This looks like another price-led promotion. Really, it’s a supply chain play and a move to boost use of trade-in programmes. Over the next year, JD and its partners will jointly fund subsidies to lower the cost of upgrading ageing appliances, while using bulk buys to push down upstream costs. What they get is stimulated demand and tightened control over how that demand is fulfilled. 

The scheme spans more than 200 subcategories, from air conditioners and refrigerators to mattresses and bathroom fittings. Consumers trading in old products via JD.com can get additional subsidies of up to 10% on top of existing incentives, directly targeting the problem that has slowed large-scale home upgrades. 

That’s not all. JD is packaging subsidies with a promise of ease. Its delivery, installation, removal and recycling service is positioned as standard, not add-on, with nationwide coverage that extends beyond top-tier Chinese cities. The trade-in model is deliberately loose: old appliances are accepted regardless of brand, age, condition or purchase channel, removing the kind of barriers that have hampered participation in the past. 

Brand partners will see benefits too. Procurement will be centralised, dedicated on-platform traffic and campaign visibility aims to convert subsidy-driven demand into sales. JD is effectively systematising demand and adding fulfilment as a bundled service.

By bundling subsidies with logistics, JD also pulls consumers into its fulfilment ecosystem. The result, as JD aims to have it, will be higher-value purchases, stronger leverage with suppliers, and tighter control over the entire appliance lifecycle, all while locking more users into their platform.  

With platforms this size, price competition can be a game of slim margins. The new subsidy programme is about keeping users loyal to JD’s platform, and not going to the competition next time they need to make one of those high-value appliance purchases. 

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With it, they demonstrate a keen awareness of young Chinese peoples’ fatigue to endless marketing, and turn an early spring trend push into something more akin to experience than a report. 

Tmall and a new approach to trend marketing: A glitch that wasn’t 

The campaign opened with apparent media failure. In Shanghai and Guangzhou, huge TV billboards hung over busy shopping streets stuck on a loading symbol. Something had gone wrong. Passersby filmed the moment, then splashed it across Xiaohongshu, alarmed that the screens had bugged out. 

Only they hadn’t… The glitch was a deliberate hook. Once the glitch-out cleared, screens revealed frames of Tmall’s Early Spring Trend Awards (早春趋势大赏). No product drop (though products were a core part of the campaign). No ramming trends down the throats of consumers. It was more like an invitation to start afresh, step into something new.  

From abstract trends to everyday refreshes 

Too often, trends are packaged in industry language that feels distant from how people actually live. They’re seen but not internalised. Tmall sidesteps this by reframing its ‘early spring trends’ as ‘partial life refreshes (人生局部刷新).’ The idea is clearly aimed at younger consumers.  

In China, that demographic isn’t interested in big, sweeping transformations. They’ve been blasted to the point of deafness with that kind of marketing. Young people are now showing much more interest in small, undramatic changes.  

New trends, old spaces 

When it came to pushing products, they weren’t placed in your typical polished or aspirational settings. Tmall put them in almost eerily dissonant environments. A laptop in an old house, a mattress on the front lawn, shoes used as a flowerpot. As with the glitching screens, they’re grabbing attention with something that feels off.  

In a media environment of consumer fatigue, a move like that feels different. It invites a second look, and with it the possibility of a maybe-I’ll-give-that-a-try type attitude.  

Going offline 

Tmall extends its narrative beyond visuals into interaction, turning trends into something users can explore and enact. On Xiaohongshu, a digital ‘life first-experience’ (人生初体验) pop-up invites users into creaky old house in the virtual world. Each room maps to a trend, shifting audiences from passive viewing to active discovery. Influencers and user-generated content then grounded these ideas in everyday use.  

The campaign later pivots to Shanghai’s F1 buzz, positioning that spring refresh through racing logic: sleep as pit stops, AI as race control, wellness as fuel. Again, those small, repeatable upgrades, but amplified through a high-performance lens.  

Tmall trend marketing: Closing the loop with commerce 

For all its creativity, the campaign remains firmly linked to conversion. Each trend is connected to curated product selections within Tmall, allowing users to move directly from inspiration to purchase. The journey is frictionless: see it, experience it, buy it. And here’s where the strategy comes into focus. The campaign isn’t just about making trends visible. It’s about making them actionable.  

Rather than publishing exhaustive lists or flogging consumers with messaging, Tmall has built environments where trends are no longer explained. They are staged, explored and experienced. In a landscape where attention is fragmented and scepticism is high, it’s an approach that carries weight. 

