Alibaba’s food delivery platform Ele.me has quietly undergone a rebrand during the Double 11 shopping season and has been renamed as Taobao Flash Sale (Taobao Shangou).
Ele.me was founded in 2009 and rose to become a leading food delivery platform in China before Alibaba and Ant Group acquired it for $9.5 billion in 2018. In June this year, Alibaba absorbed Ele.me into the group’s core China e-commerce division as part of a broader strategy to create a “comprehensive consumer platform”, as competition with food delivery market leader Meituan intensified.
Ele.me’s long-standing blue brand identity has been removed. The change has sparked conversation on Weibo as users noticed delivery riders across Chinese cities in new orange-and-black uniforms that mirror Taobao’s look and feel. The app's icon also now displays the 'Double 11 Taobao Flash Sale' logo. Ele.me's customer service centre stated that the change is merely a rebranding, with no impact on user rights, data privacy policies, or delivery capacity.
Alibaba refused to comment at the time of publication.
The rebrand comes as Alibaba is pushing into instant retail. Taobao Flash Sale has further launched the Taobao Convenience Store, a branded convenience retail model that went live in China on November 1.
“We are committed to mutual growth within the ecosystem. We don’t build warehouses, open stores, or compete with merchants,” said Gen Xian, general manager of Instant Retail at Taobao Flash Sale, in a statement.
Bigger ambitions for Taobao Flash Sale are clear. During Alibaba's August earnings call, Fan Jiang, CEO of the Alibaba e-commerce business group, said the platform had already exceeded mid-term goals for scale and consumer mindshare and aims to “lead the industry in operational efficiency”.
He added that Alibaba plans to bring more than one million Tmall-branded offline stores onto the Taobao Flash Sale platform to strengthen its online-offline retail integration. The company expects instant retail and flash-sale formats to generate an additional RMB 1 trillion ($140 billion) in transaction volume over the next three years.
