Bai Ji "I've found a new world of saving money." In the eyes of student Luo Hua (pseudonym), Kuai Tuantuan is becoming the best alternative to Meituan Waimai and Ele.me. Since 2022, Luo Hua has successively bought a batch of discounted takeout from Kuai Tuantuan—a bowl of rice noodles with two pancakes costs 15 yuan on Meituan but only 7 yuan on Kuai Tuantuan; Meituan's 20 yuan five-grain fish noodles are sold by Kuai Tuantuan merchants for 9 yuan; a bowl of vegetarian noodles is 6.8 yuan on Meituan but 4.5 yuan on Kuai Tuantuan. Here, takeout merchants provide delivery services without charging delivery fees, and users can occasionally discover exclusive coupons. Kuai Tuantuan is a group buying tool launched by Shanghai Xunmeng in 2020, used within WeChat mini-programs. Users can order fresh produce from local supermarkets or purchase products from across the internet. Compared to e-commerce platforms, the biggest difference of Kuai Tuantuan is its absolute private domain—consumers cannot see any product information on the platform; they must find group leaders through QR codes shared by WeChat friends, group chats, or Moments. This helps maintain the "loyalty" of group members. Currently, Kuai Tuantuan is tentatively entering the local life services market, hoping to carve out a piece of this battlefield where giants like Meituan and Douyin are fighting. In March this year, Kuai Tuantuan officially began recruiting service providers in the local life services market. According to reports from Ebrun, in May, some Kuai Tuantuan group leaders' stores began showing local merchant group buying coupon products. These group buying merchants are concentrated in high-tier cities like Shanghai and Beijing, with categories mainly in dining, but also including accommodation, entertainment, beauty and hair care, and life services. Interestingly, Kuai Tuantuan's dining group buying prices are exactly the same as another local life platform in Shanghai, Hao Tuantuan. For example, for a certain pan-fried bun chain brand, both Kuai Tuantuan and Hao Tuantuan sell 7.5 yuan vouchers for 10 yuan; on Douyin, the group buying price is 9.9 yuan for 12 yuan, an 8.3% discount, less than Kuai Tuantuan's 7.5% discount; Meituan's group buying price is the original 12 yuan, unchanged. Another example: both "Tuantuan" platforms sell a certain restaurant's double meal at a current price of 119 yuan with a 20% discount, while similar products on Meituan and Douyin are discounted at 7.1%. For a hotpot restaurant's double meal, both "Tuantuan" platforms offer a 5.6% discount, Douyin offers 6.2%, and Meituan ranges from 5.5% to 7.4%. Some merchants that have listed on Kuai Tuantuan told Xin Shang that the brand's group buying discounts on Kuai Tuantuan may come from external procurement by the Kuai Tuantuan platform, and the overall quantity is relatively limited. Generally, merchants do not proactively list vouchers because it affects profitability. This means Kuai Tuantuan needs to demonstrate the power of WeChat's private domain to local life merchants. Only when merchants no longer hesitate about the cost-effectiveness of advertising can Kuai Tuantuan's dream of "recreating Meituan" be realized.

Recreating a Meituan within WeChat?

