How Meituan and Pinduoduo are transforming remote Chinese towns with community group buying
- Meituan, Pinduoduo and others are counting on China’s burgeoning community group-buying business to penetrate fast-developing rural areas
- Reliable mobile internet connection allows residents in remote towns to embrace online grocery shopping
Xiang Meiling used to have only one job working at a small local hospital in Lichuan, a remote county on the border between central China’s Hubei province and the megapolis of Chongqing. Nowadays, when she is not attending her duties as a nurse, she runs a WeChat group of 157 members, all of them customers that she introduced to a community group-buying platform from on-demand service giant Meituan.
It all started in December, when Xiang began using Meituan Youxuan, which pools together residents of the same community to purchase groceries and other daily essentials in bulk at a discount. The 27-year-old single mother was so impressed by the selection, price and convenience that she signed up to be a community leader. Now, she spends her two-and-a-half-hour lunch break packing arriving goods at her home nearby and taking care of orders and inquiries from members.
“I used to watch Douyin short videos during my spare time but now I check Meituan and my WeChat group whenever I’m free,” Xiang said, referring to the Chinese sibling app of TikTok.
In Xiang’s tiny hometown of Moudao, the less-than-3km-long main street hosts 10 businesses that double as express courier stations for Meituan Youxuan, including a breakfast restaurant, a milk tea shop, a clothing store and a furniture shop. A neighbouring town has 11 pickup locations for rival Duoduo Grocery, operated by e-commerce platform Pinduoduo. While Meituan and Pinduoduo have established their respective territories, both platforms offer similar services.
Every day, about 20 to 30 people from Xiang’s community place orders on Meituan Youxuan, she said. With a roughly 10 per cent commission on each purchase, she has raised her total monthly earnings by almost 40 per cent.
“This is good extra income for me and I don’t need to put much energy into it,” said Xiang.
The heavy presence of Meituan and Pinduoduo in Lichuan, a mountainous area, demonstrates the enormous reach of Chinese tech giants, which are transforming the lifestyles of people living in some of the remotest corners of the vast country. Community group buying, China’s latest e-commerce trend, is turning previously independent, family-run shops into part of Big Tech’s powerful, algorithm-driven business machines.