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At first glance, it looks like another marketplace entering an already crowded field. But JD isn’t playing the usual cross-border game here. Instead of shipping cheap goods from China, the company has spent months building out a network of local infrastructure, including warehousing and its own delivery network under the JoyExpress banner. Their pitch is clear: faster delivery, tighter control and fewer question marks over the authenticity of what you’re buying. 

In the UK, that promise is already being localised. JD says it will offer next-day delivery to around 17 million households, supported by distribution sites in Milton Keynes and Luton – a signal that this is as much a logistics rollout as it is a retail launch. 

And that makes sense because a logistics-first approach is core to how JD operates at home. In China, the company built its reputation on owning inventory and managing fulfilment end-to-end. It’s a model that trades margins for reliability and speed. Now, it’s exporting that playbook to Europe. 

The timing is telling. Growth in China’s e-commerce market has slowed, competition has intensified, and platforms are looking outward for their next phase. Europe, with its dense urban populations and mature online shopping habits, offers a logical testing ground, if a fiercely competitive one… 

The JD.com Joybuy launch: A wider view

JD’s multi-country launch suggests this is more than a trial run. By entering six markets simultaneously, the company is effectively treating Europe as a single logistics network, aiming to build scale quickly and spread costs across borders. Its upcoming €2.2 billion acquisition of German retail group Ceconomy adds another layer, providing local expertise and supplier relationships to support that expansion. 

Unlike platforms such as Temu or AliExpress, which lean on ultra-low pricing and cross-border shipping, JD is betting on local stock and speed. If Temu represents China exporting price, the JD.com Joybuy launch suggests something else: a maturing Chinese retail market with the logistical power to stand up to some serious, established global plays. Amazon should take note.  

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Over the past year, competition in China’s retail and delivery market has intensified, often framed in media as a response to new entrants and the hefty subsidies that drove prices to unsustainable lows. However, pressure has been building in other areas. Meituan has been focusing on 30-minute fulfilment times and Taobao Flash Sale has made similar promises.  

Meituan’s acquisition of Dingdong Maicai narrows the gap between two sectors that have traditionally been somewhat separate: food delivery and e-commerce. A good way to think of this divide is that e-commerce traditionally prioritise cost efficiency over delivery speed, relying on price to win them customers.  

Instant retail, on the other hand, relies on speed. Need a tube of toothpaste, a case of beer, or a carton of milk? Use an app like Meituan and have it in your hands swiftly. The two categories didn’t overlap because when you need that toothpaste, case of beer, or pint of milk, you often need it now.  

What the Meituan Dingdong Maicai acquisition changes

This balance is now eroding. As instant retail moves beyond food delivery and starts eating into everyday household categories, they grab up the kind of high-frequency orders that traditionally helped e-commerce platforms keep a tab on stable business. These purchases were small, but regular and predictable, and thus, operationally important. In effect, Meituan is pulling the rug out from beneath its competition.  

The Meituan Dingdong Maicai acquisition isn’t so much about groceries as it is about infrastructure. It points to a broader battle between delivery platforms and e-commerce players around speed, proximity, and everyday consumption. Rather than trying to replace traditional e-commerce, Meituan is taking a shot at shaping consumer expectations in their favour.  

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As with most of the bizarre things we cover on Dao Insights, this begins online. As with most things online, an exact origin is hard to pin down. What we do know is that somewhere down the tangled line the name Malfoy in Chinese (马尔福) was noted to contain the words ma and fu – horse and fortune.

2026 marking the start of the year of the horse, this seems all too auspicious. Now Draco Malfoy is being slapped across traditional Chinese New Year decorations. Those decos look like red diamonds inked with the character fu (福). They’re stuck on people’s front doors to bring fortune to the household in the year to come – often upside down as the word ‘upside down’ sounds a lot like the word ‘arrive’ in Chinese.

He’s also made it onto fridge magnets and stickers, with Taobao merchants quick to monetise the trend. Social media has been sharing the news, and it’s even reached the actor himself. Yes, Tom Felton has shared a post on Instagram about becoming a symbol of Chinese New Year.

Draco Malfoy: the truly unlikely face of Chinese New Year

Harry Potter, as you might have gathered is very popular in China. Since translated versions of the Harry Potter series went on sale in China in the year 2000, around 200 million copies have been sold. Little doubt JK Rowling expected her character to become the face of the Lunar New Year 26 years later.

