Two food delivery worker on the street. (Photo/chinanews.com)
Shanghai resident Eva Xu likes to order meals from online vendors so she can eat at home after work and not have to trudge to a restaurant on a cold winter's night.
"I switch between several online food-ordering apps, taking advantage of incentives such as 5-10 yuan in cash coupons for each order," she said. "It actually saves me money over the cost of a restaurant."
Food delivered to the doorstep is part of the booming online-to-offline services sector, and Chinese Internet giants have been eager to cash in on the trend. In many cases, they have teamed up with smartphone app companies to reach consumers.
Search engine giant Baidu has said it will invest 20 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) to promote its daily deals website Nuomi, which is also a portal for online food delivery and other cash coupons for offline merchants.
Ride-hailing company Uber and smaller players such as online chauffeur-booking app eDaijia and home furnishing service provider Jia.com are also scrambling to gain a firm foothold in the fast changing landscape. It's a landscape with tantalizing prospects.
China's online-to-offline food sector is expected to grow 46 percent this year to 142 billion yuan, accounting for about 4.6 percent of the country's overall catering industry, according to domestic Internet consultancy iResearch. By 2017, the sector is forecast to do business valued at 200 billion yuan.
According to a McKinsey survey of more than 6,100 Chinese Internet users, 71 percent of respondents said they use online-to-offline services, and 97 percent of those said they would continue to do so.
Moody's Investors Services is predicting that investors will remain keen on the sector. Although many of the Internet giants involved in the trade aren't generating big revenues from it yet, the ratings agency said their huge cash resources cushion them from any ratings downgrades.
E-commerce giant Alibaba has said it hopes to turn more than 300 million online shoppers into users of its online-to-offline services.
Alibaba and its small financial services arm Zhejiang Ant Small Financial Services Group have invested 6 billion yuan into food vendor Koubei, which will become the center for Alibaba's online-to-offline services.
