Shanghai-based on-demand grocery retail platform JD Daojia has recently added “dozens of supermarket chains” to its offering, according to a press release of the platform owner, Dada Group, on Thursday.
The platform, which went online in 2015, promises delivery within one hour to city dwellers ordering online groceries. The firm said that the newly added supermarket chains will allow the platform to expand its coverage.
Bailian Group, a company that owns the Lianhua Supermarket chain with more than 3,401 stores in eastern China, and Ximate, which operates 23 supermarkets in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou province in Southwest China, are both among JD Daojia’s new partners.
These new partners followed the footsteps of Tencent-backed supermarket chain operator Yonghui, which joined JD Dajia in 2015, and multinational retailer giant Walmart, also investor in the firm, which partnered in 2016.
Walmart’s sales in July 2019 via JD Daojia were 13 times larger than sales in October 2016, when the retailer first debuted on the platform, said Dada in a press release, without delivering detailed sales value.
In 2018, Walmart invested USD 320 million in Dada-JD Daojia, which was created by the merging of JD Daojia and the crowdsourced logistics platform Dada in 2016. The company was later renamed as Dada Group earlier this year.
China’s major B2C e-commerce platform JD.com is also an investor in JD Daojia. The services of the firm are currently available on the jd.com website and app.
JD Daojia has covered more than 600 cities and counties in China and has gathered more than 74 million registered users, 30 million of whom are active, said Dada Group in its press release, adding that the number of daily orders on JD Daojia hit 1.5 million.
However, the startup does not lack rivals as Alibaba’s new retail platform Hema and Tencent-backed MissFresh are both targeting consumers who predilect online-to-offline convenience.