Taobao Shangou

Taobao Shangou is the online food delivery and local life service platform of Alibaba Group.[1][2] Founded in 2008 and known until 2025 as Ele.me, it was the second largest online food delivery service platform in China as of 2023.[3][4]

History

Taobao Shangou is an online-to-offline (O2O) catering and food delivery platform in China. It was founded as Ele.me by Mark Zhang and Jack Kang in Minhang Campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2008 and now is developed and operated by Lazhasi Network Technology (Shanghai) Co., LTD. By the end of December in 2016, Ele.me had covered more than 2000 cities in China, with more than 1.3 million joining shops, 15 thousand staff and more than nine million daily orders. Also, over three million riders had registered under Fengniao Delivery (the sub-service of Ele.me).

Union

On 20 April 2017, under the support and guidance of Beijing Food and Drug Administration, major online meal ordering platforms including Ele.me, Meituan Dianping, Baidu Takeaway and Daojia established an online meal ordering platform self-discipline union voluntarily.[19]

The CEOs of the four platforms made a statement and signed the "Self-discipline Convention on Online Takeaway Ordering Platform's Union" together. This convention promised solemnly to the society from 14 aspects including the proprietors’ pre-join promise, platform admission, and the improvement of the records management and information publicity of the proprietors. Its specific contents includes: establishing food security institutes and voluntarily publish information to the society on the homepages of the platforms; tightening the regulation of platform admission; submitting the management data and information to the Food and Drug Administration regularly and actively; taking linked supervision and punitive measures among the platforms, and simultaneously removing the restaurants that violate the rules from all the platforms; jointly strengthening the safety training of the riders; paying attention to improve the online advertising and the training of the proprietors; advertising and promoting the "Sunshine Food" project, etc.[19]

Litigation

In May 2021, a delivery driver named Liu died of a stroke while delivering food for Ele.me.[22] Liu had an outsourcing cooperation agreement with a third party agency and had no direct employment relationship with Ele.me.[22] His family sued both the outsourcing firm and Ele.me, arguing that Ele.me should also be responsible in the death for its failure to exercise due care.[22] In November 2022, the Chaoyang District Court ruled in favor of Liu's family, stating that the platform itself was partly liable because it had the capacity to monitor delivery updates but failed to give timely updates to the outsourcing agency, resulting in delayed medical response to Liu.[22] The Chaoyang District Court launched a media campaign to promote the decision.[22]

type	Subsidiary
industry	Online food delivery
founded	2008
founders	Mark Zhang Jack Kang
location	Shanghai, China
area served	2000+ cities in China
parent	Alibaba Group
website	https://ele.me

History

Union

Acquisition by Alibaba Group

Litigation

Further reading

References