How ambitious is Kuai Tuantuan? Perhaps no one can say for sure. In 2020, Kuai Tuantuan was officially launched. In its official introduction, Kuai Tuantuan is a community group buying tool that provides consumers with group buying, registration, and help-selling functions, and also provides merchants with live streaming and order management. From a functional perspective, Kuai Tuantuan is integrating WeChat's social resources, gathering WeChat users who seek bargains into regular group buying consumers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kuai Tuantuan played the role of an assistant for local fresh produce group leaders, with many locked-down communities ordering from fresh supermarkets through Kuai Tuantuan. Before Kuai Tuantuan was released, many group leaders were accustomed to having group members self-report orders in WeChat group chats, with the leader responsible for compiling Excel spreadsheets, which inevitably led to many missed or wrong deliveries. A group leader from a locked-down city recalled that time: "At that time, our neighbors' meat, eggs, vegetables, and fruits were all purchased by us. Kuai Tuantuan's functions became more and more complete, and I earned over 30,000 yuan in commissions alone." In Kuai Tuantuan's conception, this tool will greatly lower the threshold for various people to become community group buying leaders. Indeed, in less than half a minute, Xin Shang passed Kuai Tuantuan's review and became a help-selling group leader for a kitchenware merchant. The group leader's permissions include managing orders, managing group information, and sharing group buying information to WeChat groups or Moments. Behind such a simple way to start a group is high profit. Xin Shang compiled the commission rates for group leaders on Kuai Tuantuan; for example, some high-conversion single products have commissions around 10%, while high-commission products often reach over 15%. For local life merchants, Kuai Tuantuan's strategy is full subsidies. Official announcements show that merchants opening group buying on Kuai Tuantuan do not need to pay commissions, annual fees, deposits, or even provide a business license; merchants only need to provide a personal WeChat account and pay a technical service fee of 0.6% per transaction. The commission given to help-selling group leaders is entirely up to the merchant. In contrast, mainstream takeout platforms like Meituan and Ele.me have long maintained merchant deduction rates above 10%, and some group buying merchants face commission deductions exceeding 20%. In comparison, at the merchant level, Kuai Tuantuan has a complete "price butcher" advantage. According to Ebrun, Kuai Tuantuan has nearly 90 local life brands入驻, nearly half of which are dining merchants. Kuai Tuantuan's local life strategy follows Douyin's approach—starting with group buying coupons to attract brand merchants, and later considering whether to expand delivery services. This also means that Kuai Tuantuan, like Douyin group buying, will become a challenger to the Meituan system.

Turning Local Life Upside Down

Let's look back at the local life battlefield environment Kuai Tuantuan faces. At the beginning of this year, Douyin launched takeout services in over a dozen high-tier cities across the country, expanding business scenarios from in-store to home delivery, prioritizing capturing the most willing and active local consumers. Kuaishou is imitating Douyin's model, launching a batch of discounted group buying products with official subsidies, and some products have price advantages over Meituan. Meituan is launching a series of user subsidy activities to attract consumers, such as the takeout group buying activity Pin Hao Fan, and the popular product live streaming room Shen Qiang Shou, aiming to strengthen the low-price moat for takeout and maintain user mindshare. Additionally, WeChat Channels and Xiaohongshu are also entering the local life market. Amid competition from various platforms, the local life market is showing high homogeneity; if platforms do not intervene with subsidies, users will see the same products, prices, and discounts across different platforms. Kuai Tuantuan is using high subsidies to knock on the doors of these merchants. Official data shows that Kuai Tuantuan provides great convenience for merchants in operating costs, such as not charging annual fees, free merchant features, monthly official subsidy red packets, subsidizing 0.3% of transaction service fees, and 5% of monthly transaction amounts. More important than subsidies is that Kuai Tuantuan is returning the initiative in local life to merchants.

First, the initiative in traffic. On traditional local life platforms, the traffic distribution ecosystem is centralized, with the platform controlling the traffic distribution mechanism. Merchants must go through a series of complex data improvements to compete for higher traffic. "Every merchant has a rating with Meituan BD, and they need to improve based on conversion, quality score, average order value, and positive review rate," said a dining merchant. "Especially for new store openings, maintenance is particularly needed because with fewer orders, the weight of a single negative review is higher." In this process, even if merchants do not invest in bidding rankings on the platform, they must use a series of user subsidies to improve store data, typical activities include free delivery, 0.1 yuan gifts, member red packets, expansion red packets, fan group red packets, etc. On Kuai Tuantuan, the traffic ecosystem is the opposite, decentralized, with consumers in the form of private domain traffic held by group leaders or merchants.

