Alibaba’s Taobao adds 1-hour delivery short cut in race against ByteDance, JD.com

With on-demand delivery the latest front in China’s e-commerce war, Taobao is using Alibaba’s Ele.me and Freshippo to expand its offerings in the category

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Taobao is expanding its product offerings available for one-hour delivery and adding a hotkey to its homepage to further entice users. Photo: Shutterstock

Ann Caoin Shanghai

Published: 9:00pm, 3 Jul 2024Updated: 12:04am, 4 Jul 2024

Alibaba Group Holding’s online shopping app Taobao has made its one-hour delivery service hotkey on the platform’s homepage, as the tech giant tries to stake out a larger position in the on-demand delivery market amid competition with JD.com and ByteDance’s Douyin.

The 4-year-old service now has its own tab accessible from the Taobao homepage as of Tuesday, as China’s largest e-commerce marketplace works with food delivery platform Ele.me, also owned by Alibaba, to expand the range of products through its “24-hour local life services”, the Taobao and Tmall Group said in a statement. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The service covers a wide range of daily necessities, including fresh produce and other groceries, medicine, alcohol, and flowers. Most of these are already covered by Ele.me.

While the service is referred to as one-hour delivery in Chinese, actual delivery times can range from minutes to a few hours, according to its Taobao page.

Meituan and Ele.me delivery workers seen waiting at a traffic light among other electric bike riders on the streets in Shanghai on August 9, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock

Alibaba’s supermarket chain Freshippo and Taiwan-based RT-Mart are also part of the one-hour delivery service, according to Taobao.