Taocaicai exited community group buying — the pickup model went dark nationwide

Community group buying's promise was simple: order tonight, pick up tomorrow at a neighborhood team leader's stall. On the evening of March 25, 2025, users across China got the notice that Taocaicai's next-day pickup service was ending — replaced by a Taobao Maicai farm-direct channel that ships by courier with a three-to-four-day wait, and no plan to bring the pickup model back. The retreat had already begun at the edges: pickup points started closing in cities like Nanchang in December 2024.

The slimming was systematic. In May 2023 Taocaicai merged with Taoxianda into Taobao Maicai and the restructuring started. On the ground the business had withered: one Liaoning team leader said express orders had fallen to three to five a month half a year before the shutdown, and Taobao Maicai's order cutoff came at 10 pm — an hour earlier than rivals' 11 pm. Alibaba framed the exit as focusing on core business: group buying was a marginal, loss-making edge, worth keeping as a traffic entrance but not worth the cost of self-run logistics.

The market it left was a scale game decided by subsidy discipline. Duoduo Maicai approached ¥300 billion of GMV by late November 2025 — more than its own and Meituan Select's combined 2024 totals — in what became one-player dominance; Meituan Select itself announced a nationwide shutdown in December 2025 after more than five years of losses. Suppliers felt the squeeze from the survivors: lower prices demanded, listings gated — one agricultural supplier submitted products to 20 warehouses in February 2025 with zero approvals. The subsidized-grocery era ended with a notification.