---
title: "Who Will Be the Top Players in Community Group Buying in 2021?"
description: "Community group buying has become a fiercely competitive arena for internet giants. This article analyzes the strategies and strengths of major players like Didi, Pinduoduo, Meituan, and Xingsheng Youxuan, and predicts that Meituan, Pinduoduo, and JD.com will emerge as the top three."
author: "韩骁"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2021-02-24"
language: "en"
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---

# Who Will Be the Top Players in Community Group Buying in 2021?

> Community group buying has become a fiercely competitive arena for internet giants. This article analyzes the strategies and strengths of major players like Didi, Pinduoduo, Meituan, and Xingsheng Youxuan, and predicts that Meituan, Pinduoduo, and JD.com will emerge as the top three.

**Scan the QR code in the image to register**
**The track will eventually be divided among three players.**
Before the holiday, news spread on Maimai that community group buying teams would undergo massive layoffs. Summarizing 2020, community group buying is a track unanimously recognized by giants. As internet companies, if they don't build a team and invest money in this track, they would be embarrassed to greet others outside.
**-01-
Why do giants love community group buying so much?**
**First, to find new traffic depressions.** For internet giants, the end of the universe is not Tieling, but traffic. As the internet dividend gradually disappears, new traffic becomes difficult, customer acquisition costs rise, and giants' desire for traffic intensifies. **Using community group buying can find new traffic depressions, so it's natural to prepare.**
E-commerce user scale gradually saturates Source: Company financial reports
Secondly, **community group buying is very suitable for creating a second growth curve.** For internet companies, the market size of community group buying is large enough (fresh food alone is a 4 trillion yuan market, and home goods, snacks, etc. are also vast), and the profit model is relatively simple. It can also use high-frequency to drive low-frequency products, making the business model full of imagination.
Moreover, the fresh food industry really makes money. The price of fresh food in wholesale markets often differs from consumer supermarket prices by several times or even ten times. Although giants are currently engaged in fierce price wars, **once competitors decrease and the market forms an oligopoly, giants will show their true colors.**
After all, what goes around comes around. When food delivery platforms and ride-hailing platforms use capital to drag down and swallow opponents to dominate, they begin to show their fangs. Forget subsidies and rewards; constantly increasing commission rates and deductions are the reality. The same applies to buying groceries.
**-02-
Reviewing 2020, how have the giants developed?**
From the data, giants have progressed rapidly, planting their flags in most cities within half a year, with significant results and orders breaking ten million.
Each company's strengths and weaknesses differ.
**Didi: Returning to a wolf-like unicorn.** Affected by the pandemic, Didi's monthly active users saw negative year-on-year growth from February to August this year. Additionally, under the banner of anti-monopoly, new competitors are constantly entering the ride-hailing field, its stronghold. High-D map, Baidu Map, and Meituan, which hold C-end traffic, have launched aggregated ride-hailing models, trying to get a share of the ride-hailing track.
Compared to Tencent, Meituan, and other big brothers, Didi also lacks its own ecosystem closed loop. To tell its story well and win market value, Didi has gone all out in community group buying, as the saying goes, "Which company has the best group buying subsidies? Didi dares to claim the crown."
Furthermore, to quickly achieve the goal of being the No.1 in community group buying, when expanding to new cities, it abandoned the early strategy of focusing on a few hundred SKUs of high-frequency products, instead starting with over a thousand SKUs, using price and full categories to directly max out and quickly attract users. **From the data, Orange Heart优选's monthly active users are also the highest, showing the attractiveness of price to consumers.**
However, purely from a subsidy perspective, neither Pinduoduo nor Meituan is easy to deal with. **In terms of building the internal ecosystem of community group buying, linkage with main business, and warehouse distribution and operations, Didi does not have an advantage.**
Specifically, because Orange Heart优选's order volume grows explosively with strong volatility, the加盟 grid warehouses are originally logistics or carrier companies, which cannot quickly master sorting and delivery, and lack systems. Once order volume surges, chaos leads to internal confusion.
Additionally, according to station masters, out-of-stock and poor fulfillment are current problems for Orange Heart优选. In Chengdu, drivers are often still at the warehouse at 12 o'clock, affecting fulfillment; out-of-stock can reach over 100 items a day!
In operations, Orange Heart优选's after-sales system is also unreasonable, such as requiring valid proof for any issue, including product labels and evidence of quality problems. But out-of-stock is hard to prove. Through Didi customer service, it was learned: **"Out-of-stock is regional, but review is national standard, causing discrepancies."** Unreasonable operations and long waits test the patience of group leaders.
