The Demise of China's Hottest Online Shopping Craze

WIRED

21-07-2025

Jul 21, 2025 6:30 AM As China's digital economy matures, community group-buying platforms are being replaced by faster, more convenient delivery services. Photography: CFOTO/Getty Images
During the height of the pandemic, a unique kind of online shopping became one of the hottest trends in China's tech industry. Called 'community group buying,' it allowed consumers to save money on everything from apples to iPhones by placing bulk orders together with their friends and family. The model, which was kind of like Groupon meets Instacart, proved especially popular for groceries. But now, China's community group-buying platforms are vanishing one by one.
Late last month, Meituan, the Chinese food delivery giant, announced it was abruptly shutting down its grocery group-buying operations in all but four provinces, surprising many customers and even suppliers.
In March, Alibaba's grocery group-buying arm, Taocaicai, closed down as well. Xingsheng Youxuan, the company that kickstarted the nationwide industry, is now only operating in three provinces, down from 18. Today, Pinduoduo, the Chinese sister company of Temu, is the only major internet platform still offering grocery group-buying across the nation.
Selling groceries is not a business with high margins, and the cost of shipping something as small as a few potatoes may never make financial sense for a tech company. The promise of group-buying, however, was that pooling orders by the dozen and delivering them all to one place might just be profitable enough.
The industry began forming in the late 2010s, but it really grew when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. As Chinese cities went into intermittent lockdowns for three years, going to a grocery store was often impossible, and tech firms seized the chance to digitize and monopolize more everyday activities. While households in the biggest and most developed cities could afford having groceries delivered to their homes directly, people in less developed regions found an alternative in purchasing groceries in groups.
At the start of the 2020s, community group-buying was seen as an innovative solution to the last-mile delivery challenges associated with grocery delivery. But as pandemic lockdowns ended and Chinese companies, including Meituan, continued expanding their dense networks of couriers, they started to offer delivery in as little as 30 minutes, eliminating the need for people to get together with their neighbors to do a group buy.
'Now, instant retail is also coming to the lower-tier cities, so people could also get groceries for maybe the same price as community group-buying but within an hour, instead of waiting for a day and having to pick it up from a community group leader,' says Ed Sander, a tech analyst at Tech Buzz China, who has been tracking the group-buying industry for several years. 'We have arrived at a time when it is almost an old model.'
The day Meituan shut down most of its group-buying services, it also released a statement saying it would expand its instant delivery business. Meituan did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Side Gigs
One of the most interesting aspects of the group-buying business model is that it relies on thousands of contract community leaders. Called tuanzhang —a playful twist on the Chinese term for the military title 'regimental commander'—these people often have deep connections to local communities and are recruited by platforms to promote their services and assemble bulk grocery orders.
In exchange for sales commissions, community leaders sort out the grocery orders, and then either deliver them directly to their neighbors or wait at home for people to come pick them up. Most of the community leaders are either owners of small retail shops or stay-at-home moms and retirees who have plenty of time for a side gig.
Sue, the mother of a 3-year-old in Hangzhou, became a community leader in June last year. (She and another community leader who talked to WIRED requested that we use their online aliases because they are still working with Meituan.) With a young kid, Sue says, this is one of the more flexible jobs she could find. She spends around six hours a day sorting through food items and delivering them to people who live in the same residential complex. 'My mother-in-law would take care of the kid when I'm out delivering the groceries, otherwise it'd be too hard,' she tells WIRED.
Sue manages three group chats with over 1,300 users total, and she says she gets around 60 customers a day on average. When traffic peaks, she earns around $1,300 a month through commissions, roughly the average individual income in Hangzhou.
Group buying platforms were often praised by the public for giving people without a technical background opportunities to participate in the digital economy. But as time went on, the industry was also the subject of plenty of controversies, mostly because it competed with traditional grocery stores and drove them out of business. Amid a wider crackdown on the tech industry, the Chinese government fined five leading group-buying platforms for alleged price manipulation. It became a popular talking point that Chinese tech giants are too consumed with grocery bargains to be investing in hard tech. Money Runs Out
Aside from political concerns, the industry has also been struggling to turn a profit. While placing orders in bulk through community leaders looks like a cost-saving solution on paper, it actually comes with plenty of problems, says Sander. Since the pick-up points are operated by workers not officially affiliated with the platforms, there's no way to control the quality of the service, guarantee food is kept fresh, or standardize the process.
It's clear that the platforms have burnt through their cash by subsidizing customers and paying community leaders at competitive rates. Even startups backed by deep-pocketed Chinese tech giants, like Alibaba and Didi, couldn't escape their eventual fate. While Meituan hasn't shared how profitable its group-buying arm is, it's counted under 'New Initiatives' in its financial reports, which lost nearly $1 billion last year.
Community leaders say they notice that their customer pools have shrunk and their sales commissions are dwindling.
Lingluo, the owner of a small print shop in the southern province of Guangdong, has been a community leader since 2022. The peak of her business was from 2022 to 2023, when she had nearly 500 customers and made about $600 a month from the side business. In 2025 she has about 280 people in her group-buying ordering group chat, but only about 10 regular customers each day.
Lingluo says Meituan also changed its commission structure in May, making it harder to earn as much as before. 'In the past, if you met the bare minimum requirements, you could earn at least 5 RMB ($0.70) a day; now the commission starts at less than 1 RMB ($0.14) a day,' she says, 'So just for a few bucks a day, I still have to run downstairs to pick it up and bring it back up—there's really no point in continuing.'
Even though she lives in a city where Meituan continues to offer group-buying groceries, Lingluo says she chooses to keep her store closed most of the time. The only reason that she hasn't quit completely is that she still wants stable access to cheap groceries for herself, a motivation shared by many community leaders who talked to WIRED.
'I've visited a couple community leaders. When you went into their pickup points, they would have the posters of all of the community group-buying platforms on the wall, and they were working for all four of them, because they couldn't earn any money anymore just working for one,' says Sander.
Some recruiters at Pinduoduo's Duoduo Maicai, the only national grocery group-buying platform left in China, have been publicly reaching out to Meituan's former community leaders on social media, inviting them to join the rival platform. 'We will balance Duoduo Maicai's own development pace with our platform's social responsibilities as we carry out our operations,' a Pinduoduo spokesperson said in an emailed statement to WIRED.
Meanwhile, Meituan and many other Chinese tech companies have moved on to providing groceries primarily through instant delivery, and they are spending a lot in discounts to incentivize customers to use the more premium service. But once they get used to the instant gratification of getting their groceries in less than an hour, it'll be hard for many consumers to go back to group-ordering groceries.
While group-buying is coming to an end, the trend of grocery shopping going digital is not going away in China any time soon. 'You even see some of the older generations starting to get used to buying things online. They even buy on instant retail sometimes three times a day, because they want to have it fresh for every meal,' Sander says.