If Meituan hadn't touched community group buying back then, Taobao Flash Sales wouldn't be able to turn the tables today.

I previously wrote an article on why Meituan Select closed down, which garnered over 100k reads. The conclusion was that it shouldn't have been launched in the first place.

Looking back over the past few years with a six-month perspective, one can't help but sigh. Community group buying indeed trapped Meituan, and the impact was immense.

Around 2020, the e-commerce battlefield was filled with smoke. Alibaba and JD.com were overwhelmed by the rise of Pinduoduo, which can be said to have attracted the vast majority of the firepower.

Amidst the roaring artillery, Meituan could have stayed out of it, taking advantage of the perfect window period to develop quietly under the "blind spot."

Unfortunately, Meituan couldn't resist the temptation of community group buying and plunged headfirst into this big pit.

Referencing Didi back then, it also couldn't resist this temptation, desperately wanting a second growth curve. It lost 30 billion yuan in a year before realizing it didn't have the talent for it, and obediently admitted defeat and withdrew.

Didi struggled for just one year, and the cost was already so high. Yet Meituan endured a full five years of hardship on its Select business.

This isn't just about the tens of billions in losses on the books; strategic focus and organizational structure were also dragged down by the Select business, locked in a bitter battle with Pinduoduo.

Community group buying is a more arduous quagmire than food delivery. It required Meituan to go deep into the fields, untangle the complex agricultural supply chain, and build tens of thousands of grid warehouses.

To engage in close combat with Pinduoduo on this low-margin, long-chain battlefield, Meituan had to divert its most elite teams and most precious cash flow.

But the community group buying business was never Meituan's original target audience or within its core competency. It ultimately ended without success; losing to Pinduoduo was only a matter of time. Precisely because it consumed too many strategic resources on community group buying, although Meituan remained dominant in the food delivery market over the past few years, it painfully missed the golden development opportunities for its Flash Delivery and front-end warehouse businesses. If Meituan hadn't been distracted back then and had instead solidified the "deliver everything" mindset earlier, how could it have let Taobao seize the brand recognition for "Flash Delivery," leading to brand ambiguity today? It launched the front-end warehouse business as early as 2019. After so many years of development, Little Elephant Supermarket only covered 30 cities by December 2025, and today it covers 46 cities. In just under two months recently, Little Elephant Supermarket has been aggressively expanding. This belated explosive force 恰恰 proves the strategic inertia of those years. What were they doing earlier? Actually, think carefully about these three businesses: community group buying, front-end warehouses, and flash delivery. Front-end warehouses and flash delivery are additions built upon Meituan's existing instant delivery moat, like building on a solid foundation, both serving the core urban target audience. The Select business, however, targeted a completely unfamiliar audience and market, essentially rolling around in someone else's quagmire.

Every company has its limits, and the same applies to Meituan.

The sluggishness of Flash Delivery and the tepid progress of front-end warehouses are closely related to Meituan being lost in community group buying for too long.

Thinking about it now, the five years of misplaced efforts and opportunity costs are truly lamentable.

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