Douyin's food delivery service has re-emerged, aiming to capture a portion of both the dine-in and home delivery markets. With this new strategy, which company—Meituan, Alibaba, or JD.com—should be most concerned?
On March 5, Douyin rebranded its "Suixin Tuan" service to "Douyin Jisong." According to Douyin Life Services, the upgrade was driven by "increasing user demand for high-quality food delivery."
Data shows that as of early December 2025, over 3,000 brands had joined the "Suixin Tuan" program. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the daily average gross merchandise volume (GMV) for chain merchants using "Suixin Tuan" increased by 211% compared to the first quarter of the same year.
Over the past year, while Meituan, Alibaba, and JD.com engaged in a fierce battle in the food delivery sector, burning nearly 100 billion yuan, Douyin remained on the sidelines. Many assumed it had withdrawn from the competition, only to realize now that it was simply waiting for the right moment to execute its own strategy.
Douyin's approach is asset-light: it avoids handling logistics, does not compete on delivery speed, and focuses solely on what it does best—content-driven product discovery. Despite its light model, the company has ambitious goals: Douyin Life Services aims for a growth rate of around 50% in 2026.
More importantly, Douyin has substantial financial resources. In 2024, ByteDance, Douyin's parent company, reported a net profit of 241.5 billion yuan, earning 660 million yuan per day on average, making it the most profitable internet company in China.
With strong financial backing, Douyin can afford to experiment gradually and increase investment at critical moments. As Douyin re-enters the market with its deep pockets, industry observers are watching closely to see which competitor will be most affected.
After four years of trial and error, Douyin has shifted its food delivery strategy away from direct competition. The company's persistence in this sector dates back to the summer of 2021, when it launched "Xindong Waimai," hoping to leverage its vast user base to drive transactions. However, the initiative failed because users primarily open Douyin for entertainment, not to order food. Additionally, relying entirely on third-party logistics led to uncontrollable delivery times and costs.
In the following years, Douyin experimented with different approaches. In late 2022, it piloted "Tuangou Peisong," focusing on high-value group meals for multiple people and using content to stimulate planned purchases. Although it initially set a GMV target of 100 billion yuan, high delivery costs and low order volume remained unresolved issues, leading to a quiet scaling back by the end of 2023.
A significant turning point came in 2024. Throughout that year, Douyin underwent frequent internal restructuring. In April, Douyin Life Services was moved from the local services division to the e-commerce division to align with the "Xiaoshi Da" instant retail business. By June, "Tuangou Peisong" stopped accepting new merchants and fully transitioned to the "Doudian·Jiashou Waimai" platform. In August, the business was reassigned to the local services division. Finally, in November, the "Suixin Tuan" service was officially launched, adopting a "one-product, dual-sales" model that allows the same group purchase offer to be used for both dine-in and home delivery. The service initially invited high-quality dine-in merchants through an exclusive selection process.
After multiple adjustments, a new logic became clear: instead of competing head-on in logistics, Douyin would leverage its own strengths to bypass the most challenging aspects of the business.
The subtlety of this model lies in its fundamental difference from Meituan's approach. Meituan's food delivery service centers on instant logistics—users open the app with the intention of ordering food, making decisions based on distance, ratings, and delivery fees. In contrast, Douyin's "Suixin Tuan" relies on content-driven discovery—users stumble upon videos that spark a desire to order, with decisions based on interest and context. The former is "search-based commerce," while the latter is "discovery-based commerce." Meituan builds its own delivery network, treating speed as a critical factor, while Douyin has explicitly stated it has "no plans to build its own delivery system," outsourcing all logistics to third parties.
This means Douyin is not trying to compete directly with Meituan on speed, cost, or convenience. Instead, it is building a lighter business model—focusing on connecting users and merchants without handling fulfillment.
In March of this year, "Suixin Tuan" was officially renamed "Douyin Jisong." The name change signals Douyin's intention to transition this light model from a trial phase to regular operation. Following the rebranding, the service gained greater visibility within the app. Users searching for keywords like "waimai" or "jisong" can now access a dedicated page where nearby group purchase items available for home delivery are displayed in a feed format. Additionally, Douyin has begun testing "live-streamed instant delivery" in select cities, allowing users to order home delivery directly from live-stream shopping links, further shortening the path from content discovery to transaction.
