China’s demanding consumers are fuelling a huge new industry

More commonly known on the Mainland as O2O – online to offline – users order products and services online and take delivery in their homes or offices. Industry analyst iResearch expects the O2O market for lifestyle services to reach 1.6 trillion yuan ($240bn) in 2018, almost double its size of 879.7 billion yuan last year.
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Ele.me, one of China’s largest food delivery apps. It started eight years ago as an online food delivery service for Shanghai university students seeking quick and easy meals, and now has 70 million users and handles five million food orders daily.
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In contrast, US food delivery company Grubhub, which owns the Grubhub and Seamless apps, has about 7.4 million active users and gets an average of 271,000 daily orders.
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Labour and logistics costs are also lower in China than in other developed markets, making it much less costly to provide such on-demand services, says Wan Yuchen, a Shanghai-based analyst in China Market Research Group.
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For example, food delivery services in China often run promotions that offer free delivery, and the average cost of standard delivery is usually about $1.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160921-chinas-demanding-consumers-are-fuelling-a-huge-new-industry