Taobao’s daily orders soar as China’s instant e-commerce war heats up

Alibaba Group Holding is seeing a rapid acceleration in the volume of on-demand delivery transactions, the latest sign of growing rivalry with Meituan and JD.com in China’s instant e-commerce market.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The figures were released a day after Meituan, Alibaba’s bigger rival in the on-demand delivery sector, announced it had achieved record orders for its instant delivery service. On Saturday, Meituan said daily transaction volume covering food and retail goods had reached an all-time high of 120 million, briefly crashing its servers in certain areas.

The Alibaba figures reflect the rapid progress achieved by Taobao Instant Commerce, which was launched in late April as the company’s answer to Meituan’s Instashopping and JD.com’s food delivery service. The service reached 10 million daily orders within its first week and 40 million within the first month.

Transaction volumes have accelerated over the past few weeks as e-commerce players started to offer more discounts and subsidies to boost consumption during the peak summer season. It took the platform nearly a month to grow daily orders from 40 million to 60 million, but just 12 days to gain another 20 million.