Despite these developments, Douyin remains cautious in its strategy. According to a report by Leifeng citing a source close to Douyin Life Services, the focus for Douyin Jisong in 2026 will still be on "expanding product categories and increasing user awareness," rather than engaging in a delivery-speed arms race.
After four years of experimentation, Douyin has finally concluded that it does not need to compete head-on in the food delivery war. If it cannot win on logistics, it will compete on content; if it cannot excel in "speed and affordability," it will focus on "see it, buy it."
While Douyin has been refining its strategy, the competitive landscape in the food delivery sector has also evolved. According to third-party industry reports, Meituan still holds about half of the market, although its share has declined from 70% to 50%, and its defense costs have risen significantly. Alibaba has turned food delivery into a tool for activating its e-commerce ecosystem, burning cash but achieving synergistic benefits, with its market share quietly climbing to over 40%. JD.com entered the market with a high-profile push, carving out a small niche with its "premium food delivery" positioning but finding itself constrained in a narrow segment.
The defensive, synergistic, and positioning strategies of these players are reflected in their financial reports and business layouts.
Meituan, as the market leader, is primarily in a defensive position. Its Q3 2025 financial report showed an operating loss of 14.1 billion yuan in its core local commerce segment, compared to a profit of 14.5 billion yuan a year earlier. Sales and marketing expenses nearly doubled, rising from 18 billion yuan to 34.3 billion yuan year-on-year. However, this defensive spending has helped stabilize its market share—Meituan still accounts for over 70% of high-value orders (those above 30 yuan). According to J.P. Morgan, Meituan's market share by order volume was approximately 50% as of Q3.
In response to competitive pressures from JD.com and Alibaba, Meituan has adopted an all-encompassing strategy: subsidizing users, reducing commissions for merchants, and incentivizing delivery riders. During an earnings call in May 2025, CEO Wang Xing stated firmly, "We will spare no effort to win this competition." By Q3, he clarified that Meituan would "make necessary investments to maintain its leadership position but will not engage in a price war." Together, these statements indicate a defensive yet rational approach.
While this strategy has stabilized Meituan's core business, it has come at the cost of rising expenses. As the industry leader, however, Meituan has little choice but to respond to competitors' moves.
Alibaba has the clearest strategic intent among the three. In 2025, the company completed an eight-month strategic reorganization, upgrading Ele.me to "Taobao Flash Purchase," integrating it with Tmall flagship stores and Cainiao's supply chain to synergize with Taobao's one billion annual active buyers. The goal is not merely to compete in food delivery but to use instant retail as a high-frequency touchpoint to revitalize its core e-commerce business.
Specifically, Alibaba leverages the high frequency of food delivery to drive traffic and conversions for its e-commerce platform, while e-commerce’s diverse product range supports instant retail. By the end of October 2025, around 3,500 Tmall brands had integrated their offline stores into the instant retail business. As a result, Alibaba's instant retail revenue reached 22.9 billion yuan in Q3, up 60% year-on-year, with daily orders peaking at 120 million in August. According to J.P. Morgan, Taobao Flash Purchase's market share had risen to 42% by November.
The underlying strength of Alibaba's model lies in ecosystem synergy. While it also incurs high costs, part of Alibaba's spending is recouped through traffic conversion into e-commerce revenue—an advantage the other two players cannot replicate.
JD.com, the initiator of this intense competition, has the simplest model. In February 2025, it entered the market with a high-profile "zero commission + ten-billion-yuan subsidy" campaign, offering full social security benefits to its delivery riders and quickly establishing a "premium food delivery" differentiation.
Through low commissions, rider benefits, and self-operated kitchens, JD.com captured a portion of the market from Meituan and Alibaba. In 2025, its new business segment, which includes food delivery, generated 49.3 billion yuan in revenue, up 157.3% year-on-year.
However, the cost was evident in its financials: the new business segment reported an annual operating loss of 46.6 billion yuan, with marketing expenses surging 75.1% to 84 billion yuan.
In November 2025, JD.com CEO Xu Ran stated during an earnings call that the food delivery business was still in the first phase of strategic layout, with the goal of becoming independently sustainable—implying it is not yet self-sufficient. More recently, Xu indicated that total investment in the food delivery business would decrease in 2026 compared to the previous year.
