by Mary Ma

JDDJ and Shop Now, the on-demand retail business jointly launched by JD.com, and Dada Group (Nasdaq: Dada), has reported great growth amidst significant expansion over the last 12 months in recent annual results.

In particular, the home alliance category has seen large growth. In March, JD.com published the “JD.com Helps the High-Quality Development of the Home Appliance Industry White Paper”. The white paper revealed that the home appliance industry is embracing the innovative on-demand retail, to achieve growth.

In 2022, sales in this category on JD Shop Now increased by more than 9 times year-over-year, making it of the most important channels for top home appliance brands.

As the key players in JD.com’s omni-channel service, JD Shop Now and JDDJ has connections to 11,000 brick-and-mortar home appliance stores, which accounts for about 60% of the top home appliance manufacturers and covered 300 cities in China.

As the on-demand retail business in JD.com’s ecosystem, JDDJ provides consumers with a service of “order online, deliver from nearby stores within one hour”. Based on analysis of home appliance trends, JDDJ identified the pain points of physical stores and provided integrated solutions in connecting off- and on-line inventories, user and service digitalization, to optimize cost, efficiency and experience.

As for large and heavy appliances, together with well-known merchants, JDDJ has established a “deliver and install” service, which can be fulfilled as quickly as the next day. The innovative service has greatly improved consumers’ experiences in home appliance consumption.

Since last year, home appliance’s on-demand retail business has been growing rapidly, and the online sales of offline stores are expected to exceed RMB 10 billion yuan in the next two years.

The key of on-demand retail is the digitalization of traditional stores. As the representative of open platform model, JDDJ does not touch the inventory, and brings high quality products and services to consumers together with all-category retailers and brand owners on-board.

By merging the borders of online and offline shopping, the omni-channel retailing model extensively integrates physical and digital channels, resources and capabilities to bring the ultimate experience to consumers while stimulating greater consumer potential.

At present, there is a surging need from retailers and brand owners for access to online traffic and efficient on-demand fulfillment solutions. More retailers are now starting to build their own O2O team and by leveraging JDDJ, they can expand their on-demand retail business rapidly.