Second, the initiative in pricing. "Douyin takeout has too little profit; we never offer single-person meals on Douyin takeout," a dining merchant told Xin Shang. The strategic core of Douyin takeout is low prices, and merchants need to list products with lower discounts than Meituan to compete. This leads many merchants to play "little tricks." For example, a dining merchant with an average order value of only 30 yuan on Meituan lists takeout meals starting at 70 yuan on Douyin. On one hand, Douyin's delivery prices are higher than Meituan, so merchants must raise the average order value to cover delivery costs; on the other hand, merchants have a negative attitude towards Douyin takeout and do not want to make it their main operating platform. In response, Douyin told Xin Shang that what meal sets to list and what discounts to give are entirely decided by merchants, and the platform has no right to interfere. "Meituan's prices are also high. I suggest you add my contact and order directly; I can give you free delivery," another dining merchant suggested to Xin Shang. This form of private contact and free delivery fits perfectly with Kuai Tuantuan's takeout ecosystem. As early as 2022, many university town restaurants were using Kuai Tuantuan to manage private domain traffic, accumulating a stable fan base through low-priced meals. Eliminating intermediate links and passing the saved costs back to consumers is exactly what Pinduoduo excels at, as already proven in the agricultural products sector. In the future, Kuai Tuantuan still has significant growth space in the local life market.

Is Kuai Tuantuan the Ceiling for Private Domain Tools?

The rule of the local life market is: in the short term, look at subsidies—whoever spends more real money can rush to the forefront of the industry; in the long term, look at the ecosystem—platforms must provide stronger service capabilities to both merchants and consumers to ensure they are not overtaken by latecomers. This is precisely Kuai Tuantuan's weakness. At the end of last year, a Kuai Tuantuan user created a blacklist table of Kuai Tuantuan merchants, which resonated with many. The user mentioned: "I have repeatedly seen the same products I bought on Kuai Tuantuan on e-commerce platforms like Taobao. The products are exactly the same, but the price is cheaper than what I paid." A Kuai Tuantuan supplier merchant introduced to Xin Shang the method of finding products on Kuai Tuantuan—go to local wholesale markets to get goods, or find merchants that support drop shipping, or find Taobao affiliate products with the highest commissions on Alimama, and list them on Kuai Tuantuan. Just one thing: confirm with the merchant that it is seamless drop shipping, so consumers do not discover that the group-bought goods come from e-commerce platforms. The platform only provides technical support, and transactions between buyers and sellers rely on mutual moral guarantees, which inevitably leads to some conflicts. A Kuai Tuantuan user fiercely complained about the platform on social media: "After payment, the goods are not shipped for a month, and when requesting a refund, the group leader never responds. When complaining to the platform, the platform only says it has no right to interfere with group leaders. I found that you should never expect after-sales service here; for shopping, you should still go to major platforms." The same incident also occurred in Kuai Tuantuan's local life sector. Before Kuai Tuantuan officially entered the local life market, a user had ordered a coupon for a fast-food brand on Kuai Tuantuan but found it could not be used in-store. Similarly, he encountered difficulties in after-sales rights protection. How can Kuai Tuantuan make exhausted consumers believe that its group buying coupons can indeed be verified in-store? Kuai Tuantuan needs to solve this thorny problem. In the local life market, consumers need to look at reputation and reviews when consuming at a store. For example, dining requires looking at local recommendation lists, and beauty services require looking at brand credibility and consumer reviews. Kuai Tuantuan provides consumers with only the most basic transaction channel—ensuring that consumers can enjoy related services at lower prices through group buying. Here, consumers cannot see more merchant information, nor even consumer reviews, which places extremely high demands on merchants—well-known local brands can use Kuai Tuantuan for promotions to acquire customers, but for some small and medium-sized merchants, gaining the trust of Kuai Tuantuan users remains difficult. Ultimately, Kuai Tuantuan positions itself as a community group buying tool product, but its business scope has far exceeded that of a tool. Official data shows that in its first year alone, Kuai Tuantuan's transaction volume exceeded 10 billion yuan, and the platform's business coverage is extremely wide, including not only daily necessities but also sensitive categories like medicine and maternal and child products.

Whether from the perspective of increasing revenue or protecting the platform, Kuai Tuantuan needs to transform from a tool to a platform, using authoritative platform supervision to compress the survival space of inferior merchants.