Each of the three companies is playing a different game, with distinct strategies and varying challenges. Meituan has the largest market share but the heaviest model, adopting a clear defensive stance. Alibaba has the most clever model, using ecosystem synergy to share the cost of competition, allowing flexibility. JD.com occupies the narrowest position, with a clear focus but a limited ecosystem, facing the lowest growth ceiling.
As Douyin re-enters the arena with "Douyin Jisong," the dynamics of the competition are shifting once again. By participating in both dine-in and home delivery markets with its unique approach, which player will feel the impact most?
The answer varies. Some will face direct competition, others will experience indirect pressure, and some may struggle even before being directly challenged.
The first segment under threat is Meituan's dine-in business. From the outset, Douyin's "Suixin Tuan" has targeted Meituan's dine-in market. The cleverness of the "one-product, dual-sales" model lies in combining dine-in group purchases and home delivery within the same product link. Users discover offers through videos and can choose to dine in or have the food delivered. While seemingly expanding the food delivery market, the model actually uses content to influence dine-in purchase decisions—and content is Douyin's strongest asset.
With over one billion monthly active users, Douyin's traffic distribution logic is fundamentally different from Meituan's. The "discovery-based commerce" approach is reshaping how dine-in consumption traffic is allocated.
Moreover, in the summer of 2025, Douyin selected several "offensive cities" where it offered higher subsidies. While standard cities received 4% in subsidies, offensive cities saw rates of 6% to 7.5%, with top merchants receiving up to 10%—double Meituan's rates. In Jinan, one of the first offensive cities, Douyin's dine-in group purchase GMV surpassed Meituan's by the end of 2025, thanks to aggressive subsidies.
According to Leifeng, Douyin Life Services' GMV reached nearly 100 billion yuan in December 2025 alone, with annual GMV hitting 850 billion yuan, a 59% year-on-year increase. In contrast, Meituan's dine-in growth slowed significantly due to the food delivery war—Nomura research indicated that Meituan's dine-in growth was only 23% during the same period, likely missing its 25% target for the year.
In this battle, Meituan is losing more than just growth. Data cited by the media outlet "Wealth Intelligence Bureau" suggests that from 2024 to 2025, Meituan's dine-in market share fell from 61.3% to 59.8%, while Douyin's rose from 38.7% to 40.2%. In terms of post-redemption transaction value, the ratio between the two narrowed from approximately 7:3 in 2024 to 6:3.7 in 2025.
This represents Meituan's real vulnerability: while it has defended its share in food delivery, its highly profitable dine-in business—the core of its earnings—is being gradually eroded by Douyin's content-driven model.
Alibaba is also not immune to pressure. The existence of Taobao Flash Purchase serves as a reference for Douyin. If Alibaba can use its financial muscle to break into the food delivery market, can Douyin do the same?
Douyin certainly has the resources. As of March 5, Hurun Research's "2026 Hurun Global Rich List" showed that ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, with a fortune of 550 billion yuan, had become China's richest person, with his wealth growing 32% year-on-year.
Among Chinese internet companies, ByteDance's 2024 net profit of 241.56 billion yuan far exceeded Tencent's 194.07 billion yuan and Alibaba's 79.7 billion yuan, making it the most profitable internet company in the country.
Moreover, Douyin's content platform is more effective at product discovery than Taobao. The path from seeing a product on Douyin to making a purchase is shorter than searching on Taobao.
Although Taobao Flash Purchase is growing rapidly, Douyin Life Services still aims for 50% growth in 2026. If Douyin maintains this pace and continues to influence user dining decisions through content, Alibaba's dine-in group purchase business will eventually be affected. Can Alibaba rest easy? Probably not.
However, among the three, JD.com may be the most vulnerable. Meituan, with the largest market share, has ample resources and flexibility to respond. Alibaba benefits from ecosystem synergy, allowing it to adapt easily. What about JD.com? It entered the market with a differentiated "premium food delivery" positioning, capturing over 15% market share by the end of 2025, but at the cost of a 46.6 billion yuan annual loss in its new business segment.
A more significant challenge is its investment rhythm. How can a business that is not yet self-sufficient and requires continuous funding to maintain its share withstand Douyin's offensive if investment decreases? Douyin's "one-product, dual-sales" model is not only encroaching on the dine-in market but also penetrating home delivery, as some users who discover offers through Douyin will choose delivery.
Can JD.com protect the market share it painstakingly captured from its larger rivals?
One thing is certain: in this game, no player can afford to be complacent.
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