Therefore, Didi has the lowest user retention rate.
**Pinduoduo: Pinduoduo's existing user base has a higher overlap with the target user profile of community group buying.** Because Pinduoduo itself targets price-sensitive users in lower-tier markets, its "billion subsidy" is deeply popular, and its grassroots base is very solid. In Q3 2020, Pinduoduo's average monthly active users reached 643.4 million, giving Duoduo Maicai an inherent advantage in user penetration in the future.
Additionally, **after nearly five years of accumulation and development, Pinduoduo has accumulated rich supplier resources in upstream agricultural production, and will maintain growth in the future, forming a strong synergy with community group buying, creating Duoduo Maicai's unique competitive advantage.**
It is understood that by the end of 2019, Pinduoduo had 586,000 active merchants for agricultural products. In the next five years, the platform will invest at least 50 billion yuan to strengthen agricultural production area infrastructure and help cultivate over 1 million rural online stores with annual sales exceeding 1 million yuan. This further strengthens its agricultural supply chain. As fresh food is the golden key to community group buying, Pinduoduo has great potential in this area.
**Meituan: Stability first, long-term battle.** From a time perspective, since internet giants entered or subsidy models began, it generally takes 4-5 years to form a relatively stable market share pattern. So, the tough battle of community group buying has just begun. Meituan, as the winner of the group buying war back then, has accumulated a lot of experience in this regard. In this battle, it is steady, unhurried, and solid.
First, Meituan uses its offline iron army to promote and recruit BD to attract new group leaders, rapidly expanding its team. At the same time, **the Meituan App provides a natural traffic entrance, with ecosystem and traffic advantages.**
In supply, although the current supply chain system is locally focused with relatively low barriers, as volume increases, supply chain advantages will gradually emerge. Meituan has been rooted in local life services for many years, with deep layout in food supply chain and accumulated many high-quality local suppliers. Relying on its internal Kuailv supply chain foundation and external investments in supply chain companies like Yijiupi and Lehe Food, Meituan is not inferior in supply chain.
**In warehousing and distribution, Meituan's standardized and refined management has yielded significant results.** By optimizing grid warehouse operations and strengthening standardized and refined management of franchisees (e.g., requiring cameras in grid warehouses for real-time monitoring; recording data for each process for refined adjustments), it aims to train a regular army through high-pressure policies, compress costs while smoothing processes and improving service quality.
**Xingsheng Youxuan: Performing a song of attack and defense.** At present, Xingsheng Youxuan has no problem defending its home base. Relying on Furong Xingsheng's offline stores and a WeChat-like system, group leaders can earn commissions from orders generated by their sub-leaders, keeping the core team intact.
**Relying on the early-established "211" delivery standard, with the first-mover advantage of the logistics system and years of accumulation, Xingsheng Youxuan's fulfillment cost has dropped to 3.5%, and its timeliness is the best among all platforms.**
Moreover, **Xingsheng Youxuan's core advantage lies in lower-tier markets**, having penetrated to the township level. For this part of the market, warehouse, storage, and distribution resources are relatively limited, making it difficult for giants to go deep.
However, once expansion is involved, Xingsheng Youxuan will fall into the ocean of giants' price wars. Its warehousing and distribution system, group leader hierarchy, and incentive system have basically been learned by giants. In new markets without a foundation, the challenge of expansion is what Xingsheng Youxuan needs to face.
**-03-
Looking ahead, whose world will group buying be?**
Comparing Didi, Meituan, and Pinduoduo, Pinduoduo and Meituan have advantages in operations, warehousing, and supply chain, and their app traffic attraction is better. Didi's service lags behind Meituan, and its traffic is not as good as Duoduo Maicai. Orange Heart's user retention is a major problem, especially with grid warehouses still using traditional manual sorting, which is also a torment for franchisees.
While the three giants are fighting fiercely, JD.com has also entered the fray by investing in Xingsheng Youxuan.
JD.com acquired Meijia Maicai and strategically invested in Xingsheng Youxuan, filling gaps in group leader resources and ground promotion capabilities. This will help JD.com's community group buying business scale up significantly. It will also significantly improve supplier acquisition.
Furthermore, JD.com's warehousing and distribution capabilities are unparalleled. JD Logistics has more warehouses, larger areas, and broader coverage, making JD.com more mature in logistics management, while its warehouse infrastructure opens a channel for JD.com to extend further upstream in fresh food. Among the giants entering, JD.com leads in integrating the entire fresh food supply chain.
Therefore, **the author believes that in the future, only three companies will occupy the top tier in community group buying: Meituan, Pinduoduo, and JD.com.**
Source: Dolphin海豚智库 (ID: haitunzhiku)


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