Beijing-based grocery retailer MissFresh started to sell goods on JD.com’s main app and its affiliate platform JD Daojia at the beginning of this month, JD Daojia’s parent Dada Nexus said on its official WeChat account on Thursday.
JD Daojia will offer about half of MissFresh’s 4,000 products, Dada confirmed to KrASIA. The platform will charge MissFresh commission and fulfillment fees for each transaction. Dada’s logistics fleet will deliver the items ordered by MissFresh’s customers through JD’s apps.
MissFresh runs its own app and operates more than 500 brick-and-mortar stores that also serve as distribution points for the goods shipped to buyers in 16 cities, including Beijing and Shanghai.
While MissFresh mainly provides produce that it sources directly from farms, JD Daojia distributes goods for various supermarkets, serving as their online sales channel. Despite the differences, the two platforms competed for the same end consumers who like to have fresh food delivered directly to their homes.
As early as 2018, Alibaba, Meituan, and JD.com all intended to acquire MissFresh but stopped their pursuits as the firm’s valuation was too high, Bailian Consulting founder Zhuang Shuai told KrASIA on Thursday.
MissFresh, which counts Tencent among its investors, reportedly submitted an application for an IPO in the US earlier this month. “There might be some difficulties for MissFresh to get listed as its revenue size is still relatively small because of its business model,” Zhuang said.
This cooperation with JD.com, which is also backed by Tencent and owns a 51% stake in Dada, might be driven by MissFresh’s desire to break out of its growth bottleneck, Zhuang added.
