Internal testing for Douyin’s food delivery service Xindong Waimai has been completed after two months, according to a report by Chinese media outlet Tech Planet.
Douyin’s parent company, ByteDance, has made a series of moves to enter the food delivery sector, where incumbents Meituan and Alibaba’s Ele.me share 98.2% of the market share, according to data from CBNData and Trustdata.
To avoid direct competition with the two dominant firms, Douyin is using its own short video platform as a channel to develop its takeaway business. The platform will take advantage of its livestreaming traffic and encourage viewers to place meal orders directly from the livestream.
Livestreams on Douyin may feature meals made by restaurants near a user, and an order function will be active during the livestream. Food delivery pages will also be developed as mini programs in Douyin’s app.
What sets Douyin’s Xindong apart from Meituan and Ele.me’s services is that the actual delivery will be managed and executed by restaurants themselves. That means Douyin will not hire fleets of gig workers to ferry meals to their destinations.
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