ELE.ME, the food delivery platform owned by Alibaba Group Holding, now displays the Taobao Instant Commerce name on its app, a change that has fueled speculation that the Chinese e-commerce giant may be preparing to merge its food delivery and instant retail operations under one umbrella.

After updating to version 12.0.1 of the Ele.me app, users found Monday that it was renamed Taobao Instant Commerce. The New Times reported that the change is part of a trial run by Alibaba to integrate its food delivery and instant retail businesses, aiming to strengthen its position as a unified on-demand services platform.

Hangzhou-based Alibaba launched Taobao Instant Commerce in April to offer on-demand delivery across a wide range of product categories, including food and electronics, to fend off rivals Meituan and JD.Com. It has been available nationwide from a shortcut on the Taobao app since May 6.

Ele.me has been tightly connected with Taobao Instant Commerce from the outset, offering joint subsidies to consumers, shared supply chain access, and a common pool of delivery riders. These overlaps have fueled market speculation that Alibaba intends to combine the two into a single on-demand retail platform.

A source at Taobao Instant Commerce said that Taobao, Alibaba’s online shopping platform, had already added many product categories and brands to its instant retail operations, while further advancing Ele.me’s warehousing, delivery, instant fulfillment, supercomputing systems, and mapping services capabilities.

“Consolidating our advantages for all-round collaboration has always been Alibaba’s style of doing business,” the person noted.

Alibaba is actively encouraging stores on Tmall, its online business-to-consumer sales platform, to join Taobao Instant Commerce to enable integrated online-offline operations, Jiang Fan, chief executive of Alibaba E-Commerce Business Group, said during an earnings conference call in August.

“We expect as many as 1 million branded offline stores to join Taobao Instant Commerce,” Jiang predicted.

Daily orders at Taobao Instant Commerce peaked at 120 million in August, with the weekly average reaching 80 million a day, Jiang noted. Monthly active buyers reached 300 million, tripling from April.(SD-Agencies)