A Beijing resident named Jiang Yanxin ordered a “Niu Lai” doll, a character from a viral animated film, while travelling to meet friends for lunch. By the time she reached her table, a courier had arrived at the restaurant with the doll. She ordered on impulse. She received it before the impulse faded.
That transaction is the commercial endpoint of the billion-yuan price war that China’s ecommerce giants fought throughout 2025. Meituan, Alibaba, and JD.com subsidised beverages and meals to get consumers into the habit of expecting fast delivery across all categories. The doll arriving before lunch is over is the habit they were trying to build. It worked.
The Price War That Changed What Chinese Consumers Expect
After a year in which Meituan, Alibaba, and JD.com spent billions of dollars on coupons, free delivery, and merchant incentives, so-called instant retail has emerged as the new battleground in online shopping.
While companies’ spending frenzy moved billions of beverages to thrifty consumers, analysts said the bigger bet was on altering shopping habits, particularly in the largest cities where consumers increasingly expect goods as varied as groceries and cosmetics to arrive within 60 minutes.
“Quick commerce has fundamentally reshaped consumer expectations around convenience and reliability. It is an irreversible lifestyle shift,” Meituan Chief Financial Officer Shaohui Chen said on an earnings call.
The strategic logic was always about what came after beverages and meals. Beverages and meals are high-frequency purchases, they pull consumers back to the app multiple times per day. But they are low-margin items with thin economics per delivery. The value is not in the beverage. It is in the customer relationship and the expectation of speed that the beverage delivery habit creates.
Once a consumer expects their coffee to arrive in 20 minutes, they will expect their cosmetics to arrive in 20 minutes. Each category shift moves the platform from low-margin to high-margin delivery economics while leveraging the infrastructure already established by the low-margin use case. Drink and meal delivery may bring frequent app visits, but the larger opportunity is to convert those visits into purchases of higher-margin non-food items.
The Regulatory Brake That Ended Phase One
The subsidy war did not end because the platforms decided they had achieved their habit-formation goals. It ended because the regulator forced it.
The market regulator summoned Meituan, JD.com, Alibaba, and others multiple times last year, calling out their competitive practices and urging better protection of consumers, merchants, and couriers. In April, it imposed 3.6 billion yuan in penalties.
The ¥3.6 billion in fines forced a structural shift: from subsidy-based competition toward infrastructure and technology competition. The platforms that built the best logistics networks, most efficient routing algorithms, and deepest category coverage during the subsidy war are the ones best positioned to compete in the post-subsidy phase.
Phase Two: AI and Acquisition
Earlier this year, Meituan acquired Dingdong Maicai, and Alibaba integrated instant commerce with an AI agent in its Qwen app. This signals that the battle will move towards different strategic approaches. Meanwhile, Pinduoduo has been experimenting with its own instant retail initiative.
The Alibaba AI agent integration, connecting instant commerce directly to conversational AI in the Qwen app, is the Chinese equivalent of what Amazon is doing with Alexa for Shopping’s Auto-Buy and Buy for Me features: using AI to make the purchase decision frictionless and the delivery expectation embedded in the conversation.
The strategic competition in Phase Two is not about who can subsidise delivery most aggressively. It is about whose infrastructure is most efficient, whose AI can best anticipate and fulfil purchase intent, and whose category coverage in non-food high-margin items is most compelling. These are harder advantages to copy than price subsidies.
The Global Preview That China Is Providing
EcomWatch covered India’s quick commerce this month in two pieces: the festive season hiring surge showing Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart hiring 35-40% more temporary workers for peak season, and the D2C brands using quick commerce as their primary launch platform.
The India quick commerce story and the China instant retail story are the same story at different stages of development. China is 12-18 months ahead of India in the maturity curve. The beverage and grocery habit formation that China’s platforms spent 2025 building with subsidies is what India’s platforms are doing right now with their festive season expansion.
JD.com’s European same-day delivery and installation operation, air conditioners arriving in Paris before lunch, is the same infrastructure export: taking the instant retail model that worked in Chinese cities and applying it to European markets where the expectation has not yet been set but the logistics investment is being made in advance.
The Doll at the Restaurant Table Is the Point
The consumer expectation created by the Niu Lai doll arriving before lunch is the permanent commercial consequence of the price war. Once a consumer has experienced delivery that fast, waiting two days for a delivery feels like a regression rather than a norm. Meituan’s CFO is correct that this is an irreversible lifestyle shift, not because the technology cannot go backwards, but because consumer expectations, once formed, are extraordinarily difficult to walk back.
The Western ecommerce brands that should be most attentive to this are the ones in categories that have been insulated from quick commerce pressure because the delivery infrastructure for those categories did not previously support sub-60-minute fulfilment. That infrastructure is being built now in China, then in India, and progressively in Western markets through the European warehouse buildouts we covered in the JD.com and Amazon AWD pieces.
Our Take
China Spent Billions Teaching Its Consumers to Expect Everything in 60 Minutes
The Chinese instant retail evolution is the most important structural development in global ecommerce this year, and it has received less coverage outside China than it deserves. The price war phase is over. The habit formation succeeded.
The next phase of converting high-frequency app visits into high-margin non-food purchases through AI and superior logistics, will determine which platforms dominate Chinese urban commerce for the next decade. And the global export of that model means the consumer expectations being built in Chinese cities today will be the baseline expectations in Western cities within five years.
