreover, instant retail was also written into the Central Document No. 1 for the first time. Industry players all sensed the business opportunity and began to accelerate. As a highly perceptive player, JD Retail has already clearly defined instant retail as one of the four must-win battles in 2023, and just before Double 11, it officially released JD's instant retail "Happiness 3-Kilometer" model, proposing a "Five-Year Action Plan" around supporting entities, stabilizing employment, and promoting consumption. Clearly, this is a new signal of JD.com's firm and sustained offensive in instant retail. Such long-term practice has indeed yielded results. During this year's 11.11, with the differentiated competitive advantage of "all-category 1-hour delivery," it achieved strong growth. Data shows that JD's hourly delivery transaction volume increased by 45% year-on-year, and JD Daojia's live-streaming transaction volume increased by more than 10 times compared to 618. In addition, Dada Now's total delivery orders reached 200 million, and JD's fastest instant retail order nationwide was delivered in just 9 minutes. In October this year, JD Daojia announced its three major breakthrough directions for 2024 and its three-year development plan, clearly stating that in the future, JD Daojia will build on its digital foundation and make breakthroughs in three aspects: all-category, hourly delivery, and platformization, focusing on people, goods, and scenes. In contrast, Ele.me, which is also one of the early players in the instant retail track with strong comprehensive strength, started from food delivery and adheres to the core route of "to-home," has a more refined approach. Ele.me's COO Chen Weiye once calculated an account: "The total consumption amount of catering delivery services plus instant retail services is less than 1 trillion yuan, with a per capita of 1,600 yuan. However, the average for food and daily necessities for urban residents in China is 10,700 yuan. Even if the annual user base does not grow, there is still at least 1 trillion yuan of growth space for instant services." Focusing on supermarkets seems to have become one of the important focuses of Ele.me's instant retail at this stage. Taking this year's Double 11 as an example, under the trend of "everything can be delivered to home," local merchants, offline supermarkets, and some brand merchants that previously focused on e-commerce and hypermarket channels began to leverage Ele.me's local user traffic and rider capacity to gain new growth. Lianhua Supermarket's attempt during this year's Double 11 is also quite representative. During this year's Double 11, the overall sales of Lianhua Supermarket nationwide on the Ele.me platform increased by more than 90% year-on-year. Regarding Ele.me's layout, Shi Wei, a senior practitioner in community group buying, analyzed that merchants and brands gain new customers, new traffic, and high sales from local life scenarios, and Ele.me can leverage the store layout and brand awareness of merchants and brands to expand consumers' purchasing mindset and transfer more shopping needs across categories to Ele.me. In addition to the players on the front line, the acceleration of instant delivery platforms is also visible to the naked eye. A few years ago, Flash Delivery was an instant delivery platform for emergency help, dedicated person direct delivery, one-to-one urgent delivery, and refusing to share orders. Today, "Flash Delivery" has become synonymous with the same-city instant delivery industry, winning widespread praise from users for its professional, efficient, and reliable services. Instant delivery is a key link in instant retail, and can even be called the core "infrastructure" for industry development. As users, we increasingly value our emotional value, that is, when an instant need arises, users crave a solution full of certainty. In the words of Yu Hongjian, co-founder and executive president of Flash Delivery: "Flash Delivery is not actually a porter from point A to point B, but rather brings users a beautiful emotional value experience through the delivery of items." A survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that 86% of customers are willing to pay a premium for a better experience; and 32% of customers said that after just one bad customer experience, they would stop using the company's products and services. In China, up to 87% of consumers say that their purchasing decisions are influenced by user experience. The prevalence of the experience economy has shifted users' demand for Flash Delivery from the passive need of "emergency help" to the active need of "emotional connection." More and more people use Flash Delivery services to convey emotions and express care and love to family, friends, loved ones, and clients. Especially in the fields of high-end catering, cakes, and flower delivery, Flash Delivery has become the first choice for many users, continuously meeting users' pursuit of a better life with its fast and considerate services. Intensifying Industry Competition: Where Will the Future Competitive Focus Be? On the surface, players have their own rhythms, but in fact, as instant retail competition reaches the middle stage, it has entered a new phase of "competing in internal strength." Indeed, the ultimate competition in instant retail is about improving efficiency, experience, and product strength. Ultimately, this requires the platform's internal strength to be sufficiently solid. Digitalization, local supply chain integration, and instant delivery have become the three core areas of competition in instant retail. In this regard, JD.com's approach is to focus on digitalization and local supply chain integration. In JD's words, only by getting involved deeply enough can they squeeze out the water. For example, at the digitalization level, JD.com's layout is representative across the industry. As early as 2015, when JD Daojia was launched, it first connected with large supermarkets and major brands. Their large number of SKUs forced JD Daojia to optimize the picking process and improve efficiency. JD Daojia's "Picking Assistant" was born at that time. Through app positioning, route planning, and entering product information, it can shorten the picking time for an order from 30 minutes to 3 minutes. Of course, managing itself well is not enough. Subsequently, a Haibo system to help retailers improve efficiency across the entire supply chain was launched. It is said that after integrating this system, merchants can solve core pain points. For example, whether standard or non-standard products, information entry is worry-free; whether orders come from Meituan, Ele.me, or JD Daojia, inventory management, activity reporting, and order fulfillment operations can all be completed within the Haibo system; finally, sellers connected to multiple delivery services can use intelligent scheduling to reduce delivery costs and improve rider order acceptance efficiency. According to Dada Group's financial report, in the fourth quarter of 2022, the "intelligent order scheduling" function of the Haibo system brought considerable surprises to merchants, such as a 75% increase in operational efficiency, a 6% improvement in order acceptance speed, and a reduction in delivery costs by more than 3%. Ele.me's approach in instant retail appears more "front-end." Specifically, Ele.me focuses on "ecosystem" as its key strategy, helping brands achieve more controllable, powerful, and sustainable growth by providing better product tools, data insights, marketing planning, and other system support. In fact, within Alibaba, the local life business has always been a highly valued sector. On November 16, at the earnings conference call, Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu outlined the plan for the local life group: "We will continue to create synergies with all walks of life, not only in the industries that everyone is currently focusing on, such as food delivery, catering, and travel." He also said: "We expect that in the future, the demand for location-based technology services in the B2B sector will also grow rapidly." Conclusion The charge for instant retail has sounded, and the stories of various players are halfway told. After completing the stage of rapid development, the industry has begun to sprint towards more refined and deeper fields, and the real street battles among the participating competitors have begun.