But that right there is the joy of covering China: you wake up one morning and a British fictional villain, miscast as luck incarnate through a phonetic accident, has been speed-run through e-commerce and stuck on a front door. What a heady mix of superstition and supply chain support. We wish you a very Draco Malfoy Chinese New Year.

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The setup is simple. Grandma Wang Shuzhen travels to Europe with her granddaughter to see her off on her year studying abroad. The trip becomes a quiet retracing of Wang’s late husband’s life, guided by an old map and unresolved memories that lead the family to Barcelona. The granddaughter, meanwhile, plans a surprise, tracking down a restaurant run by her grandfather’s former apprentice.  

Food plays a big role in China UnionPay’s Lunar New Year film. Tapas is reframed as Chinese dishes. Pizza – a familiar flatbread. Crepes read as sweet jianbing. The point isn’t cultural comparison for its own sake, but emotional overlap: different cuisines, same instincts.  

The film peaks when Wang eats a dish marked ‘Specially for Shuzhen,’ cooked in the style her husband once made. Time collapses, distance disappears. The taste of home becomes a deep and emotionally charged moment.  

UnionPay’s branding stays in the background. Cards appear naturally in restaurants and on the street, reinforcing an accepted-everywhere type message without intruding on the magic of the ad. The most pointed moment comes as Wang hands her UnionPay card to her granddaughter before she begins life abroad. It’s a powerful message of support, trust, inheritance, and rooted in a family-oriented tone that Chinese viewers will find relatable.  

Though China UnionPay’s Lunar New Year film is loosely inspired by Chinese chefs who went abroad in the 90s, the film also hits on a contemporary reality. Chinese families are increasingly global. Children are studying away from home, parents are on business, international destinations are more popular than ever come holiday season.  

For a payment network supported in more than 180 countries, acknowledging that reality seems like a smart option. UnionPay’s real magic, though, is that by pushing a message of home they’re really offering users something that a good home never fails to provide: security, trust, and reassurance. 

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The penalty was levied on Shanghai Xunmeng Information Technology Co. Ltd (上海寻梦信息技术有限公司), the company behind Pinduoduo. The department that did the taxing has said the firm was ordered to rectify lapses of data in late 2025, but despite taking steps, didn’t finish the process in the prescribed time frame.  

So how does this fit the wider picture? Well, the Pinduoduo fine comes under the Measures on Tax-Related Information Reporting by Internet Platform Enterprises, which took effect in 2025 and obliges online platforms to submit quarterly tax data on merchants and workers operating on their services.  

This is part of a wider push by China’s tax authorities to get a grip on digital platforms and bring them under the umbrella of governance. It’s a change in how Beijing regulates technology companies, moving from a period of relatively light supervision to one with clearer and stricter rules for compliance.  

For much of the past decade, China’s digital giants – made up of e-commerce marketplaces, ride-hailing apps, livestreaming platforms, and social-commerce platforms – have grown faster than regulation can keep up. That rapid growth meant that traditional tax systems had trouble pinning down the vast numbers of users, merchants, transactions, and the like.  

In this context, the Pinduoduo fine is something of a warning. The tax bureau is letting China’s internet giants know that they are willing and able to enforce procedural rules, even with small penalties, to build a system where platform giants can be monitored and taxed more consistently. 

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The idea is simple: consumers will be able to browse, compare and choose different dealerships on Meituan, complete purchases and bookings online, and leave service reviews – a familiar model, just applied to a far more expensive product category.  

Meituan car sales: the partnership model  

According to Xiche Technology CEO Jiang Shunyu (蒋舜宇), the company plans to push more than 30 car brands and over 10,000 dealer stores onto Meituan by the end of 2026, building a nationwide online automotive services network.  

This is not about listing cars. It is about building a marketplace-style ecosystem that can standardise discovery, comparison, and evaluation – the same mechanics that already drive decision-making in Meituan’s restaurant ad in-store service businesses.  

In other words, Meituan is attempting to make choosing a dealership feel closer to choosing a restaurant, using platform logic to simplify a traditionally high-friction process.  

Meituan car sales plans: the real product  

The most revealing part of the push is not the consumer-facing ambition, but the infrastructure Meituan is offering behind the scenes. The partnership is positioned as a full-stack digital option for dealerships: onboarding guidance, ongoing tech support, and tools as wide in range as AI livestreaming, store design, order and review management, and data analytics.  

This is a familiar Meituan playbook: empower offline merchants to run platform-native operations, then lock in recurring traffic and transaction volume.  

