A few days ago, a source revealed that JD's instant retail business "Hourda" is about to undergo a brand upgrade and be renamed "Second Delivery", and the relevant team is currently brewing an official announcement. At the same time, the source also pointed out that "Second Delivery" will show its strength this summer, "For example, during the European Championship, 'Second Delivery' will vigorously promote the fastest delivery of cold beer".
Although the relevant news has not yet been officially announced, some users have reported that the "Hour Delivery" page alongside the "Home Page" of JD Retail on the main station of JD has been renamed "Second Delivery", and the logo of "Second Delivery" has also appeared on the homepage of the merchant.
The change of the brand name from "hour" to "second delivery" obviously means that in the track of instant retail, Jingdong will take the lead in opening the time limit for fulfillment. This idea is obviously aimed at "avoiding consumers from waiting too long", and it is also the theoretical basis of instant delivery.
In fact, in recent years, JD.com has been extremely concerned about the instant retail business. Previously, in October 2023, JD.com released the three-kilometer model of instant retail, and said at the media communication conference, "Instant retail is an important part of JD.com to provide consumers with a more 'faster, better and cheaper' consumption experience, and it is also an important part of working with merchants and brand partners to cope with external challenges and achieve steady growth." This year, instant retail is regarded as one of the three must-win battles by JD.com, and is ranked alongside "content ecology" and "open ecology".
Previously, in March this year, Jingdong's "Hour" also took the initiative to lower the threshold of free shipping and launched the "Free Shipping for 29 Yuan" activity. According to the relevant data released by the official, this service has now covered nearly 9% of the stores on the platform, and has promoted a 25% month-on-month increase in the number of users who place orders.
As for the reason for JD.com's increase in instant retail, it is actually not complicated. According to the "White Paper on the Development Trend of Instant Retail in 2023" released by China International Electronic Commerce Center, Jingdong Consumer and Industrial Development Research Institute and Dada Group Research Institute, it is expected that the instant retail market will grow at an average annual compound growth rate of 25% from 2023 to 2030, and is expected to increase to 3.6 trillion yuan by 2030, equivalent to 6% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in the same period. With a trillion-level market size and a very high growth rate, JD.com, as an e-commerce giant and already has growth anxiety, naturally does not want to miss this cake.
As a "communication" B-end and C-end service, JD Instant Retail wants to improve the timeliness of fulfillment and complete the leap from "hourly delivery" to "second delivery", it also needs to further expand the scope of cooperative merchants to enrich supply, and in terms of digital intelligence and operational capabilities, such as analyzing user behavior and habits through deep learning algorithms, completing user demand insights, and carrying out route planning and capacity scheduling.
In addition, before unmanned delivery technology is truly implemented and applied on a large scale, riders are undoubtedly still the main capacity of many instant retail platforms. This also means that if JD.com's "Hour Reach" wants to speed up, it will inevitably need more riders. What's more, in terms of capacity, there is still a gap between JD.com's "hourly delivery" and its competitor Meituan.
It is understood that as the source of capacity of JD.com's "Hour", as of 2023, Dada has about 1.2 million active riders. By comparison, Meituan has more than 6 million riders. And even Meituan has begun to seek outside support. Previously, in 2023, Meituan has announced that it has reached cooperation with third-party transportation capacity providers such as SF Express, Flash Delivery, and UU errands, and will combine its own distribution system to provide merchants with richer transportation capacity options together with a number of partners.
The reason for this is that, as a new consumption scenario, Meituan's instant retail flash sale has obvious peaks and troughs with Meituan Takeaway, and user demand is relatively more random, and it is scattered in various times throughout the day, which means that Meituan's Takeaway capacity can be mobilized outside peak periods, thereby improving order density and capacity utilization. Conversely, during peak dining hours, capacity allocation can become an important factor in the user experience. What's more, with the continuous increase in volume, flash sales are bound to increase the burden on Meituan's existing transportation capacity system.
In fact, Jingdong's "Hour Reach" is also facing the same problem, that is, although Dada is "its own family", it also has its own business, and obviously it can't serve only one family. Therefore, it is almost expected that with the fulfillment time of JD.com's open-book instant retail, the battle for transportation capacity is bound to further intensify.
The intensification of the competition for transportation capacity will inevitably further increase the pressure on new players, including Douyin and Tencent, who are exploring the instant retail business but have not yet established their own transportation capacity system. Taking Douyin as an example, with its advantages in traffic and content ecology, as well as third-party transportation capacity such as flash delivery and UU errands, it has now become a participant in the instant retail track second only to Meituan Flash Sale, JD.com's "Hourda", and Ele.me.
However, as the battle for capacity intensifies, it may be difficult for third-party service providers to fully meet the needs of these platforms at the same time. In other words, although platforms such as Meituan cannot prevent platforms such as Douyin from cooperating with third-party service providers, they can go down in person and use their own business volume to grab capacity. After all, for any capacity service provider, whose business is not to do?
Therefore, for participants such as Douyin, they may eventually need to build their own distribution system. And even if it's for the sake of closing the loop on the business, it's unlikely that a third party will always be in charge of the important part of the contract. But the question is how much time is left for them when the market competition is already so fierce.
[The picture in this article comes from the Internet]