For dealerships, this is essentially a kind of online second-store model. It promises incremental leads, better conversion, and a way to reach users beyond traditional showroom footfall – especially in an era when attention is fragmented and consumers increasingly start their journey on apps.  

Why cars?  

Cars are the definition of low-frequency, high-value consumption – which is precisely why Meituan is interested. Meituan’s core strength is high-frequency usage. Users open the app for lunch, groceries, coffee, cinema tickets, whathaveyou. The strategy here is to use that constant traffic to drive consideration for a category that normally sits outside daily behaviour. 

This is classic platform economics: use high-frequency categories to subsidise and feed low-frequency ones, then monetise through higher-ticker transactions, advertising and long-term service relationships.  

If Meituan can insert itself into the car-buying journey, it is not just selling vehicles – it is positioning itself to capture downstream spending, from maintenance to accessories to local lifestyle consumption tied to mobility.   

Are the service giants running out of turf? 

Meituan’s timing is not accidental. China’s local services market is entering a more aggressive phase, with Alibaba, JD.com, Douyin, and Kuaishou all pushing into overlapping territory. 

Alibaba has been strengthening its big consumption narrative through the amalgamation of its services under Taobao Flash Sale (淘宝闪购). JD.com has been expanding beyond e-commerce into food-delivery, travel, even coffee, and deepening its own automotive business (which is where Meituan will find its chief competitor).  

There’s an awful lot of stepping on toes. In this environment, the local life war is no longer about who has the best delivery fleet. It’s about who owns the widest range of consumption scenarios – and who can turn platform usage into repeatable growth.  

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It’s a logistics upgrade – but also a strategic one. TikTok Shop has already spent the past two years pushing beyond its Southeast Asian base into western markets, including the UK and U.S. Europe is the next battleground, and TikTok’s advantage is clear: it isn’t just selling products, it’s selling products through content. 

That matters because Europe’s e-commerce market has been tough terrain for cross-border sellers, especially those shipping from China. Delivery times, local returns, and VAT compliance can turn a viral product into a customer service nightmare – not ideal for a platform built on virality. By localising inventory and standardising fulfilment TikTok Shop is trying to remove the friction that most often kills conversion after the click.  

The move also signals intensifying competition. European consumers already buy from Amazon, Temu and Shein. TikTok Shop is betting it can win Europe by bundling marketplace logistics with creator-driven marketing – a combination that traditional platforms can’t replicate.  

For merchants, the new model comes with strings attached. Entry is invite-only for now, and sellers need local European inventory, the ability to ship to designated warehouses in Spain, Germany or Italy, and VAT qualifications in those countries.  

TikTok Shop has said it will support merchants across the full sales cycle, from product listing to content fulfilment, including with subsidies and boosted commissions. This is what happens when social commerce stops acting like a side hustle and starts behaving like big business.  

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Ride-hailing giant Didi (滴滴出行) – often dubbed ‘the Uber of China’ – is currently pushing its discount message with a strong, attention-grabbing ad campaign. At the core of the campaign is brand ambassador Tan Jianci (檀健次). Tan is unmissable. He waves the universal hand signal for OK – but this is not your run-of-the-mill celebrity billboard advertising.  

The copy has Tan drawing attention off himself and onto slashed prices. Lines like: ‘Don’t look at me, look at the hand gesture: 70% off, OK,’ and ‘I don’t care if the weather is OK or not – 70% off must be OK,’ put the focus solely on discount, with Tan speaking directly to consumers. They’ve put these posters up in commuter areas where potential customers are probably thinking a quiet cab ride would be preferable to battling rush hour with the public.  

There are clever cultural elements at play too. The universal OK hand gesture leaves three fingers raised. In China, discount is expressed as how much of the price you will have left to pay (in this case, 30%). But what’s most revealing is Didi’s choice of localisation.  

This campaign didn’t hit big, tier-one, cities like Beijing or Shanghai, but Lanzhou, Handan, Yueyang, and Luoyang – high-frequency, ride-hailing cities where price sensitivity remains acute and daily trips dominate. With that knowledge, the campaign looks less like a play for brand equity, and more like a hard push for scale and conversion.  

We’ve been writing about the importance of localisation in the Chinese market in many forms for many moons. Brands all too often think that they can take on China with a one-size-fits-all playbook. Didi has shown that winning China’s mass market often comes down to reading context rather than projecting ambition. In a category where usage is habitual and margins are thin, the smartest move is not to shout louder, but to be clearer.  

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